1. Everyone has opinions on education and parenting because everyone went through some version of it, but what we remember is one-sided
2. EA is not a privilege, we’re asking people to do stuff that’s costly
3. Kids are poor relative to their parents
4. Asking questions about what happened does not mean you disbelieve the person
5. How can you tell when you’re being frozen out because you’re a critic vs because your criticism is bad?
6. Are demanding ideas more or less likely to get adopted? Mormonism is both demanding and popular
7. Social justice people are on red alert for patterns that trolls use, for good reason because they’ve been exposed to a lot of this. But this also makes it hard to do normal good things like “look at both sides” or “ask questions”
8. When is it OCD vs valid concern vs something else? Simulation hypothesis, basilisk, Pascal’s wager
9. Programmers are way more into EA than social workers and Oxfam staff
10. Sacrifices that don’t look like sacrifices: living in a non-preferred country, not having kids, being polite to people you’re annoyed with
11. Lots of EA org leaders are parents
12. People have radically different views on what constitutes good parenting
13. Roles like moderator, board member, opening speaker: seem cool but people don’t actually want them, they’re costly
14. Give few commands to kids, and follow up immediately when you do
15. Don’t reward outcomes you don’t want, in pets or children
16. Don’t do things that would cause society to collapse

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Some basics of our approach

• Lean toward less frantic content; real life doesn’t have fast cuts, and you don’t want so much superstimulus that real life is boring by contrast.
• Try audio before video, as it’s less all-absorbing
• Set clear expectations for when screentime is available
  • Avoid intermittent reinforcement. If the child might get screentime if they ask, they ask all the time.
• Use the parent controls.
• Adjust as needed. See how your specific children are responding to the current setup.

Try audio first

The good

Audio can provide something to do, without being as grabby as video. At its best, it’s similar to an adult reading you a story.

Our first child wanted a lot of stories told to her, in a way we couldn’t keep up with. When she was about two, we realized that recorded stories were really helpful with this. Later she transitioned to children’s podcasts. She’d walk around absorbing words all day long. Then she transitioned to listening to novels from our library app. I think listening to a lot of audio contributed to her having a strong vocabulary at a young age (if archaic: “The minx! How dare she?”) although it’s correlated with being a kid who wanted to hear words all the time.

The bad

• Our kids have probably gotten less sleep during periods when we let them listen to audio while falling asleep. 
• If the kids don’t use headphones, it adds background noise to the household. If multiple kids do this at once, it’s cacophony.
• I think our kids were somewhat less motivated to learn to read written words because they could access stories through audio, but both older kids became strong readers after an initial delay. 
• Despite our assumption that unlimited audio would be fine, for our second child it didn’t work well (more in “notice how things affect your kids.”)

Avoid intermittent reinforcement

This is true with lots of things children pester for, but I see it most with screentime and sweets.
Child: Can I watch Cocomelon?
Adult: No.
Child: I want Cocomelon, I really want Colomelon. Please please I want Cocomelon, can I watch Cocomelon, can I, can I!!
Adult: Oh, all right.

The child has learned to ask seven times for Cocomelon in order to get it.

Some options I favor:

• Some hard and fast rules. “My phone doesn’t play Baby Shark.” 
• Allow some time for junk screentime, just as you surely spend some junk screentime. But make it predictable, not based on whining.
• Set expectations for when it will happen. After many such episodes, our housemate set the rule: “I’ll show you one video after dinner.” Any requests for videos would be met with “Is it after dinner? Then no” or “Ok, it’s after dinner.”
• With our nannies, I asked them to choose one day they’d show the kids a movie and stick to it. “We’ll do a movie on Friday. Today is Wednesday.”

I’ll choose to offer my kids extra screentime at times: when I’m sick or they’re sick, when I’m the only adult available and I need to focus on something. But I offer it when they’re not pestering, and I don’t want the reason to be “Because you wore me down.”

Get a device you can fully control

It’s appealing to get a made-for-kids tablet like the Amazon Fire for kids. They’re cheap and durable. But they exist to get you to buy more Amazon content. You can put it in kids mode, in which case it displays a bunch of apps you can’t remove from the homescreen. Or you can put it in adult mode, in which case there are no parental controls and you can’t install normal apps you could get on an Android or Apple device. We gave up on these tablets after a few years.

Now we get a cheap Android tablet with a thick foam case, and install the Google Family Link app for parent controls. Other parent control options we haven’t tried: Bark, Qustodio, etc.

For preschoolers who are only using audio, we’ve started with an adult’s old smartphone on wifi. When our older kids were in late elementary school, we got a Chromebook laptop that the kids use for writing and video.

You can set up some settings via the parent controls app, and control different things via bedtime settings: for example so that only certain apps work at night.

If you enable any kind of messaging app, limit the hours so it’s not pinging when your kid should be sleeping. (Learned after our kids’ cousins messaged them many times while on a trip in a different time zone.)

Follow through on using the parent controls

Sometimes I see parents arguing verbally with a child about tablet usage or physically struggling over the device. I’m happy with our method:

• If the child is misusing the tablet (glued to it when they’re supposed to be coming to dinner, etc), we can disable the tablet via our phones.
• We keep it off however long we said we would.

