Why Don't We Teach People How to Parent?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Then you have a hound helping raise the tot, which can be very rewarding for everybody.
Alternatively, if you can't stand handling shit; you learn that in short duration "easy mode" first and face less social disfavor for bailing out of the commitment to a puppy.
Raising, training, and socializing a dog are great training wheels for later becoming a parent. It is a lot more forgiving, and the childhood phase for a dog is way, way shorter than it is for a child. If you can tough it out for 8-10 months, you'll also benefit from a loyal and well-behaved companion.
There are also the additional benefits of befriending other dog owners, and the emotional support from a pet.
Not sure if this will work the same for a cat, but it doesn't hurt to try!
Edit: "Afford" might not be the best term to use here since it relates to money mainly. "Capacity" might be slightly better.
Indeed they could. Most painfully, the child figure includes things like the cost of keeping a larger house. Yet in reality a child couldn't care less how big or small of a house you have. Hell, early North American settlers used to live in tiny, one room log cabins and raised like 12 children in them just fine. If parents choose to live in more luxurious accommodations, good on them, but if we are being honest that is an adult cost to satisfy adult desires, not a child cost. The cost to support a child on what is actually necessary to support a child is only a tiny fraction of that.
But let's say, for the sake of discussion, that the figure is irrefutable. A big difference is still that the child starts to contribute after the first few years. The outflow may be $240k, but there is an inflow to offset it. Unless you are an evil parent who locks the kids in their bedrooms until they turn 18, a net gain would not be unexpected.
While there may be individual dogs out there that could have the same said about them, in the typical case the dog can't offer anything to contribute, even if the dog wanted nothing more.
Studies that focus on what it actually costs to raise a child – not what it costs to raise a child and stroke parent egos – suggest that it is more like $4,000 per year to raise a child. So at this relatively young age are only in deficit by a few hundred dollars after a year. However, their capabilities ramp up quickly from there. If a teenager is only able to contribute $3k worth of value or less per year, you have failed them miserably[1].
[1] Or they have some kind of severe disability. That is the dice you do have to roll, but is statistically uncommon.
Financial viability is improved with children (they start to contribute once you get past the first few years) – other animals like dogs, not so much.
Existing time and attention focuses can much more easily integrate children (like dining out? Bring your children!) – other animals like dogs, not so much.
But I understand and share the frustration when "dog moms" and "cat dads" try to equate owning a pet with having a child.
So you learn a lot about your own tolerance for dealing with all of that.
But there's a lot more of all of that with kids, and obviously the details are vastly different.
I want a cat so bad i'm on so many cat subreddits. But I HATE litterboxes and I don't know if one will fight my dogs.
Cats will zoom around all day long. Such fun chaotic energy.
I can't imagine a baby I'll pass I'll keep cats and dogs
A lot of innovation in automated litter boxes in the past 2 years though. Most of them cost around $500.
Having a dog can also be cumbersome if you are renting, because you will pay a premium to ensure your future apartment is dog friendly.
At my local Humane Society most young dogs seem to get adopted quickly. Senior dogs or dogs with health problems have a hard time.
I think anyone who wants to get a puppy should be willing to re-home as soon as possible instead of crating or banishing their dog because it's misbehaving (or you don't want them on your furniture).
Certain dog breeds (e.g Dachshunds) are really easy to re-home because there are rescues dedicated to them. Seems like my local shelter is usually full of pits and lab mixes.
Schools? The same "magical" we who teach math, for example.
I haven't been in school for a long time, but back in the day we had home ec and shop classes. I even took a typing class in high school, which turned out to be quite useful. We can teach kids practical life skills.
That's an overgeneralization. Schools vary widely in quality. Some schools have excellent results.
Should we shut down all the schools? I don't really understand how the nihilism in these replies makes any sense.
I don't you understand just how bad things are. Nationally 29% of 8th graders score "proficient or higher" in reading, 26% in math. The median American student is doing far worse than you think.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-test-everyone-will-fail_b_4...
Tell me how the US students compare to all of the other industrialized nations.
And again, I ask, what would you suggest? You seem to be suggesting we shouldn't be teaching parents skills in schools, because schools are allegedly no good, but isn't that also an (absurd) argument that we shouldn't be teaching anything in schools?
I don't accept the "failing" narrative. I think it's bogus.
You still haven't said what you'd do, though. Wouldn't you fire a failing employee? By analogy, wouldn't you shut down all schools?
However, it is the outsourcing of looking after children to professionals that causes the problem in the first place.
Otherwise people would learn from their "village" as the author puts it from when they were kids themselves.
You also learn to parent if you spend lots of time with your children. I worked from home from when my oldest was about an year old and it made a huge difference. I admit I cannot reconcile this with the increased amount of time the article says parents spend on caring for children, but I wonder exactly what those numbers are recording as they are hard to reconcile with the article it ultimately links to which comments on the shift from male breadwinner plus housewife households of the past..
