"A family homestead passes by legal mechanism; parenting practices do not."
I think an underrated part of the problem is here is actually the way knowledge about family is passed on. I started having kids at 36, and many of my educated urban colleagues have similarly delayed parenthood. The problem, though, is that all of our parents are now much older and less able to be involved (many elites also move away from their families). And so they are also not passing down knowledge about what is and is not appropriate parenting. Many of us have no one to say, "hey this is safe for your kid and this is not," or "these are the milestones that actually matter and these are the ones that don't." There's no one to keep our worst impulses in check, or to help cultivate our better instincts.
So I think a big part of the problem is that smaller and more stretched out generations breaks the traditional flow of information from parents to their adult children and so on. I think there are both policy and a cultural solutions to this issue.
I agree with you Jim, and as you know, I am a huge advocate of better policies to support parents. However, I also think Oren is right that the Surgeon General - and mass media - do parents a disservice when they fail to encourage parents to exercise agency and personal discernment in finding ways to reduce parental stress and improve child well-being.
Think about the Stop Smoking campaigns. Ultimately, these were mostly aimed at convincing people to voluntarily quit using nicotine, which is one of the most addictive substances in the world. Smokers were not told they should wait for better social support, policy changes, or cultural change to quit smoking (although all those things were ultimately important to the big shifts we saw). Instead they were told smoking was dangerous and bad for their health, and they should stop. I remember my dad telling me he was convinced by the public health campaign that smoking was dangerous and waited until he was basically incapacitated by a nasty case of pneumonia in his late 20s and tossed his last pack of cigarettes out a 5th story apartment window (he lived in NYC) and was too sick to navigate the stairs to get another until after withdrawal symptoms passed.
What if instead of telling parents to take care of their mental health through “self care” and get good health insurance, the Surgeon General had encouraged parents to identify the pain points and take proactive steps to resolve them. Like: quit travel sports. Like: if your child is spending hours each weekend at ridiculous birthday parties, just stop going. Like: if you find yourself overwhelmed by laundry and cooking, invest the time to teach your children to become fully contributing members of the family who know how to fold clothes, run the vacuum cleaner, and cook dinner. Almost certainly these things will be good for both you and them.
So much of trying to be a good parent is exercising prudence and discernment, as each child (even within the same family) is radically different, and family life is so variable - including changing dramatically as time goes on. What works when you have one child is going to fail miserably if you end up having six kids, and what works when kids are young does not work at all when they’re older. But too often our media, etc., etc., encourages a kind of learned helplessness on the part of parents in the face of the significant challenges they face. I am 100% for better policy, cultural changes, etc. But ultimately, I think cultural change is only going to come through individual parents saying they’re not going to participate in the craziness anymore, and leading the change in the culture that we need.
"This is among the many places where conservatives would do well to focus less on the concept of a free market in which rational actors take personal responsibility and more on the concept of a community in which our institutions, formal and informal, are indispensable in forming people for their own indispensable roles."
The importance of this cannot be overstated.
Also, regarding the bonus reading about ignoring kids more often - I'm not sure if this is one of those behaviors that might only work if adopted collectively, but I can speak from my own experience and that of all of my close friends. I'm 39, and my closest set of seven friends whom I've known since age 7, 15, and 22 all grew up without helicoptering parents. I grew up in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and I cannot remember a time when my parents or grandparents played with us, organized our social life, or pushed us (beyond our own independent interest) towards any extracurricular activity. I trained six or seven different sports over the course of childhood, played the clarinet for five years, had active social life since entering elementary school and never for a moment felt a lack of love or support from adults in my family - nor did I feel like I was owed anything by way of their attention. One of my best friends grew up in a boarding school from age seven, not even knowing the language, and grew up, again, without the sort of parental hovering we're seeing today to be a perfectly well-adapted adult. All of the above is in support of the notion that taking a back seat in your kids' social life and free time != abdicating responsibility for their wellbeing, and that, conversely, excessive involvement doesn't result in superior outcomes. This obsession with maintaining the appearance of business as a measure of actual effectiveness is visible in many other facets of American life - case in point, push for RTOs based on the notion that appearance of business = actual business...
