I think you may be onto something with stigmatizing it. Unfortunately from a public policy perspective it probably needs to be parent led. At back to school night this year the principal at my kids' school spent an hour pleading with us to keep kids off these things as much as possible, and for everyone to get more comfortable with minimal to no supervision outdoor play. Her take is that everything is downstream of destruction of attention span and the atrophy of faculties very specific to short form video. This was notable since usually her address is a bunch of mundane stuff about funding.
I’ve had so many conversations with my peers about how when we’re parents, we’ll never let iPads anywhere near our kids. To the point where it’s kind of a cliche. But for this current crop of kids it seems to be a huge problem.
What gives? Are we just naive and we’ll pull out the iPad when it comes down to it? Is the next gen of parents going to be more enlightened?
The basic thing that makes it hard (parent of a 9yo and a 4yo here) is that pocket screens and short-form video are so ubiquitous in society, and used so frequently in every part of our adult lives, that keeping kids away from them is really hard. It’s not impossible, but it means swimming against the current constantly.
It’s also true that most parents do things they firmly believed they would never do before they had kids. My kids will sit at the table for every meal and eat the same food as the adults! My kids will always sleep in their own beds! I’ll never give my kids processed snacks! Many parents have been humbled by the reality of day to day parenting…
I'm probably a decade or so out from any real parenting but my thought now is that you have to pick and choose your battles. Maybe they need to occasionally look at the ipad, eat the unhealthy snack, etc. Just don't make a habit out of it.
But of course my take should obviously be read with the tiniest grain of salt due to my complete lack of experience!
But you get good at self-regulation by self-regulating, not by abstaining. It is by eating the one cookie after your meal that you learn to eat a cookie after your meal. Not by never having tasted a cookie in your life.
As a parent of two offspring in their 30s, let me relieve you of any idea that kids are mounds of clay to be shaped and formed by their parents. The parents are just one (albeit obviously very important) of the many, many sources of influence in their lives and as Adam Smith wisely said, there's a lot of ruin in childhood development. You have to be *really* bad parents to screw them up.
What it comes down to (as the parent of a 13 and a 10 year old) is that unless you're willing to police every aspect of their lives, they are going to find a way to do what they want. My kids thankfully don't like TikTok but they do like youtube. Unless I'm willing to remove every method of watching youtube from the house or supervise them every waking moment, they are going to watch it. Unless I'm willing to remove every processed food from the house or vigorously police everything they eat, they will find a way to get those snacks.
I swore I'd never give my kids ipads, and they'd eat at the table, and they'd never sleep in my bed. I've kept to all of it.
However, I would say it's easy to swear you'll never do xyz - but you need to consider HOW you will make sure you won't backslide, and what's important enough to stick out the inevitable battles.
My kids don't sleep in my bed - because I was very careful and intentional about introducing early sleep routines, and I was not afraid of cry-it-out.
My kids don't have ipads or use screens when we're out and about (they watch TV at home) - because we don't have ipads, full stop, and we bring sticker books/other entertainment with us to restaurants/cafes; we also liberally use threats of no TV to get good behaviour. Time outs also work.
My kids eat the table - because I don't let them wander around. They either eat at the table, or stay at the table until everyone is finished eating (they don't *have* to eat, but they do have to stay seated during mealtimes). This was bloody hard to enforce and took years of guiding them back, telling them to ask to get down etc.
Basically this. We pull out the iPad or phone when we really, really need it. (i.e. flight, out to eat, long car ride, etc…) but like others have said it’s not as easy as it seems.
Sometimes you mess up (oops left my phone on the counter and my kid found it while I wasn’t looking and now they’re on YouTube) or their grandparents cave while they’re babysitting and now we have to ween them off it.
Not to mention societal pressure. Other families keep giving their kids phones and screens earlier and earlier and when your kid notices that it’s hard to go against the current.
YouTube keeps trying to redirect me to their in-house Shorts rather than to the real 10-20 minute videos I want. I wish there was a way to just turn off that line on the feed.
I got a flip phone that specifically didn't have any apps or crap on it, but my kid found a shitty web browser tucked away in some menu and that's enough to gorge YouTube until he dies.
Regarding the need for "swimming against the current," while my children are only 2 y.o. and 2 m.o., I anticipate that being an enormous challenge. Our hope is that there will be other parents who think similarly to us that we can ally with, but no idea how that will play out in reality
Yeah, it's tricky, and as they get older and their social circles expand it really only takes one family with looser guidelines. E.g. my 4th grader doesn't have any devices that could access TikTok, neither myself nor my coparent are ever on TikTok, school itself is phone-free, but some kids on the bus have smartphones and so the whole bus ride, all the kids just watch TikTok on other kids' phones. So now my kid knows what TikTok is, and enjoys it, and is primed to seek out other opportunities to watch it and also to whine to me all the time about wanting a phone. It's not awesome!
My kids are almost the same ages as yours, and it is my hope that all the anti-phone stuff in the zeitgeist now will make it easier for us by the time our kids are in school.
Dunno why most of the parents here keep getting this wrong…
Look, it’s because the kid sees YOU “playing” with the phone and being addicted to it, and they figure it must be SUPER fun to command your attention like that, so they DEMAND you share your “toy” with them.
And you’ll do it because they whine to HIGH MOTHERFUCKING HEAVEN LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.
The moralizers often forget the sheer amount of panic that any pre-k child can induce in a parent simply by whining and causing a disturbance. These little shits CAN and WILL basically ruin ALL of your plans for the ENTIRE day. And it just becomes a slog.
So when they demand the phone while you’re trying to get them to choke down their chicken fingers so they won’t have a tantrum an hour later in the middle of the zoo, you triage your concerns about smartphones burning a hole in their brain, because that little shit has been burning a hole in YOUR brain for the past 3 years of its entire precious, adorable life.
Yes. The Jia Tolentino article has a lot of good points in it, but a big thing I think it gets right is a TON of our own concerns about kids and screens is insecurity about our own screen habits, and also the universal desire that our kids turn out better than we did. Of course there is always hypocrisy and difficulty in this.
What I would say is parenting is hard and saying you should "JUST" do something is a horrible thing to say...
Also, if we want to have the fertility rate increase (this is slightly beside the point, but w/e) we are going to have to tolerate and possibly encourage more somewhat shitty parenting. High intensity parenting is a huge pain in the ass, and the fact that parenting is now seen as such a full investment (and if you don't make that investment it's neglectful) is pretty bad. Kids in the 60s watched a shitton of tv.
This is true until upper elementary school. But eventually is very much a peer driven issue. It’s almost entirely what teens talk about when socializing.
As a parent on the other side of this question (my kids age range is 14-24), I have to let you know that restricting screen-time/internet-use is easier said than done.
Virtually EVERYONE is great at making sure their 7 year old doesn't get too much screen time and certainly no unrestricted access to the internet. 17 year olds, not so much.
It's in the middle & high school era that we are losing kids to this kind of thing. Everyone is SOOOOO worried about little 5 year old Morgan being "traumatized" by seeing this or that on a screen, and we completely ignore what she is doing 10 years later.
I'm not even sure what happened with my kids. One day we were a relatively strict family in terms of internet/screen usage, our kids were younger and innocent-seeming, everything seemed to be fine, then BOOM, my kids are all addicted to their phones, consuming videos (short and long form), gaming, etc. I don't even know what happened.
And I'm not even sure what I could have done differently, short of becoming some sort of weird off-grid luddite, given that phones and screens and whatnot are such an ingrained part of our society.
Its also crazy hard when you have kids at different ages. Its really hard to give an older child more freedom and not create immediate desire from their younger siblings.
Parenting is 100% a totally different game at different age brackets - made all the more complicated when you have say a 5 year old, a 10 year old, and a 15 year old.
We had super-locked down devices (I'm around the 99% percentile of tech people in being able to do this). And then the school gave him a Chromebook that, for "safety", VPN's into a special server (so I can't filter anything inside the tunnel) that can monitor their traffic. And it's basically not filtered at all. Certainly not YouTube, and it doesn't take long to find a bunch of porn.
My boss whose kids are now college age has described a similar experience. I get the sense that the public schools have maybe unwittingly facilitated the issue with poorly thought through technology implementations. I have my views on this but it's one of the many reasons I try to operate under a 'but for the grace of God there go I' mentality rather than one of judgment. Plenty of good parents end up overwhelmed or caught of guard by stuff that seems to come out of nowhere. We seem to be doing OK in the elementary school stage but everyone tells me it all goes to hell again sometime in middle school.
And they kind of have to have smartphones once they reach that age if they want to have any sort of social life. One of my kids hates phones, technology, etc. and won't use most apps, but he still has Instagram because Instagram messaging is the way most of his friends communicate: "Group texts? Nobody uses group texts!" according to him.
My oldest graduated high school in 2016, and it was so much easier then. Ah, the good old days.
My kids high school required Instagram because that is how they communicate all information from the counseling office, school sports etc because the kids don't check email and they school can't text. That is how my daughter got her first and only social media account. As a parent I have to have one too and I hate Instagram as a way to get information!
COVID happened. I'm sure this hits differently based on age, but when we had a second-grader in the house with us all day, the screen time limits went out the window.
I am sorry to hear that. Having open minded conversations about it can help. They need to have intrinsic motivation at this age to find healthier balance.
Except me. I wish I were as good at raising kids as my parents were. One of my kids tells me I am good, and all the parents I admire are crazy strict and hovering. I don't know what to make of that. If I had started younger, I could have taken the lessons I have learned and had a second batch of kids that maybe I would do better with!
The teacher described gave the alternative, ‘limited to no supervision outdoor play’ which scares the bejesus out of a lot of people and sometimes has weather issues. And to be clear, at the ages she is talking about it means ‘free range in the neighborhood,’ not backyard. It’s trading a (real but almost certainly exaggerated) fear of physical harm for brain rot.
Yup it's scary, particularly due to vehicles but you have to just buckle up and do it. You really have to internalize that not allowing it is much more certain to damage them than the possibility of some freak accident.
I have also observed that once the neighborhood reaches escape velocity it creates a virtuous cycle among the kids themselves re: safety. We had an incident just the other day where my 2 year old somehow escaped the house in the chaos of people going in and out for my oldest's birthday party. I saw him walking outside through a window and rushed out in a panic but before I got to him one of the neighborhood kids we know already had his hand and was bringing him back. It almost gave me a heart attack in the moment but it's reassuring that they all know each other and each others siblings and aren't just going to let something bad happen. They know where each other live and will get an adult when needed.
It takes a village to raise a child, and the village has collectively decided that absolutely everyone will be on phones absolutely all the time. You can try to resist it but it's incredibly difficult.
I have two kids (16 and 13) and I was totally committed to the idea that they would have very limited screen-time and spend most of their childhood playing outside with friends. I live in a safe, lovely neighborhood in Brooklyn (Park Slope) with two playgrounds less than a block from my house and kids EVERYWHERE. Also I run my own business so have a lot of flexibility in overseeing and helping manage the kids.
I failed utterly. Here's why...
1. No Tools: Parents have no tools other than a total ban on internet enabled devices. I am a programmer and thus have way more resources than most in this department. I have set up specialized routers and and written custom software to manage devices. No dice. Some of it is due to actual technical difficulties inherent with the internet, but 99% of it is because Apple, Microsoft and Google (who would be able to implement the OS-level changes required) have next to no interest in doing this beyond a perfunctory level. This leaves you in a position where you either allow the kids a TON of access or none at all. This is under-appreciated as an issue because it makes most minor moments of weakness or deviation from a full Luddite stance fatal.
2. Social Isolation: All social life flows through phones and online activities now. If you don't let your kid have a phone and spend copious amounts of time online you are effectively ostracizing them. You can get away with this until they are in their early tweens, but increasingly it gets very painful: good luck telling your eleven year old daughter that she can't have any friends until college.
3. No Quorum: As mentioned, there's a lot of playgrounds nearby me and tons of kids in the neighborhood so I thought that it would be easy to have them play outside with friends. However, if you filter out the kids who: have access to unfettered screen-time; aren't allowed to cross streets unsupervised by an adult; or have highly scheduled lives filled with music classes, sports, etc. and you end up with a really low likelihood of finding any friends to hang out with outside of parent-organized playdates.
Look, I don't want make you pessimistic - I hope your generation succeeds where we failed - but you should be aware of how challenging it will be. If you want a suggestion of where to start, I would say force major companies to offer actually functioning management tools or else face legal action.
1) your kids can consume content on non iPad technology. My 4 yo understands that iPads are a thing but primarily watches things on a tv, therefore it’s a special place, not a ubiquitous thing in your pocket.
2) just because you let a kid consume video content doesn’t mean it needs to be crap! Give your kid more credit than settling for sort form video, toy unboxing or crap CGI like Paw Patrol.
My 4yo loves Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Classic Mickey Mouse shorts, etc. I know it’s not some BBC documentary on the Romans (we’ll get there) but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paw Patrol.
When he was into trains, we didn’t watch Thomas, we watched b roll of Japanese trains on YouTube and he loved it.
In summation, there’s a huge gulf between sticking an iPad with TikTok in front of your kid and reading the western canon. Find what works for you.
Yeah, stuff like Sesame Street still exist. When we were kids, we didn't control the TV remote because we were kids. If your kids are at an age where you can still control what's on a screen, exercise that authority.
Our kids, 7 and 11, are almost entirely screen-free - but it requires a massive commitment of energy and focus. You need to start when they are young and, critically, live in a community of parents that is raising their kids the same way. There's a real collective action problem here! Our kids go to a Waldorf school, which helps with this immensely - we're luckily able to afford a private school, but many families can't (thought some Waldorf or Waldorf-inspired charter schools are popping up, which is great).
One thing I will note is that the less screen interaction the get, the less they ask for. We usually let them go wild on long flights and watch what they want - but on our last flight to England I was happy to see my 11 year-old spend much of the flight reading and drawing. He said that I watched for hours straight on the last flight and didn't like how it made him feel.
Bottom line - avoiding screens with kids is hard, but very doable.
It gets much harder in a couple of years in my experience. We got our oldest a cell phone at 13 and the younger sibling wanted one immediately. Even waiting that long was a challenge since so many of the teenager's peers had one earlier. We also started with lots of restrictions, but those became harder and harder to hold as they got older. Telling a 17 year old that they need to stay off social media when most of their friends at school are on it creates lots of friction points.
We hold the line as best we can, but at some point there's a trade between having them take responsibility for themselves and their decisions and keeping guardrails up.
As a parent of a younger child, what makes iPads so tempting is the worry of pissing off everyone around you when your kid is whining. This is why so many parents have a rule that their kid can only use the iPad on an airplane, the premier location for random strangers to give dirty looks to the parent of the baby or toddler having a meltdown.
I have always said that you can either be a good parent or look like a good parent, but you frequently can't do both at the same time. If you want limits on your kid you have to be prepared that they will sometime react to that by acting like little shits who make other people judge you. That said, planes were also where we went no holds on the screens. I can take people judging me but not when we all stuck together in the same metal tube with each other for 8 hours.
The question you have to ask yourself is how much time do you or your potential parenting partner spend on short-form video now? That will tell you whether you're being realistic or not. It's actually pretty easy to prevent your kids from doing much of what you don't do either before middle school. The absolute hardest things to prevent your kids from doing are things you do yourself. This is why we got my son little toddler knives so he can help daddy cook, and also why I have such a struggle on weekends to prevent him from drinking my coffee. Children really, really want to copy their parents.
I think this is true but I would actually generalize it to "how much time do you spend on your phone, and can you imagine radically reducing it." Kids don't see that you're reading a text or answering a work Slack or leaving a Slow Boring comment...they just see that you're on your phone, and they want it.
I dunno. My wife doesn't touch youtube and I don't watch short form videos at all (though they do show up in my feed). Doesn't stop peers from introducing my oldest to them.
It’s because many parents don’t want to put forth the work of rearing their child and the IPad requires less time investment in their child. People sometimes do this because they don’t have time and are stressed. Others do it out of sloth and inattentiveness.
There was a video from about a decade ago of a young child who tried to interact with a magazine by scrolling and that should have been a warning sign for a lot of people.
Parenting is hard. If you don't have childcare, sometimes it's just easier to let your child have the phone for a bit so you can get work done. And, yes, I have a 2 year old. He really really really likes watching videos of himself and trucks. Without better support for parents, screentime is inevitable.
My daughter is 16. We had pretty strict limits on both sugar and screen time when she was young. We even watered down her juice, and she got only 3 hours of screen time each week, unless we were on a plane, until she was about 10 years old. We didn't actually get much pushback from her. We did our best to model similar behavior and were very transparent about our reasons for both. We were even honest that one of the reasons was that making it a special treat to have unlimited screen time made airplane rides easier for all of us.
It was hard, though, to swim upstream against what other parents were doing. We ended up fudging the truth a bit and telling folks that we limited sugar because our daughter's doctor recommended it for metabolic reasons, which was technically true because she recommended that to all kids with a metabolism, but let us be strict without telling other parents they were being bad parents. (My daughter still laughs about being seven and being offered lemonade at a party and having a friend's parent basically throw herself in the way yelling, "she had a metabolic condition," when my daughter knew the truth and was already in the process of turning it down.
We have also been limiting about social media. She didn't get an account until an Instagram account was required for her freshman year in high school by her public high school. She still doesn't have Snapchat or TikTok. She agreed to those rules after a family deep dive into the risks of social media in general and specific apps in particular. She also decided to have her Instagram account settings locked down so hard she can't even see if folks like her posts.
Ironically, we coupled these restrictions with being way less protective in other ways. She got to take the bus alone earlier than her other friends and started spending time at a homeless shelter that includes a lot of drug addicts and sex workers at a young age where she learned a lot that wasn't necessarily always age-appropriate.
