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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

This reads very closely to just blaming parents for not being good enough, and not raising good enough children.

While I’m sure family culture is incredibly important, we shouldn’t forget that growing up in such a culture is an incredible privilege. One enabled by having moderately wealthy parents.

Being moderately wealthy doesn’t mean having large saving or a fancy house. It means being able to provide 3 meals a day and clothes for your children. It means having enough time after work to pick up your kids, and read them a bedtime story.

There are many people living in the western world who aren’t that wealthy. Who have children and work 3 jobs just to keep them fed. You may even be tempted to say that the parents are irresponsible for raising children without proper financial stability, but that doesn’t help the children they have. It just provides an excuse to ignore a real social problem.

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Watch Captain Fantastic - one of my favorite movies.

What most kids really need: time, attention, and role models who instill the values mentioned above (intellectual curiosity, love of reading/learning, creativity, achievement.) Kids are pretty minimalist when it comes to money.

Thanks for removing the part of your comment that came off as "I haven't encountered this in my personal experience thus it must not be true." I agree with your assessment on "what kids really need."

Still relevant: the money-time connection is very real and doesn't have to be as extreme as "works 3 jobs to put food on the table" to have detrimental effects to kids. It's pretty hard to influence your kids' lives the more stressed and busy you are. Life circumstances can come from all kinds of places, from having to support more folks e.g grandparents in poor health, or from having kids with special needs, or from having mental health issues personally or a spouse with such issues, etc -- the list goes on. Also if you can't home school or private school and your local school districts are total garbage, your kids might pick up values you can't control very well.

In general the idea <that a parent's ability to instill values on their kids is fairly correlated with wealth/privilege> doesn't feel like a stretch.

> In general the idea <that a parent's ability to instill values on their kids is fairly correlated with wealth/privilege> doesn't feel like a stretch.

Wealth is one way to avoid a toxic culture - if your public high school is terrible you have the money to put them into a different school etc.

But you can have a great culture without wealth. In fact I’d argue a great culture is one of the building blocks of wealth.

> But you can have a great culture without wealth. In fact I’d argue a great culture is one of the building blocks of wealth.

That statement is true but also not at odds with the point you're responding to. The point is that if you start off with less, you need to work that much harder to build that culture. It's like picking how to allocate skill points in an RPG. If someone gets 40 skill points to spread along attack/defense/hp vs you who only get 10 (this is what a wealth gap does), you could allocate all of them to 1 dimension to have reasonable performance there, but it will come at a cost. And even then you won't beat someone who had the luxury of allocating all 40 points to the same thing, since they have more to begin with.

What really irks me is when folks worship the character with maxed out stats in every dimension and then for lesser characters they say "didn't grind enough" or "didn't optimize correctly." Maybe just acknowledge the truth of the matter, that folks with maxed out stats probably grinded a lot (yes yes, very admirable) but also started with a better dice roll. And if kids grow up with less education-centric culture or worse learning outcomes you can't just blame parents for not instilling that. Some parents can do more, that's guaranteed. Some parents can't, that's also for certain.

> It's like picking how to allocate skill points in an RPG

To stretch your analogy:

And then we try to make up for the skill points gap by throwing money at the unlucky and tell them to just buy some better items to make up for it.

And it doesn’t work.

> Some parents can do more, that's guaranteed. Some parents can't, that's also for certain.

But that’s the beauty - you don’t need everyone to be able to in order to build a better culture and a better future.

> And if kids grow up with less education-centric culture or worse learning outcomes you can't just blame parents for not instilling that.

In my culture that’s exactly what we do. It’s not always fair on the parents but in practice for the community it works a lot better than throwing money at the problem.

> And then we try to make up for the skill points gap by throwing money at the unlucky and tell them to just buy some better items to make up for it.

I didn't assert anything about how we allocate dollars to level the playing field for parents. Identifying a wealth gap doesn't mean the solution is to simply throw cash at the problem (though solutions _do_ require money). Pretty hard to fix family culture if parents can't afford to spend time with their kids.

> But that’s the beauty - you don’t need everyone to be able to in order to build a better culture and a better future.