From the perspective of this liberal geezer (with one adult child on her own and one teen in the house) I think the contemporary panic about OMG there's no money we're all going to starve!!! is bonkers. One can argue whether the economy is better today than 5 years ago, or whether median income is lower today than 10 years ago (the problem is adjusting for complex cost-of-living variables) but median economic wellbeing is far advanced from when I was young, and VASTLY superior to any time in recorded history before the late 1940s (when I was born). The current sense of economic malaise verging on catastrophe is delusional, feeding on idk social media? and has no relationship to managing children. Plenty of parents find themselves resource-poor, but that has always been true. Nobody in the US starves any more (except for a tiny fraction with severe psychosocial problems). 100 years ago undernutrition was widespread.
The problem of parenting isn’t parenting. It’s the relationship between parents.
Gabor Mate describes ‘the conspiracy of adults’ lacking in today’s society. I see it as the old black and white movie ‘hey you kid’ and the kid listening and feeling bad and saying ‘sorry Mr. Thomas’
Today parents are more likely to shout at and deride other parents, which causes the stress the plentiful comments and ‘warnings’ describe
Lost isn’t creeks or public parks or economic satisfaction - lost is the common set of communal values and relationships that gave us a sense of right and wrong enforceable by adults.
Today we see each household as its own fiefdom independent and sovereign, subject only to scrutiny but never aid. Add to that a much lower tolerance for risk and alarmist notions of risk and wildly high standards and you get a bad cocktail.
I would argue the "upper-middle-class" is the root cause of the problem, and frankly CAN'T solve the problem. As I pointed out to a British Substacker, both political parties consider people earning 3x the median national income to be part of "The Struggling Middle Class" (though by any reasonable definition they're not). It's relatively easy to climb from the 3rd rung of the latter to the 5th, and harder, but readily doable from the 5th to 7th. Getting from the 9th to the 10th though, is pretty hard. And rather than admitting that, and saying that maybe society won't collapse if a child with the skills to be on the 7th rung ends up there.... well, here we are.
Regarding how China successfully picked winners is explained by: "I doubt it was predicted or designed, but when the practice emerged of delegating industrial policy to local governments, China invented a structural form of antitrust. The central state declares what industries are to be favored, and then many localities toss contenders into the ring. The unsurprising result is competition. At the national level, with astonishing speed, industries with world-class competences emerge, even when — especially when — no "national champion" comes to dominate." https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/china-as-a-model/index.html
We raised two kids starting in 1987, each of whom turned out to be totally different, but two of the kindest, smartest, independent, and persistent souls you could ever meet. While they were our #1 priority, we were both working full time, i travelled every week, I was in law school at night, my wife was pursuing a masters and then a doctorate, we had a house, a sailboat, and both boys were competitive ski racers, which meant huge amounts of travel (and money) throughout North America from late October through March. We lived in a semi rural community, town of 1000, county of 10,000 with wonderful neighbors, one middle school, one high school, and an actual downtown. Was it stressful? Indeed.
But, we did not own a TV. Computer games were not allowed. Recreation took place outside. We had a pond for summer fishing and winter hockey. We put a putting green in the backyard, a weight room and pool table in the basement, and built a wax room for the maintenance of all the ski gear. And both boys got golf lessons starting at age 5 and were on skis before that.
I get that not everyone can do all these things, time, money, proximity (we lived 2 miles from the local ski area and 5 miles from the golf club). But our theory, which was the theory of my parents, was that we were going to keep the kids so busy that there would be no time for trouble. And the activities we did, golf, skiing, pond hockey etc, were things the entire family participated in. The boys are now 37 and 33. We are both 69. Our ‘retirement’ is certainly not what it could have been if we had made earning and saving money our focus. We knew it then, our kids know it now.
But you know what, we had an absolute blast as they grew up, those 22 years were the best years of our lives and we would do it all over again starting today.
We were blessed no doubt. But there are always options. Ditch the TV. Restrict the screen time. Confiscate the phone. Kick them out of the house. Find things that they enjoy that you can be involved in. Feed them correctly. Pass on the vaxes. So much can be done, too many parents just don’t have enough guts. IMO.
I need to go back and reread Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Curious as to whether it stood the test of time. Also informative because of her influence on J D Vance
I wonder if social media and the need for the perfect appearance (and sometimes grotesque) combined with new weird dieting has anything to do with female fertility? There used to be a link between extreme athletics and failure to develop, as well.
Why can't we adopt a "both-and" policy? Say, a 10% global tariff and a 10% VAT, along with funding the same benefits that just about every other developed country has (many if which are poorer than the U.S.), i.e., universal health insurance, paid parental leave, universal pre k, tuition free public college and non college apprenticeships, etc.?
"A family homestead passes by legal mechanism; parenting practices do not."