I'm glad we made those choices. We now give her wide freedom about what she eats, her tech time, and how she spends her time. She eats more sugar than her dad might like, but less than any of her peers. She spends much more time reading, playing sports, and making art than she does online. She mocks me now for being an "ipad kid" if I spend much time online.
But it also required a lot of work because it meant we had to offer her other alternatives for her time and didn't have an easy out when we needed quiet time on our own. For many parents that just isn't possible. We had flexible work schedules, in town family and family friends who loved spending time with her, and resources for healthy food, books, classes, and sports.
For many families, the pandemic absolutely destroyed their ability to reasonably set limits. Parents working from home without child care frequently had to treat every day like an airplane flight! All school age kids were given devices with youtube access. Opportunities for in person socialization, sports, etc were all super limited for kids. Most kids I know think they spend too much time online and are worse for it but treat it like smokers treat cigarettes -- the addiction is just too much to resist.
Again, we got lucky. We podded up so the kids always had a dedicated adult who was assisting with online school and the kids still had access to in person friends. But even for us, the pandemic issued in a lot more TV and screentime for all of us.
Parenting is one of those great areas of untested virtue for non-parents. I always say the biggest luxury my childless friends have is that they get to imagine that they are the kind of people who would never be tempted to yell at a toddler. No one actually lives up to all their prior expectations and everyone makes mistake big and small.
I would encourage you and your friends to stick to your guns about screentime but know that it is an uphill battle and even if you do it better than the pandemic parents it will be largely because you didn't go through that war.
You have to find friends who somewhat have the same parenting philosophy as you do, especially around screens and phones. That helps A LOT. It’s not a solve all, you are still going to have people in your life that don’t (like family) but having your kids around others who have similar parameters around screen time helps. FWIW a lot of parents now with younger kids are pulling back on screen time, myself included.
Obviously the subject of this article is education policy, but the extent to which this is a problem happening to kids is very overrated versus something happening to all of us and dumbing all of us down.
More acute among developing brains, surely, but as in so many other domains, we can't magically make schools firewalled off from what's happening outside their walls.
Once he reaches, say, middle school, and can go places by himself, how would you know? You may know that it is not on a device that you give him, but he could use it on a library device, a friend's device, or a secret device that he buys with his own money and uses on wifi. All of these are common among the youth.
I mean, how can you easily stigmatize something you're doing?
Even with smoking, to point the last 'win' we really had on this, it was a combo of the large large minority of non-smokers, a chunk of smokers who realized it was bad and was OK w/ limits, and basically people who'd felt the direct bad health effects of smoking and were dying.
The issue is as a percentage, more adults likely use short form video than ever smoked and there's no equivalent of Yul Brunner speaking via a voicebox.
I don't watch short form video and see no appeal in it.
But if the question is shouldn't parents also spend less time on their devices, particularly in front of their children, then the answer is absolutely. I was inspired by Matt's own endeavors he's mentioned at SB to try to get back into reading fiction instead of endlessly doom scrolling.
I totally agree, but can you just imagine what the reaction to say, Kamala last year saying, 'we should all spend less time on social media and more time hanging out with our families' as part of a speech?
Sure, that's why I said I think it needs to be parent-led. I think there are pretty serious limits on what any politician can do about this. To the the extent codified public policy can help beyond the lowest of the low hanging fruit (i.e. banning smart phones in schools, not relying on/handing out tablets as a misguided educational strategy) it needs to be from the bottom up.
Unfortunately, considering recent shifts in society, I'm far more likely to see a scenario where there's a state-wide referendum that's successful overturning a phone school ban than one putting it in place.
The economics take here is that the internet is *underpriced* and should be paid for by subscription, not by ad revenue.
It would probably be a net positive for society if you paid Xfinity $0.50 per gigabyte of data you use per month, and then Xfinity distributes revenue (say at $0.47 per gigabyte) to each website you use in proportion to use. Want to use 30 hours of TikTok? Fine, pay $15. Of which $14 can go to ByteDance in exchange for not having any ads.
I suspect this would very rapidly push people away from overconsuming digital media in their leisure time and make the internet a much more work-first activity. It would also *equalize* the cost of consuming high-value, paywalled media (Slow Boring paid, NYT) and low-value, ad-revenue-funded media (porn, TikTok) which would probably be good.
Implementing this would also likely lead to my deportation, on account of suggesting it.
There's merit to the idea, but data size is absolutely not the currency you want to use here. This would cripple creative and dev contractors/hobbyists while hardly impacting services like Twitter at all.
Documentaries aren't necessarily as good as textbooks, but the average documentary is still probably more informative than the average tweet. It's not the type of media so much as the length; you want to promote longform content. Maybe tax for each indexed media item.
In an alternate history book I read that was based around RFK becoming POTUS, which was a bit of a left-leaning wank (I say as a leftie) but also somewhat realistic in other ways (RFK stayed pro-life and it caused issues among Democrats in the long run), one of the side things was the Internet stayed under control of the gov't and the Postal Service charged 3 centers per email or something like that.
It’s kind of funny but also sad that any given amateur porn creator understands what “POV” means and the vast majority of people making TikTok videos don’t.
Would I not be mistaken, though, that often these mislabeled “POV” videos are simply using shortform’s 3rd-person-centric visual language to communicate a *mental* perspective?
That seems like much less of a dire violation of the intent of “POV”. Contrast with porn, where the action is the focus, and thus POV is inherently 1st-person.
No - they literally don’t understand what it means. There’s an epidemic of TikTok videos captioned “POV,” when the video is not from the video maker’s point of view in any way, shape or form.
I agree with your basic position, but I was being snarky. Most of TikTok seems made for a resident of that ship in WALL-E if they were also huffing battery acid.
This is why the non-enforcement of the TikTok ban pisses me off so much. We had a bipartisan coalition making the hard choice to ban this toxic platform, despite all the odds. Yet because of corruption, we’re now stuck with this attention vampire.
Nope. I don’t watch videos of any kind. Probably one of the few things keeping me relatively sane and well-hinged in the past 20 years was that I fucking DESPISED YouRube out the gate, and the entire “pivot to video” afterwards disgusted me.
Every once in a while I get sucked in by some Reels on FB, but it only takes 1-2 to remember that I’m being intentionally hypnotized by this bullshit. I practice what I preach and treat this stuff like a seriously addictive drug.
The thing about the pivot to video that I find really strange is that it slows down consumption of information.
I can read several times faster than anyone can talk—and for that reason I hate everything from podcasts to videos to NPR to the evening news. It’s just too slow. My default setting on YouTube is 2x speed and I’m annoyed I can’t crank it up to 3x.
I can read a Substack essay in 4 minutes that covers an amount of content that would take a podcaster 30 minutes to get through. It really puzzles me that in our low-attention-span era, people would waste their time listening to people slowly talk about things.
+1 re superiority of text over video/audio for speed of information absorption, which is why I hate podcasts and can't begin to understand their popularity. The only situation I find them useful for is when I'm washing dishes, ironing, etc., and other physical tasks that don't require much intellectual engagement, but prevent you from reading.
Podcasts and audiobooks are the absolute best when you spend ten hours a day welding in a tank. Fact is that I haven't read a book for pleasure since maybe 2022 (a new translation of "The Prince") and it's pretty sad. Spend my limited free time playing videogames instead (or configuring computers to play videogames and then going on to the next one).
Also I can't spell anymore; used to be pretty good at it but autocorrect has significantly damaged my ability to spell properly. At least my ability to construct sentences in a pleasing and useful fashion was never particularly good.
Wasn't a lot of the pivot to video based on bad data Facebook put out circa 2015 that ended up hurting a lot of the media companies that pivoted based on that data?
I like reading for solo authors but I dislike reading transcripts of conversations. So I read a lot of articles, but I also listen to podcasts or radio shows involving multiple people.
Ok, I have to speak up in defense of YouTube. Some of the stuff I find there is informative, creative (like Mark Rober and his squirrel maze) and hilarious (the Pitch Meeting series is TIGHT!). You just need to enjoy in moderation.
Keeps your algorithm (Youtube is one of the few things I actually still am signed into) healthy. It's amazing how it never recommends political stuff anymore, but it does show me videos of arcade games I'd never have heard of otherwise.
The "video essays" were always the worst form of this content for me... Why would I waste an hour watching a video when I could read the same content in five minutes?
She makes 4 hour video essays that are more like podcasts. Like one’s about Disney animatronics or how bad that Star Wars experience was. Like a video every year.
Yeah def not my shit. If she’s at all as navel-gazey as Dan Carlin, I don’t want it.
Maybe not her, but Carlin is def a certain kind of Xer commentator who has a wonderful talent for finding a way to gaze at his navel for hours on end and say a whole buncha words he thinks are profound without actually saying anything meaningful… and without even having to get stoned first.
Sometimes it’s fun to go on one of those little journeys while I’m out running… and sometimes it’s just so fucking tedious and self-impressed that I can’t stand it.
Yeah, I haven't used Facebook in years because of this problem. Facebook used to be a nice place to organize a social life and leave birthday wishes on people's walls, but it hasn't been like that for a long time. Enshittification came for it very strongly.
It's also amazing how it's so much a worse medium if you didn't grow up with it. I was looking up a clip of a TV show (Cunk on Earth) to send to a friend and the vertical video cut off a key part of the screen that was necessary for the punchline to make sense, while the stylized subtitles just make all dialogue seem stupider. If you're too stupid to follow a single joke setup and punchline from The Office without having a bunch of extra online-only garbage flashing on the screen, you're deep into brainrot.
100% this! I occasionally get looped into short form video stuff because there's some genuinely interesting-looking thing being promoted on YouTube shorts or that someone links to from TikTok on another site or whatever and I very rarely watch more than one additional video because it's all so horrible. Like, they barely work as absurdist comedy, let alone anything that I could imagine watching hours of.
It's also interesting how much of it is basically recycled jokes. Someone showed me a TikTok they thought I would like and it was basically just re-telling a joke from Scary Movie, but done worse. I get that that movie is probably from before the creators were born, but if you can't reach the level of a Keenan Ivory Wayans movie from 2000, maybe comedy isn't for you. Other ones that go viral seem to be telling a joke that was already in an episode of Friends from 1998, but with cheaper production values. It's so weird. If Mad About You was plagiarizing entire jokes from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the networks would have been embarrassed.
I’m all for diagnosing short-form video (or perhaps any video) as a fentanyl-level hazard, but I cannot imagine any sort of regulatory scheme that would get this right. Tobacco, conveniently, was a distinct substance that could be taxed; taxing video consumption without hitting up against the 1st Amendment (or the concerns that drove its conception in the first place)? Absolutely no idea.
The crazy thing on this idea to me, is that Khan Academy was showing that short form videos worked well to teach ideas?
That is, there is clearly nothing intrinsic to short form video as a medium that shows it can't be used to instruct. I'm curious what is making this current wave of the idea so bad.
I'm hesitant to lay blame on profit. If only because it has become a lazy shorthand for folks that like to blame "capitalism."
I suppose if you expand profit to cover the political/social profit of those making and pushing the videos, it does cover it some. Especially with the lack of accountability that we seem to be baking into our culture for all things.
That is, if there is a blame there, it will be a fairly diffuse blame that includes the viewers. To the point that I'm not clear how useful it is.
This kind of authoritarian thinking is why I’m not optimistic about Democratic governance after Trump. The best possible situation is a divided government till one party evolves into something better than they are today.
What’s left out here in terms of the dramatic drop in low performing student scores is the explosion of “school refusal” and chronic absenteeism. In NYC we have 1/3 of students who qualify as such.
I’ve spent 12 years as a frontline home and community-based Social Worker and watched what happens when we defanged child protective services for the sake of “equity” and fighting “white supremacy.” It used to be the case that if a kid was chronically absent eventually the caregiver might have to answer to a court, but would at least have workers in the home, addressing it and taking it seriously. This may have seemed heavy handed, but the removal of any interest or interventions on the part of the child welfare system to address educational neglect certainly corresponds to these trends. Not to mention the fact that usually Ed neglect was an indicator of larger problems in the home, which we then had the ability to address.
Eliminating the authority of CPS is currently a significant activist goal in New York City. There are few policies that would hurt poor, black kids more than removing the ability of the state to intervene when there is a material likelihood of abuse or neglect in the home.
The same activist instinct - that the state has no right to enforce norms and expectations - is also ruining public education. It's the specific motivation for "social promotion", "grading for equity", and "proficiency based learning", all of which have been spectacular disasters and are major contributors to the phenomena discussed here. It's pretty disappointing that Matt didn't even mention them.
They’re probably going to achieve their goal under Mamdani. Somehow Abundance-heads that are “ready to give him a chance” are thoroughly inattentive to how activist goals - that he is still onboard with - affect kids. And this extends far beyond this niche of education policy (and not a coincidence that his base is almost uniformly childless). Sad!
Totally agree. I've been absolutely shocked at how willing the abundance types have been to countenance him given there has been no shift in his agenda - he's dropped the "defund" slogan but his policy program is the defund agenda verbatim. Abundance types are typically aware of how disastrous utopian progressive agendas have been for city governance (and Democrats' electability outside of NYC) but looks like they're getting conned, too.
I see your point but unfortunately CPS can be too easily weaponized. I've seen it and lived it. If all it takes to open a file on someone is an overzealous guidance counselor and an angry ex, what's to stop an authoritarian government from using the same levers to come into your house anytime they please?
Yeah, it’s hard to strike a balance. But devolution in general has been pretty catastrophic in the field of mental health and other social services. Policing, enforcement and institutionalization ALL come with risks of overreach. I loved “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” but it actually accelerated the dismantling of a system that we should all be willing to agree served the needs of the chronically mentally ill better than what we have.
In the same vein, rampant unchecked ed neglect and “school is optional“ thinking is proving a disaster for poor students.
In another arena, the book To the End of June by Cris Beam does an excellent job of telling the stories of kids in the foster system and the difficulty CPS has in balancing keeping families together versus getting kids out of bad situations.
The all crime is good crowd really jumped the shark there when they pretended prosecuting severe child neglect was a bad thing. Heaven forbid with care about the rights and needs of victims.
On the one hand, child neglect can be incredibly harmful.
On the other hand, CPS tends to be involved in very counter-productive ways in perfectly reasonable but unusual parenting choices, in ways that make a lot of people uncomfortable. (For example, I once had to answer a CPS inquiry after some helpful person reported an "unattended toddler near the street." It was my 4-year-old, standing on the sidewalk in front of our house where I could see him through the window, watching a tree-cutting crew down the street.)
There is no all crime is good crowd. There is a “caging humans is bad” crowd, to which I’m happy to belong. There is a tradeoff between caging less and order.
All those people venerating shoplifting as an anticapitalist exercise don’t exist in their silly bubbles. I used to have a coworker who held every one of those ACAB opinions and those people tend to populate certain businesses I used to frequent.
There's an interesting alternate history of Harris actually running as a former DA/AG and able to tap into her bio more instead of being scared of attacks from the left.
I'm taking an econometrics class right now and all the Taiwanese kids are kicking my ass in it. But they are also very nice and always give me a lot of help. I've also heard from a few that they were interested in studying in the US, but were nervous because of the political situation. Sad!
My husband taught econometrics in a PhD program at a US school. He said that his Chinese students (mostly from mainland China) were not any smarter or even better at math than his US students, but they were much more methodical and would go over every problem slowly, which led to way fewer simple mistakes.
How much French did you have when you started? Would long-ago high school French, used intermittently on work trips to Brussels, work in this situation? How long is the program? I would love to do something like this!
I haven’t started yet. Class begins in October. I’m just wandering around France to see different regions/cities at this point. I’ll be studying in the Loire Valley. I’m certified at level B1 per the French government (took the DELF last year). I’m probably close to a B2 at this point, but it still seems like I’m at the base of the mountain looking up, especially when it comes to understanding spoken French. Anyway, beautiful country. Nice trains. Good food. A lot of political problems.
Edit: I forgot to answer your question. The university tests all incoming language students for placement purposes, so I’m sure high school French plus a little brushing up would mean you’re well qualified.
I think the USA's political problems are worse, provided Le Pen doesn't win office (then all bets are off). They basically can't form a stable administration, and that's what is needed right now to enact the needed fiscal reforms. But they're not attempting to eviscerate their own national strengths, nor are they going down the anti-science, anti-knowledge rabbit hole. But France's economy is pretty underwhelming, no doubt about that.
I think maybe, if we are not doing a good job of educating our kids, we should focus on fixing that rather than saying, heck, we don’t have to worry about our own, not a problem. It is a problem.
Keep in mind, many of our kids have parents who were immigrants.
I don’t think any Slow Borer would ever say “Screw education, let’s just import smart immigrants.” It’s a “Porque no los dos?” situation: let’s welcome smart immigrants AND improve education for American children!
Not bad faith. I do think we have used the easy out of immigration to avoid fixing real problems.
Why have we not increased the number of US med school and residency slots? We have a shortage of doctors.
Same exact issue for veterinarians.
It’s now routine for smart US kids to go overseas for medical and veterinary training. Why are we tolerating the supply being artificially constrained?
This is not just a solution to a different problem, it’s a solution that’s absurd in this context. American kids are struggling in high school so let’s make sure more of them go to med school?
Reread the article. Top American kids in high school are, in general, not struggling, but we have failed to keep up with population growth in giving them opportunities here in the US.
