I'm posting this because LessWrong was very influential on how I viewed parenting, particularly the emphasis on helping one's brain work better. In this context, creating and influencing another person's brain is an awesome responsibility.

It turned out to be a lot more anxiety-provoking than I expected. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as the possibility of screwing up someone's brain should make a parent anxious, but it's something to be aware of. I've heard some blithe "Rational parenting could be a very high-impact activity!" statements from childless LWers who may be interested to hear some experiences in actually applying that.

One thing that really scared me about trying to raise a child with the healthiest-possible brain and body was the possibility that I might not love her if she turned out to not be smart. 15 months in, I'm no longer worried. Evolution has been very successful at producing parents and children that love each other despite their flaws, and our family is no exception. Our daughter Lily seems to be doing fine, but if she turns out to have disabilities or other problems, I'm confident that we'll roll with the punches.

Cross-posted from The Whole Sky.

Before I got pregnant, I read Scott Alexander's (Yvain's) excellent Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting and was so excited to have this knowledge. I thought how lucky my child would be to have parents who knew and cared about how to protect her from things that would damage her brain.

Real life, of course, got more complicated. It's one thing to intend to avoid neurotoxins, but another to arrive at the grandparents' house and find they've just had ant poison sprayed. What do you do then?

Here are some tradeoffs Jeff and I have made between things that are good for children in one way but bad in another, or things that are good for children but really difficult or expensive.

Germs and parasites

The hygiene hypothesis states that lack of exposure to germs and parasites increases risk of auto-immune disease. Our pediatrician recommended letting Lily playing in the dirt for this reason.

While exposure to animal dander and pollution increase asthma later in life, it seems that being exposed to these in the first year of life actually protects against asthma. Apparently if you're going to live in a house with roaches, you should do it in the first year or not at all.

Except some stuff in dirt is actually bad for you.

Scott writes:

Parasite-infestedness of an area correlates with national IQ at about r = -0.82. The same is true of US states, with a slightly reduced correlation coefficient of -0.67 (p<0.0001). . . . When an area eliminates parasites (like the US did for malaria and hookworm in the early 1900s) the IQ for the area goes up at about the right time.

Living with cats as a child seems to increase risk of schizophrenia, apparently via toxoplasmosis. But in order to catch toxoplasmosis from a cat, you have to eat its feces during the two weeks after it first becomes infected (which it’s most likely to do by eating birds or rodents carrying the disease). This makes me guess that most kids get it through tasting a handful of cat litter, dirt from the yard, or sand from the sandbox rather than simply through cat ownership. We live with indoor cats who don’t seem to be mousers, so I’m not concerned about them giving anyone toxoplasmosis. If we build Lily a sandbox, we’ll keep it covered when not in use.

The evidence is mixed about whether infections like colds during the first year of life increase or decrease your risk of asthma later. After the newborn period, we defaulted to being pretty casual about germ exposure.

Toxins in buildings

Our experiences with lead. Our experiences with mercury.

In some areas, it’s not that feasible to live in a house with zero lead. We live in Boston, where 87% of the housing was built before lead paint was banned. Even in a new building, we’d need to go far out of town before reaching soil that wasn’t near where a lead-painted building had been.

It is possible to do some renovations without exposing kids to lead. Jeff recently did some demolition of walls with lead paint, very carefully sealed off and cleaned up, while Lily and I spent the day elsewhere. Afterwards her lead level was no higher than it had been.

But Jeff got serious lead poisoning as a toddler while his parents did major renovations on their old house. If I didn’t think I could keep the child away from the dust, I wouldn’t renovate.

Recently a house across the street from us was gutted, with workers throwing debris out the windows and creating big plumes of dust (presumable lead-laden) that blew all down the street. Later I realized I should have called city building inspection services, which would have at least made them carry the debris into the dumpster instead of throwing it from the second story.

Floor varnish releases formaldehyde and other nasties as it cures. We kept Lily out of the house for a few weeks after Jeff redid the floors. We found it worthwhile to pay rent at our previous house in order to not have to live in the new house while this kind of work was happening.

