Chip Off The Old Block
Astral Codex Ten Subscribe Sign in Chip Off The Old Block ... SCOTT ALEXANDER JUL 01, 2026 623 205 23 Share
I.
Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis:
Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis When he looked on Hiawatha, Saw his youth rise up before him In the face of Hiawatha, Saw the beauty of Wenonah From the grave rise up before him.
"Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha, To the kingdom of the West-Wind! Long have I been waiting for you! Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty; You bring back the days departed, You bring back my youth of passion."
But this passage communicates a secret of parenthood, something I’ve never seen discussed anywhere else. By the time you’re a parent, you’re on your way to being old, ugly, tired, and cynical. I certainly was. This felt like a brute fact about the world: we all know time only moves one direction. Then I had kids, and got confronted with people who were basically me, but young and beautiful and happy. That part of them which wasn’t me was the other person I love best in the world, also transmuted into a young and beautiful and happy form. This was a completely unexpected delight which nothing besides this one fragment of poetry had ever tried to prepare me for.
I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me. It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.
Sometimes this is fire and passion and beauty and so on. But also, I was a bit of a weird child. I understand lots of children love trains. But probably not many get an article in the local newspaper about how train-obsessed they are. My mother still has it, framed in the guest bedroom, to embarrass me whenever I visit. Beside it are little pictures of me in my train engineer’s cap and train t-shirt and train pants holding my train book in one hand and railroad caboose lantern in the other. Every so often I will find I still remember some weird fact about the maximum speeds of various 1980s train designs, memorized before I could consistently use the potty.
Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession. And I certainly didn’t pass it down on purpose. But my son is obsessed with trains. He describes the bars of his crib as a choo choo because, if you turn your head sideways, they look like a railroad track. He describes the wall around the neighbor’s yard as a choo choo because, if you’re standing on top of it, the pattern of bricks looks like a railroad track. He describes the armrest of his rocking chair as a choo choo, because . . . I still don’t understand this one. He insists on reading Blue Train, Green Train again and again. His favorite toy is a wooden railroad set. His favorite place to go is the train station.
(I asked some of my friends with male children how into trains they seemed, and they all answered “not particularly”. Then I mentioned this to an uncle, who informed me that my cousin is a top model train reseller on eBay. Maybe it is genetic.)
Playing with a model railroad at the children's museum.
When I was young, my OCD was much more disabling. The worst was my closet door. I had to close it seven times every night before I was satisfied. It’s been decades since I was that bad; my children can’t know anything about it. But lately, my son has taken to obsessively closing the door to the cabinet in his room at night. One evening, after he must have shut it ten or twenty times, I almost yelled at him: “COME ON! YOU KNOW YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO IT SEVEN TIMES!” But maybe he doesn’t know; maybe the genetic transmission isn’t that high-fidelity.
The good news is that all of this gives me a new ally in all my little quarrels with my wife. I’m hypersensitive to being startled when I’m drifting off to sleep; I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and scream, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.
Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.
The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless - my son refuses to sleep if there’s even one toy on the floor. My wife’s and daughter’s room look like a trailer park after a tornado. To my son and my dismay, they both hum wherever they go.
(also, my wife is always grumpy in the morning until she drinks her tea. My daughter is grumpy in the morning until she pretends to pour liquid from her little toy teapot into her little toy teacup and then pretends to drink it. Maybe it’s not fully genetic.)
Other times, our traits combine in unpredictable ways. I don’t like bugs - they’re gross and creepy and sometimes they bite or sting you. But my wife has an entomology degree and a lifelong passion for the subject. This doesn’t exactly look like loving bugs - it’s more that she has a map in her head of all their little alliances, and takes sides in their tiny pointless feuds: “No, you can’t kill that beetle, it eats a bug which kills butterflies, which means it’s one of the good ones!” Still, compared to any normal person, “she loves bugs” is a fair low-level description. On our honeymoon in South America, a tour guide pointed out some especially horrible millipede, and my wife reached down to pick it up, and the tour guide freaked out and eventually apologized for not mentioning that you shouldn’t do that, with his excuse being that nobody before her had ever tried.
My son combines these traits like this: he will scour our house for bugs. He is very good at it. When he finds one, he will kneel down, put his face right up to it, stare intently, then say, in a monotone, “My no like it. Daddy bring outside.” I will explain to him that it’s just a gnat or an ant or something and I don’t care, but he’ll continue to obsess and say “My no like it.” Finally, I’ll put it on a piece of paper or in the bug tube or something and bring it outside. He will follow and, once I set it outside, he’ll kneel next to it, continuing to stare at it, watching to see where it goes. If I ask him what he’s thinking, he’ll just repeat “My no like it.”
II.
Along with inheriting our preferences, our children have inherited our skills.
I’ve seen other two-year-olds draw. Draw isn’t even the right word - they scribble random loops all over the paper. My son does this too. My daughter doesn’t. She draws perfect little circles. Sometimes she’ll say she’s drawing a person, and it will actually look like a little person, with eyes and a nose.
Lyra tries to teach Kai to draw, mostly unsuccessfully.
I asked my wife how we got a child who is good at art. She sheepishly admitted that her mother had been a child prodigy at drawing. Art schools had competed to have her. She’d given up on it because it felt too easy (???) and become a math professor instead. I had never heard this story before - I just knew her mother taught math - but here was our daughter, drawing surprisingly person-like people.