Instead we keep complaining about shortages of skilled professionals while literally making it impossible to meet our own needs. It is truly sad to talk to a really smart HS kid who says, I would love to be a vet, but it’s almost impossible to get in. I was specifically thinking of one of my friend’s kids, who eventually did go to vet school. In Europe, not the US. She did really well there, too, and she’s a great vet, but not every family can afford to ship their kid off to professional school in Europe.
Kids should be able to have big dreams if we want them to work hard.
NCLB frequently resulted in an unintended gutting of HS vocational and practical training, with shortages of skilled trades and technical workers, and kids not going to college being measured by standards that don’t necessarily meet their actual needs. Measuring is important, but forcing everyone into one path is not.
We need to teach them better, they need to read whole books, and we need to not be stupid and trendy about teaching them. But we need learning to matter. Kids need goals that result in a good life and a reasonable chance of achieving them.
The fact that the average number of kids who are qualified to go to med school is declining doesn't necessarily mean the number of qualified kids is less than the number of available slots.
Wouldn't want them undercutting the wages of native smart Americans (or smart Native Americans, for that matter). It's just pragmatic class politics! If those Real Smart Guy Jobs were actually any good, no one would need to fill them with H1Bs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste building AI, or batteries for Hyundai, or low-cost transit projects...
I think it's absolutely insane that 90% of parents think their kids are reading or doing math at the level they should be doing it. If your kid is not a straight A student, which most kids aren't. How could 90% of parents possibly think that their kids who can't hold a conversation or aren't doing well in school, are at the level they should be at?
A generous interpretation is that when parents are asked whether their kid is "at grade level", parents intuitively compare their kid to the other kids in their class and mostly correctly assess they are at a similar level. Whereas the state compares the kids to the population as a whole via test scores. Basically two different questions.
Fair point. Didn't consider it from that perspective. But 90% is still insanely high, because there is no way that for the majority of parents their kids are even at a 3.5 GPA or anything like that, if we consider B's at level.
A whole cohort was raised on I-Pads, taught on chromebooks, and socialized on TikTok. We have distracted many people to death. It’s odd that so many schools adopted non-zero grading and leniency, but now with school phone bans there seems at least some
my memory of middle/high school is that i would invariably and repeatedly fall asleep when i tried to read most assigned classical reading for class, and at the same time i would binge sci-fi/fantasy/spy novels one after the other to the point where that was all i would do on some weekends or whenever i was sick. this didn't help with classical stuff, but i did end up learning how to filter through lots of text fairly quickly...
“Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been peer reviewed – used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.”
N of 59, not peer reviewed, the kids were wearing electrodes while reading and I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is mentioned.
In any event, most reading is going to be on screens so kids need to get used to it.
Maybe 'getting used to it' is going to include a lot of non screen reading to keep the skill from atrophying. It could also be the case that the way text is formatted on screens is hurting the ability or desire to read. I think it's obviously harder on the eyes in a lot of cases. You're much too dismissive of the downsides.
An oat is an oat regardless of the method by which is it harvested. This does not hold for information retention in which one methodology is inferior to another as a matter of achieving the terminal value.
Just chiming in like Patrick Spence, I graduated HS in 2018 and took ~85% of my exams on paper. My bachelor’s degree was lower, maybe ~50% (not including 2020). Plenty of blue books and messy handwritten economic calculations.
Anyway, it’s clearly feasible and it’s fairly obvious to me that the benefits of paper and pencil outweigh the downsides for this kind of thing. Why not go back?
Au contraire, how are we going to prevent kids from using AI to do all their term papers? I kind of think in-person handwritten workshops are the only real answer.
And maybe we should be looking at tech that is designed for the age group from the ground up rather than just regular tech with restrictions. A reskinned version of Google apps and a Chromebook are too much tech for younger kids. Providing a distraction machine as the primary education vehicle has the expected outcomes. I wish I have a dedicated terminal that just served up my chosen reading material without any distractions, especially ads.
While a good start. The device would be for reading, writing, quizzing, math practice. Maybe run programs - like Oregon Trail. Able to be managed by parents and teachers. So person can sit down and do focused homework. And be open source and not another ad platform or dollar grab from Scholastic and company.
Yeah, the schools are the worst culprits, I think. In second grade they’ll be giving my nephew an iPad that he’s to do most of his coursework and tests on. They don’t do textbooks anymore, either, they’re all online. Personally I think they need to put the kids in private school that would do more of a back to basics kind of instruction with no technology, but they aren’t the kind of people to do that
Schools aren't the worst culprits, but yes the whole concept of pushing digital devices on kids as a learning aid should be thoroughly discredited by this point. And we definitely shouldn't make the same mistake with AI. Technology isn't some 2001 monolith that transforms kids into supergeniuses by mere exposure, and you don't need to be a luddite to see that. I wasn't alive when radio or television were new and exciting, but I never heard about those devices being pushed as revolutionary teaching tools.
I'm bullish on artificial intelligence in education, as I think it could be enormously helpful by providing 1:1 tutoring. I see this more supplementing rather than replacing classrooms time and written tests.
Good note at the end about blue states and education spending. I live in a more blue than red area that spends a TON on education. Over the past few years we’ve passed multiple $100m referendums, most going to new buildings. Our test results have remained lackluster. The district next to us is more red than blue. They spend less per child by about $4k per year and have a top five district (often the top district) every year. If you ask anyone from our district why this is, they have absolutely no logically explanation. More money doesn’t always translate into better test scores or a better quality education, there are more factors involved than just money.
The answer is almost certainly the socio-economic status of the parents. Since you are in an area where red and blue districts abut, the red district is almost certainly higher SES.
I can’t speak for specific district issues, but talk to the board about them specifics of the facilities funding. It’s an easy rhetorical target for people who feel their property taxes as “wasted” by the district, but buildings are expensive and they have to be maintained just to stay in the game.
Actually not. Both are about the same on SES. It’s more around parent activism.
Our district build four new schools, and in that process never considered school consolidation, because even the mention of that brings out the worst of the worst parents and they cave immediately. Now we have two of those buildings half empty and parents who still don’t want to even consider school consolidation.
The district next to us doesn’t allow for anywhere near the amount of parent activism and they don’t fold over like cheap lawn chairs.
that is very interesting, i have not found that school district politics are particularly a red/blue thing... also a lot of the 2nd/3rd tier formerly "red" suburbs with very high test scores are some of the biggest sites of right -> left political swings since '16 (Cobb County, GA, Jefferson County, CO, etc)
ask your favorite search engine: why is Mississippi at the top of literacy rankings.
The poorest state in the freakin union tops New York and Cali because vibe-teaching was officially declared a bad idea 12 years ago. But what could they possibly know? They're poor.
I mean, snarky tone aside, I think on a newsletter like this where people take empiricism seriously, we’re actually quite interested in what Mississippi is doing right.
You're right. I apologize for the tone. To clarify my statement: Mississippi legislatively banned the use of non-phonetic teaching methods in 2013. What follows is a more well-thought-out statement I wrote several months ago while having a brief exchange regarding the Sold A Story podcast which first aired in its entirety in 2022:
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Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Reading Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms.
It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors.
There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems.
If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone.
Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen.
In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for.
If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
I agree with all of this. I would add that after phonics instruction teaches the ability to decode, you need a content rich curriculum. Not just a bunch of reading strategies. You actually to know stuff.
Natalie Wexler's book "The Knowledge Gap" is great
Mississippi is not at the top of the list on literacy rankings, it was (I think) the best on 4th grade literacy in 2022 when adjusted for socio-economic status. I think Mississippi has done a lot of things right, but phonics/science of reading is now pretty widespread. And there is a real question of whether the retention (holding back) policies Mississippi and Louisiana (and possibly some other southern states but I know at least those 2) actually generate lasting gains or just allow students to have better performance in 3rd/4th grade when they are seeing the material twice and are older than their peers.
I know there are some people who say you need to retain a student until they gain some level of mastery of the subject but realistically if they are only going to exhibit marginal improvements by 12th grade you don't want to do it because it increases the cost of education and has a lot of social downsides.
I think the Urban Institute stuff is a useful corrective to the generic idea that you should give all the plaudits to the wealthiest states with the best test scores because they have the most privileged students with the smartest parents. But on the other hand the fact that the adjusted scores tend to show like 9 of the top 10 states having above average poverty rates https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographically-adjusted-performance-2024-national-assessment (just selecting 4th grade math), the top 10 are
Mississippi (above average poverty) florida (same) texas (same) louisiana (same) Mass (exception) South Carolina (above average poverty) Indiana (essentially average poverty) Nevada (above average poverty) Kentucky (same) and Georgia (same). It is possible all these states have markedly better education systems than like Nebraska, Minnesota and Colorado, but I really think it indicates there's something wacky about the adjustment when the adjustment is pushing so many states with below average raw scores to the very top of the pack.
This is a rare pro-DOGE point. There is no evidence that DOGE did help things but education is a field where removing insanely bad expensive projects can improve things, save money and outsiders can spot the issues.
I’m a high school social studies teacher. My wife is a special education teacher coach. She told me a few days ago that Kindergarten teachers in our district are seeing an increasing number of kids coming in who _cannot toilet themselves or speak_. Nothing is identifiably wrong with them. Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon. We can only speculate, but our best guess right now is that parents are so terminally online that they’re not interacting with their kids enough to potty train them or talk to them. Guess they figure schools can do the entire labor of raising their kids for them? 🤷
Jesus. That’s beyond “bad educational outcomes” and suggests either some disability or absolutely massive parental neglect! How else to interpret this?
My guess, at least if this is a high SES district - it's definitely not lack of parental attention.
1. Toileting: there's a very popular parenting style (part of gentle parenting) that guides parents to wait until kids ask to be potty trained. Many of these parents are upset that day-cares (and less commonly, upset about kindergartens) require potty training. The has resulted in the age of potty-training going way up for some.
2. Speaking: People socialize less and have smaller families than they used to, so kids are just getting less time with other kids. They come to kindergarten and freeze up.
Not really. It is more a case of something that is very reasonable getting hijacked by online extremists and lazy parents.
Go read something like Good Inside, Peaceful Parents Happy Kids, or No Bad Kids.
The difference between "what gentle parenting books say" and "what people on Tiktok say" is incredibly vast.
Then people are surprised that Tiktok is a terrible place to learn about parenting. Add it to the list of many other things that are terrible to learn about on Tiktok -- finances, diet, mental health, brain surgery, rocket science, ....
There is nothing in the gentle parenting literature that says "don't potty train until your children ask". That's a Tiktok thing.
Every single gentle parenting author talks constantly about having firm boundaries that you enforce -- gently.
It is Tiktok personalities that have turned it into "gentle parenting means not enforcing any boundaries".
It became a bit of an online escalation thing, that parents - mothers especially - were guilted for asking for help when things didn’t work, and “influencers”, who were mostly high SES white ladies with one daughter, trying to out-virtue-signal one another.
But the basic idea - that kids don’t usually need to be yelled at or forced to do things because they inherently want their parent’s approval and recognition - is fine up to a point. The problem, which enabled it to get out of hand online, was its originators were never very clear about what you were supposed to do if you were giving your kids adequate recognition and they still wanted to watch YouTube for 8 hours, or act out violently in social situations, or whatever
That’s an unusual example you’ve found, though, because the author actually advocates taking an inappropriate object from a child when they’re misbehaving. I’m not familiar with that specific author, though. There are a lot of gentle parenting advocates out there. If you look at the work of Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who originated the term, I don’t see any examples that actually get that pragmatic. I don’t want to pick on her, but this is her response to people who find that gentle parenting does not work.
Ockwell-Smith made a marketing label but she herself admits it is nothing more than traditional authoritative parenting which has been talked about since 1966 with Baumrind's work.
From Ockwell-Smith's introduction to her book when she coins the phrase:
"So what is the ideal parenting style? It is one where parents walk a carefully balanced line of good responsiveness and making appropriate demands of their child, ever mindful of their development. The definition of this? Authoritative parenting, or, as I like to call it: gentle parenting."
There have been many other rebrandings of authoritative parenting that give the same advice that "gentle parenting" did in 2015. Magda Gerber called it Educaring in 1978. Jane Nelsen called it "positive discipline" in 1981. Daniel Siegel called it "No-Drama Discipline" in 2011. Laura Markham called it Peaceful Parenting in 2012, 3 years before Ockwell-Smith. Janet Lansbury called it "Gentle Discipline" in her 2014 book, a year before Ockwell-Smith coined the phrase "Gentle Parenting". And earlier in her career Lansbury called it "respectful discipline".
Lansbury, the person I quoted, wrote a US national best seller on gentle parenting which was recently republished by Penguin in a 10th Anniversary Edition.
Re-(1) this is crazy. Everyone we know read the same book that was a break glass moment if your kid reached 3 and wasn't trained. Even our pre-K required potty training. I can't even imagine reaching Kindergarten in diapers. I'm not disputing these parents exist ... but thank goodness I don't come across them.
Yeah the speaking is more likely anxiety disorders, people are thoroughly wired to learn to speak so it would be pretty hard to get to K without having learned it, even if it’s only from watching tv shows.
"Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon". Google also indicates there's no statistics that would show this is truly a national problem, and quite a variety of other speculative theories on why it could be occurring (if it is).
I realize you said you were just speculating, but I think it's worth emphasizing that there's no particular data or evidence to support that particular theory.
The worst of these “parents” just figure out a way to “home school” so they won’t feel judged or bothered. I have a friend whose sister is like this with her kids. Has a non-pottytrained 8 year old that’s being raised by the iPad.
Having witnessed the inside of the borg from my teacher wife for the last decade I think if anything this article is underrating the depth of the problem.
My overarching theory of what happened to education is basically as follows....
In general, teacher salaries are too low to attract the best teachers. Many teachers make more than people think, but nonetheless, the top decile of achievers in school are rarely wanting to become teachers in the first place because of how truly miserable the job is relative to the compensation. This means that schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack all the highly remunerative org management skills that the private sector rewards far more handsomely. This problem basically existed before and after NCLB but the existence of federal accountability papered over the deeper cracks.
But now with no federal accountability and a broader "equity based" culture in education circles, the emphasis on grading at all or even the idea that there is a bell curve like distribution of student abilities has become a policy problem to solve for, not an unavoidable reality. And too much is asked of individual teachers who are in no position to make any relevant change rather than policy makers to reinstall the carrots and sticks that avoided such problems beforehand.
Matt's work today was a public service and makes me proud to be a subscriber.
Two responses to your helpful comment. To "schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack ... highly remunerative org management skills": yes, and there was only a brief window from about 1945 through 1975 where we 1. tried to get everyone through high school 2. kept women out of many other fields, increasing the talent allocated to teaching 3. still had relatively flat compensation for professionals.
I recommend reading the story of how Houston's schools were turned around[1] with this account of high school as driven by motivation dynamics[2]. In effect, Miles assembled a command-and-control coalition to orient the entire system around what the ASC writer calls "high-structure" learning. In his piece, Matt documents the immense passive resistance to the highly un-fun effort needed to bring students who need intense structure along.
I’m in Houston zoned to HISD and everybody here is ready to run Miles out of town. I’ve been reflecting this morning on the situation here and Matt’s piece - the general discourse here is that Miles didn’t stop with low performing schools; he went after high performing schools in high SES areas driving out popular teachers and administrators and installing his new curriculum. As a result, high SES parents are pulling kids out into private school. While test scores have gone up, a lot of people feel the results have been manipulated since Miles is buddies with Abbot who has not been a champion of public education. I have heard stories of non-certified teachers and general chaos at the administration levels. Anti-Miles signs are all over our neighborhood. I don’t have kids in school but education has been a hot topic here and Matt’s piece is definitely food for thought.
After listening to the "Sold a Story" podcast, I think it's clear that high SES/high performing schools often use the same crappy methods and curriculums and poor performing schools, but the highly engaged parents are able to provide the extra resources to make up the difference.
For example, I taught both my kids to read. And I read with them basically every night when younger (now the problem is getting the book out of my daughters hand so she will go to bed).
If the kids already come to school knowing how to read then the lack of phonics instruction won't be noticed.
Also, this Econ Talk Episode with Roland Fryer (on the Houston school system) is still probably the best podcast I've ever listened to
I’ll listen! I don’t fully disagree but I think that is the problem education reform often runs into - high SES parents want lots of warm fuzzy holistic learning vibes that may not actually be good at teaching kids basic skills but schools need high SES parents to buy into reform otherwise they flee. Lots of food for thought.
Another anecdata: I graduated years ago from a Houston public school that regularly sends kids to Harvard, MIT, Caltech etc. All my AP teachers who haven't yet retired absolutely hate Mike Miles. So do the top students.
Miles' methods might work on a bad school where students desperately need structure and explicit instruction (like Sharpstown High) but top schools and teachers have usually worked out a system and disrupting it with a "one size fits all" solution is just bad. The current system seems to be to pretend to do things the Mike Miles way when admin is looking and go back to the old ways as soon as they've left the room.
Kids that go to a SES high performing school generally have parents who invest in summer school, tutors and help their kids along the way. Not everyone is that fortunate.
Adding this podcast to my list! I thought Sold a Story was incredibly eye opening.
I'm not sure anything as broad based as education can ever do better than attract largely B people.
There are 13,000 school districts and 4 million teachers in America. Is there any private business even a fraction of that size that is largely staffed by A people?
Walmart is half that size. Amazon about 1/3rd that size. And th extremely hierarchical and authorisation and completely unmoored from public input nature of private industry means they may be able to attract several thousand top tier talent into management or specialist technical positions. And even there it is trivial to run into individual stores/areas that are poorly managed.
But how could education match that? You'd need it to be national, with every school under the Department of Education, as a start and you can already see how we've run into issues.