Pressure-treated wood was treated with arsenic and chromium until around 2004 in the US. It has a greenish tint, though this may have faded with time. Playing on playsets or decks made of such wood increases children's cancer risk. It should not be used for furniture (I thought this would be obvious, but apparently it wasn't to some of my handyman relatives).

I found it difficult to know how to deal with fresh paint and other fumes in my building at work while I was pregnant. Women of reproductive age have a heightened sense of smell, and many pregnant women have heightened aversion to smells, so you can literally smell things some of your coworkers can’t (or don’t mind). The most critical period of development is during the first trimester, when most women aren’t telling the world they’re pregnant (because it’s also the time when a miscarriage is most likely, and if you do lose the pregnancy you might not want to have to tell the world). During that period, I found it difficult to explain why I was concerned about the fumes from the roofing adhesive being used in our building. I didn’t want to seem like a princess who thought she was too good to work in conditions that everybody else found acceptable. (After I told them I was pregnant, my coworkers were very understanding about such things.)

Food

Recommendations usually focus on what you should eat during pregnancy, but obviously children’s brain development doesn’t stop there. I’ve opted to take precautions with the food Lily and I eat for as long as I’m nursing her.

Claims that pesticide residues are poisoning children scare me, although most scientists seem to think the paper cited is overblown. Other sources say the levels of pesticides in conventionally grown produce are fine. We buy organic produce at home but eat whatever we’re served elsewhere.

I would love to see a study with families randomly selected to receive organic produce for the first 8 years of the kids’ lives, then looking at IQ and hyperactivity. But no one’s going to do that study because of how expensive 8 years of organic produce would be.
The Biodeterminist’s Guide doesn’t mention PCBs in the section on fish, but fish (particularly farmed salmon) are a major source of these pollutants. They don’t seem to be as bad as mercury, but are neurotoxic. Unfortunately their half-life in the body is around 14 years, so if you have even a vague idea of getting pregnant ever in your life you shouldn’t be eating farmed salmon (or Atlantic/farmed salmon, bluefish, wild striped bass, white and Atlantic croaker, blackback or winter flounder, summer flounder, or blue crab).

I had the best intentions of eating lots of the right kind of high-omega-3, low-pollutant fish during and after pregnancy. Unfortunately, fish was the only food I developed an aversion to. Now that Lily is eating food on her own, we tried several sources of omega-3 and found that kippered herring was the only success. Lesson: it’s hard to predict what foods kids will eat, so keep trying.

In terms of hassle, I underestimated how long I would be “eating for two” in the sense that anything I put in my body ends up in my child’s body. Counting pre-pregnancy (because mercury has a half-life of around 50 days in the body, so sushi you eat before getting pregnant could still affect your child), pregnancy, breastfeeding, and presuming a second pregnancy, I’ll probably spend about 5 solid years feeding another person via my body, sometimes two children at once. That’s a long time in which you have to consider the effect of every medication, every cup of coffee, every glass of wine on your child. There are hardly any medications considered completely safe during pregnancy and lactation—most things are in Category C, meaning there’s some evidence from animal trials that they may be bad for human children.

Fluoride

Too much fluoride is bad for children’s brains. The CDC recently recommended lowering fluoride levels in municipal water (though apparently because of concerns about tooth discoloration more than neurotoxicity). Around the same time, the American Dental Association began recommending the use of fluoride toothpaste as soon as babies have teeth, rather than waiting until they can rinse and spit.

Cavities are actually a serious problem even in baby teeth, because of the pain and possible infection they cause children. Pulling them messes up the alignment of adult teeth. Drilling on children too young to hold still requires full anesthesia, which is dangerous itself.

But Lily isn’t particularly at risk for cavities. 20% of children get a cavity by age six, and they are disproportionately poor, African-American, and particularly Mexican-American children (presumably because of different diet and less ability to afford dentists). 75% of cavities in children under 5 occur in 8% of the population.

