Kevin Simler

I've thought a ton about parenting over the past ~7 years, and here's what I've mostly settled on as my "parenting philosophy"... Epistemic status: variable confidence on the different points, attempt to do a very basic breadth-first pass of things that seemed important to me.

1. Treat kids like people Maybe obvious but not just an applause light. Tweak the person model until it covers kids too instead of special casing them. It's cognitively expensive to do this, but AFAICT it paid dividends in all my relationships, not just my ones with my kids.

2. Lasting influence on my kids flows through my relationships with them I think a major parenting crux of mine is that basically the only lasting (non-genetic) influence I have on my kids comes through my relationship with them.

3. Prioritize secure attachment I think attachment theory is best viewed as a game theory/decision theory problem, where people aren’t punished for closeness. I don’t think getting this right is simple. I do think it’s important.

4. Parenting is partly a governance problem, so review the literature The biggest difference between parenting and governing anything else (other than your self) is that parenting is much smaller scale, and the interests of the parents and kids are more tightly aligned.

5. In an important sense, I don’t know better than my kids do The thing isn’t at all about what I’d think of as ignorance on my part, but as process-level humility, roughly as described in Scott’s post on asymmetrical weapons. This one is hard for me to describe.

Is this also connected to e.g. Jacobs/Hayek/James C. Scott on the locality of knowledge? Like a kid is much closer to their own problems, whereas you’re viewing them from afar?

Yeah, pretty much exactly that. Relatedly I try not to overwrite the kid's narratives about what's best for the kid. IMO that's harmful even when it turns out I really do know better. So I'm try to make relational space for them to know better, if that makes sense.