I hear parents say “if you keep this up you’re going to lose a privilege, you’re going to lose tablet time, oh now you’re listening? Okay” and nothing happens. Jeff and I try hard not to make empty threats, and if we say something like “no tablet time tomorrow” we truly switch it off and leave it off for the time we said. This means you must be able to tolerate your own grumpy children without screentime. In our experience, this was well worth it. But we don’t make threats like “no screentime on this 6-hour car trip” because we don’t want to follow through with that.

I try to use something like natural consequences or logical consequences when possible, but tablet time is so valuable to the kids that I do occasionally use it as a bargaining chip when there’s nothing more relevant to use. 

Notice how things affect your particular kids

With our first kid, we didn’t feel we needed to limit audio time. Our second kid wasn’t that into audio early on, but the summer she was eight she got hooked on an audiobook series. She would spend six or seven hours a day alone in her room listening to audiobooks and maybe drawing, but mostly just sitting on her bed listening.

It became clear this wasn’t good for her. When she did emerge from her room, she was really grumpy. With the sheer hours she was spending on one activity, she didn’t spend as much time interacting with other kids or doing other kinds of play. 

So we limited all tablet time for her, including audio, but her sister only had a limit on visual tablet time. Having different rules for the different kids went basically fine. We tell them we’ll change the rules as needed to see that they’re both getting a variety of things in their life (outdoor play, reading, time with other kids, learning, eating, sleep), and if any one thing starts to eat their life we’ll step in accordingly.

Consider video of real life

The real world is interesting enough to young kids without needing a lot of video production.

• Demolition machines and other construction/demolition vehicles
• Trains
• Farm channels where people do farm chores and, like, talk about their geese
• Slow paced animal videos, like kittens growing up or eggs hatching
• Children’s music concerts: we watched this Raffi concert a lot, and concert videos from the older kids’ school.

Babies and toddlers

We didn’t use much screentime at this age. It meant that screentime was more novel when we wanted to use it occasionally:

• Distraction during long trips. 
• Distraction during nail trimming and such
• When there’s no childcare, and the adult on duty is sick or needs to take a work call

Educational apps

I really liked using an app for teaching letters to my third child; it was way better than when I taught the older two with paper materials. We used DuoABC but there are other good ones. 

Many of the educational apps try to get you to practice math facts or whatever by creating a character and earning points to spend on decorations or something. My kids didn’t seem to learn much per minute of these, because they spent so much time navigating and picking out items in the store rather than playing the educational components.

So we’ve mostly given up on apps that combine learning and play. Instead, there’s some required drilling on math facts and touch typing. Then they have some video time and game time each day to use as they like, typically on vapid games. 

Technical problems I wish someone would solve

• There’s not a good way for a parent to limit how much time is spent on an audio program. The screentime limits apply when the screen is actually on. So a kid can turn on an audio app, turn the screen off, and play the audio for an hour and the tablet only counts the 1 minute the screen was on. Sleep timers are a way to get around this in theory, but it requires someone to manually turn them on every time (and the child to not turn it off). 
• There’s not a good way to allow some apps only after other apps, e.g. other apps unlock after you’ve been on the math facts app for 5 minutes.
• There’s not a good way to lock a screen to one app, and prevent a toddler who’s all thumbs from accidentally navigating away.

Specific recommendations

Audio

Preschool age

Arnold Lobel reading his books like Frog and Toad Are Friends—simple, short stories read slowly. 

Podcasts: Little Stories for Tiny People, Circle Round, Sparkle Stories. Or search for “gentle podcasts for preschoolers.”

Youtube videos of people reading children’s books aloud (we typically put the device out of reach on a shelf so the video isn’t visible and the child isn’t tapping on other random videos.)

Elementary school age

Children’s comedy podcasts like Wow in the World, Story Pirates, and Pinna.

Serial narrative podcasts like The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian.

• Tinkercast podcasts like Wow in the World
• Go Kid Go podcasts like Bobby Wonder
• PBS Kids podcasts like Molly of Denali and Circle Round
• Many classic books have been read out loud as a podcast, if you search for “Heidi by Johanna Spyri” or whatever on any podcast app or Librivox.
  • Two out-of-copyright series loved by my animal-interested kid:
    • Clara Dillingham Pierson’s Among the Forest People and other books, animal stories with very accurate details about e.g. how a bee colony works.
    • Thornton W. Burgess’ books about forest animals. If they really get into taxonomy, one of them is basically all the North American mammals by clade.

Audiobooks from library apps like Libby. You can filter to juvenile fiction, etc.

Video

Preschool age

• Daniel Tiger (26 min). It’s a reboot of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, also focused on social / emotional skills. Topics like “what’s it like to go to the dentist”, “using words to say how you feel,” “when it’s someone else’s birthday,” etc.
• Puffin Rock (26 min). Slow-paced problem-solving by animals on an island. The narrator’s parody of nature documentaries makes it lightly amusing for adults.
• Ms. Rachel (3 min segments) Extremely chipper lady. Initially focused on speech/communication skills, there’s also a spinoff with more preschool-esque content.
• Truck Tunes (3 minute songs with videos). Songs for vehicle lovers, from obvious ones like “fire truck” through to “delimber” and  “traffic cone truck.” The right length for brushing teeth or trimming nails.
• Things I’ve heard good things about but that haven’t caught on in my family: Numberblocks (3 min), Sarah & Duck (5 min), Tumble Leaf (25 min).