I think this is an important point and it’s why I get frustrated when people suggest that we make changes based on what they do in Finland without noting that teachers in Finland are from the top of their academic distributions and thus most American teachers wouldn’t be allowed to teach in Finland. I do wonder if AI is going to make teaching more attractive as it comes for other better paying jobs taken by the cognitive elite. I think people will still want human beings in classrooms and so K-12 may become a more attractive option if other careers shrink.
I am still team AI will be a tool to aid rather than replace white color work for basically the same reason articulated here. If anything I think in a world of increasing technical user interfaces human touch may become more prioritized in professional settings.
"Parental incuriousity about student performance" pulled a deep sigh out of me. Add in "low information voters" and "despite (horrible behavior X), Trump's approval rating hasn't changed," and it just feels like we're living through a time of either massive self-delusion or catastrophic non-interest (or, more likely, both). Is this the hard wood we're boring through? Or is something more modern happening?
I'd word it that we are letting the fringes dictate too much of what is engaged with. Worst framing, is that we spent a lot of time validating those on the fringes to the point that they think they have a truth leading them.
I also think some of it almost certainly went with misguided criticisms of power structures. I'm thinking of the idiocy of "punctuality is white power." It isn't wrong that punctuality is associated with respect and existing power dynamics. It is very wrong to think that it should get tossed out.
You can't put all the blame on MAGA for this. Democrats lost all education credibility when they didn't run the "advanced math is racist" people out of town the instant that idiocy came out of their mouths.
I think and hope that we are near the bottom of smartphone/social media-induced insanity-stupidity and that from now one we will all battle against it, especially when it comes to kids. My son can forget about smartphones and social media until he's 18 (he's 2 now). I feel so lucky that he grows up in a time where we understood that digital heroin is a real menace.
I think it will be much easier than you might believe at this point. My oldest son is 14 and just a few weeks ago received his first ever cell phone to start high school -- a "dumb phone" with calling and texting only -- and I've heard no indication from him that there's any stigma being attached to that by his classmates (several of his friends also have dumb phones).
Matt Y says it’s “understandable” that parents don’t want to be told their children are doing poorly at school, because he too likes it when people say nice things about his son.
/headdesk
I like it when people say nice AND TRUE things about my son. It happens that my son is really smart and good at a lot of things, but he is not good at drawing. He basically does standard 10-year-old style stick figures. Without meaning to sound stuck-up, I can honestly say that my drawing skills at the age of 10 were noticeably better than his skills are now.
So, if someone told me “wow your son is so great at drawing,” I would know they are unserious or lying. I would NOT appreciate it! I would respect someone who told me “here are xyz recommendations if you want your son to get better at drawing” instead.
This just seems like common sense to me. Why wouldn’t loving parents want an accurate assessment of their children’s skills? You’ll still love them unconditionally if they’re bad at something!
But the professional-managerial class doesn't typically care about drawing. Nor sports, for that matter. My handwriting has always been bad; I used to get an "N" for needs-to-improve on my report card for my handwriting every year. My parents were like, "Meh, who cares about handwriting?" But if I'd gotten an N in arithmetic or reading, there would have been DRAMA and extra worksheets, and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so forth.
One of my kid's English teachers let my kid do nothing the whole semester. They started talking to us 90% of the way through and saying "well I don't want you to think I've been letting him slack." No, that's exactly what you were doing. I still see red when I think about it.
I know my kid can be a stubborn little asshole but at the elementary or middle school level dealing with little assholes is your job. We can help enforce rules and consequences at home but not if we don't know what's going in.
Just thinking this through as charitably as possible, what are parents supposed to do when told their kid isn’t doing well in school? Presumably that means they themselves have to do something—maybe there’s reluctance on their part because they don’t know what to do, or don’t think there’s anything to be done.
I’m also thinking about FdB-type questions of objective learning versus relative performance, which is a meaningful wrinkle if we’re just wondering why parents care or don’t care how well their kid is doing in school.
The first thing parents can and should do is ask the child’s teacher for recommendations. Ok, my child is not doing well, what can/should I do? And then level with them: “Ok, child is doing poorly in English, but I’m a poor single parent, I work two jobs, I don’t have enough time to help him. What do you suggest? Is there any tutoring available?” And go from there. I think most teachers are good people who want to help.
I’d suggest the answer is the bottom thirty percent of parents don’t value education much and just expect that teachers do all the work to figure it out. They are minimally involved with their kids’ lives and mostly raise them with iPads.
I know that’s kind of harsh but I don’t know what the policy response to parents who just don’t care is. Especially when the rest of the “village” feels the same way.
"The answer" is probably something like what Matt is gesturing towards. The bottom 30% maybe don't care much, but when the whole system and is geared towards "you should care" a lot more people up and down the spectrum will fall in line.
Even if they're just doing the minimum, the perception of what that minimum is can be shifted by educational leaders.
I think American society is getting better at sorting the smart people away from the less intelligent. Both my parents grew up in working class families and ended up being more highly educated than most of their childhood peers; their kids hardly even know any working class or poor people, much less spend any significant time with them. In my experience, the smartest kids from poorer families end up middle class, leaving the lower classes even farther behind since there are fewer and fewer functional people left in that community.
It’s not even that they are raising them with IPad’s. If you are talking true bottom 30th percentile and lower parenting, you are quickly reaching people who are barely involved at all, even in terms of ensuring adequate food and clothing and housing, then going even lower to actual absenteeism, than even lower into abuse, then finally into sexual abuse etc.
Like, a lot of these arguments sometimes feel and sound like arguments the upper middle class is having with itself that barely even applies to the bottom third at all.
If you listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast, a lot of these thought they were involved, but the schools told them for years they were doing fine, but they kids couldn't actually read.
Of course, IMHO, the parents should have been making the kids read on their own. And for that matter should have taught their kids to read themselves.
Part of it was that the parents didn’t realize their kids couldn’t read and if I remember correctly some of the kids didn’t really get they couldn’t read until like third grade
In my dream world, everyone with Matt’s platform would be discussing the nitty-gritty of reading instruction. Thank you for giving attention to some very real instructional issues in this post, and for the kind words about my writing.
If I can be so bold, I would suggest that readers study the four states with 4th grade reading gains since 2020. I call them the Southern Surge states. Unsurprisingly, they achieved their gains by improving curriculum in ways that address the issue of book shortages and leveled reading groups, while training teachers on reading science in the process.
The Southern Surge states prove that these are solve-able problems, and we should focus there, rather than shouting about the fallout each NAEP release cycle then walking away.
I REALLY appreciate the point about teachers not being responsible for implementing best practices because I think that gets missed a lot. Most teachers really are trying their best and do want to do a good job, but they're not going to notice the sort of changes that would lead to a 1% increase in test scores. That can't be on them. There has to be somebody higher up the chain evaluating data and implementing best practices.
This is also true about policing. Individual cops have perspective that is valuable, but we can't implement policing strategies just off of their recommendations.
Teachers shouldn't be creating their own curriculum. Managing classrooms effectively is more than enough work.
Also curriculum's should be statewide. So if you transfer schools you are still on track. Nor should each grade's curriculum have 3 years worth of materials.
Idk if I'd go as far as curriculum, but I'm broadly in favor of more standardization.
The irony is that with more standardization, we can actually allow more flexibility with how class is run. If we have a pretty good idea of what teachers are teaching, we don't have to micromanage them.
It's a tired hobby to point out the the notable typos in Matt's posts, but I found them (count: 3) a bit funnier than usual in a post about declining reading levels. Is our bloggers learning?
Never sure how seriously to take Discordianism, but the SNAFU Principle of "true communication is only possible between equals" feels like it's hyperstitioning into a genuine aphorism. It really is hard to communicate with someone who can't easily parse text, if that's the medium one is most proficient in...not just *directly* via the written Word, but because the proficient processing of text also shifts how one thinks and speaks. Like I don't buy the strong version of Chomsky, yet it's clear to anyone who encounters regular miscommunications in the workplace that some things just work better with a face-to-face. Or a phone/video call, or a diagram, or a table, or (shudders at the impropriety) a meme. No amount of workshopping an internal memo at Grocery, Inc. will get me better results than just showing someone what I mean directly...
...and that increasingly even applies to supposedly educated coworkers. I guess now I know why: with stagnation and decline even within high-ability bands, "education" just ain't what it used to be. So even though school sucked bigly, in retrospect I'm glad to have gotten out while the getting was still relatively good. It does a real disservice to both the future of society writ large + life outcomes for these individuals to let the academic floor drop out...we're much stronger together with mass basic literacy, rather than an (over)educated cadre of cognoscenti that soy polloi increasingly don't like or trust anyway. Cultivating the cream of the intellectual crop while the rest of the intellectual milk curdles: correct me if I'm wrong, but history in that vein tends not to go so well! (where's THpacis when you need him...)
In defense of your coworkers benefitting from face-to-face communication. It's also hard to _write_ something so it's clearly interpretable. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one". It's very easy to write something and be "sure" of how it will be interpreted because that's what you intended.
I used to spend a lot of time workshopping emails so that they were both concise and clear. Now I'll write a first draft, ask AI to check for clarity, and it'll rewrite it for me.
The result is usually clearer and needs minimal editing, even if the tone feels a bit AI. I either use its version or pull specific sentences because it is more clear and faster.
A part of me feels like I'm losing something relying on AI for this, but it genuinely makes me more effective.
I like to communicate with graphs and diagrams. You'd think digital technology would have made that easier at some point, but no, every tool available is basically indistinguishable from Office 2007.
I mean they probably did oral exams due to lack of resources, not pedagogical theory. That being said, I support corporal punishment in schools, with some (light) oversight.
I've had better experience although I went in scared. It was called Grand Viva and was a requirement for graduation. No prizes for guessing what the Grand morphed into in college lingo :)
1. It should reduce effective intelligence somewhat equally, so students are still on equal footing
2. It also teaches interpersonal communication skills which are also life skills. Someone who is great at doing work silently alone but not very good at communicating about that work may do well in a few specific jobs, but will have a hard time in general career-wise.
In a sane world, we’d just ban short-form video. Or tax it in inverse proportion to its length!
Short of that, we should stigmatize it. Short-form video should be disdained like a hard drug.
If YouTube is like alcohol, TikTok and Reels are cocaine.
I think you may be onto something with stigmatizing it. Unfortunately from a public policy perspective it probably needs to be parent led. At back to school night this year the principal at my kids' school spent an hour pleading with us to keep kids off these things as much as possible, and for everyone to get more comfortable with minimal to no supervision outdoor play. Her take is that everything is downstream of destruction of attention span and the atrophy of faculties very specific to short form video. This was notable since usually her address is a bunch of mundane stuff about funding.
I’ve had so many conversations with my peers about how when we’re parents, we’ll never let iPads anywhere near our kids. To the point where it’s kind of a cliche. But for this current crop of kids it seems to be a huge problem.
What gives? Are we just naive and we’ll pull out the iPad when it comes down to it? Is the next gen of parents going to be more enlightened?
The basic thing that makes it hard (parent of a 9yo and a 4yo here) is that pocket screens and short-form video are so ubiquitous in society, and used so frequently in every part of our adult lives, that keeping kids away from them is really hard. It’s not impossible, but it means swimming against the current constantly.
It’s also true that most parents do things they firmly believed they would never do before they had kids. My kids will sit at the table for every meal and eat the same food as the adults! My kids will always sleep in their own beds! I’ll never give my kids processed snacks! Many parents have been humbled by the reality of day to day parenting…
I'm probably a decade or so out from any real parenting but my thought now is that you have to pick and choose your battles. Maybe they need to occasionally look at the ipad, eat the unhealthy snack, etc. Just don't make a habit out of it.
But of course my take should obviously be read with the tiniest grain of salt due to my complete lack of experience!
Kids are bad at self-regulation, so this is much harder than it might seem. Once you crack open the door, you're on the slippery slope.
But you get good at self-regulation by self-regulating, not by abstaining. It is by eating the one cookie after your meal that you learn to eat a cookie after your meal. Not by never having tasted a cookie in your life.
As a parent of two offspring in their 30s, let me relieve you of any idea that kids are mounds of clay to be shaped and formed by their parents. The parents are just one (albeit obviously very important) of the many, many sources of influence in their lives and as Adam Smith wisely said, there's a lot of ruin in childhood development. You have to be *really* bad parents to screw them up.
What it comes down to (as the parent of a 13 and a 10 year old) is that unless you're willing to police every aspect of their lives, they are going to find a way to do what they want. My kids thankfully don't like TikTok but they do like youtube. Unless I'm willing to remove every method of watching youtube from the house or supervise them every waking moment, they are going to watch it. Unless I'm willing to remove every processed food from the house or vigorously police everything they eat, they will find a way to get those snacks.
This is my life.
I swore I'd never give my kids ipads, and they'd eat at the table, and they'd never sleep in my bed. I've kept to all of it.
However, I would say it's easy to swear you'll never do xyz - but you need to consider HOW you will make sure you won't backslide, and what's important enough to stick out the inevitable battles.
My kids don't sleep in my bed - because I was very careful and intentional about introducing early sleep routines, and I was not afraid of cry-it-out.
My kids don't have ipads or use screens when we're out and about (they watch TV at home) - because we don't have ipads, full stop, and we bring sticker books/other entertainment with us to restaurants/cafes; we also liberally use threats of no TV to get good behaviour. Time outs also work.
My kids eat the table - because I don't let them wander around. They either eat at the table, or stay at the table until everyone is finished eating (they don't *have* to eat, but they do have to stay seated during mealtimes). This was bloody hard to enforce and took years of guiding them back, telling them to ask to get down etc.
I was with you on most. But once we let the kids sleep in the bed we all got a LOT more sleep.
That was a worthwhile trade off for a couple of years.
Nope, they don't need an ipad at all
No one in the family needs an ipad, or a tablet.
Basically this. We pull out the iPad or phone when we really, really need it. (i.e. flight, out to eat, long car ride, etc…) but like others have said it’s not as easy as it seems.
Sometimes you mess up (oops left my phone on the counter and my kid found it while I wasn’t looking and now they’re on YouTube) or their grandparents cave while they’re babysitting and now we have to ween them off it.
Not to mention societal pressure. Other families keep giving their kids phones and screens earlier and earlier and when your kid notices that it’s hard to go against the current.
How is short form video used so frequently in your adult life? If people didn't show me TikTok on their phones, I would never encounter it.
YouTube keeps trying to redirect me to their in-house Shorts rather than to the real 10-20 minute videos I want. I wish there was a way to just turn off that line on the feed.
I have a ten year old and an eight year old, and I really don't think it's that hard
We took all the tablets away
My daughter has a kindle paperwhite and mp3 player with no internet browsing
She can do music on it or audiobooks.
I have a similar setup for my 9yo, but then they watch TikToks on the other kids' phones on the school bus. Sigh.
I got a flip phone that specifically didn't have any apps or crap on it, but my kid found a shitty web browser tucked away in some menu and that's enough to gorge YouTube until he dies.
My daughter is all bummed. The other kids don't want to play they are just on their stupid phones.
yes we really need to ban all phones and tablets at school
Regarding the need for "swimming against the current," while my children are only 2 y.o. and 2 m.o., I anticipate that being an enormous challenge. Our hope is that there will be other parents who think similarly to us that we can ally with, but no idea how that will play out in reality
Yeah, it's tricky, and as they get older and their social circles expand it really only takes one family with looser guidelines. E.g. my 4th grader doesn't have any devices that could access TikTok, neither myself nor my coparent are ever on TikTok, school itself is phone-free, but some kids on the bus have smartphones and so the whole bus ride, all the kids just watch TikTok on other kids' phones. So now my kid knows what TikTok is, and enjoys it, and is primed to seek out other opportunities to watch it and also to whine to me all the time about wanting a phone. It's not awesome!
My kids are almost the same ages as yours, and it is my hope that all the anti-phone stuff in the zeitgeist now will make it easier for us by the time our kids are in school.
Dunno why most of the parents here keep getting this wrong…
Look, it’s because the kid sees YOU “playing” with the phone and being addicted to it, and they figure it must be SUPER fun to command your attention like that, so they DEMAND you share your “toy” with them.
And you’ll do it because they whine to HIGH MOTHERFUCKING HEAVEN LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.
The moralizers often forget the sheer amount of panic that any pre-k child can induce in a parent simply by whining and causing a disturbance. These little shits CAN and WILL basically ruin ALL of your plans for the ENTIRE day. And it just becomes a slog.
So when they demand the phone while you’re trying to get them to choke down their chicken fingers so they won’t have a tantrum an hour later in the middle of the zoo, you triage your concerns about smartphones burning a hole in their brain, because that little shit has been burning a hole in YOUR brain for the past 3 years of its entire precious, adorable life.
Did I mention I really love kids?
> to choke down their chicken fingers
One of my favorite (now-deleted) Matt tweets:
The three stages of parenthood
1: "My kid will never eat nuggets."
2. "My kid is eating nuggets."
3. "Dinner for everyone today is nuggets."
this is very accurate! I also love my kids! :)
Yes. The Jia Tolentino article has a lot of good points in it, but a big thing I think it gets right is a TON of our own concerns about kids and screens is insecurity about our own screen habits, and also the universal desire that our kids turn out better than we did. Of course there is always hypocrisy and difficulty in this.
What I would say is parenting is hard and saying you should "JUST" do something is a horrible thing to say...
Also, if we want to have the fertility rate increase (this is slightly beside the point, but w/e) we are going to have to tolerate and possibly encourage more somewhat shitty parenting. High intensity parenting is a huge pain in the ass, and the fact that parenting is now seen as such a full investment (and if you don't make that investment it's neglectful) is pretty bad. Kids in the 60s watched a shitton of tv.
this is the article i was referencing. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-children-television-youtube-netflix i think there was a recent tolentino article about her brain breaking which i haven't read.
