In this episode, we talk about how we paid for our kids to go to a daycare facility that cost less than $1,000 a week, and how we ended up paying $62,000 per year for them to stay in the same facility for the entire year.
00:05:36.320We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day.
00:05:43.420The two scenarios, a standard like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.
00:07:00.320After he started staying with this other couple, when he would come to our house and play with the ABA therapist for a few hours for them to collect data, it went to literally zero tantrums after this.
00:07:11.700Here we have one for accepting no alternatives, and you see it goes from less than 50% of the time to almost every time after the transition.
00:07:32.980It was like one every third or fourth session.
00:07:35.700That's just saying I don't like this, basically.
00:07:38.380Yeah, refusing to do something, typically.
00:07:40.640And when I look at things like this and tantrums, for example, right, it gets me thinking of, are tantrums a normal behavior?
00:07:52.540The fact that his tantrums completely went away when he went to a more naturalist care situation, and this was a third-party provider who's judging this, not us, his parents, or anyone who really was acutely aware of how dramatically his lifestyle changed.
00:08:09.940Are tantrums a phenomenon that is unique to children in the developed world who are living in these fragmented family models?
00:08:24.280And Scott Alexander at one point wrote this piece, maybe, I think it was about ADHD, that talked about, okay, yeah, maybe people need medication now, but also it's because they're being forced to do stuff that is inhumane.
00:08:35.900That sitting in front of a computer all day is not something that we have evolved the capability of doing.
00:08:42.040And so, of course, we're going to not be able to pay attention, and so, of course, we need medication.
00:08:46.260Having a kid sit in this structured environment in daycare or then sit at a desk in school is not something kids are designed to do.
00:08:53.900It's not how kids are even naturally evolved, or we'll say just young mammals are naturally evolved to learn.
00:09:00.040So, of course, they need to be medicated to make it work, or they're just going to really not do that well.
00:09:05.440So, I think that's one part of it, which is that-
00:09:07.000I would also love to send these graphs to Scott Alexander.
00:09:09.260I bet he could do something fun with him for a post.
00:09:26.940So, everyone always says, oh, but if you homeschool your kid, how are they going to be socialized?
00:09:32.480And what they don't realize is when researchers actually look at this and they give two groups of kids a task, one group being homeschooled, the other group being conventionally schooled,
00:09:44.100the homeschooled group finishes the task in an organized fashion.
00:09:50.060It's Lord of the Flies chaos in the not real story, but fake book story way when you give this task to the schooled kids.
00:09:59.860And the general conclusion is it's not actually common throughout history for kids to grow up only around other kids in this, like, environment where there's just one or two adults and then 25 to 30 kids.
00:10:13.840And that's ultimately a really big problem.
00:10:15.940There is that problem, but we also see in our data that, for example, he is showing much less aggression and stuff like that.
00:10:23.400And we haven't even talked about the data you collected.
00:10:26.240And keep in mind, we're not just going to be going over anecdotes.
00:10:28.020I'm starting with anecdotes as a framing device.
00:10:32.780And the thing, yeah, no, before we get to illnesses, so why is it bad that kids are learning from other kids?
00:10:38.100Often kids, certain kids in a class, and only one or two need to do this, pick up bad behaviors from adults at home.
00:10:44.500And just like with sickness, which we're going to get to next, they can spread that bad behavior to everyone in their classroom.
00:10:49.300So we would often get calls about our eldest son whose graphs you're seeing from the daycare saying, oh, we're going to have to send him home.
00:11:15.900But anyway, I would then bring this up with the ABA therapist and say, oh, they said Octavian pushed someone or they said Octavian did this thing or that thing.
00:11:24.580And then the ABA therapist would be like, yeah, he did right after one of his classmates did.
00:11:49.980In June of 2023, the last year, as of the time of this podcast recording, I got really frustrated with how frequently we were sick.
00:11:58.580So I decided I will just keep a spreadsheet of it.
00:12:01.540And then from then through mid-January, so from June 2023 through mid-January, which is when the last of our child care conceived or, sorry, when our child, after the last of our child care contracted illnesses had disappeared finally, I kept a record of this.
00:13:27.040Although I will say that the lasting impact of daycare was still there because on our final day of daycare, I had a sinus infection that never went away that turned into pneumonia.
00:14:05.040If you have this many kids in a small environment and like the, in terms of like contact tracing, like any family member, anyone else that they have contact with, that could get them sick.
00:14:15.040Yeah, but they have a less strong immune system.
00:14:18.220But I suspect what we're actually looking at here, which is really interesting, is, and this is just something that no one's going to look at because they're afraid, I think, of what the data might say.
00:14:27.380But the long-term mental and physiological effects of being sick that frequently in early childhood cannot be small.