Wider age range

• Bluey (7 min episodes). Two siblings and their parents do imaginative play. Funny, touches on big life topics without being too intense.
• My Neighbor Totoro (90 min). The most loved of any movie we’ve watched.

Games

Preschool

For trips, we liked games from Toca Boca and Sago Mini. Open-ended play (rather than aimed at winning). Themes like cooking, taking care of pets, and giving characters wild hairstyles. Operating a virtual blender is a real thrill at this age.

Khan Academy Kids is well-made, free, and the music is not annoying. Only some bits can be downloaded to work offline, so prepare in advance if you want to use it for trips.

Teach your monster and Endless learning apps are good early literacy/numeracy. 

Elementary age

DuoLingo has languages obviously, but also a music/piano module that my middle schooler likes, and a math module that she tolerates.

One of our kids likes Prodigy, a math game they also use in school.

I haven’t figured out how to steer my older kids toward games that are not junk.

Parts I’m less sure about: middle school and beyond

Social connection vs. “Social Media”

We’re open to our kids using the internet to connect with real people they know. Our 11-year-old exchanges short voice messages with a friend from school, which seems basically like the phone calls we had as kids. She also has email and will email back and forth with our former nanny. 

I want to avoid “social” media that’s algorithm-driven and mostly stuff from influencers. We’ll probably hold off a long time on allowing those.

Monitoring

I haven’t figured out how much I’ll try to monitor their correspondence regarding their mental health or safety. Various apps like Bark try to do this with AI.

I spot-check their YouTube history occasionally, and have taken away YouTube at times (for an 8-year-old who was allowed to watch videos of audiobooks, but had been browsing other random stuff.) 

We ended up with unusually rule-following types, and we’d probably need a different plan with a kid who tried significantly to evade rules.

Phones

We’ve opted for a smart watch so our older kids can reach us if needed, but they can’t do most things phones can do. I’m not sure at what point we’ll let our kids get phones. Wait until 8th (the end of 8th grade) is one attempt at creating a shared commitment across families.

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A little exercise is way better than none

I am not much of an exercise person. I cannot be bothered to go to a gym. I’m willing to work out for like 12 minutes at a time. But the biggest gains come from moving from a low amount to a medium amount of exercise!

Chart from BBC, I think based on this Lancet metaanalysis

You can move around while your kids play

When I go to the playground, it’s full of parents like me who just spent the day at a desk job, and who are mostly standing and sitting around while their kids play. Jeff is very popular with the kids because he plays.

Ways to get more movement while supervising kids:

• Walk or jog around.
• Play running / chasing games with the kids.
  • Jeff’s favorite is “monster,” where an adult is trying to tag kids on the play structure.
  • More jungle gym games: “groundies” and more.
• Kick a ball around with the kids.
• Do bodyweight exercise. I am often the weirdo doing lunges or jumping jacks at the playground.
• When I’m supervising my kids in the bath, I try to at least stretch and move around a bit, or put on music and dance.
• Doing more trips up and down the stairs to get/put away things than is really needed.
• Walks or errands pushing kids in a stroller.
• More ideas for playground workouts.

Dressing for movement

I find I can dress in a way that’s fine for remote work and also fine for a lunchtime jog around the block and playground time after work.

• Wearing shoes I can move around in. I want my default shoes to be ones I’m comfortable jogging for a few minutes in. In cold weather my default is slip-on Clarks, and this summer I liked moving to close-toed sandals that felt much less slidey on my foot.
• I think a big reason women don’t move more is if it’s uncomfortable without a supportive bra. I’ve switched to wearing medium-support sports bras a lot of the time, and it’s changed how much activity is comfortable to do.
• I wear clothes that allow for getting down on the floor to play with kids.
• I’m motivated by watching a number go up (step count) or down (resting heart rate). I find some kind of fitness tracker worthwhile.

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• The world has a lot of appalling problems. Many can’t be addressed very well with money, but some can.
• On a rich-country income, you almost surely have some income you could dedicate to making the world better in whatever way seems best to you.
• This is best done not impulsively and sporadically, but deliberately as part of your ongoing budget.
• Donating a fraction of your income is a pretty great opportunity to make the world more like what you want it to be: with less suffering, more progress, more fairness, or whatever seems best to you.
• You don’t have to agree with my choice of where to donate! Think it through yourself!
• My ask to you for the coming year: think seriously about how much you want to give, and where you want to give it. One tool that I recommend is making a pledge (either for a period of time, or ongoing).

The world still has a lot of little match girls

[content: fictional and statistical child death, this section only]

Yesterday I took my daughter to see her friend in a Christmas performance based in part on Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl. I figured for a family Christmas play, they would probably alter the part where the main character freezes to death, but no. I sobbed messily while the plot moved on.

The 1844 story is about a child dying from poverty in the streets of a major European city. That was common then; all rich countries were much poorer then. 

But in today’s world, millions of children (expected to rise this year after aid cuts) still die every year from preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Those dying from extreme poverty aren’t in Copenhagen now, and they’re not in Boston where we paid $75 to watch the play. They’re out of sight, out of mind to us here.

……..

I take very seriously that I have the power to prevent other families from losing their children. This is a huge deal. For about $3,000, you can expect to save a parent from watching their child die from malaria. (Why this much, when treatment only costs a few dollars? Because most treatments won’t prevent a death, just like most vaccines. But it’s worth it to protect all the most vulnerable people, and to prevent a lot of nonfatal sickness.)