You certainly have a way of responding to things that weren't asserted in the first place. The statement you were responding to was intended to illustrate why we should have empathy for those lower on the wealth ladder. "Culture" is loaded because it's easier to build education-centric culture the higher on the wealth ladder you are. Because time, emotional bandwidth, and money are deeply connected in reality.

Your statement that in your culture you blame parents for not instilling education-centric culture is the thing I totally disagree with. I don't think shaming parents is producing results the way you think it is, or producing a "better culture and a better future," as you would say. Nobody wants to live in a culture where you get blamed for things outside of your control. And you should probably recognize that there are limits to how parents affect their children even under "perfect" conditions. These aren't nice little math functions where input -> output, these are complex human beings we're talking about.

> You certainly have a way of responding to things that weren't asserted in the first place.

I thought we were having a discussion and not a point-counterpoint style debate.

> I don't think shaming parents is producing results the way you think it is, or producing a "better culture and a better future," as you would say.

My parents grew up with actual famine, high levels of pollution, horrible factory jobs etc. So did almost all of my uncles and aunties.

A minimum wage job at Walmart in the US would have provided a huge increase in quality of life for them.

Yet looking at their education levels they were still miles ahead of the bottom 25% of US high school graduates.

> And you should probably recognize that there are limits to how parents affect their children even under "perfect" conditions.

Of course - but we can’t really untangle the complexities involved except by trial and error.

I feel we have tried providing more money/funding in the US with overall poor outcomes.

I’m telling you about a method that has worked - for a different culture in a worse economic environment. Maybe the success is not from the shaming but in spite of it - but like I said it’s difficult to untangle.

I’m not even really promoting it as I still remember the pain from getting caned for getting poor results.

The characteristics you wrote require having a steady schedule with secure housing and food options, which are extremely highly correlated with stable income, which is extremely highly correlated with earning power. So effectively, kids need parents that make money.

Family culture that values education, responsibility, etc is not at all based on wealth. I grew up poor, both my parents worked two jobs - mainly we didn't have money because there were lots of kids and certain incidents that kind of took the financial wind out of us. I walked a long way to school and I can't not remember ever having a bed time story read to me or my brothers. I was always on the school lunch program. But education, discipline and responsibility was valued; the same for my wife's family. Discipline and Responsibility is free and in this country so is education, schooling may cost money, but education doesn't. Now as to their culture -- there is a problem in that the parents of these children are the children of parents that also did not value education...it is a perpetuating cycle. How to break it? This is our conundrum and thus far we have failed as it seems that all of our various efforts are doing nothing to reduce the decay.

> One enabled by having moderately wealthy parents.

It is a cultural problem and not a wealth problem.

My state spends >$10k per student per year on education.

Excluding my mortgage my expenses for each of my kids (food, transport, clothing, etc) is well under $10k/year.

If we redirected the money from schools to parents the vast majority of two parent households could afford to homeschool their kids.

And that’s not including all the additional spending we do on disadvantaged families.

I’m a little confused as to what you’re trying to say. You start with

> It is a cultural problem and not a wealth problem.

But then go on to explain how providing an extra $10k a year to families would make a big difference in being able to educate their children.

You also make the assumption that most people can comfortably earn enough to pay for their own living expenses without children. US minimum wage is far below the US’s living wage, strongly suggesting that there are many people who struggle to feed themselves, never mind additional children.

Also there are plenty of families out there that don’t have two parents. Do you suggest we simply ignore them?

> an extra $10k a year to families

That’s my point - it isn’t an extra $10k/year - thats what we currently give families per kid.

> Do you suggest we simply ignore them?

Is there a reason they can’t simply keep going to school?

Some parents aren't good enough and aren't raising good children. Trouble is they're not to blame for the skills they don't have. What is to blame? Entropy. Plain old time degrading memory and skills and effort. It's almost as if a larger pattern of skill and memory retention would be useful. Something old and robust, yet flexible and humane.

It's been a long time since I decided that better parenting was probably the only world issue worth focusing on. I think it would trickle down into everything else. I'm not sure at what point the returns would be worth less than the effort, but given it has a 1.5 - 2.5 generation return rate, it's really hard to tell.

This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley:

“Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.”

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