Are the kids alright?
Designing vs. raising children—Signs of a gerontocracy—Wasted minds
Is a short, weekly newsletter format from The Alpine Review, where we share three things that drew our attention. This is an experiment and will evolve based on perseverance and feedback. We’re curious to know what you think.
If you only want to hear when the next Alpine Review is ready, you can opt-out of Ticket No3 here.
This week’s TK3 was initially conceived as just three charts (I wanted to keep this one short!) but, bundled together, they wanted to tell a somewhat larger story, loosely united around the idea of intergenerational transmission. As such, I couldn’t resist adding a few references and selectively borrowing from Alison Gopnik, who makes a cameo commentary appearance in all three stories — LJ
As an aside, chartology seems to have a moment these days, with Scott Galloway releasing a new book Adrift, America in 100 charts which is coincidently out today. I like Scott and his next book seems promising, based on what I’ve seen filtering so far from his ‘chart of the week’ newsletter. Check it out.
More time spent on child care
Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish — Alison Gopnik1
The first chart from Pew came to my attention courtesy of Matthew Yglesias, and included the following commentary:
As dads started doing more child care work, moms responded by doing even more child care.
The question is why? Why is childcare so much more time-consuming today?
My sense is that the answer lies in the difference between designing a child and raising a child. I claim we now spend an inordinate amount of time trying to design our children.
Zak Stein, in his outstanding book Education in a time between worlds: Essays on the future of Schools, Technology and Society makes the following observation:
Designing a child is a process in which a third person perspective is adopted and an instrumental intervention is used to change behaviors, dispositions, and capabilities […] The child does not participate in shaping their life, but is acted upon from the outside. (p.129)
Alison Gopnik, who argues parents should acts more as gardeners than carpenters, thinks we’ve started treating “parenting” (a concept she rejects) like work:
The rise of parenting is a lot like what happened to food in America at about the same time, what Michael Pollan has called “the omnivore’s dilemma.” In the past we learned how to eat by participating in cooking traditions. We ate pie, pasta, or pot stickers because our mothers cooked them, and they cooked that way because their mothers did before them. Those many and varied traditions all led to reasonably healthy outcomes. In the twentieth century, especially the American middle-class twentieth century, the erosion of those traditions led to a culture of “nutrition” and “dieting” that has a lot in common with the culture of parenting. In both cases traditions have been replaced by prescriptions. What was once a matter of experience has become a matter of expertise. What was once simply a way of being, what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a form of life, became a form of work. An act of spontaneous and loving care became, instead, a management plan. (our emphasis)
Yes, I’m all for free-range kids.
The oldest government in history
Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit — Alison Gopnik
Gerontocracy is a cancer that has metastasized to alarming proportions. If the U.S. Senate had a mandatory retirement age of 70, 71% of Senators would be gone immediately. A gerontocracy, typically signals the end of an epoch. And it’s not healthy. And it has a strong ponzi flavor to it.
Wasted minds
Raising human children is not just a commitment to next week or next year, but to the future — Alison Gopnik
It’s hard not to make any connection between the reality depicted above and the one presented here. School closures have been a topic of intense debate during the pandemic.
GZERO is my go-to for geopolitic updates and the 09/21 daily update contained the following chart and headline:
The pandemic wiped out years of progress toward achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals2, or SDGs, the UN's blueprint for making the world a better place by 2030.
The Economist, back in July, concurred:
Covid learning loss has been a global disaster […] When covid-19 first began to spread around the world, pausing normal lessons was a forgivable precaution. No one knew how transmissible the virus was in classrooms; how sick youngsters would become; or how likely they would be to infect their grandparents. But disruptions to education lasted long after encouraging answers to these questions emerged.
The NYT, which I believe broadly supported lockdowns (and teacher unions), has a more nuanced view on the subject. Worth reading.
Are the kids allright? Time will tell. Kids are resilient. But the current signals are cause for worry.
I call them tickets because they opened a door in my mind and briefly turned me into an investigator, wanting to know more. Perhaps they will have the same effect on you.
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This and the following quotations are from Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (2016). Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning (source)
https://sdgs.un.org/goals
Are the kids alright?
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