I don’t have words for how messed up it is that there are still so many preventable deaths. A world that had its act together would have fixed this by now.

The world clearly does not have its act together.

You don’t have to think global health is the best area

Donations let you make a dent in big problems, whether or not you also contribute in other ways. You can do that in lots of areas, if global health isn’t what seems most important to you:

• Maybe there are systemic changes you think are better to support.
• Maybe you think economic growth is more important, since it’s behind so many other improvements.
• Maybe you’d rather support developing new solutions instead of rolling out existing ones.
• Maybe there’s another population you think will benefit more from help.
• Maybe you want to try to prevent future problems (this is where Jeff and I are doing most of our giving this year).

If you take a hard look, you’ll also see many things you’d like to donate to that are not the most important ones. I think of those as candidates for a “have a good life in my community” budget (which is a totally valid thing to budget for!) but not a “change the world” budget.

You can afford to change things

If you’re reading this, you’re probably much richer than the typical person in the world. By living a bit more below your income, you can empower a cause you care about. As you think about your budget for the coming year, make a plan to set aside a meaningful amount to make the world more like what you want to see. (“Meaningful” will vary a lot by budget, but 10% is one longstanding method.)

Please give it a try. 

Some places to get started

• Vox’s guide to giving
  • Global health
  • Climate change
• The community of ordinary people making an extraordinary difference at Giving What We Can

If you’re interested in recommendations from the effective altruism space:

• Effective Altruism Funds
• Recommendations from staff at Coefficient Giving (previously Open Philanthropy)

The post In a discouraging world, we can afford to change things appeared first on Otherwise.

…….

I see friends post about how they can’t afford to start a family as, e.g. a teacher or a nurse. This is hard for me to believe, because

• Almost everyone in the world who’s raised kids has done so on much less money
• I’ve raised kids, and lived with other people raising kids, while much less spending than many people consider necessary.

Related: Vibecession: young people feel uniquely badly-off economically, but the economic data indicates most things (except housing). 

It is indeed harder with high housing costs, and we should try to lower them. And having kids is an irreversible decision that you shouldn’t rush into just because it’s economically feasible. 

But if you’re reading this, it probably is economically feasible. Jeff has written a good bit about our own budget over time (like from 2016 when we had a baby and a toddler, and two bedrooms for the four of us). I’ll walk through a different example: the couple we lived with in 2011 who were raising a baby on a modest budget.

You can live with housemates, even with kids

Our first non-family housemates after college were a couple we met on Craigslist. They were expecting a baby, and needed a deleaded apartment that allowed cats. Together we rented an apartment in the cheap end of Somerville (a suburb of Boston). It was a typical triple decker apartment: 1,200 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom.

We split the costs roughly 2/5 for Jeff and me (with one bedroom) and 3/5 for the other couple (with 2 bedrooms). At the time in 2011 it cost $1,700/month (about $2,500 in today’s money), and these days it’s listed around $3,300/month.

The housemates were

• Other couple dad (paralegal)
• Other couple mom (daycare worker, later full-time parent)
• Their baby, born 4 months into this arrangement
• Their baby
• Me (grad student)
• Jeff (programmer)
• Other couple’s 2 cats

There was no washer or dryer. The other couple used a laundromat, and I washed our clothes at the kitchen sink with a hand-cranked machine, and dried them on a rack. The apartment was big enough to hold parties with more than a dozen people; the Boston Effective Altruism group was born there when we invited some friends over to dinner and then made it a regular thing. When the other couple’s family came from out of town, they stayed at a nearby low-end hotel. We had one window unit air conditioner in the living room. The apartment wasn’t fancy, but functional and free of pests and mold.

None of us owned a car. All of us took public transit to work (I had the longest commute, 1 hour 40 min to my grad school campus). We brought our groceries home in a wire cart, took turns cooking, and ate a lot of pasta and beans. 

……….

Is this still possible in today’s economy?

Here’s my current-day estimate for one earner, one full-time parent, and one baby in the setup we had:

This budget doesn’t provide for debt, savings, travel, or emergencies. My understanding is that Massachusetts has better state healthcare assistance but also higher housing costs, so this might be easier in a cheaper city, especially with remote work more possible.

……

I know very few American families who share housing while raising kids. What was it like for us living with someone else’s baby?

• With our bedroom at one end of the apartment and their rooms at the other, we were never woken up by the baby crying.
• In the intense first few weeks of parenting, Jeff and I covered more of the cooking and chores, and throughout the year I helped with holding the baby so they could get a break.
• It was good pre-parenting experience for us; we felt we knew more what we were soon to get ourselves into.

What was it like for them? When we went to their parties later, the mother introduced me to her friends with “Julia saved my life.” That’s an exaggeration, and they would have made it fine through early parenthood, but it is indeed easier with more help. (Having housemates is a mixed bag, and I’m sure I was a mixed bag as a housemate. The typical housemate is more of a bemused onlooker to parenting than much of a helper.) 

We all would have preferred to continue living together, but we had a remarkably bad landlord and after making it through a one-year lease we couldn’t find another apartment that met our joint space/cat/deleading/location/cost requirements. So they moved to a cheaper part of Boston where they could afford their own 2-bedroom apartment. They now have two children. Neither of them wanted to be a full-time parent long-term, and the mom went to grad school to be a librarian.