We decided to have Lily brush without toothpaste, avoid juice and other sugary drinks, and see the dentist regularly.

Home pesticides

One of the most commonly applied insecticides makes kids less smart. This isn’t too surprising, given that it kills insects by disabling their nervous system. But it’s not something you can observe on a small scale, so it’s not surprising that the exterminator I talked to brushed off my questions with “I’ve never heard of a problem!”

If you get carpenter ants in your house, you basically have to choose between poisoning them or letting them structurally damage the house. We’ve only seen a few so far, but if the problem progresses, we plan to:

1) remove any rotting wood in the yard where they could be nesting

2) have the perimeter of the building sprayed

3) place gel bait in areas kids can’t access

4) only then spray poison inside the house.

If we have mice we’ll plan to use mechanical traps rather than poison.

Flame retardants

Since the 1970s, California required a high degree of flame-resistance from furniture. This basically meant that US manufacturers sprayed flame retardant chemicals on anything made of polyurethane foam, such as sofas, rug pads, nursing pillows, and baby mattresses.

The law recently changed, due to growing acknowledgement that the carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals were more dangerous than the fires they were supposed to be preventing. Even firefighters opposed the use of the flame retardants, because when people die in fires it’s usually from smoke inhalation rather than burns, and firefighters don’t want to breathe the smoke from your toxic sofa (which will eventually catch fire even with the flame retardants).

We’ve opted to use furniture from companies that have stopped using flame retardants (like Ikea and others listed here). Apparently futons are okay if they’re stuffed with cotton rather than foam. We also have some pre-1970s furniture that tested clean for flame retardants. You can get foam samples tested for free.

The main vehicle for children ingesting the flame retardants is that it settles into dust on the floor, and children crawl around in the dust. If you don’t want to get rid of your furniture, frequent damp-mopping would probably help.

The standards for mattresses are so stringent that the chemical sprays aren’t generally used, and instead most mattresses are wrapped in a flame-resistant barrier which apparently isn’t toxic. I contacted the companies that made our mattresses and they’re fine.

Ratings for chemical safety of children’s car seats here.

Thoughts on IQ

A lot of people, when I start talking like this, say things like “Well, I lived in a house with lead paint/played with mercury/etc. and I’m still alive.” And yes, I played with mercury as a child, and Jeff is still one of the smartest people I know even after getting acute lead poisoning as a child.

But I do wonder if my mind would work a little better without the mercury exposure, and if Jeff would have had an easier time in school without the hyperactivity (a symptom of lead exposure). Given the choice between a brain that works a little better and one that works a little worse, who wouldn’t choose the one that works better?

We’ll never know how an individual’s nervous system might have been different with a different childhood. But we can see population-level effects. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, is fine with calculating the expected benefit of making coal plants stop releasing mercury by looking at the expected gains in terms of children’s IQ and increased earnings.

Scott writes:

A 15 to 20 point rise in IQ, which is a little more than you get from supplementing iodine in an iodine-deficient region, is associated with half the chance of living in poverty, going to prison, or being on welfare, and with only one-fifth the chance of dropping out of high-school (“associated with” does not mean “causes”).

Salkever concludes that for each lost IQ point, males experience a 1.93% decrease in lifetime earnings and females experience a 3.23% decrease. If Lily would earn about what I do, saving her one IQ point would save her $1600 a year or $64000 over her career. (And that’s not counting the other benefits she and others will reap from her having a better-functioning mind!) I use that for perspective when making decisions. $64000 would buy a lot of the posh prenatal vitamins that actually contain iodine, or organic food, or alternate housing while we’re fixing up the new house.

Conclusion

There are times when Jeff and I prioritize social relationships over protecting Lily from everything that might harm her physical development. It’s awkward to refuse to go to someone’s house because of the chemicals they use, or to refuse to eat food we’re offered. Social interactions are good for children’s development, and we value those as well as physical safety. And there are times when I’ve had to stop being so careful because I was getting paralyzed by anxiety (literally perched in the rocker with the baby trying not to touch anything after my in-laws scraped lead paint off the outside of the house).