As for my son, we’ll have to see. He already narrates all of his thoughts. Since he’s only two, his thoughts are pretty rigid and stereotyped. Every evening as he goes to bed, he will say “My go to sleep this way!” because as a child he used to sleep facing the door, and now he sleeps facing away from the door, and even though it’s been months since the change, he still finds it worthy of remark. Every morning, when he wakes up, he says “Oh, it day!” because it is daytime. Then he says “My upstairs time!” because he is excited about going upstairs. Then he reaches the top of the stairs, looks out the kitchen window, and says “Oh, it day here too!” because it’s also day upstairs. I’m not claiming any of this is smart or interesting. I’m claiming he constantly says whatever he’s thinking about to anyone around him, no matter how irrelevant and repetitive, and that this is of course the first sign of a future great blogger.
(my daughter is much more reserved, which is one reason she gets short shrift in all these parenting posts; if you’re reading this years from now, sorry Lyra)
My son has another characteristic of great writers, which is that he loves judging things. His two favorite judgments are “it very funny!” and “that no actually nice”, which he deploys in mostly inexplicable ways:
And yes, he does say “that no actually nice”. I’ve always been sensitive to overusing the word “actually” in my writing. But I must overuse it in my speech too, because he picked it up before being able to consistently use the word “is”. As a result, he sounds like one of those Far Side cavemen, combining big words with comically inappropriate grammar.
It very funny!
This is another skill of both our children, maybe all children: they’re very linguistically productive. Something about having lots to say, plus minimal command of the language, lets them coin extremely meme-able phrases. My wife and I have started communicating in child-phrase-memes. If she teases me, she’ll say “It very funny!” and I’ll answer “It no actually nice!” Then she might respond with “It yes actually nice”, which is how our kids argue.
Many years from now, my children will hopefully have grown into great writers and intellectuals - and at the same time, my wife and I will have degenerated into speaking entirely like toddlers.
III.
I’ve written about transgender issues, racial IQ differences, and the Gaza war. Compared to these, writing about my kids should be a walk in the park. If only. The online parenting community is large, opinionated, and vicious.
(I use the term “parenting community” loosely; many of these people have no children of their own, just strong opinions on how other people should raise theirs).
In particular, if I ever admit that I’m disciplining my children less than maximally hard, or letting them get away with anything, or taking their preferences into account at all, a horde of I-don’t-have-children-myself-buts will show up to tell me that I’m a terrible dad and my kids will grow up spoiled/weak/soft and probably end up on welfare or in prison or writing for the New York Times. Earlier this year I mentioned that my son uses various stalling tactics to delay his bedtime, and I briefly became the Twitter Main Character and 2020s Face Of Bad Parenting for not cracking down on him harder.
So I owe you an update: my son doesn’t stall his bedtime anymore. This didn’t require any change on my part. He just sort of grew out of it, as I hoped and predicted.
How can this be, when (in the words of some commenters) I was ‘paying the Danegeld’ by agreeing to his various inane requests? Sticking to medieval analogies, the Danegeld was an anomalous institution, a product of non-iterated games by new civilizations encountering each other for the first time. It contrasted with the foundational background of the medieval world - feudalism, a bundle of specific culturally-evolved rights and duties, stable across years and centuries. James Scott memorably describes its rich complexity, starting with the seemingly simple rule that serfs were supposed to give their lords a certain number of baskets of grain per harvest:
Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be adjusted through wear, bulging, tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of the rim, and so on. In some areas the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall. Nor did it end there. How the grain was to be poured (from shoulder height, which packed it somewhat, or from waist height?), how damp it could be, whether the container could be shaken down, and finally, if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy.
Living with small children occasionally resembles a sudden Viking invasion, but it more often feels like this kind of byzantine code of feudal rights and duties.
Another way that having toddlers is like feudalism is that a lot of energy gets devoted to who is in a fortification at any given time, and whether the people who are outside the fortification can evict the current residents and take it for themselves. See also here.
For example, my son’s bedtime stalling has turned into the following equilibrium: when I say “Bedtime!” he pleads “two more minutes!” Then I have to give him the two more minutes. If I don’t give him the two more minutes, he has the right to scream and kick as I drag him to his room. But if I do give him the two more minutes, then when I say “Two minutes over!” he must go to bed quickly and enthusiastically. This is a great trade on my part, especially since I can just announce “Bedtime!” two minutes before I actually want him to go to bed.
(also, he has no concept of time, and if I say “two minutes over” after thirty seconds then he’s none the wiser. I try to not to exploit this loophole for personal advantage, but it’s a good lever to have in a crisis.)
The next step in his bedtime routine is tooth-brushing. Here the feudal code says that he has to brush his teeth for the amount of time it takes me to say “chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-CHOO-CHOO!” several times. If I try to go longer than that, he can scream and kick in protest. But if he tries to stop before I’m done, I can grab him and forcibly finish the job. Again, a great trade, especially because he can’t count and just assumes I’m saying it some reasonable number of times, plus I can add as many “chugga”s as I want to the beginning. This feels sort of like cheating, but on-the-fly adjustment of rules is part of the feudal tradition:
The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller baskets. While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction might increasingly favor the lord.
Next he wants to listen to music. I must give him at least one song of his choice. He has to give up after two songs. One vs. two songs is negotiable based on how late it is and how well things have been going up to that point, but usually we’re both able to agree which is more appropriate or concede in exchange for favors later.
Finally, he goes to bed. Exactly how long he must stay there is subject to more delicate rules. He used to get up much earlier than I was willing to tolerate; after negotiation, we decided that he must stay in his room until at least 6 AM.