……

Sharing housing seemed pretty good to us, and we’ve done it ever since. We currently have one adult housemate, and one former housemate across the street whom we see most days.

Related:

• My Experiences raising children in shared housing
• Jeff’s Kids and space

The post You don’t have to wait for a high income to have kids appeared first on Otherwise.

My children attend the public schools in Somerville, Massachusetts. It’s an urban suburb of Boston.

I started hearing about math curriculum changes in 2018, when there was drama about neighboring Cambridge (home of Harvard and MIT) removing Algebra 1 as an option in 8th grade. I think algebra is only one indicator of a larger change, but it’s the one people have latched on to.

Common concerns are:

• The standard path to advanced high school math starts with Algebra 1 before high school, so that you can take 4 years of high school math including calculus. Students who don’t start this path on time will be hard-pressed to complete calculus, which STEM-focused universities want.
• A lack of advanced options means kids who are strong at math will be bored in classes below their level, and will achieve less as adults than they could if they could move through math levels faster.
• While keeping everyone in the same classes is typically done in hopes of improving equity, a one-size-fits-all curriculum needlessly holds back talented kids of all demographics.
• This is part of a general conflict about how to improve outcomes for struggling kids while allowing others to excel where they’re strong. 

I wondered: if my kids turn out to be strong in math, will they have the chance to move ahead? Are we stunting a generation of kids who could be doing more? 

The key things I found:

• Math tracking (having different levels of math class by ability) in Somerville middle schools ended around 2018. Algebra I hasn’t been offered in 8th grade since at least that far back. I’m not clear on whether there’s tracking for other subjects.
• At the high end of achievement: the number of kids studying calculus is increasing steadily over time. It’s hard to tell how much of this is because of something the school district is doing, and how much is because of a richer student population with more educated parents.
• But average student math scores have been very low (~40% of students proficient) since the pandemic.

How it’s going at the high end

AP (advanced placement) test scores seem to have stayed pretty steady in difficulty level over the last few decades. And if fewer students are reaching calculus, we should be able to see it here because fewer kids would be taking the exams. What I found in Somerville AP scores:

• Way more kids are taking AP exams than they did a decade ago. This is true in general as well as in math: the total number of AP exams taken at Somerville High has almost quadrupled in the last 15 years.
• Over time, more students are getting at least a 3 on an AP calculus exam.
• The increase is present both overall, and in disadvantaged groups.

I looked at the AP calc test-takers at 5-year intervals.

In chart form:

It’s not just rich white kids:

This all seems like good news!

Caveats:

• We can’t see pass rates for any division of fewer than 10 students. But the overall pass numbers are growing where we can see them, while the total high school population stayed pretty steady.
• A few students are probably taking the calculus exam earlier than 12th grade.
• Some of these students may not have gone to Somerville middle schools; e.g. in Cambridge, high schoolers coming from other schools were much more likely to place out of Algebra 1 than those who attended Cambridge middle schools.
• This metric is just the thing that’s most visible to me from afar, and doesn’t give a picture of what student experiences are like or a bunch of other more nuanced things.

How it’s going at the low end

According to the standardized test (MCAS), only 39% of Somerville High 10th graders are at least “proficient” in math. Ouch.

MCAS proficiency is no longer required to graduate. I’m guessing that many students who graduate do so with very limited math understanding, as Kelsey’s excellent piece illustrates.

Curriculum

I see at least a dozen articles and discussions about Cambridge’s algebra drama, and nothing at all about Somerville’s. Somerville removed middle school tracking at the same time, and for some reason got no attention (fewer Harvard professors?) I eventually flagged down my child’s school principal at back-to-school night to find out what the middle school math situation was, because I couldn’t find anything online about what classes were offered.

She told me there are no different math classes by ability in middle school. The 8th grade teachers supposedly offer some enrichment for kids who are ready for more, but it’s hard to imagine how much enrichment is really possible for one adult to provide 20 kids who are all over the map in math ability. 

The whole district now uses the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum, although I think they must use something else for some advanced classes that IM doesn’t offer. The math education subreddit has mixed opinions on this curriculum, as it does on every single other curriculum. When I’ve browsed my kids’ materials, the approach seems fine to my uninformed eyes.

The other big change: the city got richer

Housing has also gotten much more expensive.

Many of the “Old Somerville” working class families have been priced out, and more residents are “New Somerville” tech workers. (My family has a bit of both, since Jeff grew up nearby but is a Tech Person. Most of his childhood friends either work in tech or are dead of drug overdoses.) 

You see the economic shift in school enrollment: 40% of last year’s kindergarteners are from low-income families, compared to 56% a decade before. So you’d expect rising math scores as these richer children of tech workers hit high school. I suspect this may be what’s driving a lot of the change we saw above on the top end.

My takeaways

If removing tracking is hurting advanced students, that’s sure not what the AP tests are showing. Maybe it’s just that the rising economic tide is lifting all the students, and there would be even more kids excelling if tracking hadn’t ended and there were more advanced math options in middle school? But I don’t know how we would tell that.

All I can see is how some of the numbers have changed; there’s a lot that’s not captured here.

The situation where most students are below grade level still seems bad. This is true in most of the US and isn’t special to Somerville.

