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alyssavance comments on Our House, My Rules - Less Wrong
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"But you wouldn't be hearing this "I'm higher than you in the pecking order and don't you dare forget it" attitude that is so very common."
The human race is, essentially, a species of upgraded monkeys, and there is (so far as I can see) no way to have two large groups of people, one of which strictly dominates the other, without this particular monkey behavior being ubiquitous. This holds true even when the child, in some sense, has higher utility (eg., when the parents would sacrifice their lives for their child's life, as parents often do). The only real alternative is to give children as a whole higher status, by, say, rewriting the laws so that children are not essentially their parent's property.
Here's a set of laws I'd really like to try as a social experiment.
Any child below the age of <blah> must have at least one parent. The parent(s) have responsibilities and rights as per normal.
The starting parents are the biological ones.
The parental relationship may be disconnected from either end. Consent of the disconnected party is not required. Disconnection severs both rights and responsibilities. Per rule 1, the last parent can't disconnect without arranging an adoption.
The child can add, eject and swap parents. Per rule 1, the child can't eject their last parent, they have to swap.
For a child-initiated addition or swap to go ahead, all parents and the child present after the swap must mutually consent before the swap.
Does anybody think it's actually a good idea (and not just a funny joke, or fuzzy-generating slogan)? Except for a few cases where it is, it seems emphatically not.
Eh? What is? The idea of social experiments? Yes I think they're a good idea. And unavoidable too - there are too many variables moving fast and now for much cultural stability at the moment. The main question is whether to prefer organically grown cultural shifts, or forays into deliberate design.
Fascinating idea. Only question I'd have relates to the game theory involved--if both parents want to disconnect (or suspect that they might want to in the future) there is an incentive to be the first to do so, as the first does not have to deal with the swapping requirements. Thus, there is some potential for pre-emptive swapping in order to avoid being left in a degrading situation. This problem only gets steeper as the situation becomes less pleasant.
An interesting extension: would children be able to add additional parents, with their current parents' consent?
Yes, there is an incentive to swap first, but the other parent can swap if they find any willing adopter, even somebody nasty. The child isn't consulted here, but they can immediately proceed to arrange their own swaps until satisfied.
That isn't an extension, that's part of what I designed in. 1->n parents are implicit in rules 1, 4 and 5 none of which have maximum limits.
This sounds like it's making an unreasonable assumption of the children's rationality. A child isn't going to start calmly calculating whether their situation warrants further parental swaps, carry out the necessary amount of those swaps and then carry on contently once they reached the favored state. More likely, the insecurity and uncertainty of knowing that anyone can at any moment decide to disconnect the relationship would leave them in a state of psychological ruin before they reached adulthood.
They don't have to calmly calculate, they just have to find someone they'd prefer to be with who's willing to take them - a "Matilda" scenario. If the relationship is stable, they won't be stressed. If it's unstable, they will be comforted by the ability to search for a safe harbor via swaps. I think this system would encourage self-reliant responsibility early, since every child would feel able to alter their circumstances and recover from a mistake.
At what age could these kinds of separations be initiated? At any age? Does that imply that children would need to be convinced of this being a real possibility as soon as they're old enough to understand it, so that they're capable of voluntarily choosing it?
The earlier the age that the kids found out, the more harmful it would be for their well-being. Even the very possibility that your parents might choose to abandon you at any moment is going to damage the well-being of many children. I remember, at the relatively old age of ten, being shaken to the point of tears by the mere thought and worry that one of my parents might happen to die. Not to mention the consequences of it actually happening and proving to the child that they can never be absolutely certain of being safe from abandonment.
Your proposal is not necessarily fully bad, but I suspect that in most cases, the kids would need to be at least teenagers before they were prepared to handle the emotional weight of simply having the option available.
And once I've taught them about the conditional nature of love (and the parent-child relationship) am I allowed to go ahead and teach them about Santa Claus? There's a whole new spin I could put on the Christmas tradition (He's making a list, He's checking it twice, He's gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Santa Claus is coming to town!...)
Meanwhile, is it ok to use religious indoctrination to prevent children from considering adoption a viable option (on pain of eternal damnation)?
Can I legally lure children off the street with candy? How about push advertising targetting the well know vulnerabilities in human cognition? Can I start a cult which is to be propagated by preaching the Divine Will that all followers attract and adopt as many children as possible into the fold. Heck, most of the existing religions would lap that up straight away.
You could certainly lure, but could you retain? Memes wanting to parasitize the ready supply of children would have to get extra-tasty. This may or may not be a good thing.
I'm assuming the rules on abuse start out the same, but I think they'd shift. For some things, "so jump ship" would be the answer, and the severity of legal disapproval would decrease. I think the law would quickly increase the penalties for brainwashing, as it would be viewed as an attempt to game the system - nobody likes a cheat.