I think an underrated part of the problem is here is actually the way knowledge about family is passed on. I started having kids at 36, and many of my educated urban colleagues have similarly delayed parenthood. The problem, though, is that all of our parents are now much older and less able to be involved (many elites also move away from their families). And so they are also not passing down knowledge about what is and is not appropriate parenting. Many of us have no one to say, "hey this is safe for your kid and this is not," or "these are the milestones that actually matter and these are the ones that don't." There's no one to keep our worst impulses in check, or to help cultivate our better instincts.
So I think a big part of the problem is that smaller and more stretched out generations breaks the traditional flow of information from parents to their adult children and so on. I think there are both policy and a cultural solutions to this issue.
I agree with you Jim, and as you know, I am a huge advocate of better policies to support parents. However, I also think Oren is right that the Surgeon General - and mass media - do parents a disservice when they fail to encourage parents to exercise agency and personal discernment in finding ways to reduce parental stress and improve child well-being.
Think about the Stop Smoking campaigns. Ultimately, these were mostly aimed at convincing people to voluntarily quit using nicotine, which is one of the most addictive substances in the world. Smokers were not told they should wait for better social support, policy changes, or cultural change to quit smoking (although all those things were ultimately important to the big shifts we saw). Instead they were told smoking was dangerous and bad for their health, and they should stop. I remember my dad telling me he was convinced by the public health campaign that smoking was dangerous and waited until he was basically incapacitated by a nasty case of pneumonia in his late 20s and tossed his last pack of cigarettes out a 5th story apartment window (he lived in NYC) and was too sick to navigate the stairs to get another until after withdrawal symptoms passed.
What if instead of telling parents to take care of their mental health through “self care” and get good health insurance, the Surgeon General had encouraged parents to identify the pain points and take proactive steps to resolve them. Like: quit travel sports. Like: if your child is spending hours each weekend at ridiculous birthday parties, just stop going. Like: if you find yourself overwhelmed by laundry and cooking, invest the time to teach your children to become fully contributing members of the family who know how to fold clothes, run the vacuum cleaner, and cook dinner. Almost certainly these things will be good for both you and them.
So much of trying to be a good parent is exercising prudence and discernment, as each child (even within the same family) is radically different, and family life is so variable - including changing dramatically as time goes on. What works when you have one child is going to fail miserably if you end up having six kids, and what works when kids are young does not work at all when they’re older. But too often our media, etc., etc., encourages a kind of learned helplessness on the part of parents in the face of the significant challenges they face. I am 100% for better policy, cultural changes, etc. But ultimately, I think cultural change is only going to come through individual parents saying they’re not going to participate in the craziness anymore, and leading the change in the culture that we need.
"This is among the many places where conservatives would do well to focus less on the concept of a free market in which rational actors take personal responsibility and more on the concept of a community in which our institutions, formal and informal, are indispensable in forming people for their own indispensable roles."
The importance of this cannot be overstated.
Also, regarding the bonus reading about ignoring kids more often - I'm not sure if this is one of those behaviors that might only work if adopted collectively, but I can speak from my own experience and that of all of my close friends. I'm 39, and my closest set of seven friends whom I've known since age 7, 15, and 22 all grew up without helicoptering parents. I grew up in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and I cannot remember a time when my parents or grandparents played with us, organized our social life, or pushed us (beyond our own independent interest) towards any extracurricular activity. I trained six or seven different sports over the course of childhood, played the clarinet for five years, had active social life since entering elementary school and never for a moment felt a lack of love or support from adults in my family - nor did I feel like I was owed anything by way of their attention. One of my best friends grew up in a boarding school from age seven, not even knowing the language, and grew up, again, without the sort of parental hovering we're seeing today to be a perfectly well-adapted adult. All of the above is in support of the notion that taking a back seat in your kids' social life and free time != abdicating responsibility for their wellbeing, and that, conversely, excessive involvement doesn't result in superior outcomes. This obsession with maintaining the appearance of business as a measure of actual effectiveness is visible in many other facets of American life - case in point, push for RTOs based on the notion that appearance of business = actual business...
From the perspective of this liberal geezer (with one adult child on her own and one teen in the house) I think the contemporary panic about OMG there's no money we're all going to starve!!! is bonkers. One can argue whether the economy is better today than 5 years ago, or whether median income is lower today than 10 years ago (the problem is adjusting for complex cost-of-living variables) but median economic wellbeing is far advanced from when I was young, and VASTLY superior to any time in recorded history before the late 1940s (when I was born). The current sense of economic malaise verging on catastrophe is delusional, feeding on idk social media? and has no relationship to managing children. Plenty of parents find themselves resource-poor, but that has always been true. Nobody in the US starves any more (except for a tiny fraction with severe psychosocial problems). 100 years ago undernutrition was widespread.