Misc:

• Somerville is an urban area with 81,000 people. The city is mostly white, but Somerville High is plurality Latino. About half the students are low-income, and most students’ first language is not English.
• The city has several middle schools but one main high school; there’s a very small alternate high school program for kids with special needs, which I haven’t included.
• I’m curious what proportion of Somerville students are educated outside the public schools, and what they’re studying there, but I couldn’t find that.
• The high school seems to have offered more AP math classes over time: adding statistics in 2014, and BC calc in 2018, if the AP test-taking records indicate this.
• Some families I know pay for extracurricular math classes like Russian School of Math or Art of Problem Solving, either because the kid loves math or because the parents want their kid to be a high achiever.
• The top end isn’t that relevant to my family so far, because none of my kids are above grade level at math. See: Most kids of smart parents will be pretty ordinary.

The post How is math going in my city’s public schools? appeared first on Otherwise.

I still enjoy it. But in spaces focused on old-fashioned vibes, you encounter a lot of people who believe that the past was actually this charming.

Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s Little House on the Prairie books are problematic, and also I will always love them. She wrote about the beauty of family and hard work, but she wrote them because she spent her whole life supporting disabled family members. She and her daughter beautified her “pioneer girl” history to make good books. Her daughter describes the reality:  “It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked [my father’s] health permanently, and interest rates of 36 percent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land.”

My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past. I grew up listening to folk music and imagining a past where nice boys would admire a nice quiet girl like me, and I wouldn’t have to figure out dating because everything would just unfold, probably on a May morning. My mother pointed out that a lot of the songs along the lines of “my own true love proved false to me” were about unplanned pregnancies.

I also assumed the bonny lasses in these songs would be wholesome and nice. But were popular girls of the past nicer people than they are now?

Some of my picture came from growing up in the Anglo-American folk dance and music community: it had a lot of aging hippies with graduate degrees. So I came away imagining a past with a lot of the kind of people who become engineers and English teachers. A more accurate picture would have been “Imagine the high school in a small town where the same few dozen kids form your entire group of peers and potential partners.”

Bookish girls like Belle didn’t really go to live in enchanted castles with huge libraries. They stayed in villages where everyone thought they were weird and their best option was Gaston.

Maybe my favorite podcast episode ever is Rachel Laudan on food history: “I did have the extraordinary good fortune to grow up eating what I think the romantic movement dreams of. We had milk fresh from the cow; I never had pasteurized milk until I went to school. We had fish from the river, pheasant from the farm. The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden. So, I do romanticize—some of that because the taste was often extraordinary. And then I tweak myself and I say, ‘Look, Rachel, your mother spent all day, every day gardening or cooking.’ Essentially. As well as doing other chores. And she said to you, ‘Rachel, it’s servitude. I want you to have a life I didn’t have.’ “

I love living in a time and place where we get to choose aesthetics. I have bread rising in my kitchen right now, and I’m looking forward to baking it in an electric oven that doesn’t require me stacking wood or putting smoke into my house.

So I’ll continue to enjoy retro vibes, and draw on the past for lessons on how to be a human. (For example, making music together is one of life’s great experiences, and it’s a mistake to entirely substitute recorded music for that.) But I’ll enjoy doing so with indoor plumbing, dental care, and a desk job.

The post The past was not that cute appeared first on Otherwise.

The kids all know that making a baby requires an egg cell and a sperm cell, and those can be combined either by a doctor or by some kind of body positioning. The older ones know about IVF and miscarriages. They know there is medicine you can take so you won’t get pregnant. They know body parts and pronouns don’t always match up the same way.

They know a lot of adult couples, and some Disney portrayal of being in love. One of the kids wrote a letter suggesting marriage to her first-grade classmate, but her sister and I convinced her this was coming on too strong.

……

Some misunderstandings:

• One of them believed conception included the egg and sperm talking to each other. Turns out they took the comic-book style of “It’s So Amazing” and “It’s Not the Stork” more literally than I expected.
• Two of them asked if it hurts when the doctor puts the cells together, because they assumed any activity combining bits of people’s bodies would be taken care of by medical professionals.
• Our au pair came to me flustered by some well-intentioned advice from our six-year-old, who knew our au pair didn’t want to have children. Our kid helpfully told our au pair that she should avoid snuggling too close with the kind of woman who has a penis, because someone could still have sperm even if she identifies as a woman. After that, we asked our kid not to offer reproductive advice to anyone outside the immediate family.
• The kids knew our previous au pair was gay, but they were surprised to learn that her girlfriend was also gay. What are the odds??

…..

Some things I think they don’t fully know:

• Almost all sex is for fun, not to conceive babies.
• Lots of human behavior has an undercurrent of trying to impress each other, and some of that is sexual in nature.
• A huge amount of women’s restricted role in traditional societies came from limiting access to their sexuality and preventing pregnancies. We still haven’t fully figured out how societies should handle spaces that are in theory non-sexual, when people keep developing attractions to each other.
• Being in love can be a painful and risky experience, not only a warm and safe one.
• Romantic and sexual interactions can range from delightful and mutual to one-sided and exploitative.

…..

