I am not an expert but isn't that just the kind of dogmatic viewpoint which the article suggests has little value.
You may believe day-care for two year-olds is fundamentally wrong, but there's little empirical evidence to show that children raised in different ways have different outcomes.
At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised wrongly, rather than merely assert it as fact.
Empirical evidence can't decide on moral issues. To complicate matters further most moral stuff can't be explained very well. For example, 'murder is wrong' is an uncontroversial moral fact which is both unfalsifiable and hard to explain.
In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care. But most of us already know this.
You have already elided from fundamentally wrong to not as good as. So this is moving in the right direction.
I would ask you to take the next step with me. Please acknowledge, the points below can be true sometimes:
- Some Day Care will offer more love and attention than some parents
- Some children who attend poor quality day-care as two year-olds will grow to become just as mature or balanced as most of their their stay-at-home peers.
All I wanted to do is to show that this situation is more nuanced than "fundamentally wrong".
I am afraid I don't subscribe to your morality. At best, it puts the perfect in the way of the good. For many parents, at some point, day-care is surely the best choice available to them and we should not be quick to judge them as bad parents for doing so.
No, that's what I'm arguing against. Parenting manuals are arguing minutiae while children are increasingly being brought up by strangers who don't love them. Of course there are exceptions. So what?
So then we have move to a discussion about each child's circumstances on its own merits, rather trying to make one size fit all. And I would argue that this is what parents are already doing in their millions. If so many parents are deciding that their kids' best option is day-care I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
I'm not arguing that one-size-fits-all; there are many legitimate parenting styles. The books argue about these, and the article is right, we shouldn't worry. But daycare just isn't one of them, as I've explained. It's the opposite of parenting.
>I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
'At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised [rightly] rather than merely assert it as fact.'
This is a good challenge. You may disagree, but I believe that overall (some individuals may fall far from the mean), there can be no better way to determine how best to do parenting than the way that parents actually do it.
It is inconceivable to me that rules (morality, laws, tradition or whatever) should decide against parents in the large. Evolution has determined that parents will always be the ones most vested in their children's general well-being.
Nah, everybody used to think slavery was OK. Yet it wasn't. Plenty of people know they shouldn't smoke. Yet they do. Evolution is 'red in tooth and claw'.
Let me re-formulate my explanation of why daycare is bad:
(1) Small children need love and attention; they also need adult help available; they need to feel secure.
(2) Love, attention and help aren't raw undifferentiated qualities. The quality depends on the source. A familiar source which knows the child is required.
(3) The anxiety induced by an early childhood separation from such sources is potentially traumatic and long-term.
Therefore, young children shouldn't be separated from their mothers and/or close relatives.
Nobody is arguing for abandoning kids 24/7 to strangers. A good daycare is staffed by trained professionals who know how to take care of children, and know how to provide the love, attention and security that children need. Furthermore, I'm arguing for a maximum of 3 days of daycare, so each parent still has their own full day with the children, as well as the entire weekend with the family.
Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is. You're attacking a straw man. (The existence of bad daycares notwithstanding; they do exist, are hopefully rare, but should definitely be avoided.)
(1) There's no such thing as a professional parent. It's a relationship.
(2) Professionals have expertise in some domain, e.g. heart surgery, but as the article shows, there's no expert knowledge of childcare. There's no prevailing child-rearing philosophy.
(3) Professionals are paid significantly above the minimum wage.
>know how to provide the love
No. A mother loves her child, but love can't be provided as a commodity, like complimentary chocolates. Even if a carer tries her hardest, this will fall short, because she doesn't love the child. She's also heavily constrained by having to follow procedures, timetables, attend to other children, and so on.
>Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is.
That's exactly what it is: somewhere to put your toddler while you head off to work. Or it's a convenience. But in reality small children need someone they trust and are close to available at all times.
Yes, they are professionals. They have been trained for this, unlike parents, who surprisingly often have no idea what they're doing.
