6 ms·

Yes I think they are saying the lack of non-cognitive skills appears to be what is lacking. But there does seem to be some evidence that those who are in parent

by xupybd 8y ago

Yes I think they are saying the lack of non-cognitive skills appears to be what is lacking. But there does seem to be some evidence that those who are in parental care better develop these skills and have better outcomes. I think the tricky part will be demonstrating how to provide these non-cognitive skills outside of parental care. Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force but this may not pay off in the long term if future generations fail to perform in life.

killjoywashere 8y ago
I have some real cognitive dissonance with the mixed desires for women to have complete equality in the workplace, and children who are perfectly cared for as though they were in their mother's arms, yet the children can't come to work in many cases for very practical reasons (highly intellectually demanding work settings, high risk work settings, etc). And at the same time, it's all men's fault.
- pay_more_money 8y ago
  Pay more money for all the desirable jobs, nevermind the undesirable jobs, and don't enslave women under a patriarchy of indentured motherhood. Also, women deserve compensation for entertaining the premise of marriage in all cases, and should retain total autonomy of childcare upon the failure of a marriage, and total purchasing authority, when compensated extra for childcare, after divorce.
  - xupybd 8y ago
    >Pay more money for all the desirable jobs, never mind the undesirable jobs But how? We've found that market economies tend to work the best. These pay based on supply and demand. The other option is a planned economy where you might be able to attempt something like this but all examples of planned economies have resulted in so much suffering I don't think we want to try that again. Who is going to drive the rubbish trucks, clean the toilets, keep the sewers flowing and look after the sick and elderly if we get rid of all the undesirable jobs? Some jobs are horrible to do but we need them done. Evidence that children cared for in the home may have better outcomes than those in child care need not lead to the conclusion that women must be forced into indentured motherhood. It simply means we have a problem to investigate. There might be a better way to do this. But doesn't your comment that women "should retain total autonomy of childcare upon the failure of a marriage" suggest that you think women are the only party responsible for childcare?
    - pay_more_money 8y ago
      Here's a subtle clue: even under tightly controlled, planned social arrangements, for example, when you attempt to bring a criminal to justice, you might sometimes find incentives that create underground market economies. Spooky bribery at a distance, if you will. Surrogate motherhood is rare and problematic, but in some cases there is enough incentive to simply carry a child for a reward, and then exit the parental role. Sometimes, this might even happen with unplanned pregnancies. What's the tipping point that splits the difference between terminating a pregnancy, versus a charade marriage incentivized by court mandated custody and support arrangements that bring justice to an potentially unjust circumstance befalling an unfortunate couple?
      - xupybd 8y ago
        I'm sorry I don't understand what you are saying here? Are you saying that the court system is forcing people into charade marriages? If so I'm not sure there is evidence of that. The number of divorces and single parenthood has skyrocketed in recent years. If anything I think there is something about modern society pushing people away from marriage. But as I say I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.
      - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
        This begs the question: why get married?
  - cheez 8y ago
    Obviously a joke poster
- drivebycomment 8y ago
  I don't think there's enough evidence to suggest that stay-at-home dad would result in worse outcome of children. So, it would be fair to criticize men if men aren't sharing the burden of raising the children 50/50 (after the first year or so of nursing period is over).
  - rayiner 8y ago
    The nursing period is also not a differentiating factor. The long-term benefit from breastfeeding is very thin, likely not even a couple of IQ points if that: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/139/4/e20161848; http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/139/4/e2016184... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everybody-calm-down-about-breastfeeding/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everybody-calm-down-abo...
    - steve_taylor 8y ago
      Some recent studies have found lack of breastfeeding and autism to be linked.
      - rayiner 8y ago
        “Linked” is a weasel word for lack of a a quantifiable result. (Not breastfeeding increases autism risk by X%.) The better thing is to look to the massive medical experiment we happened to have conducted in the last 50 years. From 1970 to today, breastfeeding rates have inverted. Back then, 70% of babies were never breastfed, even in the hospital. Today, it is the opposite. But rates of autism are not much higher among Gen X-ers than millenials.
        steve_taylor 8y ago
        “Linked” is a synonym for “correlated”. No need to be a dick.
    - drivebycomment 8y ago
      I don't mean that the nursing period is so much a differentiating factor for the outcome, but rather that if the parents chose to breastfeed, that is one and about the only biologically differentiated role between a mother and a father, thus needs to be accounted for in some way. Ideally men should take more of other child caring burdens during the breastfeeding, but that depends on various other practical factors, so I wouldn't call men up for failing to do that.
- rayiner 8y ago
  The evidence for advantages from being raised by a parent rather than other caregivers is extremely thin, and more important, unquantified. We invoke all those platitudes about the importance of mothering because we lack the data to make meaningful assertions. How much more will your child earn if you stay home and raise it, instead of going to work and leaving it in daycare? And does that offset the advantages we know accrue to children from higher parental income? We don’t really have any evidence that being cared for by a stay at home parent improves outcomes. We have quite a lot of evidence that, e.g., SAT scores correlate highly with parental income.
  - zootar 8y ago