You could be right. I like the sound of that!
Any age that could coherently express an intent in words: "I want you to be my mommy instead".
For babies, this would work like expedited parent-initiated adoption. Probably anyone still holding the baby a month after the birth is determined to make a go of it.
After children start to socialize they would be exposed to this as a pervasive cultural thing among their peers. "Yeah, I traded up to Miss Smith, she's really nice", "Bobby got given away, and he doesn't like them, so he's been asking around, but I think he'll have trouble because everyone knows he's rude".
You were raised in a culture where you get an allocation of at most two parents and that's it. Instinct insists that if they die you starve - naturally the thought of abandonment panics you. I think what this system puts in place instead is more like a tribe where the aunts and uncles chip in with the parenting and the child runs to whoever is closest when they want a hug. Leaving a parent might be a terrible wrench, but the feeling would be there that "I could go back, I could have both at once if they agree, nothing's final".
But of course I'd have to see it run.
You are implying that a child's need for security in the form of having stable caretaker figures, guaranteed not to disappear no matter what happens, is a learned cultural thing. While this is in theory possible, every intuition I have gained from my exposure to developmental psychology disagrees, and quite strongly so. E.g. attachment theory - yes, there may be several attachment figures, but that doesn't mean that being betrayed by any in the form of abandonment is going to be any less shocking. You also haven't addressed the feeling that ensues from the thought that you can never really rely on anyone, knowing that anybody could at any time choose to abandon you, and the effect that is going to have for forming commitments later on in life. Or the constant pressure to be "good enough" not to be abandoned that children in such a scheme would constantly be exposed to. Young children are distressed by even such minor things such as disruptions in their evening routines, to say nothing about the knowledge that your entire home might change at any moment.
Wow, I'm surprised by the number of comments supporting this baby-swapping opt-out-of-mommy nonsense using self-reference as evidence. First of all- we were NOT like most children in our intelligence or rational abilities. Developmental psychology clearly demonstrates that there are many concepts most children are incapable of grasping until reaching certain ages. Do you really think an entity without basic object permenance can decide who its mommy is going to be? OOH That mommy has CANDY!
Also, we might NOT correctly remember how we reasoned things out as children. My mother tells me how I would make up ridiculous stories (once saying my father ran me over with the car) that I actually believed. I have no memory of this.
Finally, in a somewhat Burkian argument, there are many cultures with different ideas of child-rearing, but all of them privilege the parent-child relationship. Over all the irrationality surrounding feelings and human relationships, this seems to work and to last. The implementation of any of these thought experiments would involve massive government intervention into something very personal and natural. And I know no one here really wants that.
There is clearly a lot of bitterness here about having been both rational and powerless as children. However, I would guess that more damage is done in our society from its extended adolescence, keeping twenty- and thirty-somethings financially dependent on mom and dad than from children not being able to 'swap up.'
Not exactly - I'm implying it may be a contextual instinct. That is, a highly nuclear family pushes different buttons from a highly extended one.
The feeling of being a rolling ball on a narrow hill ledge is different from the feeling of being the same ball in a valley bottom. Children would tend to fall out of unstable families and into stable ones. Having lived my childhood in an unstable family, let me assure you that the feeling "this is teetering on the precipice" is not assuaged by the inability to swap.
Or stuck with a less-than-averagely-attractive baby, with bad genes or something, because supply of babies for adoption will almost always outgrow demand.
That's why you'd want to legalize infanticide.
It would be fascinating to see the dynamics of this system, and particularly how children start to actively offer something to potential parents whom they see as superior to their current ones.
Ultimately, I think this would come out as a matching system that puts the worst children in the hands of the worst parents and so on, while simultaneously giving everybody an incentive to be a better child or parent.
Two potential downsides: children may be mistaken about their short- vs long-term interests (goodness knows I was at several times in my development), and the inequalities in outcomes may increase--as usual, there is a tradeoff between equity and efficiency. If the best parents match to the best children, we would expect the range from worst children to best children to expand quite dramatically, particularly if the legal obligations arising from adopting a child were minimal and so successful children could attract a number of investors/parents.
It would certainly be fascinating. It would construct a functional reputation economy for both parents and children, give children a lot of real power but prevent them misusing it, force a more negotiated style of parenting, break down "the family" and create something different but perhaps better, "the family as a standing wave".
It would almost entirely detach sexual activity from family. People who wanted families could just offer their services (singly or in partnership) and obtain kids. People who like children could continue parenting indefinitely, or perhaps even specialize in an age range. One possible downside: it would let people be casual baby lasers, as they could foist off their spawn about as fast as they could pop them out.