The "steeper expectations" are the other big problem. You do a better job if you relax and enjoy it.
Now, take the source with a grain of salt, but in the Ramona series one of the characters has swimming lessons at the YMCA, and they get on the bus by themselves and go to the Y, swim and come home. Zero time spent on the parent's part. These days that'd probably be 60 minutes of childcare
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/the-at-...
Here's the problem with that. A few years ago the FBI announced that they had liberated 42 children from sex trafficking. What they neglected to mention: "the professionals who look after children" had lost ALL 42 children in 4 days.
Which of course means that in about 4 days every last of those children decided anything was better than "the professionals who look after children", and had run away. The idiots among those children who ran away to their home were ... well, idiots (for a child, that's a crime, ironically called "depriving a child of parental rights", yes, running away FROM youth services TO parents is called that). In other words they got arrested, and put in juvenile detention.
(this is a crime also somewhat famous because the police, on a regular basis, refuses orders from a judge to arrest)
The real change is elsewhere: in 1970, having child allowance for 3 children was essentially a living wage. In 1980s, it was over 5. Today ... 15? We effectively had professionals who look after children (almost exclusively mothers), paid but not employed by the state. Today we seem to have lots of professionals who don't seem to do half of what those mothers do, but spend more on them. We exchanged child allowance for a huge expansion of government. It didn't work, to put it mildly.
Of course, these days such a policy would tilt greatly towards immigrants, and it's probably a non-starter especially with Trump's numbers where they sadly are.
And the joke is: look at the population pyramid. Even if we decided to reinstitute that policy and it actually got fertility back up to 3 ... it's too late. I don't know how we're going to keep population, even in the US, at the level it currently is. In Europe ... "will the last person please turn out the lights?". Ironically China is actually the country arguably worst off. Hell, in 20 years we'll need a version of youth services that actually breeds children or something.
Of course, nobody is arguing that this needs to start happening, well, 20 years ago. "Too many people" you hear everywhere. But look at the numbers: there's WAY too few people.
And using immigration to fix the population pyramid in the USA would probably not work due to housing and politics?
New Zealand fixes its birth rate imbalance somewhat by immigration. About 30% of our population was born in another country (i.e our population is 50% higher than it would be without immigrants).
Note that NZ is managing to make more houses "Auckland increased housing supply by 4% from 2016 to 2021"[1]. Interestingly increases in house supply don't decrease prices (presumably house demand is still outstripping house supply in New Zealand, unlike some other aging population countries with declining house prices in locations). Auckland is highly unaffordable (about as relatively unaffordable as San Francisco: wages to prices).
Immigration drives house prices up, simplistically +10% immigrants doubles or triples house prices: "We suspect these two features largely underpin Coleman and Landon-Lane's (2007) and McDonald's (2013)| macro estimates that a 1 percent population increase from migration is associated with about a 10 percent increase in house prices nationally"[2].
Whether or not we want it, institutions do teach parenting. I, for one, took the parenting course when I was in high school. I also took another parenting course offered by the local health authority just before I was about to have my first child.
Perhaps what is really going on is that parents/would-be parents don't want to be taught?
That is certainly a theme seen outside of the topic of parenting. High school graduates in particular, who have spent 12+ years of their life in the education system, are oft considered 'uneducated'. Not because they actually are uneducated, just that they haven't received an education from a particular school.
I don't know where this general idea that we don't teach parenting comes from. Even ignoring said classes, once I had children the teachers will still lining up around the block to help me through the process. There is no subject I know of that has more teaching resources directed to it.
Kids that finish high school are considered uneducated either because contextually we are talking about specialized skills and secondary education, or because school does a terrible job at actually educating.
Right, and still do. That never went anywhere. That is still how it is done.
Since the dawn of man a small group of, predominantly young, people have set out into the world and left their families behind, but we saw a temporary aberration where that rate rose as people left for college, often to never return. While that trend started seeing a meaningful reversal by the late 2010s, those of average child rearing age today would have been the young adults most likely to leave around the peak migration.
We're still not talking huge numbers. The large majority of people have always stayed close to their parents, but enough people separated from their families that you can write an article about it. Particularly The Atlantic, which caters to the type of people most likely to leave their family behind.
Clearly we do teach parenting, from families, to the community, to even under the direction of formal institutions – so perhaps the takeaway is that the Atlantic's primary audience thought they knew better when they were 18 when they left their families behind, never befriended anyone older with children where they ended up, and now are feeling the consequences of their actions as they have children of their own?
> People want to be taught how to parent, just not by the government.
Keep in mind that the article is focused on America. Government is the community. Understandably, things are different in China (or whatever overlord it is you live under).