This Babylon Bee article, except it’s “dad and son”.
The agreement was sealed by the purchase of an automated green light which turned on at 6 and announced that he could start banging on the door. Unfortunately, the terms proved unclear; given that he was allowed to come up “when the green light was on”, he proceeded to learn how to override the auto-timer and turn it on himself at any hour of the night, at which point he felt licensed to bang on the door. This necessitated a delicate renegotiation, but we finally settled on a new rule: no leaving his crib before the light turns on, including to fiddle with the light.
As the AI experts tell us, once an entity has become powerful enough to escape any possible control scheme, alignment is the only option.
Is this still bad overly-permissive parenting, just a higher-level of Danegeld-paying? Should I be yelling at him: “YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS! BRUSH YOUR TEETH AS LONG AS I DEMAND, AND YOU’LL GET A WHUPPING IF YOU STOP BEFORE I’M READY!”? My argument against is that for a trivial cost of 3-5 extra minutes of my time per night, my children enthusiastically comply with their whole bedtime routine, sans protest or difficulty. Also, Tocqueville argues that the replacement of the ancient system of fair feudal privileges and duties with one of authoritarian enforced obedience led to the French Revolution, and I’m not sure what the parenting equivalent would be but it sounds bad.
The biggest disadvantage is that, although I do think my children genuinely try to keep these rules, they’re too young to have what I consider natural intuitions about category boundaries. My son is allowed two songs per night - but sometimes, halfway through his second song, he decides he doesn’t like it and wants to switch to a new one. And having switched, he doesn’t think it should count as two songs until the new song is finished, because he hasn’t gotten to hear and enjoy two songs he actually liked. Meanwhile, to my mind this is an illegal attempt to hear two and one-half songs. Most of our remaining fights happen around edge cases like these, although they’re thankfully getting rarer.
The second biggest disadvantage is that it’s hard to do nice things for my children; any temporary indulgence gets interpreted as a renegotiation of the feudal code and becomes tomorrow’s expectation. My wife lets the kids play with tablets on long car rides. Now whenever I want to drive the kids somewhere, even to the cafe five minutes away, they demand their tablets. At first, when I said no, they interpreted this as a defection and claimed the right to scream all through the trip. After enough training, they learned the new rule - Mommy allows tablets in the car on long rides, Daddy bans them on short ones - but it was a stressful first couple of car trips. The twins have usufruct rights to one cup of Gatorade every morning. Sometimes they ask for Gatorade in the evening; and after a long tough day it would be so easy to just give it to them. But I know that if I did it once, every future time I refused would get treated as a violation and penalized with screaming.
The twins playing on tablets in the car. Lyra has become the IT Toddler. If Kai’s tablet acts up, he hands it to her to see if she can fix it.
The smallest disadvantage - more cute than actually bad - is that my children have learned to interpret their relationship to the universe as partaking of sort of cosmic feudal code. I understand this happened in real ancient/medieval times - God as “Lord of the Universe” and so on - but it’s stranger to see it happen to your own kids. Sometimes my son asks to see his Nana - who lives five hundred miles away, and visits only once a month - and I’ll tell him that she’s five hundred miles away and this is impossible. “See Nana two minutes?” he will ask, because the feudal code always gives him the right to ask for two more minutes of something.
Or maybe this isn’t about feudalism at all - interpreting your society’s legal code as giving you the right to bargain with the universe is very Jewish. Maybe it’s just another way the bloodline expresses itself.
Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten By Scott Alexander P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. 623 Likes ∙ 23 Restacks 623 205 23 Share Previous Next 205 Comments Jati 1d
I loooove this. Thank you for writing it, Scott.
REPLY SHARE Jesus De Sivar 1d
Beautiful.
Also 2 of the pictures contained secret cows: The second one (painted on the wall at the children's museum) and the last one (a plushie toy)
REPLY (1) SHARE Anotherone 1d
Pretty sure the 2nd one is Bluey (unless the cow plushie is especially hidden)
REPLY SHARE Presto 1d
I love these posts.
My upstairs time.
Thank you Scott & family.
Have fun!
REPLY SHARE Shaked Koplewitz 1d
My friend's son (in NY) also used to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subway map and start listing all the stations at random times in any conversation (also, whenever he was actually on the subway). Sadly he's since grown out of it.
REPLY (2) SHARE onodera 1d
He should've collaborated with Jay Foreman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPyg2pK11M
REPLY (1) SHARE Sniffnoy 1d
Man, I get why he did it (largely a matter of YouTube limitations...), but it's still confusing that he renamed his channel to "Map Men".
REPLY SHARE Melvin 4h
Maybe he just got up to Mornington Crescent and stopped.
REPLY SHARE Timothy Johnson 1d
I have two toddlers, and this is the best description I've ever read of what it's actually like.
REPLY SHARE Emily 1d
If you’ve never heard anyone say that liking trains is genetic then you haven’t spent very much time on /r/autismmemes
REPLY (2) SHARE Ryan W. 1d
I was going to say. I feel certain Scott knows about this and must have decided not to comment on it for the sake of whatever narrative he was constructing.
REPLY (1) SHARE Emily 1d
I mean I once saw a poster at the eye doctor that said to get your kids tested for their vision because 1 of 2 people have blurry vision and they won’t know until you test them.
