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shminux comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - LessWrong
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Comments (257)
I like the summary given by one reviewer:
Certainly "love your kids and have fun with them, the rest will work itself out" is an attractive message. It contradicts my anecdotal short-term observations, but they don't claim any short-term effects, only long-term.
You don't even have to be a "reasonable" parent. Parents in the 1960's were "bad" by today's standards*, and the kids turned out fine.
*The book talks about how parents spend far more time on childcare today than they did in the 1960's.
It is worth pointing out I think that the baby boomers were far more violent that the current generation and were dysfunctional in many other ways. They also produced the biggest bubble and the worst financial crash since the great depression, and a marked decline in many aspects of American life such as the economy (rampant deficits and declining living standards for average people). And look at the ethical standards of the politicians from the baby boomer generation.
The fact that most people mostly recover from their childhood by their thirties does not mean that it did no damage. Your teens and 20s are supposed to be the best years of your life.
(blink)
I assume you mean "supposed to be" here in the sense of conventionally understood to be, rather than some kind of obligation. Even so, though, it seems like a poor convention to endorse.
If not, anyone who had lousy teens and 20s but are going great in their 30s should be ashamed of themselves and start making self destructive decisions so as to rectify the situation!
Yeah, that seems to follow. Of course, the alternative reading simply means we should look forward to life getting worse and worse.
Me, I only really started getting the hang of this life in my early 40s, and am looking forward to seeing what comes next.
I've seen recently a kenote (french) on the effects of TV on people. While this sentence seems reasonable, I would say (if the keynote is as solid as it looks) that you should go real easy on TV. 1 hour a day is already much too much. During the very first years of development, this would be a catastrophe. (To name just one example, we have reasons to believe TV is almost entirely responsible for the recent 10% drop in SAT scores — from the 60s to the 80s. I don't know how many IQ points that would be.)
(Now the effects of TV do not all come from the screen itself. There are priming effects (smoking, violence, food), there are attentional effects, there are sedentary effects… Those different effects can be addressed differently.)
But if you're already a "good enough" parent, you probably cut TV for quality time anyway.
I heard a horror story (anecdote from a book, for what it's worth) of a child basically raised in front of a TV, who learned from it both language and a general rule that the world (and social interaction) is non-interactive. If you could get his attention, he'd cheerfully recite some memorized lines then zone out.
Was the book "The boy who was raised as a dog?" Because I remember reading the same story in that book.
It certainly could be - I read the anecdote from a book I picked idly off a shelf in a bookstore, and I retained the vague impression that it was from a book about the importance of social factors and the effects of technology on our social/psychological development, but I could have been conflating it with another such book. After reading an excerpt from "The Boy who was Raised as a Dog", the style matches, so that probably was the one I read. Would you recommend it?
Yes yes yes! An awesome book!
Well! I may have to take a more in-depth look at it sometime this summer.