Are parents not constrained? Parents have jobs, households to run, appointments, groceries, etc. I see parents dragging children through shopping malls because the child does not want to come along and the parent does not want to deal with it.
And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love? You have a ridiculously dogmatic view of how people work. Your view is wrong.
Just wait until you have children, and give it a try. If it's a good daycare, children will love it there. (If it's a bad one, find a better one.)
Not professionals. For example, we don't call a fast food server a professional, yet he is trained.
Yes, a mother is constrained by having to look after her other children and the household, but it is an organic set of constraints which is customised to the particular family and has arisen in part out of their previous interactions and out of her family traditions. Furthermore it can be altered (by her). It's not a bureaucratic scheme designed to maximise the convenience and minimise the legal/financial risk to the daycare and its staff.
Yes, there are horrific families and there are no doubt daycare workers who are more affectionate than others. But this doesn't affect the argument.
>And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love?
Who do I have to be? I've merely claimed that daycarers don't love the kids in their charge. I think our great-grandmothers would have known this instinctively and would be horrified at the direction we have taken as a society in this regard.
My son is in daycare, and has been since he was 8 months old. My wife and I talked to a bunch of people, weighed up the pros and cons, and felt it was best. We were aware of opinions on all sides, and even some empirical evidence that suggested daycare was bad for kids (particularly boys). So here's why we decided to do it anyway.
We live in a prosperous neighbourhood in the UK that has a lot of good daycare centres. Our friends with kids used the same daycare and were very happy. We have only one child and knew that would always be the case, and wanted him to grow up around other children, comfortable being with people other than his parents. We don't have any family living nearby, so asking them to provide daycare wasn't an option. I couldn't give up work, so without daycare my wife would have had to abandon her career. But she really enjoys her job - she didn't want her whole life to be about being a parent, which is good for her mental health (and by extension our son's mental health). Plus the income gives us extra financial stability, and it teaches our son that is normal for a woman to go to work.
On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised. Indeed, he has played with toys and watched films we didn't really like. In the short run it actually cost us money.
So we started daycare at just 3 hours per week, and gradually (over the course of 4 years) increased that to 20 hours per week. We always ask him whether he likes his daycare, we are engaged with them and we coordinate activities and teaching methods. He has thrived. Of course, we can't say how things would have turned out had we decided a different course, but he's doing absolutely fine. Also, this is just a one-off case, and not some 'proof that it's a good idea to send kids to daycare'.
As parents, it's all about your child, your values, your circumstances, what kind of daycare is available, what alternatives you have, and a lot of other factors. Blanket comments like "daycare is anti-parenting" are unhelpful at best, and harmful at worst.
I don't know what your situation is - whether you even have kids. Perhaps in our situation you would have made a different choice. Perhaps you'd even have been right, and somehow our son would turn out 'better' (whatever that means) if he hadn't gone to daycare. What I do know is at the time of choosing whether to send our son to daycare, your comments would have been hurtful. Feeling like you're being judged by the "good parenting police" often leads to extreme anxiety, and that's rarely in the child's interest.
So if you don't approve of daycare, that's fine. Don't send your kids to daycare. But please keep those opinions to yourself, or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
> On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised.
That is only a problem if you have very unusual ideas about how a child should be raised. At a good daycare, your child is cared for by professionals who need to meet much stricter criteria than parents.
Of course not all daycares meet the highest standards, and standards can also vary per country. But a good daycare is good for your child.
I agree. For example, my wife and I think he's much too young to be interested in superhero movies, but all his friends at daycare like superheroes so now he does too. Despite my reservations, I suspect it's healthier for him than growing up solely under our influence. Instead, we discuss what it means to be a 'goody' or a 'baddy' and use it in a positive way that fits within our values.
That's a touching story. Not unusual, just human.
In the long run your child will almost certainly embody you and your wife's values, with his own twist.
Don't forget that those circumstances include the decision of whether or not to have children in the first place.