It seems plausible to me that if people can’t even tell their vision is near-sighted, other less obvious things about your experience of the world would be even easier to miss.
i would not be surprised if at least 90% of rationalists are autistic. But since everyone is, then I could see it being weird to turn it into a *thing.* But also from my experience, a lot of people in nerd communities genuinely don’t know it about themselves. Many of them think they have OCD, or have no idea why their insomnia is so bad.
It’s funny, I think a lot of what rationalists have built for helping to navigate the world (updating your priors, for example), are genuinely helpful things for autistic people, and that should be more widely known.
(I have been working at an autism clinic for the past year after getting sick of corporate work so I have some basis for my opinions, but I’m not always right either)
REPLY (1) SHARE Evan Þ 16h
As a kid, I couldn't tell my vision was near-sighted because only one eye was really bad, so I compensated with the other eye well enough most of the time. It ended up well enough that I just assumed everyone's vision was like mine!
Then we visited a science museum with an exhibit on eyes that had a vision test, and I wanted to check it out (like everything else in the museum), so Dad got to see me roundly fail the test.
REPLY (2) SHARE Crooked Bird 11h
I was exactly like that, but my kindergarten teacher flagged it because I kept closing one eye to read the blackboard...
REPLY SHARE Thasvaddef 6h
Hopefully he took you to buy a monocle.
REPLY SHARE Hafizh Afkar Makmur 10h
Specifically about trains though? There are at least 4 choices (dinosaur, robot, train, rockets) and this one chose exactly the same as his father.
REPLY (1) SHARE Emily 9h
So firstly, even if we assume 4 exclusive choices of interests, we should point out the obvious error in Scott's thinking, which is that his son inherited his same interest genetically because he is the male child. Obviously there are gender related differences that tend to emerge in general in people, but Scott would have to have way more children to determine to what extent it is gender-based and to what extent it was random that the interests of his children lined up with the genders of the parents. As counter examples, my dad was the one who understood me the best (I am a woman), and with the toddlers that I have worked with, I have seen girls who are interested in trains and boys who are interested in music.
So if we expand out the sample size to 2 children, one of whom had a shared interest with the father, it suddenly seems less likely that trains as a specific interests was passed down, but rather more the trait for intense interests was passed down, and the son happened to develop the same interests as the father. In fact, in terms of combinatorics and assuming 4 distinct interests that are equally likely, there is a 3/8 chance of one child having the same interest as the father while the second has a different one. It is thus not strange statistically to see Scott and his son share an interests.
Trains tends to develop as an interest for many people because it combines spinning (wheels), cause-and-effect play, things that follow a predictable pattern, they are large and visually interesting, and there are lots of variants easily available for kids (toy tracks, thomas the tank engine, train parks). Likely the train obsession in Scott's son was not borne out of nowhere, but after being exposed to train toys.
Music actually tends to be another really common interest.
REPLY (2) SHARE Hafizh Afkar Makmur 8h
Yeah what exactly are toys that are given (between those 4 major interests) to the children is a big confounder
REPLY SHARE Matthias Görgens 6h
> and there are lots of variants easily available for kids (toy tracks, thomas the tank engine, train parks).
This is a bit circular. The reason these are available widely is because many kids develop an interest.
REPLY (1) SHARE Emily 4h
Only if you think trains are the only possible thing that could fit the other descriptors. Even if you can’t think of any other thing, including availability as a reason is still allowing for the possibility that something else that fits the other descriptors could theoretically exist.
As an illustration of what I mean, if you assume the average person tends to like sports for various reasons, then it would not be circular to say that Americans tend to like (American) football because it is widely available in their country, while English people tend to like soccer because it is widely available in theirs.
REPLY SHARE Space Monkey 1d
My boy/girl twins just turned one and I can't wait to experience this. Too early to know for sure, but seems like we each got a little version of us <3
REPLY SHARE Greg Tarsa 1d
"It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you."
Wait until you have a grandson. You'll be much older, uglier, tired and maybe cynical but the thrill is just as strong--and just as surprising.
REPLY (1) SHARE Matthias Görgens 6h
And you can hand over your grand kids when you are done with them.
REPLY SHARE Alan Thiesen 1d
"Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee."
REPLY (1) SHARE sylvia horsley 1d
Beautiful! Sublime!
REPLY SHARE Ryan W. 1d
It's funny how kids comply with rules sometimes. I have twins. We taught them they had to hold our hands when they crossed the street. They interpreted the hand holding as the important part and started crossing the street holding each others hands. Thankfully, nobody ended up getting hit by a car so I get to smile while I tell the story.
REPLY (2) SHARE McJunker 1d
Similarly, I learned in class in the third grade that drinking and driving was Bad, capital b.
But nobody ever specified drinking ALCOHOL was the bad part. Just the act of drinking while driving was Wrong and Dangerous.
I was very upset in the back seat to see mom drink a coke from the McDonald’s drive through.
REPLY (4) SHARE Ryan W. 1d
Kids can be tiny, sometimes very confused, enforcers!
REPLY SHARE timunderwood9 1d
I had that same confusion for years, but I think as a mark of a future rationalist I was mainly consciously confused rather than assuming my Dad was horribly breaking the rules.
REPLY SHARE ManyCookies 1d
I thought "driving without a license" meant that you went to prison if you lost your wallet and got pulled over. I believed this much, much later than I should've lol.
REPLY SHARE Starr 19h
Hah, I'm glad I'm not the only one. My mother still likes to tell the amusing anecdote of when I was like 5 years old and started scolding my dad for drinking the coffee he'd just picked up at the McDonald's drive-thru.