Even that could be an upside, considered differently: those who are most capable of having children--who have access to high-quality genes, the kind of physiological traits that make childbirth relatively easy, whatever--could very easily consolidate the work of actually having the children, while those with greater material means (should the groups be distinct) can provide for them.
Clearly, this is technically possible even under the current legal regime, but the system you're proposing might open the door to related contracts.
In fact, if we believe that there are economies of scale and gains from trade within families, two parents may be suboptimal. With three or more, one parent could more easily be home (with perhaps more children to handle) while the family's income could remain substantial.
Also, I love thinking about families as standing waves.
Constrained only by the capacity of Neverland Ranch.
Yes, a celeb with money who wanted children and was wanted by children could quickly gather quite a large family.
That's some strong selection pressure in favour of attractive, well behaved and appreciative children who will grow up to be repulsed by their own spawn.
I get the first part. What's the selection pressure for the second part, though? (I tried a couple times to reason it out and I'm not seeing it.)
Think Cuckoo.
You can afford to produce more offspring if you can reliably ensure they will be well cared for by others (they are adorable) but are immune to their allure yourself. You will get rid of them and don't have to spend resources that could be better directed at finding mates and gestating.
Aaaah, okay, whoops. Of course, once everyone's repulsed by kids, the selection pressures would change a bit.
I think he's saying a baby laser wins on resources and heredity. Which is true, but they lose on memetic influence.
Baby laser? Nice one, I hadn't heard that term before.
I don't think this would have much of an effect. Even abused children will typically cling to their parents and try to avoid outcomes where they'd become permanently separated. Theoretically, a child might choose to swap or eject a parent if they came into contact with a new adult and grew to like them far more than the previous parents, but that sounds like it'd introduce an incentive for parents to prevent children from growing close with other adults. Also, it creates a possibility for manipulative adults to pressure children into making decisions about their parental figures that they wouldn't actually make otherwise.
Abused children fear being abandoned. Would they fear swapping? I suspect the potential-wall would be lower, at the very least. Also, abusers divide into some that want a child to abuse, and others that abuse an unwanted child. The latter would just disconnect, and I think they make up the vast majority of bad parents.
Yes children could make mistakes (under pressure or otherwise), but they could also recover from mistakes.
How does child support fit into the mix?
Child support is a responsibility like the others, it arrives with adoption and disappears with disconnection.
We have a lot of bad impulses that one way or another are the legacy of our monkey origins. The trick is to get better at not giving in to them, and part of that is recognizing that they exist.
Is there any evidence for this being more than just talk?
It's extremely hard to sacrifice yourself for someone else. There just aren't many situations where making yourself dead is the best and only way to make someone else stay alive.
But parents — probably the vast majority of them — routinely make tremendous sacrifices in every area of their lives for their children, which seems to come pretty darn close.
Evidence of these "tremendous sacrifices" being... ?
In my experience at least:
Are these similar to dying for a child? I don't know. It's possible that the sum of the financial equivalent of the above is comparable to a statistical life, but I'm just giving rough estimates.
Child birth.
Can you substantiate the claim that giving birth is a sacrifice made for the child as opposed to for the future good of the mother herself?
In general I find it hard to believe that people would choose to become parents for the sake of a potential child, who will only exist because they decide so, unless they expect to enjoy raising a child at least some of the time, or otherwise profit from it (social approval, commitment between married partners, support in old age, government aid).
Are any sacrifices provably made "for the recipient" rather than "because the sacrificer gains some (intangible) value from having made it?"
Point taken, it may be too fuzzy a term to distinguish.
I'm sure many of the siblings of our ancestors chose otherwise. But I'd be surprised if that choice stayed popular.
Those reasons help. But our instincts give an extra boost when it comes to both expecting and remembering.
If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
The system is very, very clearly broken. If a parent wants to (for whatever reason), it is quite easy for them to abuse their child enough to give them shell shock, without there ever being any chance of a court prosecuting them. See, eg., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_Bay.
That's what I what I told my wife when she got the idea that she should be allowed out of the kitchen.
It should be clear this is intended only as an argumentum ad absurdum. (Because there is no way I'm willingly placing myself at the mercy of whatever laws happen to be politicked into marriage already or at any time in the duration of the contract in question. That's just crazy.)
Or, we could give the most dominant parents free access to all the best trash. (See, for example peace-among-primates.)
I notice in a plug at the end that Sapolsky wrote a book about why zebras don't get ulcers, and other stress-related diseases. In fact, ulcers are caused by bacteria, and a Nobel was awarded for that discovery. I wonder if Sapolsky will want to avoid being credited with that in unrelated op-eds.