Why should we assume that? My own parents seemed to be generally clueless about parenting. I assume that our ancient ancestors were generally clueless too. Instinct is for animals, learning and science for humans.
I mean, I have dogs. They have to be fed. One often doesn't tell me when he needs to go out because he's anxious. The other I can't walk with the other dog because he'll try to fight other dogs for whatever reason, so I walk them separately. Every being has nuances you have to work around feeding them and keeping them safe. Who knows what my kid would be like but they're my kid.
Maybe it is just pretty innate but that doesn't mean I know the best way to do it. I don't know HOW to train my dogs well, I know how I train my dogs. But without learning how professionals etc do it I'm not min-maxing, basically.
I've had a hard time training that one dog to let me know he needs to go out. He just doesn't tell me. So I've been looking around for better ways to do it.
I almost given up on my little dog being reactive to other dogs. It sucks. Poor guy never gets to go on walks but I can't keep him calm, I don't know his past life, and I'm by no means a dog trainer.
Aside from that parenting for as long as we have been around has been something that was taught -- from your own family, if nothing else. The evidence of that is the experience of literally every single person who has had children who have family members tell them that everything they are doing is wrong.
That's a little bit different, from single child families, who see their relatives with newborns once a year. Not much chance to naturally learn parenting this way, until you are thrown in the cold water once it is your turn.
For me it was fortunately easier, mainly because I often visited and helped with my siblings children as they lived close. But if they would have lived far away, everything would have been way, way harder.
So formally teaching it for those who do not had that experience, makes some sense, I think. That is, until we find ways to be closer again by default.
There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child.
So many people bored and living alone. So many parents with no energy left to play with their children. It doesn't have to be this way forever.
The world changes, society changes, cultures change, and parenting is contextual in all of these.
I think the bigger issue is how are you going to come up with a curricula when you won’t get any group larger than 1 to agree on the right answer to any of these topics. And there are incentives to teach most kids the wrong answers for a few people, so their kids get a leg up.
I do believe parents should follow whatever instincts they do have though. A diversity of parenting approaches guarantees a diversity of children which I think is a good thing.
Learning to rear young is also something to learn. We are not a species that abandons their young to their own behaviors. We are one that needs to rear our young and teach them behaviors. You see, there is a fitness advantage to leaning off the body in a way, of pairing down the organism to its most basic and necessary parts so that you might survive and breed on less resources while others, bogged down by unneccessary cost centers, are less successfull. As we gained the abilities to teach others things that we have learned, we have also gained an entire world of abilities that would not be innate, or would be much more statistically rare to establish innately (e.g. how many mutations would a human need to be born speaking mathematical proofs? consider this is also weighed against the likelihood that a mutagenic event does not hit on whatever site(s) contribute to this behavior).
Parents fulfill basic needs pretty well without much struggle learning how. Psychological needs are often neglected (though I say that without a good reference for statistics on this, but I suspect it's something that isn't hard to agree on.)
Sure, they say "No one knows how to raise kids merely by instinct," and this is maybe half-true, in that it's pretty instinctual to give them food, share the shelter you provide for yourself, and protect your kids from physical danger. But beyond that, it's not instinctual.
[0] https://canadacollege.edu/dreamers/docs/Maslows-Hierarchy-of... (PDF)
There’s a vast array of character traits in children that require different parenting in a way that your parents haven’t treated you or your siblings or you’ve been unaware of the way they’ve treated you differently from your siblings.
I had on child, a girl, and I though the same way as you. Everything went well and was reasonable. Until my second was born. A boy with a “do-then-maybe-think” character trait. He’s awesome and loving and his emotions are like valleys and mountains. Totally different kid. Radically different way to communicate and raise him.
I’ve been reading “Good Inside” and this resonated with me. It’s a radically different way of looking and caring for your kids than I used to be treated. Can recommend
It should be vastly generalized but for many parents having a foundation of broad knowledge to build upon would be a major help.
I cannot believe I have friends that had kids in their early 20s or teens. Going to grab a beer with my 38yo friend and he's got a 16 yo kid.. wild.
Frankly, telling them how hard it is going to be and educating them on dealing with it just makes that first part that much harder.
I'm about to break into my 40s, with two young kids and I kinda wish we did it sooner. I'd have more energy for them for starters, but I also realise that I'm unlikely to enjoy grandchildren if they leave it as late as we did.
Maybe the cycle will bring back social shame again, which to me is at a historical low. And we'll again have manners manuals with content copied from 1924. Politeness, saying please and thank you, waiting for adults to finish before interrupting, doing house chores, no shouting, etc.
However, they are mostly also found in religious areas which turn some people away.
So, teaching as in informing, is only a part of the equation. Healing is a very big part, too.