This is true until upper elementary school. But eventually is very much a peer driven issue. It’s almost entirely what teens talk about when socializing.
As a parent on the other side of this question (my kids age range is 14-24), I have to let you know that restricting screen-time/internet-use is easier said than done.
Virtually EVERYONE is great at making sure their 7 year old doesn't get too much screen time and certainly no unrestricted access to the internet. 17 year olds, not so much.
It's in the middle & high school era that we are losing kids to this kind of thing. Everyone is SOOOOO worried about little 5 year old Morgan being "traumatized" by seeing this or that on a screen, and we completely ignore what she is doing 10 years later.
I'm not even sure what happened with my kids. One day we were a relatively strict family in terms of internet/screen usage, our kids were younger and innocent-seeming, everything seemed to be fine, then BOOM, my kids are all addicted to their phones, consuming videos (short and long form), gaming, etc. I don't even know what happened.
And I'm not even sure what I could have done differently, short of becoming some sort of weird off-grid luddite, given that phones and screens and whatnot are such an ingrained part of our society.
This!
Its also crazy hard when you have kids at different ages. Its really hard to give an older child more freedom and not create immediate desire from their younger siblings.
This is as old as parenting itself.
Parenting is 100% a totally different game at different age brackets - made all the more complicated when you have say a 5 year old, a 10 year old, and a 15 year old.
Yep, no way for a 15 year old to get an iphone and their younger siblings to not IMMEDIATELY want one as well.
Oh yeah, this is a big problem with my age spread (9yo and 4yo).
We had super-locked down devices (I'm around the 99% percentile of tech people in being able to do this). And then the school gave him a Chromebook that, for "safety", VPN's into a special server (so I can't filter anything inside the tunnel) that can monitor their traffic. And it's basically not filtered at all. Certainly not YouTube, and it doesn't take long to find a bunch of porn.
GoGuardian can GoJumpInALake.
My boss whose kids are now college age has described a similar experience. I get the sense that the public schools have maybe unwittingly facilitated the issue with poorly thought through technology implementations. I have my views on this but it's one of the many reasons I try to operate under a 'but for the grace of God there go I' mentality rather than one of judgment. Plenty of good parents end up overwhelmed or caught of guard by stuff that seems to come out of nowhere. We seem to be doing OK in the elementary school stage but everyone tells me it all goes to hell again sometime in middle school.
And they kind of have to have smartphones once they reach that age if they want to have any sort of social life. One of my kids hates phones, technology, etc. and won't use most apps, but he still has Instagram because Instagram messaging is the way most of his friends communicate: "Group texts? Nobody uses group texts!" according to him.
My oldest graduated high school in 2016, and it was so much easier then. Ah, the good old days.
My kids high school required Instagram because that is how they communicate all information from the counseling office, school sports etc because the kids don't check email and they school can't text. That is how my daughter got her first and only social media account. As a parent I have to have one too and I hate Instagram as a way to get information!
COVID happened. I'm sure this hits differently based on age, but when we had a second-grader in the house with us all day, the screen time limits went out the window.
This was definately a big part of it, but some of my family's dysfunction with screens started a bit earlier.
You have to become an off-grid, homeschooling Luddite
I am sorry to hear that. Having open minded conversations about it can help. They need to have intrinsic motivation at this age to find healthier balance.
Never state something you will never do as a parent. It will come back to bite you.
The one unchanging rule of parenting is that all of us swear a solemn oath to do it differently from our parents.
Except me. I wish I were as good at raising kids as my parents were. One of my kids tells me I am good, and all the parents I admire are crazy strict and hovering. I don't know what to make of that. If I had started younger, I could have taken the lessons I have learned and had a second batch of kids that maybe I would do better with!
The fact that you aren't as good at raising kids as your parents shows what a lousy job they did at raising you.
Just kidding; it's wonderful to appreciate what your parents did for you.
The teacher described gave the alternative, ‘limited to no supervision outdoor play’ which scares the bejesus out of a lot of people and sometimes has weather issues. And to be clear, at the ages she is talking about it means ‘free range in the neighborhood,’ not backyard. It’s trading a (real but almost certainly exaggerated) fear of physical harm for brain rot.
Yup it's scary, particularly due to vehicles but you have to just buckle up and do it. You really have to internalize that not allowing it is much more certain to damage them than the possibility of some freak accident.
I have also observed that once the neighborhood reaches escape velocity it creates a virtuous cycle among the kids themselves re: safety. We had an incident just the other day where my 2 year old somehow escaped the house in the chaos of people going in and out for my oldest's birthday party. I saw him walking outside through a window and rushed out in a panic but before I got to him one of the neighborhood kids we know already had his hand and was bringing him back. It almost gave me a heart attack in the moment but it's reassuring that they all know each other and each others siblings and aren't just going to let something bad happen. They know where each other live and will get an adult when needed.
It takes a village to raise a child, and the village has collectively decided that absolutely everyone will be on phones absolutely all the time. You can try to resist it but it's incredibly difficult.
I have two kids (16 and 13) and I was totally committed to the idea that they would have very limited screen-time and spend most of their childhood playing outside with friends. I live in a safe, lovely neighborhood in Brooklyn (Park Slope) with two playgrounds less than a block from my house and kids EVERYWHERE. Also I run my own business so have a lot of flexibility in overseeing and helping manage the kids.
I failed utterly. Here's why...
1. No Tools: Parents have no tools other than a total ban on internet enabled devices. I am a programmer and thus have way more resources than most in this department. I have set up specialized routers and and written custom software to manage devices. No dice. Some of it is due to actual technical difficulties inherent with the internet, but 99% of it is because Apple, Microsoft and Google (who would be able to implement the OS-level changes required) have next to no interest in doing this beyond a perfunctory level. This leaves you in a position where you either allow the kids a TON of access or none at all. This is under-appreciated as an issue because it makes most minor moments of weakness or deviation from a full Luddite stance fatal.
2. Social Isolation: All social life flows through phones and online activities now. If you don't let your kid have a phone and spend copious amounts of time online you are effectively ostracizing them. You can get away with this until they are in their early tweens, but increasingly it gets very painful: good luck telling your eleven year old daughter that she can't have any friends until college.
3. No Quorum: As mentioned, there's a lot of playgrounds nearby me and tons of kids in the neighborhood so I thought that it would be easy to have them play outside with friends. However, if you filter out the kids who: have access to unfettered screen-time; aren't allowed to cross streets unsupervised by an adult; or have highly scheduled lives filled with music classes, sports, etc. and you end up with a really low likelihood of finding any friends to hang out with outside of parent-organized playdates.
Look, I don't want make you pessimistic - I hope your generation succeeds where we failed - but you should be aware of how challenging it will be. If you want a suggestion of where to start, I would say force major companies to offer actually functioning management tools or else face legal action.
1) your kids can consume content on non iPad technology. My 4 yo understands that iPads are a thing but primarily watches things on a tv, therefore it’s a special place, not a ubiquitous thing in your pocket.
2) just because you let a kid consume video content doesn’t mean it needs to be crap! Give your kid more credit than settling for sort form video, toy unboxing or crap CGI like Paw Patrol.
My 4yo loves Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Classic Mickey Mouse shorts, etc. I know it’s not some BBC documentary on the Romans (we’ll get there) but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paw Patrol.
When he was into trains, we didn’t watch Thomas, we watched b roll of Japanese trains on YouTube and he loved it.
In summation, there’s a huge gulf between sticking an iPad with TikTok in front of your kid and reading the western canon. Find what works for you.
Yeah, stuff like Sesame Street still exist. When we were kids, we didn't control the TV remote because we were kids. If your kids are at an age where you can still control what's on a screen, exercise that authority.
Our kids, 7 and 11, are almost entirely screen-free - but it requires a massive commitment of energy and focus. You need to start when they are young and, critically, live in a community of parents that is raising their kids the same way. There's a real collective action problem here! Our kids go to a Waldorf school, which helps with this immensely - we're luckily able to afford a private school, but many families can't (thought some Waldorf or Waldorf-inspired charter schools are popping up, which is great).
One thing I will note is that the less screen interaction the get, the less they ask for. We usually let them go wild on long flights and watch what they want - but on our last flight to England I was happy to see my 11 year-old spend much of the flight reading and drawing. He said that I watched for hours straight on the last flight and didn't like how it made him feel.
Bottom line - avoiding screens with kids is hard, but very doable.
It gets much harder in a couple of years in my experience. We got our oldest a cell phone at 13 and the younger sibling wanted one immediately. Even waiting that long was a challenge since so many of the teenager's peers had one earlier. We also started with lots of restrictions, but those became harder and harder to hold as they got older. Telling a 17 year old that they need to stay off social media when most of their friends at school are on it creates lots of friction points.
We hold the line as best we can, but at some point there's a trade between having them take responsibility for themselves and their decisions and keeping guardrails up.
Yeah, the screens-lead-to-more-screens spiral is real.
As a parent of a younger child, what makes iPads so tempting is the worry of pissing off everyone around you when your kid is whining. This is why so many parents have a rule that their kid can only use the iPad on an airplane, the premier location for random strangers to give dirty looks to the parent of the baby or toddler having a meltdown.
I have always said that you can either be a good parent or look like a good parent, but you frequently can't do both at the same time. If you want limits on your kid you have to be prepared that they will sometime react to that by acting like little shits who make other people judge you. That said, planes were also where we went no holds on the screens. I can take people judging me but not when we all stuck together in the same metal tube with each other for 8 hours.
The question you have to ask yourself is how much time do you or your potential parenting partner spend on short-form video now? That will tell you whether you're being realistic or not. It's actually pretty easy to prevent your kids from doing much of what you don't do either before middle school. The absolute hardest things to prevent your kids from doing are things you do yourself. This is why we got my son little toddler knives so he can help daddy cook, and also why I have such a struggle on weekends to prevent him from drinking my coffee. Children really, really want to copy their parents.
I think this is true but I would actually generalize it to "how much time do you spend on your phone, and can you imagine radically reducing it." Kids don't see that you're reading a text or answering a work Slack or leaving a Slow Boring comment...they just see that you're on your phone, and they want it.
I dunno. My wife doesn't touch youtube and I don't watch short form videos at all (though they do show up in my feed). Doesn't stop peers from introducing my oldest to them.
It’s because many parents don’t want to put forth the work of rearing their child and the IPad requires less time investment in their child. People sometimes do this because they don’t have time and are stressed. Others do it out of sloth and inattentiveness.
All in all, it’s a crutch.
There was a video from about a decade ago of a young child who tried to interact with a magazine by scrolling and that should have been a warning sign for a lot of people.
I’ve done that. I think I was trying to pinch zoom on whiteboards as early as 2010.
I remember that video and thought it was somewhat eerie at the time!
Because they're losing the skill to read physical magazines?
I'm combating this by getting my toddler a Newsweek subscription
Parenting is hard. If you don't have childcare, sometimes it's just easier to let your child have the phone for a bit so you can get work done. And, yes, I have a 2 year old. He really really really likes watching videos of himself and trucks. Without better support for parents, screentime is inevitable.
I blame Covid.
My daughter is 16. We had pretty strict limits on both sugar and screen time when she was young. We even watered down her juice, and she got only 3 hours of screen time each week, unless we were on a plane, until she was about 10 years old. We didn't actually get much pushback from her. We did our best to model similar behavior and were very transparent about our reasons for both. We were even honest that one of the reasons was that making it a special treat to have unlimited screen time made airplane rides easier for all of us.
It was hard, though, to swim upstream against what other parents were doing. We ended up fudging the truth a bit and telling folks that we limited sugar because our daughter's doctor recommended it for metabolic reasons, which was technically true because she recommended that to all kids with a metabolism, but let us be strict without telling other parents they were being bad parents. (My daughter still laughs about being seven and being offered lemonade at a party and having a friend's parent basically throw herself in the way yelling, "she had a metabolic condition," when my daughter knew the truth and was already in the process of turning it down.
We have also been limiting about social media. She didn't get an account until an Instagram account was required for her freshman year in high school by her public high school. She still doesn't have Snapchat or TikTok. She agreed to those rules after a family deep dive into the risks of social media in general and specific apps in particular. She also decided to have her Instagram account settings locked down so hard she can't even see if folks like her posts.
Ironically, we coupled these restrictions with being way less protective in other ways. She got to take the bus alone earlier than her other friends and started spending time at a homeless shelter that includes a lot of drug addicts and sex workers at a young age where she learned a lot that wasn't necessarily always age-appropriate.
I'm glad we made those choices. We now give her wide freedom about what she eats, her tech time, and how she spends her time. She eats more sugar than her dad might like, but less than any of her peers. She spends much more time reading, playing sports, and making art than she does online. She mocks me now for being an "ipad kid" if I spend much time online.
But it also required a lot of work because it meant we had to offer her other alternatives for her time and didn't have an easy out when we needed quiet time on our own. For many parents that just isn't possible. We had flexible work schedules, in town family and family friends who loved spending time with her, and resources for healthy food, books, classes, and sports.
For many families, the pandemic absolutely destroyed their ability to reasonably set limits. Parents working from home without child care frequently had to treat every day like an airplane flight! All school age kids were given devices with youtube access. Opportunities for in person socialization, sports, etc were all super limited for kids. Most kids I know think they spend too much time online and are worse for it but treat it like smokers treat cigarettes -- the addiction is just too much to resist.
Again, we got lucky. We podded up so the kids always had a dedicated adult who was assisting with online school and the kids still had access to in person friends. But even for us, the pandemic issued in a lot more TV and screentime for all of us.
Parenting is one of those great areas of untested virtue for non-parents. I always say the biggest luxury my childless friends have is that they get to imagine that they are the kind of people who would never be tempted to yell at a toddler. No one actually lives up to all their prior expectations and everyone makes mistake big and small.
I would encourage you and your friends to stick to your guns about screentime but know that it is an uphill battle and even if you do it better than the pandemic parents it will be largely because you didn't go through that war.
I would want to raise my kids off the grid and get rid of my own smartphones and computers so they have no idea they even exist
You have to find friends who somewhat have the same parenting philosophy as you do, especially around screens and phones. That helps A LOT. It’s not a solve all, you are still going to have people in your life that don’t (like family) but having your kids around others who have similar parameters around screen time helps. FWIW a lot of parents now with younger kids are pulling back on screen time, myself included.
The thing is you are doing it out of knowledge of the risks. I think earlier generations had no choice but to keep up with the technology and trends!
Obviously the subject of this article is education policy, but the extent to which this is a problem happening to kids is very overrated versus something happening to all of us and dumbing all of us down.
More acute among developing brains, surely, but as in so many other domains, we can't magically make schools firewalled off from what's happening outside their walls.
What is wrong with parents? Over my dead body that my son would use TikTok.
Once he reaches, say, middle school, and can go places by himself, how would you know? You may know that it is not on a device that you give him, but he could use it on a library device, a friend's device, or a secret device that he buys with his own money and uses on wifi. All of these are common among the youth.
I think it is probably a combination of ignorance and path of least resistance.
Your son won’t need your permission in college or beyond.
Are you really going to be the parents that don't let your kids watch The Simpsons because Bart is a bad role model?
I'm sure your parents said the same thing about some new technological advancement when you were young.
I mean, how can you easily stigmatize something you're doing?
Even with smoking, to point the last 'win' we really had on this, it was a combo of the large large minority of non-smokers, a chunk of smokers who realized it was bad and was OK w/ limits, and basically people who'd felt the direct bad health effects of smoking and were dying.
The issue is as a percentage, more adults likely use short form video than ever smoked and there's no equivalent of Yul Brunner speaking via a voicebox.
I don't watch short form video and see no appeal in it.
But if the question is shouldn't parents also spend less time on their devices, particularly in front of their children, then the answer is absolutely. I was inspired by Matt's own endeavors he's mentioned at SB to try to get back into reading fiction instead of endlessly doom scrolling.
I totally agree, but can you just imagine what the reaction to say, Kamala last year saying, 'we should all spend less time on social media and more time hanging out with our families' as part of a speech?
The elitist talk would be 24/7 from everywhere.
Sure, that's why I said I think it needs to be parent-led. I think there are pretty serious limits on what any politician can do about this. To the the extent codified public policy can help beyond the lowest of the low hanging fruit (i.e. banning smart phones in schools, not relying on/handing out tablets as a misguided educational strategy) it needs to be from the bottom up.
Unfortunately, considering recent shifts in society, I'm far more likely to see a scenario where there's a state-wide referendum that's successful overturning a phone school ban than one putting it in place.
Yes, and does the district give every kid a Chromebook starting at kindergarten?
The economics take here is that the internet is *underpriced* and should be paid for by subscription, not by ad revenue.
It would probably be a net positive for society if you paid Xfinity $0.50 per gigabyte of data you use per month, and then Xfinity distributes revenue (say at $0.47 per gigabyte) to each website you use in proportion to use. Want to use 30 hours of TikTok? Fine, pay $15. Of which $14 can go to ByteDance in exchange for not having any ads.
I suspect this would very rapidly push people away from overconsuming digital media in their leisure time and make the internet a much more work-first activity. It would also *equalize* the cost of consuming high-value, paywalled media (Slow Boring paid, NYT) and low-value, ad-revenue-funded media (porn, TikTok) which would probably be good.
Implementing this would also likely lead to my deportation, on account of suggesting it.
There's merit to the idea, but data size is absolutely not the currency you want to use here. This would cripple creative and dev contractors/hobbyists while hardly impacting services like Twitter at all.
I suppose you could use time on a site. I’m mostly looking for backdoor ways to punish video relative to text.