REPLY SHARE Nathan Okerlund 1d
My nephew went one better on this and decided it was valid to hold his own hand through the parking lot. (I blame Miley Cyrus.) Thankfully, this innovation was also detected and reproved before he got hit by a car.
REPLY SHARE avalancheGenesis 1d
It is, indeed, very funny and nice, actually. Always enjoy these sorts of updates. You've got to have Something To Protect.
In the vein of daydreaming about epsilon-probability things: I think wanting to roll the dice and see what character sheets pop up for progeny is not a particularly pure-hearted motivation for me to want children, but an honest one at least. (Narcissistic, maybe? But then why inflict children on the world at all if one doesn't have a decent level of self-regard?) Absent actual cloning, it's just really difficult to come face-to-face with accurate representations of one's self. Certainly I find myself ruefully laughing at the cosmic joke of Turning Into My Parents, despite spending young adulthood vowing that'd never happen. Can't break the chain, for better and for worse.
REPLY (1) SHARE Whenyou 1d
I'm basically an anti natalist, but I also recognise that the anti natalist arguments will probably only work for those who should not have kids. If you love yourself and life and the world, and think your kids will be happy and have a positive impact on everything, you'll just think the antinatalist argument is ridiculous. I think if one is to have kids, although I fundamentally disapprove, they probably should be a little full of themselves.
REPLY (3) SHARE Anonymous Dude 1d
Pretty much.
I hate myself and would hate to see it reproduced. It would just seem like another slap in the face to be reminded of my deficiencies again.
REPLY (1) SHARE Whenyou 1d
Caplan's book that basically says "don't you worry, genetics trumfs all, your children are going to turn a lot like you! :)" like that's supposed to be uplifting?? I do NOT want anyone to have a psyche like mine.
REPLY (1) SHARE Anonymous Dude 1d
Exactly.
I'll literally start seeing a glass as 'one-third empty' when drinking something. I was a teenager in the 90s and was paranoid about the draft. I majored in a STEM field because if I failed and had to do education, there was a shortage of teachers in those subjects at the time. I picked a career subpath with the highest returns to *mediocrity*, because I didn't know if I'd be good or not before I started, right? I never dated until I was almost 30 out of a combination of fear of harassment accusations and divorce settlements, and before I started dating I went to the men's divorce firm to tell me what to look out for. I would stay in relationships I disliked for *years* because I was afraid the person would try to smear me if I left.
Nah, let the poisoned seed die.
REPLY (3) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
All of these things sound totally normal, plus or minus a mild anxiety disorder, and some of them describe me also. I think you should get treatment for anxiety/depression, and if you don't want kids, you're fine, but this is hardly "let the curse upon my bloodline die out" levels of bad. You can probably even genetically select kids for low internalizing behavior now if you really want (I can't remember if that's actually on panels, but it will be soon).
REPLY (2) SHARE Anonymous Dude 16h
What are you, a psychiat...oh, wait.
I'm 47. There's really no point at this point, those sperm are riddled with errors and I don't think the extra IQ points are worth it. Plus I'd have to date *substantially* younger, and only the top tier of men can do that--my net worth is seven digits, not nine.
But, y'know, thanks for the vote of confidence. And yeah, I think being able to genetically select out depression etc. is going to help a lot of people in the future!
REPLY (2) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 15h
"Plus I'd have to date *substantially* younger, and only the top tier of men can do that"
As someone who is rapidly aging myself, this is one of my biggest concerns about the future
REPLY (1) SHARE Anonymous Dude 15h
I hear you man, but I never expected an infinite time period to do this. Hell, back when I started I already kinda thought I was too old. There's a wall for men too, it just comes a little later.
REPLY SHARE Mark Paskowitz 13h
For what it's worth, I met my wife when I was 45 and she was 32. My net worth was low six figures, I didn't even have a job at the time, and I had a pretty poor dating history. We've been married seven years now, and we're expecting our first kid in about six weeks.
I know being an old dad is going to be tough. My dad was 34 when I was born, and I could sometimes notice the difference compared to my friends' dads. I also know I was lucky to meet my wife. So I won't pretend to guarantee you that everything will work out if you just give it a shot, but it may not be as pointless as you think.
REPLY SHARE Whenyou 15h
You are making the ethical assumption that "normal" people should have children. I don't think so, I think even people with mild anxiety disorders probably shouldn't. Neuroticism is a curse.
REPLY (1) SHARE B Civil 13h
Having children is obviously a very personal choice but the kind of people who manage to grow themselves out of the things you describe can make the best teachers in life, I think
REPLY SHARE __browsing 19h
Scott beat to me to it, but I was going to suggest embryo selection might be helpful as well.
I have mixed feelings about some of my own genetic endowments but the other side of me says at least I'm not a clinically BPD fentanyl junkie knocked up with three kids before age 25.
Anyway, great article
REPLY (1) SHARE Anonymous Dude 16h
I'm old (see above). Agreed, great article.
REPLY SHARE Peperulo 18h
Some of these things might turn out differently in your kids due to environment and randomness. And if you have a kid with your exact problems, you'd be in the best position to notice and ensure that they get addressed. I hope you manage to address them as well!
REPLY (1) SHARE Anonymous Dude 16h
I'm old (see above). There's really no point now.
REPLY SHARE skaladom 14h
If you look at how people actually come to have kids or not, you'll be quickly disabused of the need to be pro- or anti-natalist. It's entirely unrelated.
