Less Wrong Parents

saliency

Less Wrong Parents
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-parents

Recently the NYC LW/OB community had two babies and is expecting a third.
I created a google group as a way of sharing information, primarily thinking of the NYC community.

I posted my pre-baby purchase list and William Eden posted an extensive list of books on early parenting.

William suggested opening up the group so as to get insight from the larger LW community on parenting.
I think this is *probably* a good idea. Google groups are simple to set up but have limits.
For this reason I request that if you are going to have an extensive debate on a subject you create a new thread (aka: get a room)

The primary objective is to lower the cost of obtaining information on parenting.
I believe this overall goal to be more important then any particular "truth".

My hope is that this will primarily serve as a place for people to ask parenting question and post guides.
Perhaps if enough guides are posted they can eventually be consolidated into a wiki.

Less Wrong Parents
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!forum/less-wrong-parents

Recently the NYC LW/OB community had two babies and is expecting a third.
I created a google group as a way of sharing information, primarily thinking of the NYC community.

I posted my pre-baby purchase list and William Eden posted an extensive list of books on early parenting.

The primary objective is to lower the cost of obtaining information on parenting.
I believe this overall goal to be more important then any particular "truth".

My hope is that this will primarily serve as a place for people to ask parenting question and post guides.
Perhaps if enough guides are posted they can eventually be consolidated into a wiki.

Is this from real data?

I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents' belief systems and behaviors and their children's.

I'm not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I've noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle "problematic" behavior / do anything to "educate" their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.

The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding "I don't know, let's find out" to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.

I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child's chances of not being stupid is something you care about.

At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven't read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.

Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.

If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.

Here's some previous LW discussion of this research area.

3Swimmy14y

Here is one study, it is fairly typical of the kind. (I can gladly dig up more for you, but this is one of the better ones.) It finds family effects, but they are much smaller than many people would expect. Of course it is more difficult to find out whether a child is "rational" as opposed to intelligent, and the same is true for parents, so there are no data (to my knowledge) on how much parenting affects scientific inquisitiveness.

4A1987dM14y

I read Psychology Applied to Modern Life and IIRC I was appalled by the number of X for which it says “it has been found that X has very little effect on children's development”.