>But please keep those opinions to yourself
That's silly. This is a discussion which you're not obliged to read and I'm not a best-selling author or anything like that. More importantly, in response to lovemenot's request I tried to move beyond opinion and give an explanation. You're free to criticise it on its own merits if you don't like it.
>or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
But I did recognise it: 'I'm not arguing that one-size-fits-all; there are many legitimate parenting styles'. Also 'Yes' at the very start.
Btw, using one's own child as an example in a discussion like this increases emotional investment and then it's harder to determine what's true. Better to argue abstractly I think.
> Empirical evidence can't decide on moral issues.
It can, depending on whether the moral question is one of fundamental axioms or applications of axioms to objective conditions. That is, if you take as a moral axiom that it is wrong to raise children in ways which cause certain harms, empirically showing day care does not cause those harms would answer whether (under that rule, at least) day care was morally wrong.
OTOH, if you take “day care is morally wrong” as itself axiomatic, it's true that empirical evidence has no role.
> In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care.
The first sentence is very loosely true (empirically, even); in the sense in which it is true, however, the second is not in the general sense (that is, it is not true that there is no way care choice for which it is true), though it may be in a naive sense (if one assumes that all parents have I'd a binary choice between day care and Monday care, and then the children are blindly sent to something meeting the definition of “day care” if that option is chosen.)
Good people already know that daycare is bad, even those who use it, even though they can't explain. So yeah, it's axiomatic.
>however, the second is not in the general sense
Au contraire, it's a perfectly true general statement that children can't get love and attention at daycare. From minimum wage, high-turnover staff looking after a large number of kids in a bureaucratically-controlled environment? No way.
Actually I guess most people wouldn't want or expect employees to love their charges anyhow. It would likely be construed as 'inappropriate', as when a teacher hugs a pupil.
Good lord, are you wrong. Just no. Good people investigate daycares and send their kids to a good one, rather than spreading harmful lies on the internet.
A bad daycare is bad, a good daycare is good. Do your homework as a parent. It's possible you live in an area where there are no good daycares, but you need to understand that your situation is not universal. But instead of just badmouthing people who are making responsible choices for their children, you could also help create a market for better daycares, you could join the parent committee for the daycare to help improve it, or petition the government to better regulate or fund daycares.
Maybe you need to try a bit harder to find a better daycare.
Small children need love and attention, but they also need social interaction. They can get both at a daycare. And a daycare doesn't have to mean they never see their parents again. I consider 3 days of daycare and parents each working 4 days to be a perfect balance, and I notice a lot of parents doing exactly that. Although different people may have different situations and needs and find a different balance. But the benefits of daycare shouldn't be too lightly dismissed.
'Uncontroversial statement' if they prefer. I'd be happy to nitpick with them provided they aren't murdering people or sending their babies to preschool.
> while often getting fundamentals wrong, e.g. there are millions of two year olds in day care.
You suggest there's something wrong with that, but I'm at a loss as to what it could be. Of course two year olds go to day care. Do you want to deny them their social development? I recommend starting daycare around 6 months.
I'm personally really happy with our arrangement: I work 4 days, my wife works 4 days, and 3 days of daycare. We get to spend plenty of time with the kids, but we also have a (practically) full-time job and the kids get lots of time to play with other kids.
I'd be more worried if millions of two year olds were not going to daycare.
I grew up w/ divorced parents and generally most of my friends also had divorced parents. I don't think the divorce as such is such a big deal, its really whether or not both parents keep "showing up". I'd take divorced parents that show up vs married-absentee's any day.
EDIT: I realized you might be meaning -- if you don't let the struggle of parent-hood tear apart your relationship with your spouse, you're doing a good job. In which case I agree 100%.
I agree, didn't grow up with divorced parents, and I'm not a divorced parent, but it seems - especially in this day - this just isn't as much as a bad omen as it used to be.
