Here's my anecdote of what awesome things my parents did for me as a kid to inspire any parents out there:
My sister and I had adventures for birthday parties. These were not your typical go-to-ChuckECHeese's parties and never involved going anywhere other than our own house and yard - but that house had been transformed by my parents into a wild and glorious place. Starting weeks in advance, my parents would prepare a storyline and set of challenges for us and the party guests to face. Rooms would be locked up or door knobs removed, and windows concealed as they went about decorating. And on the morning of the party, mysterious objects would appear throughout the house and more places were closed off. When the guests arrived, the presents would be intercepted from them and spirited away somewhere and the children would gather in the starting room, gazing at the streamers and decorations that revealed this years theme; an adventure in space, a medieval castle, dense jungles. When all had arrived, the event began.
Always something happens to the presents - stolen by pirates, taken away by wild animals, hidden by the traitor who murdered the king. Our goal was to solve the mystery and recover the presents. Now, the party took form - a message left behind or a trail leading us into another room. There we might encounter a familiar party game but always, always in the theme of the party. Often some small reward for all the guests who made it to through the trial (which was always everyone) - a small animal or cheap toy, but immediately cherished for the work that went into getting it. And everywhere, there were mysteries. Coded messages revealed by dropping some liquid into a sequence of beakers and watching what colors they turned. Mysterious recordings left for us to listen to and figure out where next to go. A chess board that we were slowly given moves to make until finally we found the piece that had killed the king. Cards scattered across the house revealing a message.
And special effects worthy, in the mind of a child, of any film. Moody colored lighting (fun to play with after the party was over), dry ice for fog, and the cakes! The cakes were always a thing of wonder; hidden compartments revealing the next clue only after we had eaten; frothing volcanoes; dragons with flaming nostrils.
Until finally we would reach the last room, the room that had been locked up for days now. Not a surface in there was undecorated. Dripping jungles and fantastical landscapes made incarnate in that final room so much more so even than in the rest of the party. And if that was not reward enough - the presents at long last recovered and the mysteries solved! But not just for the birthday boy or girl, for there would always be individual miniature pinatas, one for each guest. (To me, this is what pinatas are. Those big things where only one person gets to swing and the slowest kid always feels left out of the candy grad - those are not pinatas.) These gifts had been earned.
As best as I can recall, none of this is an exaggeration. The amount of effort they went through must have been enormous, but oh how we loved it - all of us. I looked forward to my sister's birthdays almost as much as I looked forward to my own. And our friends loved them too. Years later, in college I had a friend come up to me and ask me about my birthday parties, not because I had known him at the time of the parties, but because our mutual friend who had been going to those parties for years had told them about them. They stopped after our tenth birthdays, but we still continued this on many holidays on a much smaller scale - there were inevitably puzzles to solve to get at least one present on Christmas morning.
I doubt this had any bearing on rationality, but in terms of happiness? Unbeatable. Challenge yourselfs; make holidays at least as much fun as a giant Blue Screen of Death blocking off half the house until the intrepid guests tear it down and reveal the adventure beyond.
Planned top-level post -- any feedback very much welcome.
Obviously a followup to: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists
My very first top-level post on LW was a solicitation for advice/feedback/discussion on the topic of rationalist parenting. I'd like to revisit the topic now.
Goals
First of all, let's talk about goals. I can think of four.
What We Know
To speak to goal 1 first, Bryan Caplan claims flat outcomes for goal #1 under commonly tried parenting interventions, which seems counter-intuitive. More explanation of what exactly the studies in question proved would be welcome.
As Luke helpfully taught us, negative reinforcement doesn't seem to work as well as positive. Spanking, in particular, is right out. This is in large part because reinforcement reinforces everything about what the subject's doing at the time it occurs. This means, in particular, that you're reinforcing both the target behavior and being caught at it. In the case of positive behavior/reinforcement, there's nothing particularly problematic about this, but for the negative case, you're also punishing being caught/noticed/seen, which can be problematic.
Nutrition in early childhood does seem to influence life outcomes, mostly on the low end: serious malnutrition depresses IQ -- try to avoid it.
Praise seems to be important, first of all because it is often a powerful positive reinforcer in children. Research has shown that the target of the praise is important. Praising a child for having worked hard to understand a concept seems to lead to more future efforts of the same kind than praising their intelligence.
Simply talking to children, well before they've developed language skills, seems to be important for goals 1 and 4. I plan to use mine as rubber ducks=).
Defaults to Notice and Perhaps Reject
There are some idiosyncrasies of the default in modern American childrearing that don't seem to do anyone any favors.Segregation by age:
Outside of their siblings, American six-year-olds are socialized almost entirely with other six-year-olds. Historically, it has been possible for six-year-olds to be friends with 15-year olds -- to, I suspect, the benefit of both. The older children provide near(er)-term models for the younger children of their future growth, and the older children are thus encouraged to be role-models.Extending this a bit further, there seems to be a taboo against children having adult friends who aren't their close relatives, or close friends of their parents. This taboo seems to be self-reinforcing -- any adult who indicates an interest in befriending a child knowing that the taboo exists signals that they may have suspicious intentions. I suspect that this is yet another way of infantilizing children. The solution is probably just to have lots of local close friends who can be friends to your children.
General Over-protectiveness:
We've all heard of the rise of "helicopter parenting". This article sums things up nicely.What I think I know:
In reference to Goals 2 and 3, most of the struggles I see seem to be about autonomy. Alicorn and I have both spontaneously remarked on how much we love being adults, and this is mostly a function of the extent to which we get to choose our activities from moment to moment, choose where we want to live, choose what/when we want to eat, go where we want to go, stay as long as we want to stay, etc. etc. Similarly, from watching childhood friends with their children, they seem to get in trouble -- the interaction seems to become massively Less Fun -- when they decide that, e.g. the child really must eat food X at time Y, when, as a spectator, I really can't understand why the child can't be left alone to find some food when ey want some.
This suggests increasing autonomy as an important subgoal. In particular, it points to criteria for "optimizing the build" of your child -- what skills do ey need before ey can stay home a few hours without you? Before ey can walk around the corner/bike across town to run an errand/meet a friend/etc.? Before you can safely encourage em to get a driver's license/car? Grind those skill points!
That's all I've got -- what else do we, as a community, know?