Documentaries aren't necessarily as good as textbooks, but the average documentary is still probably more informative than the average tweet. It's not the type of media so much as the length; you want to promote longform content. Maybe tax for each indexed media item.
In an alternate history book I read that was based around RFK becoming POTUS, which was a bit of a left-leaning wank (I say as a leftie) but also somewhat realistic in other ways (RFK stayed pro-life and it caused issues among Democrats in the long run), one of the side things was the Internet stayed under control of the gov't and the Postal Service charged 3 centers per email or something like that.
Western countries might be a bit more tolerant of it than Nepal, that's for sure.
I dunno if we’re ever going away from “unlimited data” in anything but a dystopian hellscape though.
Sure, this is probably a structural choice that would have needed to be normalized in 1998.
We should have all noticed that this generation doesn't understand the meaning of the phrase "point of view."
It’s kind of funny but also sad that any given amateur porn creator understands what “POV” means and the vast majority of people making TikTok videos don’t.
Would I not be mistaken, though, that often these mislabeled “POV” videos are simply using shortform’s 3rd-person-centric visual language to communicate a *mental* perspective?
That seems like much less of a dire violation of the intent of “POV”. Contrast with porn, where the action is the focus, and thus POV is inherently 1st-person.
I guess…? I think that’s being way too generous - Occam’s Razor suggests that they just literally don’t understand the meaning of the words.
Hanlon’s suggests that they don’t care because their dominant visual language matters more to them than the pedantic definition of “POV”.
Are you trying to imply that somehow the kids started out “woke” and thus were unable to understand that phrase?
No - they literally don’t understand what it means. There’s an epidemic of TikTok videos captioned “POV,” when the video is not from the video maker’s point of view in any way, shape or form.
And why does this matter?
I agree with your basic position, but I was being snarky. Most of TikTok seems made for a resident of that ship in WALL-E if they were also huffing battery acid.
When I was a kid, people huffed airplane glue, not battery acid!
Fair. I generally agree, just didn’t understand the reference.
Pigouvian taxes on short videos? I like it!
You are a true exemplar of Matthew Yglesias Thought With Boring Characteristics.
I’ll take that as a compliment! 😊
Wait, are you calling them Slow?
Lol no it’s a joke about Xi Jinping.
This is why the non-enforcement of the TikTok ban pisses me off so much. We had a bipartisan coalition making the hard choice to ban this toxic platform, despite all the odds. Yet because of corruption, we’re now stuck with this attention vampire.
The "ban" requires ByteDance to divest. The app will continue in its full glory under different ownership.
You watch Jenny Nicholson videos don’t you?
Nope. I don’t watch videos of any kind. Probably one of the few things keeping me relatively sane and well-hinged in the past 20 years was that I fucking DESPISED YouRube out the gate, and the entire “pivot to video” afterwards disgusted me.
Every once in a while I get sucked in by some Reels on FB, but it only takes 1-2 to remember that I’m being intentionally hypnotized by this bullshit. I practice what I preach and treat this stuff like a seriously addictive drug.
The thing about the pivot to video that I find really strange is that it slows down consumption of information.
I can read several times faster than anyone can talk—and for that reason I hate everything from podcasts to videos to NPR to the evening news. It’s just too slow. My default setting on YouTube is 2x speed and I’m annoyed I can’t crank it up to 3x.
I can read a Substack essay in 4 minutes that covers an amount of content that would take a podcaster 30 minutes to get through. It really puzzles me that in our low-attention-span era, people would waste their time listening to people slowly talk about things.
+1 re superiority of text over video/audio for speed of information absorption, which is why I hate podcasts and can't begin to understand their popularity. The only situation I find them useful for is when I'm washing dishes, ironing, etc., and other physical tasks that don't require much intellectual engagement, but prevent you from reading.
I like these British historians making fun of the French during their Hundred Years’ War discussions.
They're useful if you're trying to drive, or fold laundry, or do other chores that require moving around and using your eyes.
That’s the only time I talk on the phone.
As a 1970s teenagers, I talked on the phone for HOURS. So many hours. Now I never do, because I assume people are busy.
I'd rather just read 40 minutes a day and not listen to anything (except maybe music) while doing chores.
That is when I listen to music!
Podcasts and audiobooks are the absolute best when you spend ten hours a day welding in a tank. Fact is that I haven't read a book for pleasure since maybe 2022 (a new translation of "The Prince") and it's pretty sad. Spend my limited free time playing videogames instead (or configuring computers to play videogames and then going on to the next one).
Also I can't spell anymore; used to be pretty good at it but autocorrect has significantly damaged my ability to spell properly. At least my ability to construct sentences in a pleasing and useful fashion was never particularly good.
Wasn't a lot of the pivot to video based on bad data Facebook put out circa 2015 that ended up hurting a lot of the media companies that pivoted based on that data?
I’ve never watched a video review or listened to a podcast or audiobook for this reason.
Seconded; I speed through most everything except for fiction.
I like reading for solo authors but I dislike reading transcripts of conversations. So I read a lot of articles, but I also listen to podcasts or radio shows involving multiple people.
I don't really like conversations as a format. Too much personality, too little information.
Ok, I have to speak up in defense of YouTube. Some of the stuff I find there is informative, creative (like Mark Rober and his squirrel maze) and hilarious (the Pitch Meeting series is TIGHT!). You just need to enjoy in moderation.
The TV shows are fine. The DIY ecosystem is AMAZING. Just most of the rest is nonsense.
Pro tip: watch things you like; don't watch other things.
Keeps your algorithm (Youtube is one of the few things I actually still am signed into) healthy. It's amazing how it never recommends political stuff anymore, but it does show me videos of arcade games I'd never have heard of otherwise.
I already do. No harm in stating my reasons though, especially if I feel like the stuff I don’t watch is pretty deleterious or mind-numbing.
And if you're trying to figure out how to replace the battery in your damn key fob, it's invaluable.
I will agree that I learned how to fix a leaky sink from YouTube much more readily than from trying to read instructions/follow diagrams on a page.
The "video essays" were always the worst form of this content for me... Why would I waste an hour watching a video when I could read the same content in five minutes?
She makes 4 hour video essays that are more like podcasts. Like one’s about Disney animatronics or how bad that Star Wars experience was. Like a video every year.
Millennial YouTube: Here's a four hour video essay
Zoomer YouTube: let's recap TikTok drama
Yeah def not my shit. If she’s at all as navel-gazey as Dan Carlin, I don’t want it.
Maybe not her, but Carlin is def a certain kind of Xer commentator who has a wonderful talent for finding a way to gaze at his navel for hours on end and say a whole buncha words he thinks are profound without actually saying anything meaningful… and without even having to get stoned first.
Sometimes it’s fun to go on one of those little journeys while I’m out running… and sometimes it’s just so fucking tedious and self-impressed that I can’t stand it.
Na, it’s more of “look at this weird niche thing.” She also had a whole thing about getting the largest stuffed spider ever produced.
It’s mostly nerdy and theme park stuff. Kind of like Defunctland (what happened to that one ride guy.)
Ahh okay, is it like Just The Zoo Of Us on Maximum Fun? That’s about the most “Tumblr Millennial” that I can tolerate.
Yeah, I haven't used Facebook in years because of this problem. Facebook used to be a nice place to organize a social life and leave birthday wishes on people's walls, but it hasn't been like that for a long time. Enshittification came for it very strongly.
Reels as a medium just reeks of desperation.
I-understood-that-reference.GIF
We should ban it from being a tab in Instagram and YouTube or at least make it easy to remove.
It's also amazing how it's so much a worse medium if you didn't grow up with it. I was looking up a clip of a TV show (Cunk on Earth) to send to a friend and the vertical video cut off a key part of the screen that was necessary for the punchline to make sense, while the stylized subtitles just make all dialogue seem stupider. If you're too stupid to follow a single joke setup and punchline from The Office without having a bunch of extra online-only garbage flashing on the screen, you're deep into brainrot.
100% this! I occasionally get looped into short form video stuff because there's some genuinely interesting-looking thing being promoted on YouTube shorts or that someone links to from TikTok on another site or whatever and I very rarely watch more than one additional video because it's all so horrible. Like, they barely work as absurdist comedy, let alone anything that I could imagine watching hours of.
It's also interesting how much of it is basically recycled jokes. Someone showed me a TikTok they thought I would like and it was basically just re-telling a joke from Scary Movie, but done worse. I get that that movie is probably from before the creators were born, but if you can't reach the level of a Keenan Ivory Wayans movie from 2000, maybe comedy isn't for you. Other ones that go viral seem to be telling a joke that was already in an episode of Friends from 1998, but with cheaper production values. It's so weird. If Mad About You was plagiarizing entire jokes from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the networks would have been embarrassed.
I’m all for diagnosing short-form video (or perhaps any video) as a fentanyl-level hazard, but I cannot imagine any sort of regulatory scheme that would get this right. Tobacco, conveniently, was a distinct substance that could be taxed; taxing video consumption without hitting up against the 1st Amendment (or the concerns that drove its conception in the first place)? Absolutely no idea.
I think we’re just screwed on this score.
The crazy thing on this idea to me, is that Khan Academy was showing that short form videos worked well to teach ideas?
That is, there is clearly nothing intrinsic to short form video as a medium that shows it can't be used to instruct. I'm curious what is making this current wave of the idea so bad.
The profit motive?
I'm hesitant to lay blame on profit. If only because it has become a lazy shorthand for folks that like to blame "capitalism."
I suppose if you expand profit to cover the political/social profit of those making and pushing the videos, it does cover it some. Especially with the lack of accountability that we seem to be baking into our culture for all things.
That is, if there is a blame there, it will be a fairly diffuse blame that includes the viewers. To the point that I'm not clear how useful it is.
This kind of authoritarian thinking is why I’m not optimistic about Democratic governance after Trump. The best possible situation is a divided government till one party evolves into something better than they are today.
AYFKM? We tax all kinds of media. And drugs.
No. We don’t (media).
They pay corporate taxes. And we DO have sales taxes on advertising.
So do Google and Meta. Did you forget to take your pills or something?
You’ve lost the plot and are clearly trolling. Reported.
This is completely incompatible with any meaningful notion of free speech.
Ok zoomer.
What’s left out here in terms of the dramatic drop in low performing student scores is the explosion of “school refusal” and chronic absenteeism. In NYC we have 1/3 of students who qualify as such.
I’ve spent 12 years as a frontline home and community-based Social Worker and watched what happens when we defanged child protective services for the sake of “equity” and fighting “white supremacy.” It used to be the case that if a kid was chronically absent eventually the caregiver might have to answer to a court, but would at least have workers in the home, addressing it and taking it seriously. This may have seemed heavy handed, but the removal of any interest or interventions on the part of the child welfare system to address educational neglect certainly corresponds to these trends. Not to mention the fact that usually Ed neglect was an indicator of larger problems in the home, which we then had the ability to address.
Eliminating the authority of CPS is currently a significant activist goal in New York City. There are few policies that would hurt poor, black kids more than removing the ability of the state to intervene when there is a material likelihood of abuse or neglect in the home.
The same activist instinct - that the state has no right to enforce norms and expectations - is also ruining public education. It's the specific motivation for "social promotion", "grading for equity", and "proficiency based learning", all of which have been spectacular disasters and are major contributors to the phenomena discussed here. It's pretty disappointing that Matt didn't even mention them.
They’re probably going to achieve their goal under Mamdani. Somehow Abundance-heads that are “ready to give him a chance” are thoroughly inattentive to how activist goals - that he is still onboard with - affect kids. And this extends far beyond this niche of education policy (and not a coincidence that his base is almost uniformly childless). Sad!
Totally agree. I've been absolutely shocked at how willing the abundance types have been to countenance him given there has been no shift in his agenda - he's dropped the "defund" slogan but his policy program is the defund agenda verbatim. Abundance types are typically aware of how disastrous utopian progressive agendas have been for city governance (and Democrats' electability outside of NYC) but looks like they're getting conned, too.
I see your point but unfortunately CPS can be too easily weaponized. I've seen it and lived it. If all it takes to open a file on someone is an overzealous guidance counselor and an angry ex, what's to stop an authoritarian government from using the same levers to come into your house anytime they please?
Yeah, it’s hard to strike a balance. But devolution in general has been pretty catastrophic in the field of mental health and other social services. Policing, enforcement and institutionalization ALL come with risks of overreach. I loved “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” but it actually accelerated the dismantling of a system that we should all be willing to agree served the needs of the chronically mentally ill better than what we have.
In the same vein, rampant unchecked ed neglect and “school is optional“ thinking is proving a disaster for poor students.
In another arena, the book To the End of June by Cris Beam does an excellent job of telling the stories of kids in the foster system and the difficulty CPS has in balancing keeping families together versus getting kids out of bad situations.
Really? So sad
In Kamala Harris’s primary campaign, she was attacked from the left over getting the state involved in truancy cases!
The all crime is good crowd really jumped the shark there when they pretended prosecuting severe child neglect was a bad thing. Heaven forbid with care about the rights and needs of victims.
It is really hard to get CPS right.
On the one hand, child neglect can be incredibly harmful.
On the other hand, CPS tends to be involved in very counter-productive ways in perfectly reasonable but unusual parenting choices, in ways that make a lot of people uncomfortable. (For example, I once had to answer a CPS inquiry after some helpful person reported an "unattended toddler near the street." It was my 4-year-old, standing on the sidewalk in front of our house where I could see him through the window, watching a tree-cutting crew down the street.)
There is no all crime is good crowd. There is a “caging humans is bad” crowd, to which I’m happy to belong. There is a tradeoff between caging less and order.
All those people venerating shoplifting as an anticapitalist exercise don’t exist in their silly bubbles. I used to have a coworker who held every one of those ACAB opinions and those people tend to populate certain businesses I used to frequent.
Hot take - "enforcing consequences for crime is bad" and "crime is good" are indistinguishable positions.
bullshit
caging humans is good if they are violent criminals likely to hurt more people.
There's an interesting alternate history of Harris actually running as a former DA/AG and able to tap into her bio more instead of being scared of attacks from the left.
Kamala Harris was based for going after school absences.
If a kid is chronically absent at school, what are the odds everything is fine at home?
Evil Kamala the Cop forcing kids to go to school like some kind of monster.
It might help if decent parents weren't terrified of getting reported if their kid plays outside alone.
The perfect moment to start redoubling our efforts to drive away smart foreigners who one day might become smart Americans!
I'm taking an econometrics class right now and all the Taiwanese kids are kicking my ass in it. But they are also very nice and always give me a lot of help. I've also heard from a few that they were interested in studying in the US, but were nervous because of the political situation. Sad!
My husband taught econometrics in a PhD program at a US school. He said that his Chinese students (mostly from mainland China) were not any smarter or even better at math than his US students, but they were much more methodical and would go over every problem slowly, which led to way fewer simple mistakes.
Hey, I've gone back to school overseas, too! In France. To study French. I'm writing this comment from Toulouse.
And you're right. It is sad, and so unnecessary, and so counterproductive.
How much French did you have when you started? Would long-ago high school French, used intermittently on work trips to Brussels, work in this situation? How long is the program? I would love to do something like this!
I haven’t started yet. Class begins in October. I’m just wandering around France to see different regions/cities at this point. I’ll be studying in the Loire Valley. I’m certified at level B1 per the French government (took the DELF last year). I’m probably close to a B2 at this point, but it still seems like I’m at the base of the mountain looking up, especially when it comes to understanding spoken French. Anyway, beautiful country. Nice trains. Good food. A lot of political problems.
Edit: I forgot to answer your question. The university tests all incoming language students for placement purposes, so I’m sure high school French plus a little brushing up would mean you’re well qualified.
"I’ll be studying in the Loire Valley. "
That's the kind of sentence that makes the rest of us stare at our reflection in the mirror, thinking about what we've done with our lives.
Tres bien, merci! Sounds lovely, political problems notwithstanding.
I think the USA's political problems are worse, provided Le Pen doesn't win office (then all bets are off). They basically can't form a stable administration, and that's what is needed right now to enact the needed fiscal reforms. But they're not attempting to eviscerate their own national strengths, nor are they going down the anti-science, anti-knowledge rabbit hole. But France's economy is pretty underwhelming, no doubt about that.
I think maybe, if we are not doing a good job of educating our kids, we should focus on fixing that rather than saying, heck, we don’t have to worry about our own, not a problem. It is a problem.
Keep in mind, many of our kids have parents who were immigrants.
I don’t think any Slow Borer would ever say “Screw education, let’s just import smart immigrants.” It’s a “Porque no los dos?” situation: let’s welcome smart immigrants AND improve education for American children!
It wouldn't be an SB thread without a dollop of bad faith comment interpretation. Lol.
Not bad faith. I do think we have used the easy out of immigration to avoid fixing real problems.
Why have we not increased the number of US med school and residency slots? We have a shortage of doctors.
Same exact issue for veterinarians.
It’s now routine for smart US kids to go overseas for medical and veterinary training. Why are we tolerating the supply being artificially constrained?
This is not just a solution to a different problem, it’s a solution that’s absurd in this context. American kids are struggling in high school so let’s make sure more of them go to med school?
Reread the article. Top American kids in high school are, in general, not struggling, but we have failed to keep up with population growth in giving them opportunities here in the US.
Instead we keep complaining about shortages of skilled professionals while literally making it impossible to meet our own needs. It is truly sad to talk to a really smart HS kid who says, I would love to be a vet, but it’s almost impossible to get in. I was specifically thinking of one of my friend’s kids, who eventually did go to vet school. In Europe, not the US. She did really well there, too, and she’s a great vet, but not every family can afford to ship their kid off to professional school in Europe.
