For the results of a different survey, 10 years ago, asking similar questions: https://reason.com/2014/08/20/helicopter-parenting-run-amok-most-ameri
Nearly half of respondents think it should be illegal for a 12 year old to play solo at a park. It's over 2/3 for a 9 year old. Those are tough numbers.
I'm glad this worked for you, but would your thought be to use unique signs for each kid if each had a multi-month signing phase?
In particular, I would not use this approach too extensively if your kid may want to be able to communicate with others who work with kids - teachers at daycare, speech pathologists, many nannies, other pediatric medical professionals etc. I do agree that straight ASL isn't quite right either. Our kid's speech pathologist uses a lot of signs but chooses for example to use "car" - a fairly easy sign - for all vehicles since bus, train, etc. are more abstract or complex. This approach has allowed our kid to communicate with a range of people over the relevant time period, not just our household.
I'm fairly surprised to read this, as I continue to be surprised by the number of my friends and acquaintances who have flown home with COVID despite having the means not to. Every flight I've taken since the pandemic started, I've taken the time to game plan what would happen if I or someone in my party were to test positive during the trip. Did you not do this? On the scale of the incomes you have posted on your blog previously, $2000 or so is not very much.
And from the JetBlue policy you linked to, I guess you bought Basic Blue fares?
It seems like you c...
I think you are maybe also not thinking of the degrees of privacy people value.
For example, I used to have a job where it was valuable to be able to present to new professional acquaintances as politically neutral or at least politically agendaless. I have a very Google-able name. And Google really likes Facebook results. Therefore I kept anything publicly available, including on Facebook, fairly neutral - no tags in public contra pictures, for example. My bar was, if someone were to see they were going to meet with me, search my name, and read whate...
I can't find it right now, but I distinctly remember you posting about BIDA having a similar "kids excluded" policy, I think back when under-5s couldn't be vaccinated. At the time, you said it was no/low cost, and someone in the comments pointed out that the cost was the entire cost of attending the dance. I didn't see an explicit revision to your thinking posted. Can you articulate your revised cost-benefit for under 2s, who can't do basic things like cover a cough or wash their hands after touching their mouth?
Possibly scarier: the federal government and national lab system has not identical, but very similar barriers.
Not wanting your kid to be at minimal age to start school is a totally valid counterargument. Perhaps there's a middle ground - prioritizing the spring for example.
Had anyone I'd been discussing this with brought up this counterargument I would have had a very different takeaway from the conversation. The point I was trying to make was that even people who are thinking some about the economics of pregnancy and parenthood don't seem to be thinking about it very comprehensively in my experience.
That said, IIRC from your blogs, 2 of your 3 kids have June-ish birthdays, so I take it your concern about being in the youngest quarter of the year wasn't something important enough to you to actively avoid.
| as you start looking for a house
We've been keeping our eye on houses in our area for several years. If the right one showed up on the market we would likely try to buy. I know people who have spent their entire careers in this state. Maybe it's not the most typical approach, but I don't expect there will be a concentrated 6 month period of "looking for a house" for us.
For a more concrete example, we nearly lost our housing last year on very short notice (<1 month), and so had to secure a new rental. Most rentals require income to be a certain percenta...
I think means testing goes in a lot of different directions. You may qualify for housing assistance and your kid may qualify for more financial aid in college, and I don't know that either of those would be questioned. However, my understanding is that court-ordered child/spousal support works differently and is unlikely to be adjusted downward based on a decrease in income, especially in this scenario.
On the other side of the coin, good luck buying a house.
I agree completely, and yet I am also very convinced that very few people enter parenthood having done rational economic calculations.
As an example:
(A) I've seen many folks TTC with an explicit intent to get the entire pregnancy + birth on one year's health insurance deductible, which I'd guess saves $7500 or so on a HDHP versus the worst case of meeting the full deductible in two consecutive years. This often results in a baby born in the fall.
(B) A summer versus fall baby requires ~10 months less childcare before public school (or combi...
What is your current approach if a kid wants to call someone just to talk (say, your dad)? Do you do it for them on your phone? Do they do it on your phone? Is this something that they just don't have interest in doing?
I'm similarly interested in how you are teaching your kid phone skills. Has your kid ever picked up the phone? At what age do you anticipate they will start picking up a phone?
We are considering getting a land line or a family device in a year or two, not sure which yet.
I'm curious if the ceiling fan is reversible, and if so if you tried it blowing up. That would give you something of a pressurized plenum approach and may more evenly mix the air.
We also prioritized sleep pretty heavily. Just as a datapoint, here are some of the ways that has looked for us:
I'm finding this exchange strangely frustrating. I was trying to ask whether you planned to explicitly exclude children under 2 and/or 5, since my understanding is the local laws would permit an event with them and so your plan in this regard wasn't clear to me from your writeup. I expected there to be either a small additional risk in your analysis from including them or an included cost to not, since then presumably people are paying a sitter (or staying home). I don't have a strong opinion either way on the correct approach. But "I would not personally ...