I had one part of the conversation earlier than my 10-year-old wanted, because she was traveling to a lot of dance events with Jeff. I said something like:

• At some point, someone will think you’re cute and want to treat you in a romantic way or get cuddly with you.
• Sometimes teenagers or adults who are older than you will be interested in you in that way. It happened to me, it happened to Grandma, it happens to a lot of girls in dance spaces.
• If someone is making you uncomfortable, leave. You can make an excuse if you want, like you need to go to the bathroom or you feel sick or you told someone you’d meet them at a particular time. You can pretend someone is calling you. Or you can just leave with no excuse. But get physically away from them.
• Then tell Papa or another grownup you know well.

She hated this conversation, but when I repeated it six months later she took it more calmly.

…..

I’ve been reading aloud Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books to the kids. I like the way it includes different threads of how attraction can work.

In Wintersmith, the spirit of winter latches onto a teenaged witch. She keeps having awkward conversations about it with the bawdy older witch Nanny Ogg:

“Is this going to be the talk about sex?” asked Tiffany.
“Did anyone say there was going to be one?” asked Nanny innocently.
“I kind of got the feeling,” said Tiffany. “And I know where babies come from, Mrs. Ogg.”
“I should hope so.”
“I know how they get there, too. I live on a farm and I’ve got a lot of older sisters.”
“Ah right,” said Nanny. . . . . “You shouldn’t be frightened of him. He should be frightened of you. . . . it’s a poor lookout if a bright girl can’t wind a boy around her little finger. He’s smitten with you. You could make his life a misery with a word. Why, when I was a girl, a young man nearly threw himself off the Lancre Bridge because I spurned his advances!”
“He did? What happened?”
“I unspurned ‘em. Well, he looked so pretty standing there, and I thought, that’s a good-looking bum on him if I ever saw one.”

The post Things my kids don’t know about sex appeared first on Otherwise.

Obviously other people have other methods they prefer; this is just outlining my favorite method. I’m on the small end of adults, so my clothes aren’t that big and I don’t really need the under-seat space for my feet. But in a pinch, my family has used this method with 5 of us and 5 backpacks, no carry-on. More from the One Bag people on Reddit.

Backpack

This backpack is one I’ve been pretty happy with. Many airlines say 14 x 18 x 8 in for underseat bags, but I’ve never had someone call me on a backpack that was a little bigger. They seem to just check that you’re carrying only one bag and that it could plausibly fit under a seat.

I prefer any color other than black so I’m less likely to mix it up with someone else’s black backpack.

Second bag

If I get a ticket that only comes with an under-seat bag, I want a thin packable bag that can go inside my backpack for the actual flight. If I can put the backpack in an overhead bin, I use this as my under-seat bag. I made one that was exactly how I wanted it, but a tote bag or things sold as “packable daypack” work.

For most of the trip, I’m using my small bag as a purse for things I want easy access to, and the backpack for the rest. For actually getting onto a plane, I combine them into the backpack. Jacket gets tied around waist if it won’t fit. Once I’m on the plane, half the time I need to keep it all actually under the seat, and the other half there’s room to separate the two bags and put one in the overhead bin.

What I pack

• Warm layer like a fleece jacket. I want this for the plane even if not at my destination, because I get cold trying to sleep on a plane.
• Packable puffer jacket: mine comes with an attached bag you can stuff it into so it gets very small. Thanks to the person who lent me hers in Australia; I was converted. 
• One pair of pants, and I wear the other. For conference trips I usually bring one pair of black pants and one pair of jeans.
• Enough tops for every day; I might wash some in the sink if it’s a long trip.
• One or two cardigans or sweaters.
• Ziploc bag with travel size of liquids/gels. They rarely check the size of your plastic bag or whether you’ve got all your liquids inside it (UK airports seem most likely to care about the size of the bag). Hotels nearly always have shampoo but don’t always have conditioner.
• 7-day medication box; it is very easy to forget to take your meds while traveling, and this helps me know whether I’ve missed a day. 
• Toiletries bag with other stuff like toothbrush, hair brush, toothbrush, sleep eyemask, etc.
• One bag to contain all my cables / chargers / power adapters / headphones
• Water bottle
• Snacks that can get squashed, like nuts and granola bars

Other people’s example packing lists.

Electronics

• Laptop charger just used for travel, so I’m not looking for it at the last minute before departing or after getting home. 
• Some kind of small power bank. I don’t aim to power my laptop with it, but do aim to be able to charge my phone if I end up stuck somewhere. I find the airplane seat outlets don’t work maybe a quarter of the time, so I don’t want to rely on this.
• I have power adapters for the countries I visit most often, and one clunkier multicountry that works almost anywhere.
• Cables that go with whatever chargers you’re bringing, which might not be the same as what you typically use.
• Cable with a USB-A end (the big old rectangle kind), even if I don’t normally use that, because many planes have this as a charging option.
• I’m based in the US and have an Android phone, so Google Fi is a good phone plan for me. Service just works anywhere in the world; it’s great.
• I like having a watch that can go over a week on one charge, in my case a Fitbit Inspire 3. I charge it before the trip and it just works for like 9 days.

More optional

• Extra gallon-size ziploc for things that spill, wet swimsuit, etc.
• I get cold while sleeping. Americans aren’t used to hot water bottles, but they are good if your feet get cold at night. Sometimes I bring a hot water bottle, and there’s typically some kind of kettle or coffee maker in a hotel room that can fill it. I’ve also used a single-walled metal water bottle for this; the nicer insulated ones hold heat too well for this. 