    Do SAT scores correlate highly with parental income after controlling for parental SAT scores?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > We have quite a lot of evidence that, e.g., SAT scores correlate highly with parental income. Correlation isn't causation; there's a big highly mutually correlated group of things (SAT scores, IQ, educational attainment, parental IQ, parental income, parental educational attainment, # of books in home during childhood,...) there is at best very weak evidence that parental income is a cause of SAT scores, such that a parent who foregoes income to spend more time with the child would be, even before considering any effect from greater parental contact time, harming their child's likely SAT scores.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  > And at the same time, it's all men's fault. Where is this coming from? Are you grinding a personal axe here? No one said anything about men's responsibilities or lack thereof so I don't quite understand the point you are making.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post flamewar comments on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    The thought didn't come out the way I meant it to. Can you delete the comment?
briandear 8y ago
> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force Any data to support that? Given that there is a deadweight economic loss due to taxes, if both parents work and the income from the second parent doesn’t exceed the cost of child care + taxes, it would seem that in many cases, two parents working could actually be a net loss for the economy as the family might have less disposable income than if just one parent worked. A family with two kids could very easily spend $50k per year on child care. So the other parent would have to make $50k just to break even before the taxes. The second parent could very easily have to make $80k just to cover child care plus the loss from taxes since that second income is taxed as part of the overall household income. Kids with stay at home parents have higher school performance, which has an economic impact as well. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-stay-home-parents-are-good-older-children https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-sta...
- xupybd 8y ago
  You're correct, I should have phased that something along the lines of. It is assumed that having both parents in the workforce should produce better economic outcomes. I also agree that there may be a negative net effect on the economy. But I have no idea if there is evidence for this and think it would be very hard to accurately research this given the number of other variables you'd have to account for. There is some evidence that there are economic benefits to women entering the workforce. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    There are economic benefits to women and families. I think it’s fairly sensible to propose that the doubling of the supply of workforce has impacted the price paid for labor. The old fashioned troops and notions that hurt women in the workforce hurt men outside of the workforce. Guys with wives who make more get a lot of grief. When problems happen, it’s nearly impossible for working age men or couples to get safety net benefits.
- flukus 8y ago
ryandrake 8y ago
> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force but this may not pay off in the long term if future generations fail to perform in life. Who is "we" in this statement? The parents? Society? I think whether it makes sense varies from family to family. When my daughter was born, my wife and I did the math and it made zero sense for her to go back to work and for us to pay for child care. The cost of child care was far more than she could possibly bring home. Plus, we have the (apparently old fashioned) belief that an attentive and caring parent would do a better job raising her than some rando child care worker who's trying to corral 10 other kids all day.
- xupybd 8y ago
  Sorry, that point has generated more heat than I expected. What I was meaning here (and said poorly) is that for society specialisation seems to work out with a net overall increase in productivity. If some specialise in childcare it should free others up to specialise in other fields and allow those specialised in childcare to look after more children than stay at home parents would. I also should have stated that this is an assumption I was basing my next statements on, not a statement of fact. This was also just a generalisation used to reason from. I'm not trying to speak for anyone's individual situation. I share your belief that a caring parent is going to be better at raising children than a care worker. I would choose this option myself if I were to have children regardless of the economics (here in New Zealand childcare is heavily subsidised by the government, so the numbers would be a little different).
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  If you work outside the home and put your kids in child care you pay taxes and help billionaires get rich, two things you don't do if you take care of your own. 20 years ago there was a comic in Z magazine that showed two day care workers talking about how paradoxical it was that they couldn't afford to put their own kids in day care. Of course they blamed "capitalism" but in other industries "capitalism" works differently. What was revolutionary about the Ford motor car was that auto workers were productive enough that they could afford the cars that they made, not something that is true about childcare workers. Some kids are in family situations that are worse than the average day care. For instance, I know a lady who raised a crop of five children, four of which were spectacularly unsuccessful, and then she took care of their children, most of whom turned out to be white people with black problems. Somebody might look at this situation and see "love", but that love is obviously toxic. In the case of our family we had our son in day care part time, which gave my wife a break sometimes and let him get some socialization, but didn't have a huge cost. As he spent most of his time growing up with adults he wound up with great verbal skills.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by xupybd 8y ago

killjoywashere 8y ago

I have some real cognitive dissonance with the mixed desires for women to have complete equality in the workplace, and children who are perfectly cared for as though they were in their mother's arms, yet the children can't come to work in many cases for very practical reasons (highly intellectually demanding work settings, high risk work settings, etc). And at the same time, it's all men's fault.