But we also prioritize neurological development more than most parents, and we hope that will have good outcomes for Lily.

I continually train my ten-year-old son’s working memory, and urge parents of other young children to do likewise.  While I have succeeded in at least temporarily improving his working memory, I accept that this change might not be permanent and could end a few months after he stops training.  But I also believe that while his working memory is boosted so too is his learning capacity.    

I have a horrible working memory that greatly hindered my academic achievement.  I was so bad at spelling that they stopped counting it against me in school.  In technical classes I had trouble remembering what variables stood for.  My son, in contrast, has a fantastic memory.  He twice won his school’s spelling bee, and just recently I wrote twenty symbols (letters, numbers, and shapes) in rows of five.  After a few minutes he memorized the symbols and then (without looking) repeated them forward, backwards, forwards, and then by columns.    

My son and I have been learning different programming languages through Codecademy.  While I struggle to remember the required syntax of different languages, he quickly gets this and can focus on higher level understanding.  When we do math learning together his strong working memory also lets him concentrate on higher order issues then remembering the details of the problem and the relevant formulas.     

You can easily train a child’s working memory.  It requires just a few minutes of time a day, can be very low tech or done on a computer, can be optimized for your child to get him in flow, and easily lends itself to a reward system.  Here is some of the training we have done:     

• I write down a sequence and have him repeat it.
• I say a sequence and have him repeat it.
• He repeats the sequence backwards.
• He repeats the sequence with slight changes such as adding one to each number and “subtracting” one from each letter.
• He repeats while doing some task like touching his head every time he says an even number and touching his knee every time he says an odd one.
• Before repeating a memorized sequence he must play repeat after me where I say a random string.
• I draw a picture and have him redraw it.
• He plays N-back games.
• He does mental math requiring keeping track of numbers (i.e. 42 times 37).
• I assign numerical values to letters and ask him math operation questions (i.e. A*B+C).        

The key is to keep changing how you train your kid so you have more hope of improving general working memory rather than the very specific task you are doing.  So, for example, if you say a sequence and have your kid repeat it back to you, vary the speed at which you talk on different days and don’t just use one class of symbols in your exercises.

Follow up to: Rationality Games Apps

In the spirit of: Games for rationalists

Obvious candidates are 

• Dragon Box
• HabitRPG
• Anki App

There are lots of low profile apps filed under learning in the app stores but most of this is crap and it takes lots of time to explore these. 

I also found some recommendation for learning with Android apps and will point my son to these. 

I'd like to hear what apps do you or yours children use. Which apps and esp. games do you recommend for future rationalists?

So I have a three-year old kid, and will usually read or tell him a bedtime story.

That is a nice opportunity to introduce new concepts, but my capacity for improvisation is limited, especially towards the end of the day. So I'm asking the good people on LessWrong for ideas. How would you wrap various lesswrongish ideas in a short story a little kid would pay attention to?

I'm mostly interested in the aspects of "practical rationality" that aren't going to be taught at school or in children's books or children's TV shows - so things like Sunk Costs, taking the outside view, wondering which side is true instead of arguing for a side, etc.

Pointers to outside sources of such stories are welcome too!

Edit: actually, if you want to share ideas of games or activities of the same kind, go ahead! :)

Developing rational patterns of thought in children is very important and I'm glad Gunnar brought that issue up.

I wanted to share with you some thoughts I have regarding estimation games.

From an early age I've been constantly calculating various kinds of estimates - e.g. "how many people live in this building", "how long will it take to cross the US on foot", "what's the height of that tower", "how many BMWs are manufactured annually" and so on.

I believe that practising this technique is not only fun but also helpful. Sometimes one has no way or time to acquire accurate information regarding something and even a rough estimate can be very valuable. 

People are often surprised when they see me do it whereas for me it is completely natural. I think the reason is that I do it from a very early age.