REPLY SHARE Matthias Görgens 6h
> I think if one is to have kids, although I fundamentally disapprove, they probably should be a little full of themselves.
My kids are definitely full of themselves. Very smug little buggers.
REPLY SHARE Geoff B. 1d
Doting on the twins *and* taking a potshot at the Times? Two of my favorite Scott personae in one post!
REPLY (1) SHARE DocTam 21h Edited
No child of mine will ever write for the New York Times!
REPLY SHARE Jacob Malloy 1d
This man loves his kids. Makes parenting sound so fun.
REPLY SHARE Anna 1d
My friend's kids are...fond of trains, and that's why I know about the camera at "The Diamond." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhNpn9L5ndM
Also, your bit about Lyra being the IT twin made me think of my own twins at that age; I always had the Pet Shop Boys' "Opportunities" in my head because "you've got the brawn, I've got the brains; let's make lots of money" was absolutely how they operated.
REPLY SHARE luke 1d
“See Nana two minutes?”
thats so sad
REPLY (1) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
They will see Nana this weekend for Fourth of July!
REPLY (1) SHARE Mark Y 1d
Does Nana believe in video calls? The request was to “see” Nana, not technically to be near her.
REPLY (1) SHARE Samuel Elder 8h
Video calls twice a week are the only way my mom manages to continue living across the globe from her only two grandchildren.
REPLY SHARE Peter Gerdes 1d
Seems pretty plausible there is something pretty close to a gene for train obsession. It does seem to be a pretty strong interest for many people with a certain kind of aspergerish vibe (vibe .. probably not that much to do with the medical diagnosis but you know what I mean).
REPLY SHARE Billy Hamilton 1d
When I was small, I also drew meaningless loops on the page. But eventually they resolved themselves into the wheels of trains.
REPLY SHARE Peter Gerdes 1d
This does make me wonder if the claim I heard that people lost a lot of appreciation for how much is influenced by genetics when families stopped living in the same village might be true.
REPLY SHARE Samuel Elder 1d
Two more bits of parenting technology that have come in handy with handling these sort of negotiating dilemmas for our kids (3.5 and 2):
- Offering special reasons when the usual rules are broken. For example, there's (sometimes) a kiddie train at our mall that our kids want to ride every time they see it. We go there frequently enough that if we let them, the price would far outpace the value of the experience to them (but they wouldn't naturally temper their asks, because they don't understand the cost side of the equation). But the one-time value exceeds the one-time cost -- if we were on vacation, it would be a no-brainer. So we needed to find a way to limit the frequency, without subjecting it to a negotiation. Enter my parents: Our rule is that they can ride the train when they are visiting, but not when they aren't. Plus, it gives them positive associations with their grandparents!
- Offering weekly or monthly rhythms. Weekly rhythms becomes natural once preschool starts, which in Singapore is at 18 months, and they start to cherish weekends, like they'll do for the rest of their lives. For monthly rhythms, after she turned 3, we started offering our daughter monthly 1-on-1 ice cream dates. This doubles as an incentive for her to learn the calendar, as every time the month changes, she knows she can ask to go have ice cream again!
REPLY (1) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 1d
Just give them an allowance and let them decide? They'll learn to understand the tradeoff soon enough.
REPLY (3) SHARE Naremus 1d
Those ages are a bit young for an allowance, they are more likely to eat the money than hold onto it, and they won't really understand what it means for the money to be gone and will still want to ride the train. Plus, if they get attached to the money and you try to take it to pay for the train (even if they just asked to ride it), you will have a whole new screaming experience. A virtual allowance, where you keep the money for them, is beyond their understanding and you will appear to be capricious rather than consistent which entails further screaming. We started giving our son an allowance at 5 and it's still not uncommon to find the bills crumpled up and forgotten in an odd location.
REPLY (1) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 19h
What does he say when you tell him he's free to spend his own money when he wants something?
REPLY (1) SHARE Naremus 18h
Right now all he wants to do is save it, I think he values having it and receiving it more than using it. It's a fairly small amount of money each week, and I think he is imagining buying something really cool eventually but has a hard time with choice paralysis. The allowance is a bonus rather than a replacement of us buying him things, so he isn't deprived or anything like that. My wife loves it because if she wants to shut something down she can just tell him to use his own money.
REPLY (1) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 15h
Seems like it's working then!
But also, wow, very relatable. I was just like that too, and I regret it. Arguably I'm still like that, but the future is uncertain. You should let him know that the marginal utility of money will vastly decrease in the future and the optimal strategy is consumption smoothing. I wish someone had told me when I was young. I thought I was so wise...
REPLY SHARE Samuel Elder 21h
Yeah, they’re too young for a fully fungible allowance, but I could imagine kind of coupon system — “This special paper entitles you to one train ride” also working as a bridge to an allowance. Later stages could involve coupons that are good for multiple things, so they have to decide which they want.
REPLY (1) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 19h
What's wrong with fungibility? You could of course still disallow some purchases
REPLY (1) SHARE Samuel Elder 8h
A banlist is hard to maintain. Unless you somehow could exhaustively list all disallowed purchases (highly unlikely, and difficult to communicate anyways), it has to be constantly negotiated over, and the whole point of this was to limit the need for negotiations. An explicit allowlist is much easier.
REPLY SHARE B Civil 13h
Give them the keys to the car while you're at it
REPLY SHARE Apunaja 1d
Lovely. Thanks for sharing Scott.