pay_more_money 8y ago
Pay more money for all the desirable jobs, nevermind the undesirable jobs, and don't enslave women under a patriarchy of indentured motherhood. Also, women deserve compensation for entertaining the premise of marriage in all cases, and should retain total autonomy of childcare upon the failure of a marriage, and total purchasing authority, when compensated extra for childcare, after divorce.
- xupybd 8y ago
  >Pay more money for all the desirable jobs, never mind the undesirable jobs But how? We've found that market economies tend to work the best. These pay based on supply and demand. The other option is a planned economy where you might be able to attempt something like this but all examples of planned economies have resulted in so much suffering I don't think we want to try that again. Who is going to drive the rubbish trucks, clean the toilets, keep the sewers flowing and look after the sick and elderly if we get rid of all the undesirable jobs? Some jobs are horrible to do but we need them done. Evidence that children cared for in the home may have better outcomes than those in child care need not lead to the conclusion that women must be forced into indentured motherhood. It simply means we have a problem to investigate. There might be a better way to do this. But doesn't your comment that women "should retain total autonomy of childcare upon the failure of a marriage" suggest that you think women are the only party responsible for childcare?
  - pay_more_money 8y ago
    Here's a subtle clue: even under tightly controlled, planned social arrangements, for example, when you attempt to bring a criminal to justice, you might sometimes find incentives that create underground market economies. Spooky bribery at a distance, if you will. Surrogate motherhood is rare and problematic, but in some cases there is enough incentive to simply carry a child for a reward, and then exit the parental role. Sometimes, this might even happen with unplanned pregnancies. What's the tipping point that splits the difference between terminating a pregnancy, versus a charade marriage incentivized by court mandated custody and support arrangements that bring justice to an potentially unjust circumstance befalling an unfortunate couple?
    - xupybd 8y ago
      I'm sorry I don't understand what you are saying here? Are you saying that the court system is forcing people into charade marriages? If so I'm not sure there is evidence of that. The number of divorces and single parenthood has skyrocketed in recent years. If anything I think there is something about modern society pushing people away from marriage. But as I say I'm not sure I follow what you're saying.
    - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
      This begs the question: why get married?
- cheez 8y ago
  Obviously a joke poster
drivebycomment 8y ago
I don't think there's enough evidence to suggest that stay-at-home dad would result in worse outcome of children. So, it would be fair to criticize men if men aren't sharing the burden of raising the children 50/50 (after the first year or so of nursing period is over).
- rayiner 8y ago
  The nursing period is also not a differentiating factor. The long-term benefit from breastfeeding is very thin, likely not even a couple of IQ points if that: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/139/4/e20161848; http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/139/4/e2016184... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everybody-calm-down-about-breastfeeding/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/everybody-calm-down-abo...
  - steve_taylor 8y ago
    Some recent studies have found lack of breastfeeding and autism to be linked.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      “Linked” is a weasel word for lack of a a quantifiable result. (Not breastfeeding increases autism risk by X%.) The better thing is to look to the massive medical experiment we happened to have conducted in the last 50 years. From 1970 to today, breastfeeding rates have inverted. Back then, 70% of babies were never breastfed, even in the hospital. Today, it is the opposite. But rates of autism are not much higher among Gen X-ers than millenials.
      - steve_taylor 8y ago
        “Linked” is a synonym for “correlated”. No need to be a dick.
  - drivebycomment 8y ago
    I don't mean that the nursing period is so much a differentiating factor for the outcome, but rather that if the parents chose to breastfeed, that is one and about the only biologically differentiated role between a mother and a father, thus needs to be accounted for in some way. Ideally men should take more of other child caring burdens during the breastfeeding, but that depends on various other practical factors, so I wouldn't call men up for failing to do that.
rayiner 8y ago
The evidence for advantages from being raised by a parent rather than other caregivers is extremely thin, and more important, unquantified. We invoke all those platitudes about the importance of mothering because we lack the data to make meaningful assertions. How much more will your child earn if you stay home and raise it, instead of going to work and leaving it in daycare? And does that offset the advantages we know accrue to children from higher parental income? We don’t really have any evidence that being cared for by a stay at home parent improves outcomes. We have quite a lot of evidence that, e.g., SAT scores correlate highly with parental income.
- zootar 8y ago
  Do SAT scores correlate highly with parental income after controlling for parental SAT scores?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > We have quite a lot of evidence that, e.g., SAT scores correlate highly with parental income. Correlation isn't causation; there's a big highly mutually correlated group of things (SAT scores, IQ, educational attainment, parental IQ, parental income, parental educational attainment, # of books in home during childhood,...) there is at best very weak evidence that parental income is a cause of SAT scores, such that a parent who foregoes income to spend more time with the child would be, even before considering any effect from greater parental contact time, harming their child's likely SAT scores.
xenadu02 8y ago
> And at the same time, it's all men's fault. Where is this coming from? Are you grinding a personal axe here? No one said anything about men's responsibilities or lack thereof so I don't quite understand the point you are making.
dang 8y ago
Please don't post flamewar comments on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  The thought didn't come out the way I meant it to. Can you delete the comment?