While most dancing children will be covered by the recent EUA, many younger ones (and therefore likely one or both parents) will not. I understand that you yourself have a <1 year old for whom the vaccine availability timeline is unclear. She would not be welcome at the dance events hosted in my area.
It isn't now, which means the inclusion of those people isn't counted a loss. When you revisit the analysis in six months or two years, will you remember to put them in then?
I also think that ignoring the loss of people who can't reasonably dance in masks is a mistake, but that's strictly my opinion rather than a shortcoming of your writeup.
People sweat while dancing. Some people sweat a lot. I have heard that wet, even damp, cloth masks are essentially useless. Does this hold true for surgical type masks as well? If so, many folks will be effectively unmasked for much of the evening, even if they do something reasonable like get a fresh mask every 2-3 dances.
On an entirely separate note, my community has re-started some of its dances with mask and vacc required, no exceptions. This has excluded several families with children who were active participants pre-pandemic. What is your plan regards to families with children? The "I" in BIDA perhaps makes it extra un-pallatable to exclude them.
It seems like what you really need is walkie-talkie technology in a watch form factor. I'm kind of surprised I've never heard of such a thing.
Those are only useful while the kids are in boosters or carseats though. They don't really add an extra seat in a general sense.
Another relevant childhood memory: my parents added an additional lap belt to the back bench seat of our minivan in around 2001, making a 7 seater into an 8 seater legally. We fit four accross a few times (mostly kids/tweens 6-12 YO, no booster seats). Also not the most comfortable but also an adventure. I would be curious what the cost is to add a seatbelt to a 5 seater car nowadays, as it would likely need to be a shoulder belt. With kids in boosters to a much older age it would be more complicated to fit 4 across and I wouldn't do it in a Fit, but there may be other cars where this would be an option.
I got put in the middle front seat fairly frequently growing up (1990s). It wasn't comfortable, but it was an adventure and for half hour rides it sure beat there having to be two trips which would have been the only alternative. Comfort isn't everything.
I presume safety standards have a lot to do with the decline of smaller 6-7 seaters. Today I don't think it would be legal for me to be in the front seat at all at the ages I was sometimes sitting in the middle front seat (5ish-10ish) due to passenger-side airbags that can't be turned off*. The minim...
I have yet to see anything convincing me that a vaccinated person is unlikely to give me COVID, even 2 weeks after dose 2. Especially because right now, the vaccinated people are the ones most likely to be exposed to COVID (e.g. nurses, grandparents living in group facilities). I would not be comfortable being unvaccinated and unmasked around a vaccinated unmasked person for this reason. I am eagerly awaiting information to change my mind on this, but I have not seen it yet.
If I were also vaccinated, I would feel reasonably good that even if I got COVID, I...
Those two options are part of a much larger picture, that seems really simplistic. Most places aren't doing any real contact tracing right now - the white house certainly isn't. We might be 'saved' by a vaccine, we might not. I don't think that any of us thought, two weeks in, that we'd still be here seven months in. I figure it's 50-50 that dancing is a significantly lower risk (say a factor of at least 2) two years in than it is now. There's no coherent plan, no coherent timeline for how long you have to endure this. Right now it's people's employers tha...
First, I am very curious what the results would have been with enforced mask-wearing.
Second, at what point in the pandemic to we start accepting that to some people, risks similar to this may be worth it and should be their choice? It's been seven months and it's about to be winter. If safe options for socialization aren't available or aren't meeting people's needs, they are going to go for unsafe options. I expect that by two years into the pandemic I will be ready to go to a dance weekend and then do my due diligence to quarantine strictly for two weeks ...
Alright, I'll push back a little.
I think your numbers are off. My understanding (mostly from this NYT piece) is that WIC also renews the first of the month, at least in many areas. Many people were hit extra hard in March (less income, less support available from community orgs, less food from work or supplies from daycare). I would expect that on Apr 1-2, it could easily have been 1 in 25 shoppers who were WIC-eligible, or even much higher. And, making up numbers, I am going to say that for any given WIC-eligible SKU, maybe half of WIC participants ...
It seems very likely that in 2-4 weeks the critical bottleneck to care won't be PPE or ventilators, both of which have some hope of increased availability in that time frame, but skilled medical professionals who are still healthy enough to work, whose number is infinitely harder to scale up in a month. Shouldn't we be doing everything we possibly can to protect our medical professionals now?
We did this growing up. We brought sleeping bags to dances and set them up somewhere safe. Under the hall's piano was a frequent choice if the band had brought a keyboard. No one would step on us there. Bedtime was at the end of break, which was later than normal bedtime. Lots of good memories of falling asleep to contra music and contra feet. I don't know that we would have fallen asleep at our normal bedtimes in that environment. My kids will, I hope, do the same in a few years.