QC

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.

6. Concern about "super-stimuli" is overblown I tend to think two things. One is that humans are actually pretty good at handling this type of stuff. The other is that controlling kids has harms that aren’t often adequately accounted for. I'm more confident in the second.

7. Own your role as a parent Pretending like I'm not in charge of stuff that I'm actually in charge of is bad and confusing for kids.

8. Don’t punish; have boundaries I think things can get relationally screwy pretty fast once punishment-flavored intent enters the picture. Correct implementation is subtle, but I know it when I see it.