I see more cooperative parents (whether they're living together or not) than un-cooperative ones. Married or not. It's just a title to a lot of these people.
Also, if that's what the child grew up with, it's probably less likely to affect them negatively (assuming all positives everywhere else).
Mummy and Daddy are the most basic, rock-solid concepts for a child, and a divorce can't be anything but world-redefining for any child not yet old enough to have an understanding of the complexities of human relationships.
Yes, this does depend on the "showing up"-ness of each parent.
My kids are strongly attached to their mother. She's the primary go-to, but if I'm away for work, or late home for whatever reason, they're surprisingly happy and comforted when I return home.
If we got divorced, the kids would be shattered and it would affect them forever. The scale depends on their resilience, but they would be changed for the worse in the immediate. Future-wise, maybe it would better prepare them for the challenges of life and instill them with some kind of resilience, but I think there would be a part of them permanently broken.
It's all shades of grey though, it all depends on the healthiness of the parents relationship. A divorce can be a better option for kids if the parents' relationship is unhealthy.
Ouch, sounds like an actual experienced parent left that comment... People underestimate the difficulty of not getting divorced when you have kids - more so if you have twins etc.
Frank Abagnale's ("Catch Me If You Can" protagonist) take on divorce gives some insight into his life story [1], and is an interesting counterpoint. A transcript for those who hate watching videos. The transcript starts from the link and transcribes 132 seconds of his speech, up to the 23:57 mark.
--- BGN ---
I was one of those few children that got to grow up in the world with a daddy. Now, the world is full of fathers. But there are very few men worthy of being called daddy by their child. I had a daddy; loved his children more than he loved life itself. Steven Spielberg told Barbara Walters the more I've researched Frank's youth, without having met Frank, I couldn't help but put his father in the film through the likes of Christopher Walken.
My father was a man who had four children---three boys and a daughter. Every night at bedtime, he'd walk into your room. He was 6'3". He would drop down on one knee, kiss you on the cheek, pull the cover up, and he'd put his lip up on your earlobe. And he'd whisper deep into your ear, "I love you. I love you very much."
He never, ever, missed a night.
As I grew older, I sometimes fell asleep before he got home. But I always woke up the next morning, knew he had been at my bedside.
Years later, my older brother joined me in my room, temporarily; he was in the Marine Corps. He was 6'4". He played semi-pro football for Buffalo. But my father would walk around to his bed, hug him, kiss him, whisper in his hear he loved him.
When I was 16 years old, I was just a child. All 16 year olds are just children. Much as we'd like them to be adults, they're just children. And like all children, they need their mother, and they need their father. All children need their mother and father. All children are entitled to their mother, and their father. And though it is not popular to say so, divorce is a very devastating thing for a child to deal with, and then have to deal with the rest of their natural life.
For me, a complete stranger, a judge, told me I had to choose one parent over the other. That was a choice a 16 year old boy could not make. So I ran. How could I tell you my life was glamorous? I cried myself to sleep 'til I was 19 years old. I spent every birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day, Father's Day in a hotel room somewhere in the world where people didn't speak my language.
--- END ---
>It's impossible for any scientific study to address all possible outcomes and the relationships between them
Yes and even if there somehow were credible, reproducible studies that addressed all aspects of parenting and all childhood outcomes then these still couldn't tell one how to parent because there's a moral component.
Credentials and prizes are heading the way of the dodo because we're slowly realising that while neither knowledge nor significance can be measured our opinions can be swayed by prestige and politics.
>We know how human beings are supposed to live to be happy: small communities of stable relationships, with a lot of face to face time, ideally spending some of it outside doing some sort of physical activity.
That's how we used to live, in small roving bands where all males are close relatives. Total lack of privacy. No dentists. Parasites. Obsession with the spirits that apparently lived in trees and rocks, also the evil spirits which brought disease and thunderstorms (cholera not having been identified). Endless wars with other tribes...