Kids should be able to have big dreams if we want them to work hard.
NCLB frequently resulted in an unintended gutting of HS vocational and practical training, with shortages of skilled trades and technical workers, and kids not going to college being measured by standards that don’t necessarily meet their actual needs. Measuring is important, but forcing everyone into one path is not.
We need to teach them better, they need to read whole books, and we need to not be stupid and trendy about teaching them. But we need learning to matter. Kids need goals that result in a good life and a reasonable chance of achieving them.
The fact that the average number of kids who are qualified to go to med school is declining doesn't necessarily mean the number of qualified kids is less than the number of available slots.
I don't think there's any "maybe" about it. We definitely should and must do a better job educating our children!
The Trump administration is bad on education *and* bad on immigration.
He loves the poorly educated!
Very true.
Indeed. Let’s not forget that the smart foreign students have had most if not all their schooling paid for by someone else.
Wouldn't want them undercutting the wages of native smart Americans (or smart Native Americans, for that matter). It's just pragmatic class politics! If those Real Smart Guy Jobs were actually any good, no one would need to fill them with H1Bs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste building AI, or batteries for Hyundai, or low-cost transit projects...
I think it's absolutely insane that 90% of parents think their kids are reading or doing math at the level they should be doing it. If your kid is not a straight A student, which most kids aren't. How could 90% of parents possibly think that their kids who can't hold a conversation or aren't doing well in school, are at the level they should be at?
A generous interpretation is that when parents are asked whether their kid is "at grade level", parents intuitively compare their kid to the other kids in their class and mostly correctly assess they are at a similar level. Whereas the state compares the kids to the population as a whole via test scores. Basically two different questions.
Fair point. Didn't consider it from that perspective. But 90% is still insanely high, because there is no way that for the majority of parents their kids are even at a 3.5 GPA or anything like that, if we consider B's at level.
I can only go based on this article though: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/opinion/grade-inflation-high-school.html
Great point though, for a lot of parents, it's all local. Comparing to the worst kid in the class or neighborhood I suppose.
A whole cohort was raised on I-Pads, taught on chromebooks, and socialized on TikTok. We have distracted many people to death. It’s odd that so many schools adopted non-zero grading and leniency, but now with school phone bans there seems at least some
acknowledgment that schools train habits.
Reading whole books rather than short excerpts would help immediately.
I was appalled that my daughter’s 6th grade class read no books. Recent years have been better, thank god.
my memory of middle/high school is that i would invariably and repeatedly fall asleep when i tried to read most assigned classical reading for class, and at the same time i would binge sci-fi/fantasy/spy novels one after the other to the point where that was all i would do on some weekends or whenever i was sick. this didn't help with classical stuff, but i did end up learning how to filter through lots of text fairly quickly...
Ban the chromebooks too. Back to paper for everything education-related.
Shall we only eat grain that has been hand scythed and hauled in ox carts?
Not a valid objection.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen
“Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been peer reviewed – used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.”
N of 59, not peer reviewed, the kids were wearing electrodes while reading and I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is mentioned.
In any event, most reading is going to be on screens so kids need to get used to it.
Maybe 'getting used to it' is going to include a lot of non screen reading to keep the skill from atrophying. It could also be the case that the way text is formatted on screens is hurting the ability or desire to read. I think it's obviously harder on the eyes in a lot of cases. You're much too dismissive of the downsides.
This is just the top-hit. It appears that a 49-atudy metaanalysis reaches the same conclusion regarding screen inferiority on information retention. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb-retain.html#google_vignette
An oat is an oat regardless of the method by which is it harvested. This does not hold for information retention in which one methodology is inferior to another as a matter of achieving the terminal value.
"while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes"
Sometimes I think these researchers are just making shit up.
We will at some point be speed-running the Dune universe won't we?
The NAEP tests are administered on tablets/Chromebooks :)
Seems like they could go back to paper fairly easily.
Blue Books for the Book God.
Scantrons for the Pencil Throne.
And quill pens with inkpots with liberal amounts of blotting sand.
I'm sorry but this battle has been lost and one needs to move on.
I graduated high school in 2019 and ~98% of my testing was done on paper. This seems like a Covid-era thing that could fairly easily be undone.
Just chiming in like Patrick Spence, I graduated HS in 2018 and took ~85% of my exams on paper. My bachelor’s degree was lower, maybe ~50% (not including 2020). Plenty of blue books and messy handwritten economic calculations.
Anyway, it’s clearly feasible and it’s fairly obvious to me that the benefits of paper and pencil outweigh the downsides for this kind of thing. Why not go back?
Au contraire, how are we going to prevent kids from using AI to do all their term papers? I kind of think in-person handwritten workshops are the only real answer.
They sure can.
And maybe we should be looking at tech that is designed for the age group from the ground up rather than just regular tech with restrictions. A reskinned version of Google apps and a Chromebook are too much tech for younger kids. Providing a distraction machine as the primary education vehicle has the expected outcomes. I wish I have a dedicated terminal that just served up my chosen reading material without any distractions, especially ads.
This is called Amazon Kindle (the actual device), which I love exactly because it isn't good at browsing the rest of the internet
While a good start. The device would be for reading, writing, quizzing, math practice. Maybe run programs - like Oregon Trail. Able to be managed by parents and teachers. So person can sit down and do focused homework. And be open source and not another ad platform or dollar grab from Scholastic and company.
But those all exist in the countries that are doing better than us in education, as Matt points out.
Yeah, the schools are the worst culprits, I think. In second grade they’ll be giving my nephew an iPad that he’s to do most of his coursework and tests on. They don’t do textbooks anymore, either, they’re all online. Personally I think they need to put the kids in private school that would do more of a back to basics kind of instruction with no technology, but they aren’t the kind of people to do that
Schools aren't the worst culprits, but yes the whole concept of pushing digital devices on kids as a learning aid should be thoroughly discredited by this point. And we definitely shouldn't make the same mistake with AI. Technology isn't some 2001 monolith that transforms kids into supergeniuses by mere exposure, and you don't need to be a luddite to see that. I wasn't alive when radio or television were new and exciting, but I never heard about those devices being pushed as revolutionary teaching tools.
I'm bullish on artificial intelligence in education, as I think it could be enormously helpful by providing 1:1 tutoring. I see this more supplementing rather than replacing classrooms time and written tests.
My wife is a high school teacher and said banning phones totally transformed her class. She had totally forgotten what it was like pre-phones
Great piece Matt!
Good note at the end about blue states and education spending. I live in a more blue than red area that spends a TON on education. Over the past few years we’ve passed multiple $100m referendums, most going to new buildings. Our test results have remained lackluster. The district next to us is more red than blue. They spend less per child by about $4k per year and have a top five district (often the top district) every year. If you ask anyone from our district why this is, they have absolutely no logically explanation. More money doesn’t always translate into better test scores or a better quality education, there are more factors involved than just money.
You should keep asking that question!
Late to the party (traveling today) but this comment made me thing of an interesting article:
https://www.barbarabiasi.com/uploads/1/0/1/2/101280322/bilaschon_2023.pdf
“This paper studies the impact of capital projects on student learning and the real estate market,
using nationwide data on U.S. school districts and focusing on what investments work and on
whom. We use newly collected data on school capital bonds, test scores, and house prices for 28
U.S. states and a new research design that identifies the causal impact of bond authorizations in
the presence of dynamic and heterogeneous treatment effects. On average, bond authorization
significantly raises test scores and house prices. Yet, there are large differences across bonds and
districts. Spending on infrastructure renovation and upgrades, such as HVAC or roofs, raises
test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities increases house prices
but not test scores. Bond authorization is most beneficial in districts with more disadvantaged
student populations, in part because these districts prioritize bonds that improve learning. We
find suggestive evidence that capital funding rules drive differences in bond impacts.”
The answer is almost certainly the socio-economic status of the parents. Since you are in an area where red and blue districts abut, the red district is almost certainly higher SES.
I can’t speak for specific district issues, but talk to the board about them specifics of the facilities funding. It’s an easy rhetorical target for people who feel their property taxes as “wasted” by the district, but buildings are expensive and they have to be maintained just to stay in the game.
Actually not. Both are about the same on SES. It’s more around parent activism.
Our district build four new schools, and in that process never considered school consolidation, because even the mention of that brings out the worst of the worst parents and they cave immediately. Now we have two of those buildings half empty and parents who still don’t want to even consider school consolidation.
The district next to us doesn’t allow for anywhere near the amount of parent activism and they don’t fold over like cheap lawn chairs.
that is very interesting, i have not found that school district politics are particularly a red/blue thing... also a lot of the 2nd/3rd tier formerly "red" suburbs with very high test scores are some of the biggest sites of right -> left political swings since '16 (Cobb County, GA, Jefferson County, CO, etc)
No hints at all as the the districts?
For education the past a certain point the diminishing returns reach zero, even for short term exam results.
ask your favorite search engine: why is Mississippi at the top of literacy rankings.
The poorest state in the freakin union tops New York and Cali because vibe-teaching was officially declared a bad idea 12 years ago. But what could they possibly know? They're poor.
I mean, snarky tone aside, I think on a newsletter like this where people take empiricism seriously, we’re actually quite interested in what Mississippi is doing right.
You're right. I apologize for the tone. To clarify my statement: Mississippi legislatively banned the use of non-phonetic teaching methods in 2013. What follows is a more well-thought-out statement I wrote several months ago while having a brief exchange regarding the Sold A Story podcast which first aired in its entirety in 2022:
---
Whether or not there is a depth of understanding about the Reading Recovery method that was improperly communicated to teachers is irrelevant. Whatever the shortcomings of the podcast, it did showcase the explicit use of the 3-queuing pattern in live, pandemic-era, zoom classrooms.
It further explored the (very positive) results from parents (with enough resources) making end-runs around school policy and seeking out private, phonetic reading tutors.
There is research to be done (perhaps rediscovered) as to why this may be so; however, what is _known_ is that the skill level for US students has fallen dramatically. The tipping point occurred in the early 1990's which happens to align with the ascension of the 3-queuing, Reading Recovery curriculum within US elementary school systems.
If the site breaks following a deployment, the deployment gets rolled back. The retrospective happens _after_ customers are no longer cursing your name. Its more complicated with humans, but time spent blaming lock-downs or (as a recent academic article complained of) a mysterious reticence of college students to read entire books, doesn't help anyone.
Phonetic teaching methods were used for centuries to create the peak from which we've fallen.
In the mean time, while the magic is sorted into science, those incantations that worked reasonably well from the 17th through the end of the 20th century might just pull us out of the fire long enough to be able to accomplish the research you yearn for.
If there is research that desperately needs to be explored, right now, it should be within the realm of how to help people who were put through the Reading Recovery program and are suffering the results.
I agree with all of this. I would add that after phonics instruction teaches the ability to decode, you need a content rich curriculum. Not just a bunch of reading strategies. You actually to know stuff.
Natalie Wexler's book "The Knowledge Gap" is great
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips&sort=new
Mississippi is not at the top of the list on literacy rankings, it was (I think) the best on 4th grade literacy in 2022 when adjusted for socio-economic status. I think Mississippi has done a lot of things right, but phonics/science of reading is now pretty widespread. And there is a real question of whether the retention (holding back) policies Mississippi and Louisiana (and possibly some other southern states but I know at least those 2) actually generate lasting gains or just allow students to have better performance in 3rd/4th grade when they are seeing the material twice and are older than their peers.
I know there are some people who say you need to retain a student until they gain some level of mastery of the subject but realistically if they are only going to exhibit marginal improvements by 12th grade you don't want to do it because it increases the cost of education and has a lot of social downsides.
I think the Urban Institute stuff is a useful corrective to the generic idea that you should give all the plaudits to the wealthiest states with the best test scores because they have the most privileged students with the smartest parents. But on the other hand the fact that the adjusted scores tend to show like 9 of the top 10 states having above average poverty rates https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographically-adjusted-performance-2024-national-assessment (just selecting 4th grade math), the top 10 are
Mississippi (above average poverty) florida (same) texas (same) louisiana (same) Mass (exception) South Carolina (above average poverty) Indiana (essentially average poverty) Nevada (above average poverty) Kentucky (same) and Georgia (same). It is possible all these states have markedly better education systems than like Nebraska, Minnesota and Colorado, but I really think it indicates there's something wacky about the adjustment when the adjustment is pushing so many states with below average raw scores to the very top of the pack.
This is a rare pro-DOGE point. There is no evidence that DOGE did help things but education is a field where removing insanely bad expensive projects can improve things, save money and outsiders can spot the issues.
Yep because they didn’t have the money to bring in some consultants to talk them into thinking that phonics was overrated
I’m a high school social studies teacher. My wife is a special education teacher coach. She told me a few days ago that Kindergarten teachers in our district are seeing an increasing number of kids coming in who _cannot toilet themselves or speak_. Nothing is identifiably wrong with them. Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon. We can only speculate, but our best guess right now is that parents are so terminally online that they’re not interacting with their kids enough to potty train them or talk to them. Guess they figure schools can do the entire labor of raising their kids for them? 🤷
UPDATE: Seems to be a thing in the UK as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3dykw576yo
Jesus. That’s beyond “bad educational outcomes” and suggests either some disability or absolutely massive parental neglect! How else to interpret this?
My guess, at least if this is a high SES district - it's definitely not lack of parental attention.
1. Toileting: there's a very popular parenting style (part of gentle parenting) that guides parents to wait until kids ask to be potty trained. Many of these parents are upset that day-cares (and less commonly, upset about kindergartens) require potty training. The has resulted in the age of potty-training going way up for some.
2. Speaking: People socialize less and have smaller families than they used to, so kids are just getting less time with other kids. They come to kindergarten and freeze up.
Just about every part of gentle parenting sounds insane when actually explained. It gained too much cultural currency by having an anodyne name.
Not really. It is more a case of something that is very reasonable getting hijacked by online extremists and lazy parents.
Go read something like Good Inside, Peaceful Parents Happy Kids, or No Bad Kids.
The difference between "what gentle parenting books say" and "what people on Tiktok say" is incredibly vast.
Then people are surprised that Tiktok is a terrible place to learn about parenting. Add it to the list of many other things that are terrible to learn about on Tiktok -- finances, diet, mental health, brain surgery, rocket science, ....
There is nothing in the gentle parenting literature that says "don't potty train until your children ask". That's a Tiktok thing.
Every single gentle parenting author talks constantly about having firm boundaries that you enforce -- gently.
It is Tiktok personalities that have turned it into "gentle parenting means not enforcing any boundaries".
It became a bit of an online escalation thing, that parents - mothers especially - were guilted for asking for help when things didn’t work, and “influencers”, who were mostly high SES white ladies with one daughter, trying to out-virtue-signal one another.
But the basic idea - that kids don’t usually need to be yelled at or forced to do things because they inherently want their parent’s approval and recognition - is fine up to a point. The problem, which enabled it to get out of hand online, was its originators were never very clear about what you were supposed to do if you were giving your kids adequate recognition and they still wanted to watch YouTube for 8 hours, or act out violently in social situations, or whatever
I disagree strongly here. The original authors were very clear on what to do. Here's just one of many examples:
https://www.janetlansbury.com/2019/11/our-children-crave-boundaries-permissiveness-is-unkind/
That’s an unusual example you’ve found, though, because the author actually advocates taking an inappropriate object from a child when they’re misbehaving. I’m not familiar with that specific author, though. There are a lot of gentle parenting advocates out there. If you look at the work of Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who originated the term, I don’t see any examples that actually get that pragmatic. I don’t want to pick on her, but this is her response to people who find that gentle parenting does not work.
https://sarahockwell-smith.com/2024/02/27/gentle-parenting-is-hard-doesnt-work-and-makes-parents-feel-bad/
“Try harder, wait until they’re teenagers, also buy another book”. Great.
Ockwell-Smith made a marketing label but she herself admits it is nothing more than traditional authoritative parenting which has been talked about since 1966 with Baumrind's work.
From Ockwell-Smith's introduction to her book when she coins the phrase:
"So what is the ideal parenting style? It is one where parents walk a carefully balanced line of good responsiveness and making appropriate demands of their child, ever mindful of their development. The definition of this? Authoritative parenting, or, as I like to call it: gentle parenting."
There have been many other rebrandings of authoritative parenting that give the same advice that "gentle parenting" did in 2015. Magda Gerber called it Educaring in 1978. Jane Nelsen called it "positive discipline" in 1981. Daniel Siegel called it "No-Drama Discipline" in 2011. Laura Markham called it Peaceful Parenting in 2012, 3 years before Ockwell-Smith. Janet Lansbury called it "Gentle Discipline" in her 2014 book, a year before Ockwell-Smith coined the phrase "Gentle Parenting". And earlier in her career Lansbury called it "respectful discipline".
Lansbury, the person I quoted, wrote a US national best seller on gentle parenting which was recently republished by Penguin in a 10th Anniversary Edition.
Re-(1) this is crazy. Everyone we know read the same book that was a break glass moment if your kid reached 3 and wasn't trained. Even our pre-K required potty training. I can't even imagine reaching Kindergarten in diapers. I'm not disputing these parents exist ... but thank goodness I don't come across them.
I can't even imagine the bullying a kid in diapers would have gotten in kindergarten when I was growing up.
Yeah the speaking is more likely anxiety disorders, people are thoroughly wired to learn to speak so it would be pretty hard to get to K without having learned it, even if it’s only from watching tv shows.
gentle parenting is a bunch of nonsense and practioners should be shamed
"Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon". Google also indicates there's no statistics that would show this is truly a national problem, and quite a variety of other speculative theories on why it could be occurring (if it is).