Also, did you notice that in the last picture they both have their legs in very similar positions?
REPLY SHARE Alejandro 1d
>>I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me.
Not necessarily true! One of my two daughters, gender aside, is an exact copy of me down to the type of little-Idiosyncratic-quirks-that-seem-impossible-to-be-genetic mentioned in the article.
REPLY (2) SHARE AlexTFish 1d
Yes! I have two daughters, and there are some ways in which they're both like my wife and not me, and plenty of ways they're like each other and not either of us, but if there's a trait shared by me and one daughter and not my wife and the other, odds are rather strong it'll be me and my eldest vs my wife and my youngest.
REPLY SHARE vectro 21h
I have seen families where the similarity pairs are father-daughter and mother-son.
REPLY SHARE Shovacklerod 1d
Curious about a small syntactic mention that you and your wife share different rooms?
I just moved in with my partner of a few years on the condition that we maintain separate bedrooms. I was wondering if this is a reasonable thing to maintain up until or after marriage. It just never felt correct to me that an adult couple with sufficient means should automatically always have to share a bedroom, I bargain that it could even save many a relationship.
REPLY (2) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
Yeah, we have different rooms and have continued to do so after marriage. We're both introverts and light sleepers, and both keep (often desynchronized) weird schedules.
REPLY SHARE vectro 21h
It's a "trend"!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-to-a-happy-marriage-two-master-bedrooms-1489672201
REPLY SHARE Aris C 1d
Great post. Qq, I remember you said in another post that you are really adverse to lying. You don't consider it lying telling your kids that 2 minutes have passed when they haven't?
More generally, how acceptable do you think it is to lie to children?
REPLY (1) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
For context, sometimes when I offer him five minutes he'll say "No, two minutes!" because he thinks two might be larger than five. I don't think he has a well-calibrated sense of what this entails such that I am betraying him by not living up to it.
REPLY (1) SHARE Aris C 1d
I get that but truth is a function of what you know and believe, no? Not a function of the other person's expectations?
REPLY SHARE beowulf888 1d Edited
I don't know how old your kids are now, but when my stepson was age four plus a few months, childhood amnesia kicked in. It was quite remarkable. One week, he was fondly remembering all the fun things he did with his daycare teacher (whom he loved), but within a space of about two weeks, he had completely forgotten her and the rest of his pre-four-year-old life. I had made a point of talking about her frequently to try to keep those memories intact for him. We had photos of her, and he no longer remembered who she was after this inflection point.
You might want to keep an eye out for this occurrence in your kids. It would be interesting if their brains do their synaptic pruning* of their younger memories at the same time.
*According to a sketchy neurological theory
REPLY (1) SHARE beowulf888 1d
Also, the same daycare teacher I mentioned above said she'd ask her kids who they were in their previous lives (she'd phrase the question something like, "Who did you use to be before you came here?"). She said about half of them would give her some very detailed stories about who they used to be before they "came here." My ex was kinda shocked she was doing this. But I was woo-woo enough to appreciate it. My stepson didn't display any memories of being anyone else, though.
REPLY (2) SHARE Aris C 1d
He's a young soul
REPLY SHARE Marian Kechlibar 1d Edited
It would have been interesting to record these utterances.
The Department of Perceptual Studies at UVa has been studying kids who make statements about their previous lives for a long time (50 years +), and they have aggregated a massive cache of several thousand cases, plus the relevant methodology. This isn't something you can reproduce in a clean room within tightly controlled conditions, and to reduce accidental contamination of the utterances by leading questions etc. is quite important, even though the hard-core skeptics will simply laugh anything off.
That said, I still suspect that this phenomenon is much more widespread than just "thousands", and your daycare teacher's record goes in that direction. Most of the West (with some interesting exceptions such as Iceland or Scottish Highlands) considers reincarnation "woo-woo" and people really have to trust you before they tell you that their kid speaks of a previous life. No one wants to have their kid labeled as a freak, mentally ill or just crazy, and other people are really cruel in this regard. (If anything, the cruelty became even worse with social networks.)
A case study: one of my friends, a fairly materialistic doctor, has two daughters. The older one made several spontaneous statements matching the life of her long deceased grandmother. Not just that, her personality is basically a carbon copy thereof, very untypical for that family, and she has acted "adult" when she was very young. Too adult, I would say; she was basically unmanageable by standard parental means as young as three or four, having her own judgment and following it regardless of threats or punishments.
The catch: not even her father, ex-husband of said friend, knows about those statements. He was never much into parenting, and she didn't tell him, precisely to save the kid from mocking. I might be the only person beside her to know, because she trusted me a knew that I am interested in such phenomena.
REPLY (1) SHARE beowulf888 7h Edited
I've had enough weird stuff happen to me that I'm no longer persuaded that physicalism can accurately describe the entirety of reality. I'm perfectly willing to accept the phenomenon known as reincarnation. One doesn't have to posit the existence of souls to come up with scenarios that could lead to us having other memories.
REPLY SHARE Anna Gát 1d
The look so much like you!!
REPLY SHARE darwin 1d
>Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession.
...
Who's gonna tell him?
REPLY (1) SHARE Marian Kechlibar 1d
There are studies on identical twins who were separated as newborns, and they indicate that they have the same jobs, hobbies, food preferences and even their partners tend to look and behave very similarly. Why not trains then.
REPLY SHARE magic9mushroom 1d
>The twins have usufruct rights to one cup of Gatorade every morning.
