How I want to raise my future kids
Communication and aesthetics
Communicate and maintain healthy boundaries. Guiding principle: Don’t do anything for them that they can’t do for themselves.
E.g. Don’t take responsibility for things that are theirs: their feelings, their decisions, anything that’s theirs.
And be sure to update these boundaries appropriately as they mature.
Play with them. See Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen.
(Don’t cause them to lose their natural ability to play!)
No reward-and-punishment “education”, no extrinsic motivations, no coercion. Allow them to be responsible for their own decisions and mistakes. (Cf the books linked above.)
Example of what this looks like: Praise that doesn’t feel uncomfortable: praising without judgment.
Overall, I expect to take a lot from Alfred Alder’s Individual Psychology.
I also find myself attracted to the parenting philosophy of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. I’ve already written about this. E.g. How to communicate and listen with full emotional bandwidth. There’s also a nourishing energy from this book that I really like.
Hold space for infinite play.
Intrinsic motivations over extrinsic motivations. Attention on how things feel, rather than how others may judge them as instrumental to their own value systems. Emphasize feeling (1, 2). (Do not emphasize playing others’ games, like money, prestige, etc.)
Prioritize aesthetics, honor intrinsic motivations.
Take them seriously; takingchildrenseriously.com
Intuition is sacred. Don’t cause them to unlearn their trust in it.
(Make sure they don’t acquire the contradiction that it’s not okay to think and feel anything unless you can give an explanation for it to yourself/others)
Figure out how to have them intuit the overarching way of being that contains (e.g.) Alexander Technique and other forms of meditation. / Some of this is innate, and so don’t cause them to lose it.
If my wife and I become enlightened, do our kids grow up nearly effortlessly enlightened? hehe
Community
I’d like to have between 4 and 6 kids
Seems like it would be fun. I’m a sibling of two so I didn’t have this much.
Also, raising a bunch of kids with my wife would be really hot.
Raise them in a colocated community of people that my wife and I look up to.
But I also want them to have access to nature, which is almost in conflict with this.
Where do such communities exist?
Oh, the SF Neighborhood was created explicitly for this reason.
Hm, what I want is SF but with much more nature.
Put them in situations where they naturally become highly socially intelligent. (And avoid the opposite of this.)
Find something better than conventional school?
E.g. consider private tutoring
cf Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem (wiki) (metareview)
(Watch the development of AI tutoring.)
Time and activities
Encourage them to spend their time on positive-sum games, e.g. interactions with the physical world, rather than zero-sum games of power, ranking, and naive prestige.
At the same time though, I don’t want anyone to pick the games that they play. I want them to pick their own games— and then they will know that they can always leave any game that they choose to play. (Again, boundaries.) (E.g. don’t impose the games “college admissions!!”/grades/sports/etc. on them.)
(I think the parenting of the Polgar sisters might have been bad? Chess is a purely artificial game, and that László Polgár chose this and not something of positive-sum value really feels like a cop out. I haven’t read his book though!)
Exercise with them, make it a natural part of their lives
stretch with them, encourage them to intuitively maintain their physical flexibility
Pull-up bars are gonna be all over the house. Even my daughters are going to have pull-up strength!
Lots lots lots of outdoors
musical aptitude if they want it
Teach other languages from a young age, even if not practically necessary
From the standpoint of teaching a kid younger than 5, there’s really not much else that they can do except memorize, so might as well use that to teach them languages.
Teach them to read from a young age
cf Anki guy. note to self: add this
Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger did this with his child
Avoid superstimuli (e.g. electronics? uhh)?
A lot of the above breaks with the current pace of AI progress though, so I dunno.
Health
I also want my children to be as healthy as possible, and I have some unusual views on how to go about this. Mainly, I have strong naturalistic priors.
Avoid environmental contaminants
Avoid all synthetic materials by default, including/especially almost all plastics synthetic fabrics, perfluorinated compounds, and synthetic nonstick materials.
Resources
Run tests on potential homes for the most common contaminants before we buy or rent it
Feed them predominantly animal foods. My babies will be eating liver!
See follow Scott Alexander’s 2022 review on pregnancy interventions
Strong water and air filters at home.
Figure out how to make pregnancy easier— modern pregnancy practices don’t make sense to me in many ways (e.g. no squatting??). Also, “birthing centers” exist and might be good.
Research how to reduce the chances that my children develop allergies.
Or, if they do develop allergies, get them immunotherapy early on in life. When I was younger I had very severe environmental allergies and asthma, but immunotherapy resolved this entirely. Probably one of the most impactful unusual actions that my parents have ever taken on my behalf.
Run micronutrient tests on them to proactively check for deficiencies. GI tests, too. What else?
My children will not need to have any orthodontics! and they will not need to have any teeth removed! I don’t buy the narrative that malocclusion (teeth crowding) is a natural phenomenon in humans. We’re gonna figure this out!
Likely interventions: Baby-led weaning, don’t use baby food, hard food/ lots of chewing
Lots of sunlight from a young age?
Final notes
One counterargument to the efficacy deliberate parenting comes in the form of twin studies which are used to conclude that parenting strategies are usually/mostly insignificant in the development of children. IMO: Eh. While I believe almost every parent tries extremely hard to provide for their children on the object level, I don’t think almost any trying to deviate and create a perfect environment from first principles. Moreover, variance of parenting interventions doesn’t seem particularly high where I grew up, and in that case it’s totally expected that variance of parenting outcomes wouldn’t be high either— but that doesn’t mean that deliberate and unusual efforts can’t cause outstanding results.
contact me, chris@chrislakin.com
To do
Find and marry a nice girl
Get rich together
Last updated 2023-02-22.