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Technologos comments on Our House, My Rules - Less Wrong
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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.'
I'm not surprised. There are certain axes along which many Less Wrongers are just weird (incorrect and slightly tilted from reasonable). The view of children as suppressed, oppressed small-sized adults is one of them. My hypothesis is that Less Wrongers draw from a couple dominant sources: people who had an overly authoritarian upbringing and thus see things like "Santa Claus", normal parental controls and religion in an overly negative way, and people who are socially impaired enough to not recognize when others are getting these ideas consistently wrong.
Instead of cultivating an insular world where like-minded individuals try to figure out what they don’t understand in the ways that they endorse (ways that are proving to NOT WORK on certain kinds of topics), they should try to encourage people who think differently (but smarter on those topics) to explain it to them. And then, it would be useful to look and check if endorsed methods could have (in theory) found that answer or if there are certain topics for which rationality just doesn't do the job, yet.
While I am somewhat surprised at how close the suggestion came to being seriously discussed I haven't seen large numbers of people supporting the baby-swapping opt-out-of-mommy nonsense out of self reference. In fact, I haven't seen a single example of that, even if self reference came up in tangents. Although to be fair a few replies may have slipped by 'recent comments' without my awareness.
As someone who considers his childhood to have been remarkably empowered I am a little wary about just where you are waving your generalisation stick around, I am sure to catch a splash here or there. I don't think the interest shown in the comically absurd child liberation proposal is evidence of bitterness. A complete detachment from reality maybe, but not necessarily bitterness.
I think you're right.
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.
Within a short time of birth, certainly. I'd be in favor.
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.