Less Wrong Parents
Less Wrong Parents
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-parents
Recently the NYC LW/OB community had two babies and is expecting a third.
I created a google group as a way of sharing information, primarily thinking of the NYC community.
I posted my pre-baby purchase list and William Eden posted an extensive list of books on early parenting.
William suggested opening up the group so as to get insight from the larger LW community on parenting.
I think this is *probably* a good idea. Google groups are simple to set up but have limits.
For this reason I request that if you are going to have an extensive debate on a subject you create a new thread (aka: get a room)
The primary objective is to lower the cost of obtaining information on parenting.
I believe this overall goal to be more important then any particular “truth”.
My hope is that this will primarily serve as a place for people to ask parenting question and post guides.
Perhaps if enough guides are posted they can eventually be consolidated into a wiki.
It is generally well known that the eager new parents tend to overthink everything and overdo everything they can think of (stroller type? formula vs breast milk? daycare amenities? nursery wall color?). As mentioned in the discussion and in the quoted book, there is only so much a parent can do to affect the way their offspring grow up. It turns out that optimal parenting is not that hard. Provide a happy, supportive and occasionally challenging environment, make time to enjoy the little ones and don’t sweat the minutiae. If you find parenting not fun, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: I’m somewhat surprised by the strong silent downvote to below the troll threshold. And now that it is so low, people won’t even bother spending karma on explaining it.
EDIT2: hmm, I didn’t mean to whine, guys, but I’m happy that this comment is above the troll level again.
Let me say what irritates me about this comment.
Nice strawman here. What exactly was your probability estimate that LW readers with kids are going to discuss the rational nursery wall color?
Assuming this is true, there is still a question how much exactly is the “only so much”. It could be still significant, and might be worth doing anyway.
Well, this needs a better argument than just a link to a book on Amazon. For the beginning, any argument would be better than none.
Yes, children get genes from their parents, so any hypothesis of “parents do X and that’s why their children do Y” gets an alternative explanation “parents and children share a gene G; it causes parents to do X, and it causes children to do Y”. It is good to be suspicious about the first explanation. But also about the second one.
For example, if the “parenting quality waterline” would actually very low, such as 99% of parents doing it wrong and getting random (that also includes very good) results, and 1% parents doing it right and getting mostly great results, it probably would not show in most statistics. Why? Simply, if the author of the research does not know what is the thing that those 1% are doing right, they would just split the sample along some other, mostly irrelevant axis… and then get the result that really, that axis is mostly irrelevant. (More generally, a difference between A and B will appear strongly if you divide people to A group and B group, and will be hidden if you divide people to groups containing a similar ratios of A to B.) The confusion would be to equate the “parental role” with what was being measured.
Couldn’t a LW group for parents help with this? It is not supposed to be a group for Straw Vulcans.
I am not sure if I am not reading between the lines too much right now, but it seems to me like a connotation “thinking about something too rationally = being obsessive and spending a lot of time (for diminishing returns)”. Well, ain’t necessarily so. We can also speak rationally about saving time. About making a smart decision once, and then following it. (Which could be better than deciding every time again and also better than acting on the whim.)
And the group for LW parents will make is less fun, or...?
Sorry, that whole argument did not contain much more information than “guys, that topic is boring, shut up”. The downvotes were well-deserved.
Thanks, I didn’t realize that what I wrote can be interpreted this way.
The last time this book was discussed on LessWrong there seemed to be a large mindkilling effect, and the same thing appears to be happening now.
I suggest that the reason for this emotional reaction is that there are at least two different ways of pattern-matching the result that “parents don’t affect life outcomes,” one of which is obviously true and one of which is obviously false, in other words it is a deepity.
Of course parents can’t change their child’s IQ or height.
On the other hand, of course parents can change the experiences their child absorbs, which make up the substance of life and provide the basis for learning new things, understanding the world, and finding a place within it.
In one reading, things like the color of the baby’s room are irrelevant minutiae.
In a different reading, the color of the baby’s room is part of the fabric of her life and will be involved in her first memories. To call this minutiae feels reductive.
The useful takeaway message is that we shouldn’t feel anxiety about the types of things that modern advertising is trying to convince us are important, but I would suggest that we shouldn’t be feeling anxiety about our babies anyway and anxiety should be addressed as its own separate issue.
If I understand correctly, there’s a maximum height and a maximum IQ your genes allow you to achieve, but whether you actually achieve them depends on nutrition.
Is this from real data?
I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents’ belief systems and behaviors and their children’s.
I’m not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I’ve noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle “problematic” behavior / do anything to “educate” their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.
The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child’s chances of not being stupid is something you care about.
At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven’t read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.
Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.
If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.
You know, smart (especially academic) parents are more likely to say that :). This is not a simple issue, I think this is actually a question about how much parent-provided environment mediates the effect of the parent IQ. Mediation analysis is subtle.
Alternate explanation for:
Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don’t recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn’t rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.
Or, smart people had smart parents. Smart parents tend to do that kind of thing, but the main effect to the kids’ IQ comes from having the right genes, not from the actual behavior. (A lot of the things that correlate with kids having higher IQs are like this, including things like “amount of books in the house”, IIRC—control for heredity, and the effect on IQ vanishes.)