I am confused. WP says that usufruct does not include the right to destroy the thing, but presumably they drink it.
>Also, Tocqueville argues that the replacement of the ancient system of fair feudal privileges and duties with one of authoritarian enforced obedience led to the French Revolution, and I’m not sure what the parenting equivalent would be but it sounds bad.
I mean, the obvious fictional example of this not turning out so great for the parents is the Gasai family from Mirai Nikki. I didn't go quite that far when Mum stopped feeding me, but I did beat her up and lock her out of the apartment (and then run away after she had the police yell at me for a couple of hours).
It is bad. Relationships never fully recover from something like that.
REPLY (2) SHARE Admond Kyre 19h
Perhaps the usufruct rights apply to the cup, and not the liquid?
REPLY SHARE Huluk 5h
Water rights (maybe even mining rights) can be usufruct, so the resource only needs to be abundant like Gatorade in a supermarket.
REPLY SHARE Alena F 1d
Such a wonderful post. I also have twins (and another child) and it's very special to see two children to be so different while so close in age (one of my twins is a copy of my sister).
REPLY SHARE John McGrath 1d
You’ve ridden the steam train in Tilden Park?
REPLY (1) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
My wife has taken them there and they love it.
REPLY (1) SHARE John McGrath 21h
Awesome--you should give it a ride too. When my son was little he was not the only one of us clapping hands afterward and chanting "again! again!"
REPLY SHARE Dave Berry 1d
"(I use the term “parenting community” loosely; many of these people have no children of their own, just strong opinions on how other people should raise theirs)."
In my experience, the opinions of non-parents on how to raise children were about as useful as advice from virgins would be on how to have better sex.
REPLY (1) SHARE TGGP 1d
That sounds like something Dave Barry might write.
REPLY SHARE Murphy 1d Edited
Nice article and your kids sound adorable.
Gotta admit, more than a few things sound familiar coming from a family with mild heritable autism. I have a hypothesis that some things are easier for kids and parents when both are *just* enough on the spectrum to understand what the other is doing and why.
Side note: that crib looks kinda similar to the one I and my brother had as a child except ours had a bar missing leaving a gap *just* large enough for me to slide out if I needed to.
Apparently my parents first tried turning the missing bar to the wall but that led to my brother climbing out a bit like your own little one.
They decided that leaving a route to escape was safer vs him climbing over the top and turned it back.
I have very early memories of the rules about when I had to stay in the cot till. Though they were suspended at least once when I was scared of a storm.
So just to say that if you worry about him falling while climbing out like that then removing a bar or 2 probably won't cause chaos.
REPLY (1) SHARE Godoth 1d
Speaking as someone who is not even a little bit autistic in a family not even a little bit autistic who has three not even a little bit autistic kids—this is all very familiar!
REPLY SHARE Axel 1d
Having a toddler myself this is so relatable, especially the do a nice thing once and be cursed with it forever. Great article!
REPLY SHARE Ben Gould 1d
What a lovely piece. "Paying the Danegeld", hahahahaha I hate people.
REPLY SHARE Citizen Penrose 1d
The part where you have to act as a tyrannical dictator has always been one of the main things I find off-putting about the idea of being a parent. Nice to know less autocratic, more ...uh feudal arrangements are possible.
REPLY (2) SHARE vectro 21h
There are many parenting styles and "tyrannical dictator" is but one. I would say the vibe in our family is something more akin to "hope and peace and love and trust".
REPLY SHARE Hafizh Afkar Makmur 10h
It's usually hard to be true absolute tyrant. Unless you're a true superman, you still need to negotiate sometimes. "Rules for Rulers" is a good CGP Gray video about it, but I'm very sure that he has changed the title to something incomprehensible by now.
REPLY SHARE dualmindblade 1d
Too heartwarming dammit! Fwiw I'm an even more permissive parent, to a fault, certainly, and not the only one, with three adult data points and they're all totally awesome. As far as I can tell no trace of those faults made it through, almost like they raise themselves..
REPLY SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 1d
"(also, he has no concept of time, and if I say “two minutes over” after thirty seconds then he’s none the wiser. I try to not to exploit this loophole for personal advantage, but it’s a good lever to have in a crisis.)"
There never was a crisis so dire I would have had my parents lie to me like that, but I suppose it's theoretically possible.
REPLY SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 1d
Why not have a norm that disputes are to be negotiated with calm discussion rather than screaming?
Also why not just give them money and have them decide if the treat is worth the price?
REPLY (2) SHARE Scott Alexander 1d Author
Because the children are two, speak a maximum of 5-6 word sentences, and don't understand the concept of money.
REPLY (2) SHARE Benjamin Ikuta 18h
Hmm, but yet they understand negotiation. I can't imagine it'll be much longer
REPLY (1) SHARE Samuel Elder 8h Edited
Being a parent of young kids really helps drive home how many layers human culture is built on that adults just take for granted. Here's an example that might help illustrate: Counting.
My kids each learned the "counting chant" fairly quickly: "One, Two, Three, ..." They would sometimes skip numbers, and couldn't always pick it back up if you said something like "What's after seven?" But they mostly got that part down some time between 18 months and 2 years old.
You'd think that would mean they can count. Well, it turns out that learning the numbers is only the easy part of actually counting. The hard part is making sure you say exactly one number for each object. For this, it helps to point at each object and enunciate clearly, pausing for a little between numbers and objects, but you have to make sure you don't mess up and speed up the pace of your counting faster than the pace of your pointing, or vice-versa. This requires much