00:14:35.840So I suspect what we're actually seeing as a result of this is probably pretty pronounced in adults who are in these situations, lower IQ scores, lower.
00:14:46.880Like it is insane that somebody would put so much effort into doing something like breastfeeding and then send their kids to daycare when the daycare, if you're familiar with data that looks at illnesses in early childhood, is almost certainly having a dramatically more profound effect on pretty much all of the same metrics.
00:15:06.280Yeah. You would hear about this more profoundly in historical contexts, like Helen Keller being blind and deaf after having a really terrible fever and stuff.
00:15:15.480And now obviously we have better healthcare treatments and medications for things like this, but that doesn't mean that sicknesses don't still leave an impact.
00:15:23.640And we're seeing from various bits of research on long COVID that there does appear to be lasting impacts from various illnesses.
00:15:31.380So yeah, it's better to not get ill and there are probably lasting impacts that we don't realize because they're hard to track.
00:15:37.340And outside of all this, there has been, this isn't just anecdata, right?
00:15:41.060There have been actual really good studies on this.
00:15:44.600The best of them that I have seen is the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program, often abbreviated to the TN-VPK.
00:15:54.580The TN-VPK is a statewide pre-kindergarten program for four-year-old children aimed at providing free education.
00:16:01.940The program ended up having more applicants than available spots in certain years, leading to the use of a lottery system for admission.
00:16:09.820This lottery system inadvertently created a natural experiment, allowing researchers to compare outcomes between those who were offered a spot in the program, the treatment group, and those who are not, the control group, thus providing a controlled sample.
00:16:21.980The findings from this research have been widely discussed due to their implications.
00:16:26.280Initially, children who attended TN-VPK program showed gains in academic achievements.
00:16:31.780However, as these children retract over time, the initial benefits appeared to fade out.
00:16:37.460And by third grade, some negative effects emerged.
00:16:40.340Specifically, the research found that by third grade, children who attended TN-VPK programs were performing worse on academic measures compared to their peers,
00:17:02.660Everyone expected, like when this study was done, because the state thought they were being so magnanimous by putting kids into these programs,
00:17:11.040and all the parents wanted their kids to be in this program,
00:17:14.200no one on the research team expected this sort of a result.
00:17:16.880No one expected they would end up long-term hurting kids.
00:17:20.700And now, when we see our own anecdata, it seems to back what we're hearing there.
00:17:27.100Like, putting kids in these group environments is just really bad for them.
00:17:34.560And I think that this is the thing, is that we think that kids need constant instruction and stimulation instead of being in a room with a bunch of their siblings and some perfunctory level of observation.
00:17:48.760And we have, there's a lot of cool toys for them to mess with and play with and fight over and stuff.
00:17:52.420And I hope that soon, and this is a project I want to work on after the Collins Institute goes live,
00:17:58.240is I'd like to work on a video camera that notes when kids are doing dangerous things and sets off alarms,
00:18:04.640but that otherwise allows kids to just do their own thing without a lot of adult supervision.
00:18:09.740What I want is, for those who've read Ian Biggs' culture series, a slap drone.
00:19:25.640Well, what I would say is if we're looking more broadly, if we're doing a meta-study of the research on daycare interventions,
00:19:31.640a lot of research does suggest or indicate various, mostly short-term benefits.
00:19:37.920And most of those short-term benefits are measured in the form of academic performance in similarly structured school environments later on,
00:19:44.480which is misleading because it makes you think, oh, yeah, they're doing so well.
00:19:57.560I do think, in general, what the research says that shows is more robust is that for lower-income people,
00:20:05.040basically if your home environment is unsafe or bad, daycare is a good thing because it's better than that, right?
00:20:11.400It's better than an abusive household.
00:20:13.380It's better than an impoverished or dangerous household where there are drug users, whatever.
00:20:16.780So I am glad that daycare is mostly subsidized in the United States for lower-income houses where you're more likely to see situations like that.
00:20:25.900However, the effects, the positive effects of daycare appear to wear off over time, even in academic environments,
00:20:35.020so even when it comes to dealing with bureaucracies.
00:20:37.980And this only seems to have an effect on lower socioeconomic children.
00:20:42.800It's not really helpful to kids who have a good home environment already.
00:21:20.040One is, you need to be willing to work with people who are very culturally different from you.
00:21:26.100Like, the people who we are working with to do this are not of the similar socioeconomic background or similar socioeconomic status to us.
00:21:34.020I'm sure they think that we're the weirdest nerds in the entire world, and we basically don't share a single hobby or intellectual interest.
00:21:43.800And that's okay, because what we do share is they're expecting their first kid later this month.
00:21:50.380Like, what we all care about is our kids and family and starting sustainable businesses and sharing resources and being smart about the way that we live our lives.