The school of thought shminux represents, though not popular in the main stream, is one I ascribe to. Bryan Caplan and a few others have books on the subject.
Shminux, this though is exactly why I see this group to be of value. I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research. I want to examine three peoples strategies and trust that I can blindly go with the suggestions, or at least have a strong starting point.
This group is certainly a good idea, but probably not in the way you describe. Chances are, the most value you get will be from babysitting by the people you trust, as one thing new parents lack the most tends to be the time away from their young children and spent with each other. If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing research, you are probably overthinking it.
One clarification I wanted to make is that, while it is easy to royally screw up your kids by being a surly, high-strung, abusive, or even overly possessive parent, it is hard to “optimize” them by doing your absolute best at every conceivable aspect of parenting. The point of diminishing returns is reached very quickly, and all the extra effort tends to be wasted (that was the point made in the book, I believe), so spend this extra effort on something worthwhile instead. The wisdom to know the difference is probably what your group ought to keep in mind more than anything.
I read Psychology Applied to Modern Life and IIRC I was appalled by the number of X for which it says “it has been found that X has very little effect on children’s development”.
Here’s some previous LW discussion of this research area.
Here is one study, it is fairly typical of the kind. (I can gladly dig up more for you, but this is one of the better ones.) It finds family effects, but they are much smaller than many people would expect. Of course it is more difficult to find out whether a child is “rational” as opposed to intelligent, and the same is true for parents, so there are no data (to my knowledge) on how much parenting affects scientific inquisitiveness.
Shminux gave a citation. What more do you want?
downvoted.
Book =/= data.
Descriptions of the book mention only “insights” and “clear thinking”, so I’m assuming that the author didn’t exactly go out and present charts, graphs and reports from careful studies, experiments and analyses. If my assumption that the book is merely “good thinking” rather than actual experimental results and observations is wrong, then my model needs some updates.
I was trying to clarify and differentiate between “Some cool guy wrote a book, some LW user believes what it says” and “A researcher presented experimental results, explained the most logical cause and effect for these results, and a LW user affirms that this is not cherry-picked or biased”. I hope that makes it a bit more clear why I asked that question.
Books are such a ridiculous concept.
Someone tells you they know something, or they tell you something and that they can prove it. You click the link to know more, and instead of being told straight away you’re supposed to spend money. You then receive a standardized-length text, containing scattered bits of the information you wanted, lots of waffling, padding, anecdotes and forewords, and rarely any raw data dumps.
In the reasonable case, it’s also in a rather inconvenient format; text is still text, but there is no easy way of extracting data. The format contains DRM that, if you were to leave them in place, would enable a third-party company to revoke your access anytime they want, and prevent you from redistributing it. The latter is actually illegal, though it’s one of those obscure never enforced laws like “don’t fish in your pajamas”.
In the preposterous case, it’s a bunch of squiggles on organic matter. The organic lump must be physically schlepped to you, which can take days or weeks. It will then clutter your house, and is surprisingly heavy for its volume. Of course, it has no searching or exporting methods.
What’s next, going to Mount Sinai and waiting for research papers on marble tablets?
The Nurture Assumption has more summaries of existing research (and criticism of insufficiently rigorous analysis), my edition has 32 pages of references.
I have no such memory and have scored around 140 on official IQ tests.
There are complicating factors in my case that mean that it doesn’t necessarily completely invalidate your theory, but ‘my parents did that and I don’t remember it’ is not a particularly plausible one. I do have a pretty horrible episodic memory, but my parents were distant in general and it would have been very out of character for me to ask that kind of question of them or for them to answer that way. On the other hand, I was put in my school’s gifted program and explicitly taught ‘let’s find out’-type skills at a relatively early age that I still use today, so if you modify your theory to ‘someone has to do that, parents can make sure that it happens by doing it themselves’, that still works.
The people who raised you are not necessarily the people who conceived you, nor the people who owned the house you slept in.
I think ‘parents’ is being used as a proxy for ‘people who raised you’.
It seems odd to consider individuals that I saw perhaps one day out of eight, 9 months out of the year, for four or five years (the teachers in the gifted program) as ‘having raised me’, but oddness aside it is a compelling model in some ways, yes.
This list strikes me as a good example of why a LW listserv / shared research about this is useful. Yeah, stroller type won’t make much of a difference, and nursery wall color won’t either. About half of important life outcomes are heredity, and you’ve missed the opportunity to change that.
But breastfeeding? We’re talking ~8 points of IQ, here. Breastfeed your children, and do it for as long as you can stand.
I am pro-breast feeding but skeptical of the IQ claim. Can you link the study?
My guess is they compare the avg IQ to the average of a selection of people who breast feed.
I would expect this to be subject to selection bias.
Google says:
Later:
Basically, it’s one of those cases where doing it is probably better than not, but not at all costs. If you are constantly stressed because your baby prefers the bottle, or you get repeated breast infections, or you don’t produce enough milk, it’s time to direct your efforts elsewhere.
This translates to “cited study is obsolete, new study needed”.