Now, obesity has replaced malnutrition. Distraction has replaced boredom. Social media has replaced gossip. These are better problems to have and they're solvable in turn. Then we'll see what the next problems are.
One problem that all cultures face is that of pecking order. Respecting the pecking order as animals gave us a lesser chance of death by violence within the species. But we've inherited the desire to rise up the status hierarchy and one of the commonest means of doing so is by trying to emulate the most successful. Unfortunately a high proportion of the most successful people appear to be sociopaths who seem to feed off of finding new ways to subtly weaken the culture as a whole.
I'd rather live with the Amish or with John Plant than potentially be arrested by my own house or car. The house would merely lock me in but the car would no doubt drive me to the police station also.
I'd also rather get up to switch the lights on. Moving about periodically is healthy, right?
Small reward now or larger reward later? In real life we might think: why can't I just have both?
Yet it frequently is a matter of 'either or' since the smaller reward robs me of the mental resources required to create or bring about the larger reward. For example if I party now I won't get the new job later on because I won't have the energy to learn the relevant skills.
It’s usually pretty clear why you can’t have both: because resources can’t be used more than once (like money), or recharge at a certain rate (like mental energy).
I think the bigger issue is that future payoffs are inherently riskier. Spending a resource now for some utility now (like buying a movie ticket at the cinema) carries a much lower risk than even the safest 5-year investment.
I think that risk is the primary cause of time discounting, although there are others. Certain goods may have inherently less utility if you buy them later (an obvious example being a medical treatment for an ailment you have now).
What is interesting to me is why different people have different time preferences, other than obvious variables like age, wealth, education, etc. Is just a personality trait like any other? I’m also curious what people think about their own time preferences. Do people wish their discount functions were different? Obviously I sometimes regret decisions like staying up late, where I knew full well I was “screwing over my future self,” and I obviously can’t yet know how I’ll think about my long term low-discount actions, like saving money for retirement.
There's some evidence of a genomic component to future discounting. There's a section on it in Robert Sapolsky's excellent book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
You can have both. Invest 10% of your salary each month in a retirement fund, eat out with the rest, net costs like rent. You'll retire a millionaire. You just need to size the rewards correctly.
I never understood this... if there was some investment strategy that beat inflation, then if everyone used it, inflation would catch up to it.
So if you invest 10% of your salary all you're doing is saving 10% adjusted for inflation, assuming your investment vehicle doesn't do worse than inflation. And then when you retire you just live off that.
There is no free lunch. In Capitalism, millions of people are in a rat race to survive and eat.
In any case, no matter how wealthy Fred is, if Fred spends an extra $1000 on X then he has $1000 less to spend on something else. How is that supposed to result in inflation? Spending money doesn't magically put more money in one's pocket (despite wishing it did!), it means you've got less money.
Inflation means, afaik, only that the same amount of money has lesser purchasing power than it previously had.
This is an effect that can have various causes. One of them is that the government or Central Banks printed more money. Another way this could happen is if there was an influx of income in your region. This effect is less visible in today's economy with cheap and easy shipping of products, but can still be observed in objects that are pretty much impossible to ship. The only example that comes to my mind right now is housing.
> Inflation means, afaik, only that the same amount of money has lesser purchasing power than it previously had.
That's a tautological definition.
Money's value is determined by supply and demand, just like everything else. If there's more money representing the same amount of goods, the money gets devalued and you have inflation.
To understand inflation one must understand how money is created and destroyed, i.e. what determines the supply of money. Spending money faster does not create more supply, and McDonald's raising their prices is not inflationary because they did not create more money.
Money is created by printing it, or by the creation of debt. Money is destroyed by burning it or by paying down debt.
Well, Wikipedia seems to agree with that tautological definition.
While McDonald's alone increasing their price wouldn't be inflation, it could become that if a significant part of the businesses in that location increased theirs as well.
It's just really hard to find examples of this today. It's mostly limited to holiday hotzones, rent and similar.