00:22:01.200And I'd say that this is the key thing.
00:22:04.000You need somebody who is going to actually appreciate the help you are giving them.
00:22:09.400And you need to actually appreciate the help they're giving you.
00:22:12.140Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't do one of those two things.
00:22:16.440They either see it as transactional, which removes the utility in how something like this can be structured, or they commodify it in some way.
00:22:25.060And that's something we've been very careful not to do.
00:22:28.480And I guess you even experienced yourself being largely raised by babysitters and nannies as a kid.
00:22:34.220And you were actually really, you've always been very against the idea of, I guess, we'll say traditionally compensated, like non-community-based child care.
00:22:45.080Because you just found that, especially the more experienced nannies and babysitters you had who turned it into a career, who weren't like first-timers who actually cared, were pretty mean.
00:23:38.660Clearly got off on being cruel to kids.
00:23:41.940And it's something that I think appears in women much more than it appears in men.
00:23:45.700No, I didn't have that many, I didn't have any severe cases of this growing up.
00:23:49.740Like, I wasn't, like, traumatized by this or something.
00:23:51.580But I definitely say that something about that psychological profile seems to disproportionately sort these individuals into paid childcare roles outside of the school system.
00:24:05.040That makes sense, because there's less oversight.
00:24:09.180I think that this is, this can be more toxic than people realize.
00:24:13.020And within the daycare system itself, once you get to kid number three, I think pretty much everyone is going to be able to find a more cost-effective option that is more in their kid's best interest if they are willing to take that leap.
00:24:27.060Even though I can understand that leap can be so enormously difficult, and it may not work out the first couple times, which it didn't for us.
00:24:34.340And we've been, let's be honest, we've been trying since before our first son was born.
00:24:41.060There was that person who maybe was a real person and maybe wasn't who said they were going first to Saudi Arabia to work at a school and even sent us photos and spoke with us on the phone and then just disappeared.
00:24:53.420And then there was another one who we bought a fight for.
00:24:57.800And the day that she was supposed to fly out to come and be a live-in nanny decided she just didn't feel like it.
00:25:04.020This is what we talk about, the entitlement of Gen Alpha.
00:25:11.180Oh, and then we've had a bunch of, a bunch, so many failures.
00:25:14.020But here's the thing, even on the side of daycare, it was terrible.
00:25:17.780And this is something that maybe was just associated with the daycare that our kids were at, although I don't think so, is they would close at the drop of a hat.
00:25:27.960Like, they would shut down classrooms.
00:25:39.820And so we're still paying for all that.
00:25:42.100And when we first, before the pandemic, daycares often would say, okay, you can have one week where you don't have to pay your daycare dues while still being enrolled, where you can take a family vacation.
00:26:54.520If you are the one who has a more stable career and income, finding a couple that you can work with to help get their careers off the line while they watch your kids is one thing you can do.
00:27:03.900I think other people also have a group of multiple families where one parent in each family works part-time is totally capable of creating a homeschool pod or a childcare pod where there's just a rotation of when this parent has a day off.
00:27:21.660So like nurses, firemen, people with part-time jobs where they don't work every single day of the week, that is something that's super feasible.
00:27:28.760So proximity is really important as well.
00:27:31.240I think the only, the way too, that we found the couple that we're doing all this with now is just by texting people in our community too, that we met through various other random Facebook groups or running into them, et cetera.
00:27:49.120Anything that we did through care.com, anything that we did through Craigslist, anything that we did online, which is how we do everything.
00:27:57.460And I think that might have larger implications.
00:27:59.500This is a totally different podcast subject in terms of community building and how people can form relationships that actually lead to.
00:28:08.940This is a problem when people community build, they try to community build with peers, individuals who are near or close equivalents to them.
00:28:18.680This is the worst group you can community build with because there is no arbitrage in terms of community exchanges.
00:28:27.920So you consider something like our neighbors.
00:28:29.900We can do things like help put together their companies, help with their tax filings, help with marketing.
00:28:34.740And they can do things like change our oil, for example, take care of our kids, fix our car when it breaks.
00:28:40.800These are two skill sets where we can no more do what they can do for us than they can do what we can do for them, which means that both sides genuinely appreciate the relationship.
00:28:53.940But this is something that is allowed because our backgrounds are so different.
00:28:58.320And this is why same background communities allow for so little depth to form within them, which is what really contrasts these intentional cult like EA communities and stuff like that with more traditional religious communities that exist across socioeconomic lines and sort of career pathways.
00:29:22.480Get to know your local community and don't expect to, unless you're doing one of these things where you're all nurses and firemen and you're the same socioeconomic status, but you happen to have a spouse in each house who has a part-time job and is willing to watch kids, then this is not going to work with people who are your peers.