Expected result = if DHA and AA were the main causal agents for the difference, and they have been introduced to formula food, the difference should be much reduced (extent of reduction being contingent on the existence of other causal factors).
I’d say it translates more to ‘investigate DHA/AA addition to formula and see whether it is anywhere near as much as breast milk or if it is just another cynical marketing ploy where trivial amounts are added to allow a popular claim on the label’.
For human breast milk, the median concentration of polyunsaturated fatty acids—including both DHA and AA—is given as 588 mg / 100 ml, subject to fluctuation. [1]
The local topselling Amazon baby formula contains 800 mg / 100 ml, closely monitored. Feel free to check your local products.
There are supplements that can be added if you want more, those are trivial molecules to manufacture and store.
Cool. Is there much variation between baby formulas—are the unpopular ones worse?
Do you mean in regard to these nutrients, or in general? In general they vary quite abit in composition and price. Though for all I now DHA & AA are constant (though I’d doubt it, given most parents aren’t going to bother to look for it, ime).
Very interesting, thanks.
Why are you in favor of breast-feeding at all?
It is correlated with socio-economic status, and thus with all good things. But every correlation I have seen corrected for parental SES goes away, including IQ. Decades of randomized controlled studies demonstrate no effects. On the positive side, I must admit one cluster-randomized (n=31) study of IQ in Belarus, but I am not impressed.
Because when in doubt go with convention.
I think there is a lot we don’t understand.
Now if my wife found it bothersome perhaps we would not follow convention, but so far it she likes doing it. From a fathers perspective it is vastly superior due to the ability to leave a bottle out of the refrigerator for 6 hours instead of 1.
Is that a serious question? Because when you add “at all” and then list sudies which only address IQ benefits it seems like you think that is the only potential benefit.
Now it’s at +6. (What about having a feature that hides and disregards karma scores for posts less than 24 hours old?)
You may be right, but you didn’t provide any evidence to support your claims. I think that’s why you’re getting downvoted. You should edit your comment to offer some evidence.
Several Internet people have reported that if someone doesn’t tell you “My family is horribly fucked up and I spent most of my childhood in excruciating suffering of some kind, and if I tried to tell my parents about it they called me mean names” it means you don’t know them well enough yet. I have no idea how to fix that, but it seems worth keeping in mind, and perhaps increasing the weight of “my kid is sincerely hurt by things I consider trivial” relative to “my kid is a selfish whiny attention whore with no sense of proportion”, even if the latter turns out to be true of kids in general.
Interesting—I can’t relate to that that much, but I notice people report different experiences and have different assumptions about parents, I wonder which is more common … I guess this calls for a poll!
So how much do you think this describes your childhood?
My family is horribly fucked up [pollid:198]
I spent most of my childhood in excruciating suffering of some kind [pollid:199]
f I tried to tell my parents about it they called me mean names [pollid:200]
(I agree with your conclusion, by the way!)
Wow, that is a lot of “Yes” responses.
I am in shock at the “yes” responses to the third question. Relevant
The “My family is horribly fucked up” is kinda fuzzy. I consider “fairly fucked up” to be the norm. So if my family is about average, should I vote close to Yes (because they’re not horribly fucked up, but sorta) or should I vote No (because they are the norm)?
By the way, there is no contradiction—even the selfish whiny attention whores with no sense of proportion can be sincerely hurt by things you consider trivial.
In fact, that’s perhaps causal. They’re sincerely hurt because they have no sense of proportion (and not likely to gain it).
It would seem that nobody knows me. People who by this standard are, in fact, known or have the possibility of being known without making up lies have my sympathy.
Belongs in Discussion.
Moved.
One thing I personally found useful is to train yourself to check upon the kid more often then I would say were necessary if asked. Starting with sudden peaks in temperature and ending, so far, with ruined wallpaper. Just do it:)
What happened to lesswrong parents discussion ? Is it alive somewhere else ?
This sounded a bit cultish. Babies aren’t the property of LessWrong.
Sounds better.
I think you’re being oversensitive—if I said the NYC Swing Dancing Club had two babies, I don’t think anyone would bat an eye.
Eyes batting like mad over here. I’ve only ever heard that construction applied to actual members of the organization, e.g. “our swing dancing club has two new parents”, or “our Thursday morning playgroup has two new toddlers”.
It wouldn’t sound cultish or anything, but it’d still sound “weird” to me.
Keep in mind that the NYC community is a physical tight-knit community in a way that LW or even a swing dancing club isn’t. (I live in SF and expect a great deal of cooperative parenting if and when the LWers there start breeding en masse.)
That makes it worse?
Amused that Saliency of all people is getting accused of being phygish.
I know, right?? laughs
Nobody said the babies are the property of Less Wrong. But they are presumably part of the community.
I wouldn’t describe a baby as a LWer on the basis of their parents’ affiliation any more than I would describe them as a Christian, a Democrat, or a heterosexual.
No they aren’t? Babies aren’t too interested or capable of increasing their rationality. or making decisions.
I believe at least one of us has a deep misapprehension of what a community is.
While I found chaosmosis’ comment slightly ill formed I agree that their proposed wording is better than the original wording, which just sounded off to me.