Things I don’t usually bring

• Enough liquids that I’d need to check a bag.
• Foreign cash. In Western Europe, you can pay for everything with tap-to-pay on your phone. I only bring cash if planning to go to e.g. hole-in-the-wall places or countries where vendors are less likely to take credit cards. I do bring my bank card for if my phone dies or I want to get cash at an ATM.
• A full coat if I’m going someplace where I won’t need the coat; I’d rather do 30 minutes of Boston winter without my coat than lug it around for a week.
• Extra shoes. I might wear sturdier shoes on the plane and pack flats if I need to look fancy at some point during the trip. Women’s shoes are often uncomfortable for travel and conferences; ask an LLM or the internet for recommendations on comfortable conference shoes. I like the Ecco Bluma flats I got secondhand; I literally climbed a small mountain in them the day after a wedding when I hadn’t brought other shoes.

Streamlining packing

Ideally my travel stuff is in as few places as possible (mostly a dresser drawer) so I’m not checking lots of different rooms while packing.

• Sleep mask
• Travel size toiletries
• Bag of chargers and adapters
• Duplicate of hairbrush, toothbrush, and makeup so I don’t have to pack them at the last minute
• Medication holder with a few of things that I or other people often need.

Jet lag

I like these pieces from Helen Toner and Lincoln Quirk (both more experienced than I am with seriously long flights.)  

If traveling eastward: 

• On the day I arrive, I stay awake until reasonable local bedtime (at least 8 pm), even if I’m tired from an overnight flight. Napping at this point will mess you up.
• I use melatonin to get sleepy at the right time; I continue using it each night for at least 3 nights. Helen: “It works much better in this context than other drugs that make you sleepy (or awake), since it is literally the chemical that signals to your circadian clock that night is falling, rather than meddling with your wakefulness by hotwiring some other system.”
  Dosage between 0.5 and 5 mg is similarly effective. It’s hard to find tablets less than 1 mg; I get the gummy kind and break them into pieces.
• Set an alarm if you need to do something in the morning, even if you think you won’t possibly sleep that late. I surprised myself by sleeping through the first few hours of a conference, because my body clock was set to sleep late.
• In the morning, spend some time outdoors / in daylight if possible. Sunlight is much brighter than indoor light and helps set your internal clock to know when morning is.
• I use caffeine as usual in the morning / early afternoon after arriving.

If traveling westward:

• Again, stay awake until a reasonable local bedtime (for me, at least 8 pm).
• I do find it’s fine to nap on the plane westward, as long as it’s before mid-afternoon in the time you’re trying to adjust to.
• Your body will want to wake up too early in the morning. If possible, stay in a dark environment until some reasonable waking hour (for me, 6 am) to give your body cues about when nighttime is. If I’m awake and bored, I might listen to podcasts in the dark.
• I’m not sure it helps very much, but I use slow-release melatonin upon return to try to sleep longer.

My favorite bag

This is probably overkill, but I made my ideal travel daypack because I couldn’t find what I wanted at a price I liked.  

• Not bulky, so I can cram it inside my backpack when needed
• Few pockets, so I’m not looking for my passport in 9 different places
• Straps to use as a backpack if it’s my only bag, or as a shoulder bag if I’m also carrying a larger backpack
• Room to hold my laptop, a jacket, and a water bottle — what I want during the day at a conference.

Previously: Travel with one adult and one baby (yes I do check a bag in that case).

The post Air travel with only an under-seat bag appeared first on Otherwise.

In male/female couples it’s usually the woman who owns more of the parenting work, and that can feel unfair if the arrangement comes from assumptions rather than a willing choice. 

I want to highlight some counter-examples from the effective altruism space, to show it’s really possible to make an intentional choice about who does what.

• Jeff and I both travel for work, but he’s more fearless than I am about having the kids solo. Once while I had to be on a work trip during the annual vacation with his side of the family, he took our four-year-old and two-year-old to the beach, and also took his sister’s two-year-old because she was working. Then, during this trip where he was responsible for three preschoolers, he potty-trained our toddler. 
• My friend has pursued jobs focused on impact, while her husband has a normal job he’s not pursuing for altruistic impact. He does more of the childcare while she commutes part of the week to another city for her work. He’s also taken on more of the planning work involved in parenting, like choosing a school for their child and coming up with a reward system for behavior they’re trying to encourage.
• My coworker’s story from the recent EA New Zealand summit: Two of the women attending had young babies. Their male partners came along as childcare support with the babies in carriers and stood at the back of the lecture theatre during the talks, ready to take the babies out when needed. (New Zealand president Jacinda Ardern, her partner, and their baby used a similar method in 2018.)
• You wouldn’t know from most writing about philosopher Hilary Greaves that she has children, because she’s been busy being an Oxford professor and directing the Global Priorities Institute. She mentioned in a 2018 podcast that she had 4 children at that time, and she now has 7. My understanding is that her partner has covered more of the parenting work, and that his doing so allowed her to spend more time on her career. (I’m so impressed with the amount of work that both of them must have done!)
• Not parenting, but in one couple I know through EA, the wife is a medical resident. She works 80 hour weeks, and he has a more normal work week, so he views it as his role to be sure she gets meals when she comes home. He said he’s not saving people’s health in his daily work, but he’s supporting her to do that.

Related:
Jeff’s Equal parenting advice for dads
My Dividing responsibilities at home
Michelle Hutchinson’s My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career

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