> Wikipedia seems to agree with that tautological definition.
It reminds me of when I saw a technical analyst on CNBC sagely note that the reason the P/E ratio was high was because the Price rose faster than the Earnings. Sheesh!
It is not inflationary if McDonald's increases their prices. Spending more at McDonald's means you have less to spend elsewhere. Your spending does not create more money to replace it.
Consider if the money was a fixed number gold coins instead, and you'll see that anyone raising prices does not result in more gold coins.
Inflation does not mean that the amount of money was increased.
This is "just" the primary way a government or central bank controls the inflation
The definition of inflation is limited to the devaluement of a currency. This means that it can only be evaluated by comparing that currency to actual goods / services that can be bought / used.
Money is created many different ways. Banks could loan out a lot of money for instance, if some promising new opportunity is discovered. M2 money consists of many more things than just government-issued money from the mint.
Secondly, inflation is defined as a RISE IN PRICES and not the printing of money. Even Milton Friedman said that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. His claim be totally tautological if the definition was as you think it is.
Most of those investopedia inflation theories were debunked by George Reisman in the book "Capitalism". There's an awful lot of garbage circulating around as to what inflation is and what causes it.
The most ridiculous was Gerald Ford's WIP (Whip Inflation Now) campaign in the 70's:
Now, banks do create money when they make loans. But this is not inflationary as the loans are made against collateral, i.e. it is matched against value. And when the loan is repaid, the money is destroyed.
When banks make loans that have no collateral and are not paid back, it is inflationary. Guess who does that? The government! Most of what the government says about inflation is propaganda, because (like Gerald Ford) they want to blame anything and everything but government policy.
It's as much propaganda as people blaming "the speculators" for increasing housing prices.
Your comments indicated you thought inflation is printing money. So now you claim to know better than those who know the actual definition, what leads to inflation?
Creating money with no collateral and lending it out is equivalent. Whether the banknotes are actually printed on paper or just digitally added to a ledger makes no difference.
> you claim to know better
Why yes, yes I do know better than people who don't know better. I cited George Reisman, for instance, as someone who does know better.
> Who do you think increased the housing prices?
Supply and demand.
> bitcoin prices have gone up
Because people think bitcoin is the currency of the future.
Speculators don't cause assets to rise in value. They are betting that the assets will rise in value. Big difference.
I don't agree with the theory that spending the money faster is the same thing as having more money, which is why I discount the velocity of money theory of inflation.
You are missing the point. We frequently make tradeoffs in life. Many times this involves a small sacrifice now for a more sizeable gain in the future.
That's a sad way to think about life. Back of the envelope math says I can be pretty happy with way less than that, different standards and all I suppose.
Do you live in america? Do you plan to live 15-20 years past retirement? You are already at 50k/year with a million dollars, which is an amount of money that is ok in the present if you are young, but with inflation it will be a lot less.
Are you aware of how much elderly healthcare and care in general costs?
The average cost of a private room in a elderly care facility in the present is about 90k/year.
My standards are about not dying because I can't afford to pay for my prescriptions.
I hope you have kids, and they (continue to) like you.
I don't know what the inflation rate is between now and 65 years old... and I hope to live for 20 years after that. Assuming you're 50, that's 35 years of inflation which is right about a halving in value at 2%. So you're going to end your life with $25k/yr current equivalent and hope that SS and Medicare carry you through. Good luck.
>I would expect significant causal relationships between practicing the creation of music and ability in the creation of music, and between practicing audio discrimination and ability in audio discrimination.
Yes, and real musicianship is more complicated still since hearing and playing abilities co-evolve as one cycles round and round a new piece. For example, notes previously played too quietly can be played louder merely by hearing them as louder. At least that's the way I experience it. If true it adds a whole new meaning to 'active listening' since motor activity may be included in the loop.
Yes, while often getting fundamentals wrong, e.g. there are millions of two year olds in day care.