That said, the class was small. Maybe 10 people in all. For me, it was a worthwhile class.
Same here, and I also took a parenting class in high school. Further, once the child was born the teachings have continued, with many teachers offering additional teachings and support. I don't think I have seen anything else in life that has tried to be taught to the same extent.
Not teaching how to parent must be a regional thing. Or is it is that we do teach it, but parents don't want to be taught?
I have always wanted to know how that kid turned out.
1. You never stop learning, kids change and they change quickly. The parenting techniques that worked yesterday may fail today.
2. Recognizing and normalizing emotion without feeding it underlies a lot of parenting skills.
3. It's ok to make mistakes, it demonstrates to kids that they can also make mistakes.
4. You really need to unpack how you were parented, what worked, what didn't and any trauma (ideally before you have kids) because you will pass all of that down if you don't put thought into it.
5. Being a good parent is neither being a fascist dictator who beats their kid into submission, nor is it being your kids permissive best friend. Finding the balance is tricky.
Furthermore, predicting the effect at scale, in the long run, feels impossible. An unregulated parenting education feels reasonable: let them make mistakes, and progressively grow from there, over a few generations.
Let alone the difficulty of finding a common ground, especially on something involving strong emotional ties. It was probably easier in the past, when religions/states were stronger, because, for better or for worse, they provided a way to unify people.
Because our society is optimized to achieve short-term extraction of value on behalf of the ownership class, and it's an ideological imperative for it to squeeze ever harder.
Ensure your kids are reasonably happy. It's not super expensive, they don't need a trip to Disney World every year or anything. Try not to let them make obvious, life altering mistakes. Past that, just enjoy the ride.
There were so many books saying do this, don't do that. Everyone had words of wisdom for me, like "children love routine" and so on.
Much advice seemed self serving to me, and much of it was contradictory.
I decided to ignore all advice, read nothing, and just find our own way. Seems to be fine. My kid is happy, doing well and we aren't beating ourselves up over whether we're "doing it right".
Or: just watch super nanny and bluey? Better then many, if not most, "parenting" resources.
One thing I learnt is don't shout, don't smack, let them feel their emotions and co sleeping is way better than cry it out. Acknowledging them is so important rather than worrying you are spoiling them. Spoiling them is more giving them tablets and devices
Even with teaching and all the guidance and preparation in the world some people are still astonishingly bad, like criminal bad. Much of that has to do with various mental health conditions, especially those passed from parent to child like Fragile X. There isn't a magic solution to gift people some credible amount of empathy, awareness, reduction of narcissism, basic handle on finances, nutrition, and so forth. These conversations tend to devolve into eugenics. The US used to feel very strongly one way about eugenics and then once the horrors of the holocaust were revealed those same people did a 180.
The current sentiment, at least in the US, is just let people fail. That sounds harsh, but attempting to regulate reproductive rights is complicated. Yet, for some strange reason abortion is always an outlier to that reasoning on regulation.
As of 2022, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is $310605 [1] [2]. That does not include all the unpaid parenting time which is probably another 40h per week between the parents. So we're talking 18+ years worth of unpaid time invested (or sunk) into your child. And when they go to work the government gets to tax them and keep all of it.
Financially speaking we've invested $500k (equiv) into each child and the government gets to keep all the return.
For the government and capitalist system it's much cheaper to import "ready" adults from abroad after someone else bore the cost.
The tax system and incentives need to be re-arranged if we want people to have children. Even the biggest proponent (Musk) isn't doing anything to help out. Surely his employees have no time for parenting after these 60h weeks.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041... [2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-true-cost-of-raising-a-child
I teach my kids how to parent by practicing it. I learned how to parent my children by observing my boomer parents, and doing the opposite in nearly every circumstance.
Now I wish I had a more detailed memory. I have many memories of my childhood of course, but I don't remember the little things that my parents were doing "behind the scenes" to make it all work.
Even the unpaywalled part of the article mentions that experience is too narrow and obviously inadequate. For instance: being parented is quite different from parenting; there's a long important period where the child will have no memory (or only vague disconnected memory) of being parented; and the experience of being parented gives insight into other parenting styles.
> I teach my kids how to parent by practicing it. I learned how to parent my children by observing my boomer parents, and doing the opposite in nearly every circumstance.
The opposite of one mistake isn't the correct action, it's usually a different mistake. Even though you gave zero details, I suspect "doing the opposite" will just set your kids up to repeat your parents' mistakes.
As the symbolic parent of every child who attends, his picture hangs in every classroom. The Great Worshipful Headmaster has more parenting experience than all parents in the village put together!
He has brought us Parent-Child Science from the gods, which he used to prove which religion is the best for kids, and has published many papers on how voting for the wrong party (or listening to Taylor Swift) is literally child abuse.
I eagerly await their next communication!