briandear 8y ago

> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force Any data to support that? Given that there is a deadweight economic loss due to taxes, if both parents work and the income from the second parent doesn’t exceed the cost of child care + taxes, it would seem that in many cases, two parents working could actually be a net loss for the economy as the family might have less disposable income than if just one parent worked. A family with two kids could very easily spend $50k per year on child care. So the other parent would have to make $50k just to break even before the taxes. The second parent could very easily have to make $80k just to cover child care plus the loss from taxes since that second income is taxed as part of the overall household income. Kids with stay at home parents have higher school performance, which has an economic impact as well. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-stay-home-parents-are-good-older-children https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/eric-bettinger-why-sta...

xupybd 8y ago
You're correct, I should have phased that something along the lines of. It is assumed that having both parents in the workforce should produce better economic outcomes. I also agree that there may be a negative net effect on the economy. But I have no idea if there is evidence for this and think it would be very hard to accurately research this given the number of other variables you'd have to account for. There is some evidence that there are economic benefits to women entering the workforce. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336
- Spooky23 8y ago
  There are economic benefits to women and families. I think it’s fairly sensible to propose that the doubling of the supply of workforce has impacted the price paid for labor. The old fashioned troops and notions that hurt women in the workforce hurt men outside of the workforce. Guys with wives who make more get a lot of grief. When problems happen, it’s nearly impossible for working age men or couples to get safety net benefits.
flukus 8y ago

ryandrake 8y ago

> Economically we are far better off with children in care and parents in the work force but this may not pay off in the long term if future generations fail to perform in life. Who is "we" in this statement? The parents? Society? I think whether it makes sense varies from family to family. When my daughter was born, my wife and I did the math and it made zero sense for her to go back to work and for us to pay for child care. The cost of child care was far more than she could possibly bring home. Plus, we have the (apparently old fashioned) belief that an attentive and caring parent would do a better job raising her than some rando child care worker who's trying to corral 10 other kids all day.

xupybd 8y ago
Sorry, that point has generated more heat than I expected. What I was meaning here (and said poorly) is that for society specialisation seems to work out with a net overall increase in productivity. If some specialise in childcare it should free others up to specialise in other fields and allow those specialised in childcare to look after more children than stay at home parents would. I also should have stated that this is an assumption I was basing my next statements on, not a statement of fact. This was also just a generalisation used to reason from. I'm not trying to speak for anyone's individual situation. I share your belief that a caring parent is going to be better at raising children than a care worker. I would choose this option myself if I were to have children regardless of the economics (here in New Zealand childcare is heavily subsidised by the government, so the numbers would be a little different).
PaulHoule 8y ago
If you work outside the home and put your kids in child care you pay taxes and help billionaires get rich, two things you don't do if you take care of your own. 20 years ago there was a comic in Z magazine that showed two day care workers talking about how paradoxical it was that they couldn't afford to put their own kids in day care. Of course they blamed "capitalism" but in other industries "capitalism" works differently. What was revolutionary about the Ford motor car was that auto workers were productive enough that they could afford the cars that they made, not something that is true about childcare workers. Some kids are in family situations that are worse than the average day care. For instance, I know a lady who raised a crop of five children, four of which were spectacularly unsuccessful, and then she took care of their children, most of whom turned out to be white people with black problems. Somebody might look at this situation and see "love", but that love is obviously toxic. In the case of our family we had our son in day care part time, which gave my wife a break sometimes and let him get some socialization, but didn't have a huge cost. As he spent most of his time growing up with adults he wound up with great verbal skills.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]