I realize you said you were just speculating, but I think it's worth emphasizing that there's no particular data or evidence to support that particular theory.
It’s probably gone from an N=0 issue to a non zero issue. That is the shock.
If there's something to it then it's definitely pretty shocking.
The worst of these “parents” just figure out a way to “home school” so they won’t feel judged or bothered. I have a friend whose sister is like this with her kids. Has a non-pottytrained 8 year old that’s being raised by the iPad.
That's bad
It’s child abuse
Your last sentence hit me like a bullet to the dome. What on earth
My friend has called CPS, but this is rural MS, they have a lot on their plate
or gentle parenting gone awry
Having witnessed the inside of the borg from my teacher wife for the last decade I think if anything this article is underrating the depth of the problem.
(appropriate qualification of Matt's good and sage piece on Lumping from a few days ago https://www.slowboring.com/p/theres-too-many-lumpers-out-there) BUT....
My overarching theory of what happened to education is basically as follows....
In general, teacher salaries are too low to attract the best teachers. Many teachers make more than people think, but nonetheless, the top decile of achievers in school are rarely wanting to become teachers in the first place because of how truly miserable the job is relative to the compensation. This means that schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack all the highly remunerative org management skills that the private sector rewards far more handsomely. This problem basically existed before and after NCLB but the existence of federal accountability papered over the deeper cracks.
But now with no federal accountability and a broader "equity based" culture in education circles, the emphasis on grading at all or even the idea that there is a bell curve like distribution of student abilities has become a policy problem to solve for, not an unavoidable reality. And too much is asked of individual teachers who are in no position to make any relevant change rather than policy makers to reinstall the carrots and sticks that avoided such problems beforehand.
Matt's work today was a public service and makes me proud to be a subscriber.
Two responses to your helpful comment. To "schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack ... highly remunerative org management skills": yes, and there was only a brief window from about 1945 through 1975 where we 1. tried to get everyone through high school 2. kept women out of many other fields, increasing the talent allocated to teaching 3. still had relatively flat compensation for professionals.
I recommend reading the story of how Houston's schools were turned around[1] with this account of high school as driven by motivation dynamics[2]. In effect, Miles assembled a command-and-control coalition to orient the entire system around what the ASC writer calls "high-structure" learning. In his piece, Matt documents the immense passive resistance to the highly un-fun effort needed to bring students who need intense structure along.
[1] https://www.the74million.org/article/the-last-reformer-houston-schools-chief-mike-miles-on-the-case-for-going-bold/
[2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-school
I’m in Houston zoned to HISD and everybody here is ready to run Miles out of town. I’ve been reflecting this morning on the situation here and Matt’s piece - the general discourse here is that Miles didn’t stop with low performing schools; he went after high performing schools in high SES areas driving out popular teachers and administrators and installing his new curriculum. As a result, high SES parents are pulling kids out into private school. While test scores have gone up, a lot of people feel the results have been manipulated since Miles is buddies with Abbot who has not been a champion of public education. I have heard stories of non-certified teachers and general chaos at the administration levels. Anti-Miles signs are all over our neighborhood. I don’t have kids in school but education has been a hot topic here and Matt’s piece is definitely food for thought.
After listening to the "Sold a Story" podcast, I think it's clear that high SES/high performing schools often use the same crappy methods and curriculums and poor performing schools, but the highly engaged parents are able to provide the extra resources to make up the difference.
For example, I taught both my kids to read. And I read with them basically every night when younger (now the problem is getting the book out of my daughters hand so she will go to bed).
If the kids already come to school knowing how to read then the lack of phonics instruction won't be noticed.
Also, this Econ Talk Episode with Roland Fryer (on the Houston school system) is still probably the best podcast I've ever listened to
https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
I’ll listen! I don’t fully disagree but I think that is the problem education reform often runs into - high SES parents want lots of warm fuzzy holistic learning vibes that may not actually be good at teaching kids basic skills but schools need high SES parents to buy into reform otherwise they flee. Lots of food for thought.
Marissa, thank you so much for the context and correction! If you happen to have any links filling in details, I'd love to learn more.
Another anecdata: I graduated years ago from a Houston public school that regularly sends kids to Harvard, MIT, Caltech etc. All my AP teachers who haven't yet retired absolutely hate Mike Miles. So do the top students.
Miles' methods might work on a bad school where students desperately need structure and explicit instruction (like Sharpstown High) but top schools and teachers have usually worked out a system and disrupting it with a "one size fits all" solution is just bad. The current system seems to be to pretend to do things the Mike Miles way when admin is looking and go back to the old ways as soon as they've left the room.
A lot of this is anxious dinner party chat but these articles capture the anxiety about the changes: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/hisd-mike-miles-durham-elementary-kelly-21029318.php; https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/houston-isd-sickout-20136437.php; https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/hisd-separations-teacher-turnover-thousands-leave-19596977.php
Thank you!
Kids that go to a SES high performing school generally have parents who invest in summer school, tutors and help their kids along the way. Not everyone is that fortunate.
Adding this podcast to my list! I thought Sold a Story was incredibly eye opening.
I'm not sure anything as broad based as education can ever do better than attract largely B people.
There are 13,000 school districts and 4 million teachers in America. Is there any private business even a fraction of that size that is largely staffed by A people?
Walmart is half that size. Amazon about 1/3rd that size. And th extremely hierarchical and authorisation and completely unmoored from public input nature of private industry means they may be able to attract several thousand top tier talent into management or specialist technical positions. And even there it is trivial to run into individual stores/areas that are poorly managed.
But how could education match that? You'd need it to be national, with every school under the Department of Education, as a start and you can already see how we've run into issues.
I think this is an important point and it’s why I get frustrated when people suggest that we make changes based on what they do in Finland without noting that teachers in Finland are from the top of their academic distributions and thus most American teachers wouldn’t be allowed to teach in Finland. I do wonder if AI is going to make teaching more attractive as it comes for other better paying jobs taken by the cognitive elite. I think people will still want human beings in classrooms and so K-12 may become a more attractive option if other careers shrink.
I am still team AI will be a tool to aid rather than replace white color work for basically the same reason articulated here. If anything I think in a world of increasing technical user interfaces human touch may become more prioritized in professional settings.
"Parental incuriousity about student performance" pulled a deep sigh out of me. Add in "low information voters" and "despite (horrible behavior X), Trump's approval rating hasn't changed," and it just feels like we're living through a time of either massive self-delusion or catastrophic non-interest (or, more likely, both). Is this the hard wood we're boring through? Or is something more modern happening?
As a society, we don't seem prepared to admit that the dominant political movement right now is steeped in loser culture.
Honestly, movements plural! A lot of the left is dead set against anyone being improved or held to account.
We're becoming sloppy across the board.
Crocs with socks in professional settings marks the decline of civilization.
I'd word it that we are letting the fringes dictate too much of what is engaged with. Worst framing, is that we spent a lot of time validating those on the fringes to the point that they think they have a truth leading them.
Some of it is online discourse, but there does seem to be emerging data that we're also just becoming a ruder society in person across the board.
Right, I don't think it is just online fringes.
I also think some of it almost certainly went with misguided criticisms of power structures. I'm thinking of the idiocy of "punctuality is white power." It isn't wrong that punctuality is associated with respect and existing power dynamics. It is very wrong to think that it should get tossed out.
Democracy is wasted on the demos.
The excesses and failures of Neoliberalism has created a lot of losers.
You can't put all the blame on MAGA for this. Democrats lost all education credibility when they didn't run the "advanced math is racist" people out of town the instant that idiocy came out of their mouths.
I think and hope that we are near the bottom of smartphone/social media-induced insanity-stupidity and that from now one we will all battle against it, especially when it comes to kids. My son can forget about smartphones and social media until he's 18 (he's 2 now). I feel so lucky that he grows up in a time where we understood that digital heroin is a real menace.
This will be a very interesting experiment. Good luck with that.
I think it will be much easier than you might believe at this point. My oldest son is 14 and just a few weeks ago received his first ever cell phone to start high school -- a "dumb phone" with calling and texting only -- and I've heard no indication from him that there's any stigma being attached to that by his classmates (several of his friends also have dumb phones).
I have also heard that we may finally be getting passed peak 'teenagers with smart phones' culturally. Hopefully it is true.
Our kids are ten and eight
We have already told them repeatedly "No smartphones or social media till they are eighteen"
Matt Y says it’s “understandable” that parents don’t want to be told their children are doing poorly at school, because he too likes it when people say nice things about his son.
/headdesk
I like it when people say nice AND TRUE things about my son. It happens that my son is really smart and good at a lot of things, but he is not good at drawing. He basically does standard 10-year-old style stick figures. Without meaning to sound stuck-up, I can honestly say that my drawing skills at the age of 10 were noticeably better than his skills are now.
So, if someone told me “wow your son is so great at drawing,” I would know they are unserious or lying. I would NOT appreciate it! I would respect someone who told me “here are xyz recommendations if you want your son to get better at drawing” instead.
This just seems like common sense to me. Why wouldn’t loving parents want an accurate assessment of their children’s skills? You’ll still love them unconditionally if they’re bad at something!
But the professional-managerial class doesn't typically care about drawing. Nor sports, for that matter. My handwriting has always been bad; I used to get an "N" for needs-to-improve on my report card for my handwriting every year. My parents were like, "Meh, who cares about handwriting?" But if I'd gotten an N in arithmetic or reading, there would have been DRAMA and extra worksheets, and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so forth.
One of my kid's English teachers let my kid do nothing the whole semester. They started talking to us 90% of the way through and saying "well I don't want you to think I've been letting him slack." No, that's exactly what you were doing. I still see red when I think about it.
I know my kid can be a stubborn little asshole but at the elementary or middle school level dealing with little assholes is your job. We can help enforce rules and consequences at home but not if we don't know what's going in.
Just thinking this through as charitably as possible, what are parents supposed to do when told their kid isn’t doing well in school? Presumably that means they themselves have to do something—maybe there’s reluctance on their part because they don’t know what to do, or don’t think there’s anything to be done.
I’m also thinking about FdB-type questions of objective learning versus relative performance, which is a meaningful wrinkle if we’re just wondering why parents care or don’t care how well their kid is doing in school.
The first thing parents can and should do is ask the child’s teacher for recommendations. Ok, my child is not doing well, what can/should I do? And then level with them: “Ok, child is doing poorly in English, but I’m a poor single parent, I work two jobs, I don’t have enough time to help him. What do you suggest? Is there any tutoring available?” And go from there. I think most teachers are good people who want to help.
I’d suggest the answer is the bottom thirty percent of parents don’t value education much and just expect that teachers do all the work to figure it out. They are minimally involved with their kids’ lives and mostly raise them with iPads.
I know that’s kind of harsh but I don’t know what the policy response to parents who just don’t care is. Especially when the rest of the “village” feels the same way.
"The answer" is probably something like what Matt is gesturing towards. The bottom 30% maybe don't care much, but when the whole system and is geared towards "you should care" a lot more people up and down the spectrum will fall in line.
Even if they're just doing the minimum, the perception of what that minimum is can be shifted by educational leaders.
The bottom 30% probably have <= 100 IQ kids... What's concerning is that at least a few of them aren't stupid and they're falling through the cracks.
I think American society is getting better at sorting the smart people away from the less intelligent. Both my parents grew up in working class families and ended up being more highly educated than most of their childhood peers; their kids hardly even know any working class or poor people, much less spend any significant time with them. In my experience, the smartest kids from poorer families end up middle class, leaving the lower classes even farther behind since there are fewer and fewer functional people left in that community.
It’s not even that they are raising them with IPad’s. If you are talking true bottom 30th percentile and lower parenting, you are quickly reaching people who are barely involved at all, even in terms of ensuring adequate food and clothing and housing, then going even lower to actual absenteeism, than even lower into abuse, then finally into sexual abuse etc.
Like, a lot of these arguments sometimes feel and sound like arguments the upper middle class is having with itself that barely even applies to the bottom third at all.
If you listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast, a lot of these thought they were involved, but the schools told them for years they were doing fine, but they kids couldn't actually read.
Of course, IMHO, the parents should have been making the kids read on their own. And for that matter should have taught their kids to read themselves.
But apparently that's not the norm.
Part of it was that the parents didn’t realize their kids couldn’t read and if I remember correctly some of the kids didn’t really get they couldn’t read until like third grade
In my dream world, everyone with Matt’s platform would be discussing the nitty-gritty of reading instruction. Thank you for giving attention to some very real instructional issues in this post, and for the kind words about my writing.
If I can be so bold, I would suggest that readers study the four states with 4th grade reading gains since 2020. I call them the Southern Surge states. Unsurprisingly, they achieved their gains by improving curriculum in ways that address the issue of book shortages and leveled reading groups, while training teachers on reading science in the process.
https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding
The Southern Surge states prove that these are solve-able problems, and we should focus there, rather than shouting about the fallout each NAEP release cycle then walking away.
I REALLY appreciate the point about teachers not being responsible for implementing best practices because I think that gets missed a lot. Most teachers really are trying their best and do want to do a good job, but they're not going to notice the sort of changes that would lead to a 1% increase in test scores. That can't be on them. There has to be somebody higher up the chain evaluating data and implementing best practices.
This is also true about policing. Individual cops have perspective that is valuable, but we can't implement policing strategies just off of their recommendations.
very much agreed that's why we have management.
Teachers shouldn't be creating their own curriculum. Managing classrooms effectively is more than enough work.
Also curriculum's should be statewide. So if you transfer schools you are still on track. Nor should each grade's curriculum have 3 years worth of materials.
Idk if I'd go as far as curriculum, but I'm broadly in favor of more standardization.
The irony is that with more standardization, we can actually allow more flexibility with how class is run. If we have a pretty good idea of what teachers are teaching, we don't have to micromanage them.
It's a tired hobby to point out the the notable typos in Matt's posts, but I found them (count: 3) a bit funnier than usual in a post about declining reading levels. Is our bloggers learning?
Never sure how seriously to take Discordianism, but the SNAFU Principle of "true communication is only possible between equals" feels like it's hyperstitioning into a genuine aphorism. It really is hard to communicate with someone who can't easily parse text, if that's the medium one is most proficient in...not just *directly* via the written Word, but because the proficient processing of text also shifts how one thinks and speaks. Like I don't buy the strong version of Chomsky, yet it's clear to anyone who encounters regular miscommunications in the workplace that some things just work better with a face-to-face. Or a phone/video call, or a diagram, or a table, or (shudders at the impropriety) a meme. No amount of workshopping an internal memo at Grocery, Inc. will get me better results than just showing someone what I mean directly...
...and that increasingly even applies to supposedly educated coworkers. I guess now I know why: with stagnation and decline even within high-ability bands, "education" just ain't what it used to be. So even though school sucked bigly, in retrospect I'm glad to have gotten out while the getting was still relatively good. It does a real disservice to both the future of society writ large + life outcomes for these individuals to let the academic floor drop out...we're much stronger together with mass basic literacy, rather than an (over)educated cadre of cognoscenti that soy polloi increasingly don't like or trust anyway. Cultivating the cream of the intellectual crop while the rest of the intellectual milk curdles: correct me if I'm wrong, but history in that vein tends not to go so well! (where's THpacis when you need him...)
In defense of your coworkers benefitting from face-to-face communication. It's also hard to _write_ something so it's clearly interpretable. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one". It's very easy to write something and be "sure" of how it will be interpreted because that's what you intended.
I used to spend a lot of time workshopping emails so that they were both concise and clear. Now I'll write a first draft, ask AI to check for clarity, and it'll rewrite it for me.
The result is usually clearer and needs minimal editing, even if the tone feels a bit AI. I either use its version or pull specific sentences because it is more clear and faster.
A part of me feels like I'm losing something relying on AI for this, but it genuinely makes me more effective.
I like to communicate with graphs and diagrams. You'd think digital technology would have made that easier at some point, but no, every tool available is basically indistinguishable from Office 2007.
A short phone call can often save many many e-mails.
My older relatives told me that in Haiti, they would take oral exams. If you got something wrong, the professors could spank you. Just saying.
Edit: this was meant to be joke about trauma that was given to my relatives and past on to me. I don't support spanking children for any reasons.
Haiti isn't the societal example we should be shooting for.
Oral exams are definitely one solution to AI though
You can do written exams or even computer papers on computers with no internet hookup
I mean they probably did oral exams due to lack of resources, not pedagogical theory. That being said, I support corporal punishment in schools, with some (light) oversight.
The original comment was completely insane.
I mean, in France 20 years ago when I was teaching English, there was no spanking, but it was very much a “here we punish ignorance” kind of vibe.
Oral exams minus the spanking are not bad.
We had (the medieval Latin named) viva voce! And you only get a few seconds before the examiner loses patience and gets irritated.
I've had better experience although I went in scared. It was called Grand Viva and was a requirement for graduation. No prizes for guessing what the Grand morphed into in college lingo :)
supervising an oral exam when the student is flailing is pretty excruciating...
I don't think it's any different from interviewing a candidate.
The worst candidates get screened out before the interview though. At school all students have to do the oral exam even students who know nothing
fear reduces effective intelligence
What do you mean?
If you take the SAT while I’m pointing a gun at you and threatening to blow your brains out, it will lower your score.
1. It should reduce effective intelligence somewhat equally, so students are still on equal footing
2. It also teaches interpersonal communication skills which are also life skills. Someone who is great at doing work silently alone but not very good at communicating about that work may do well in a few specific jobs, but will have a hard time in general career-wise.
Learning how to perform under pressure is also a valuable skill.
Also spankings are NOT a good to the head
Spanking shouldn't be the first thing you turn to. But it should definitely be a tool in the tool kit.