I think it's easy and natural for children to grasp if this method is introduced through everyday experiences. By making this into a game children can gain intuitive understanding of quantitative techniques. I suspect many children can enjoy this kind of games.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Do you remember yourself doing something like this? From what age? Do you practice anything similar with your children?

The idea of polyamoury is one that interests me. However, while such books as The Ethical Slut have done a good job of providing me with tools to understand and possibly handle the challenges and rewards involved, I found them unsatisfying in that they were largely based on anecdotal evidence, with a very strong selection bias. Before making the jump of attempting to live that way, one would need to know precisely the state of the art of scientific, rigourous, credible research on the topic; it is a tedious job to seek out and compile everything, but I believe it is a job worth doing. 

I'll be initiating an ongoing process of data compilation, and will publish my findings on this thread as I discover and summarize them. Any help is greatly appreciated, as this promises to be long and tedious. I might especially need help extracting meaningful information from the masses of data; I am not a good statistician yet, far from it.

To Be Expanded...

I bought my niece a Kindle that just arrived and I'm about to load it up with books to give it to her tomorrow for her birthday. I've decided to be a sneaky uncle and include good books that can teach better abilities to think or at least to consider science cool and interesting. She is currently in the 4th Grade with 5th coming after the Summer.

She reads basically at her own grade level so while I'm open to stuffing the Kindle with books to be read when she's ready, I'd like to focus on giving her books she can read now. Ender's Game will be on there most likely. Game of Thrones will not.

What books would you give a youngling? Her interests currently trend toward the young mystery section, Hardy Boys and the like, but in my experience she is very open to trying new books with particular interest in YA fantasy but not much interest in Sci Fi (if I'm doing any other optimizing this year, I'll try to change her opinion on Sci Fi).

Note: This is based on anecdotal evidence, personal experience (I have worked with children for many years. It is my full-time job.) and "general knowledge" rather than scientific studies, though I welcome any relevant links on either side of the issue.

The holidays are upon us, and I would guess that even though most of us are atheists, that we will still be spending time with our extended families sometime in the next week. These extended families are likely to include nieces and nephews, or other children, that you will have to interact with (probably whether you like it or not...)

Many LW-ers might not spend a lot of time with children in their day-to-day lives, and therefore I would like to make a quick comment on how to interact with them in a way that is conducive to their development. After all, if we want to live in a rationalist world tomorrow, one of the best ways to get there is by raising children who can become rationalist adults. 

PLEASE READ THIS LINK if there are any little girls you will be seeing this holiday season:

How To Talk to Little Girls: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bloom/how-to-talk-to-little-gir_b_882510.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false


I know it's hard, but DON'T tell little girls that they look cute, and DON'T comment on their adorable little outfits, or their pony-tailed hair. The world is already screaming at them that the primary thing other people notice and care about for them is their looks. Ask them about their opinions, or their hobbies. Point them toward growing into a well-rounded adult with a mind of her own.

This does not just apply to little girls and their looks, but can be extrapolated to SO many other circumstances. For example, when children (of either gender) are succeeding in something, whether it is school-work, or a drawing, DON'T comment on how smart or skilled they are. Instead, say something like: "Wow, that was a really difficult math problem you just solved. You must have studied really hard to understand it!" Have your comments focus on complementing their hard work, and their determination.

By commenting on children's innate abilities, you are setting them up to believe that if they are good at something, it is solely based on talent. Conversely, by commenting on the amount of work or effort that went into their progress, you are setting them up to believe that they need to put effort into things, in order to succeed at them.


This may not seem like a big deal, but I have worked in childcare for many years, and have learned how elastic children's brains are. You can get them to believe almost anything, or have any opinion, JUST by telling them they have that opinion. Tell a kid they like helping you cook often enough, and they will quickly think that they like helping you cook.

For a specific example, I made my first charge like my favorite of the little-kid shows by saying: "Ooo! Kim Possible is on! You love this show!" She soon internalized it, and it became one of her favorites. There is of course a limit to this. No amount of saying "That show is boring", and "You don't like that show" could convince her that Wonderpets was NOT super-awesome.