The problem of parenting isn’t parenting. It’s the relationship between parents.
Gabor Mate describes ‘the conspiracy of adults’ lacking in today’s society. I see it as the old black and white movie ‘hey you kid’ and the kid listening and feeling bad and saying ‘sorry Mr. Thomas’
Today parents are more likely to shout at and deride other parents, which causes the stress the plentiful comments and ‘warnings’ describe
Lost isn’t creeks or public parks or economic satisfaction - lost is the common set of communal values and relationships that gave us a sense of right and wrong enforceable by adults.
Today we see each household as its own fiefdom independent and sovereign, subject only to scrutiny but never aid. Add to that a much lower tolerance for risk and alarmist notions of risk and wildly high standards and you get a bad cocktail.
Good news is the kids will be just fine anyway.
I would argue the "upper-middle-class" is the root cause of the problem, and frankly CAN'T solve the problem. As I pointed out to a British Substacker, both political parties consider people earning 3x the median national income to be part of "The Struggling Middle Class" (though by any reasonable definition they're not). It's relatively easy to climb from the 3rd rung of the latter to the 5th, and harder, but readily doable from the 5th to 7th. Getting from the 9th to the 10th though, is pretty hard. And rather than admitting that, and saying that maybe society won't collapse if a child with the skills to be on the 7th rung ends up there.... well, here we are.
Regarding how China successfully picked winners is explained by: "I doubt it was predicted or designed, but when the practice emerged of delegating industrial policy to local governments, China invented a structural form of antitrust. The central state declares what industries are to be favored, and then many localities toss contenders into the ring. The unsurprising result is competition. At the national level, with astonishing speed, industries with world-class competences emerge, even when — especially when — no "national champion" comes to dominate." https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/08/13/china-as-a-model/index.html
We raised two kids starting in 1987, each of whom turned out to be totally different, but two of the kindest, smartest, independent, and persistent souls you could ever meet. While they were our #1 priority, we were both working full time, i travelled every week, I was in law school at night, my wife was pursuing a masters and then a doctorate, we had a house, a sailboat, and both boys were competitive ski racers, which meant huge amounts of travel (and money) throughout North America from late October through March. We lived in a semi rural community, town of 1000, county of 10,000 with wonderful neighbors, one middle school, one high school, and an actual downtown. Was it stressful? Indeed.
But, we did not own a TV. Computer games were not allowed. Recreation took place outside. We had a pond for summer fishing and winter hockey. We put a putting green in the backyard, a weight room and pool table in the basement, and built a wax room for the maintenance of all the ski gear. And both boys got golf lessons starting at age 5 and were on skis before that.
I get that not everyone can do all these things, time, money, proximity (we lived 2 miles from the local ski area and 5 miles from the golf club). But our theory, which was the theory of my parents, was that we were going to keep the kids so busy that there would be no time for trouble. And the activities we did, golf, skiing, pond hockey etc, were things the entire family participated in. The boys are now 37 and 33. We are both 69. Our ‘retirement’ is certainly not what it could have been if we had made earning and saving money our focus. We knew it then, our kids know it now.
But you know what, we had an absolute blast as they grew up, those 22 years were the best years of our lives and we would do it all over again starting today.
We were blessed no doubt. But there are always options. Ditch the TV. Restrict the screen time. Confiscate the phone. Kick them out of the house. Find things that they enjoy that you can be involved in. Feed them correctly. Pass on the vaxes. So much can be done, too many parents just don’t have enough guts. IMO.
I need to go back and reread Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Curious as to whether it stood the test of time. Also informative because of her influence on J D Vance
I wonder if social media and the need for the perfect appearance (and sometimes grotesque) combined with new weird dieting has anything to do with female fertility? There used to be a link between extreme athletics and failure to develop, as well.
You should do an american compass podcast episode (or series) on the parenting stuff
Also, are there still safe places for kids to run around outside together unsupervised? I hear that concern from parents often.
Why can't we adopt a "both-and" policy? Say, a 10% global tariff and a 10% VAT, along with funding the same benefits that just about every other developed country has (many if which are poorer than the U.S.), i.e., universal health insurance, paid parental leave, universal pre k, tuition free public college and non college apprenticeships, etc.?