Based Camp - Just how Bad is Daycare？ A Chilling Case Study & Literature Review

00:00:00.000 We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing

00:00:06.420 this.

00:00:06.700 We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day, the two scenarios, a standard

00:00:15.200 like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing

00:00:23.820 whatever they want all day.

00:00:25.540 Would you like to know more?

00:00:26.960 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:00:27.960 It is wonderful to be here with you today.

00:00:31.200 Something really shocking happened to us recently.

00:00:34.720 We took a giant gamble on how we were handling our children's childcare.

00:00:43.340 So before this, we were sending our children to a daycare facility.

00:00:48.920 And if you are not at the lower end of income in Pennsylvania, that means you are paying

00:00:52.880 for that all out of pocket.

00:00:54.480 So by the time we got to children number three at a, I'd say like a low range to mid-range

00:01:00.520 facility in terms of cost.

00:01:02.340 Yeah.

00:01:02.920 This was cost, what was it?

00:01:03.920 $5,400 a month?

00:01:05.440 It was.

00:01:06.540 We paid $1,193 every week.

00:01:09.980 And that's $62,036 a year.

00:01:14.840 Insane.

00:01:15.740 Just for three kids?

00:01:17.040 Just for three kids.

00:01:18.120 With the fourth kid on the way, we basically decided this.

00:01:21.740 And keep in mind, we're in suburban or really exurban Pennsylvania.

00:01:26.700 Oh, you know, friends of ours looked at our daycare bills and said, this is, you're so lucky.

00:01:31.380 I wish I could be paying this.

00:01:34.100 Yeah.

00:01:34.260 Yeah.

00:01:34.360 Who would live in like New York and Philadelphia.

00:01:36.080 So this is almost as inexpensive as it gets unless you're in an extremely rural area.

00:01:41.060 Yeah.

00:01:41.340 Or unless you are low income.

00:01:43.600 And we actually know people also actually who intentionally manipulate their income in

00:01:50.720 a way that probably the IRS would not be happy about to qualify for subsidized daycare

00:01:55.880 because it makes that much of a difference.

00:01:58.120 $62,000, that's a generous salary for someone that's.

00:02:02.520 Yeah.

00:02:02.800 And this is why a lot of people are like, why bother working when all of it would literally

00:02:06.800 go to daycare?

00:02:07.560 And keep in mind, of course, it's post-tax dollars.

00:02:10.040 And I'd point in mind, this was only three kids.

00:02:13.780 Yeah.

00:02:13.960 This is the minimum number of kids we could have and be above replacement rate as a family.

00:02:20.720 This is the, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's insane.

00:02:24.460 Yeah.

00:02:24.580 So to be above replacement rate in the U S you, and you are not in poverty, you need

00:02:29.980 to be extremely wealthy.

00:02:30.860 And this does part to show why you do get this higher fertility rates on the really low

00:02:35.860 end, because there just isn't a cost to additional kids when the state's offering to pay for

00:02:40.680 everything in the same way that there is an enormous cost to additional kids for the

00:02:44.420 middle class.

00:02:45.500 But I need to go further with our experiment because something came down to, we realized

00:02:49.700 we couldn't keep affording this as we moved on with our family.

00:02:52.560 So we're like, we need to find a new sustainable solution.

00:02:54.580 And this got really interesting for us because we had tried au pairs before, and we had found

00:03:02.100 that they were fairly entitled.

00:03:04.180 And live in newbies.

00:03:05.280 It was just like having an extra kid.

00:03:07.740 Yeah.

00:03:08.200 Babysitters, live in nannies, the whole thing, all of it. 0.98

00:03:11.080 We tried everything.

00:03:12.040 Even like PhD students, we tried bringing over to our house to work.

00:03:15.380 And so we ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to

00:03:22.900 be doing this.

00:03:23.700 Here's what we ended up deciding to do and try.

00:03:26.700 And this was a big risk for us is we have neighbors who were willing to basically do a

00:03:34.000 childcare pool with us.

00:03:35.100 And we know many families that have done this before where they live right next to other

00:03:38.500 families.

00:03:39.100 In this case, it was actually a couple that was soon to have a family whose business we're

00:03:42.680 helping to get started.

00:03:44.300 And they're really interested in doing like some communal childcare, sharing of resources,

00:03:49.060 things like that.

00:03:49.780 So pooling resources together in that classic community way.

00:03:54.340 So some people are doing this with friends.

00:03:56.140 We did it with neighbors that we didn't really know that well.

00:03:57.920 And so we were obviously like really nervous because everyone, whenever you go as a parent

00:04:02.780 to the pediatrician, for example, and this is something only Malcolm does.

00:04:05.620 I stay home and keep doing whatever it is I do.

00:04:07.940 And Malcolm does all the kid errands.

00:04:11.040 The pediatricians constantly shame him.

00:04:13.240 Like how many words does this kid speak now?

00:04:15.660 And what are their milestones with this?

00:04:18.040 And so you are constantly afraid that if you do not have some kind of professional team,

00:04:22.400 making sure that your child meets these weird, arbitrary learning milestones,

00:04:27.000 you would kind of be the worst parent ever.

00:04:29.940 And that if we went to a less structured education format or childcare format for our three kids,

00:04:34.980 the things would just totally go off the rails.

00:04:36.680 They'd be bored out of their mind.

00:04:37.900 They would complain about it.

00:04:38.920 They wouldn't want to spend time with this couple.

00:04:41.120 And I know what they do with the couple.

00:04:43.400 So they do about an hour a day of teaching, learning to read or something like that.

00:04:48.140 And other than that, the kids just basically do whatever they want.

00:04:50.520 They've got a room to themselves and they play amongst themselves.

00:04:53.200 So going into this situation, this was an enormous risk.

00:04:57.660 Yeah.

00:04:58.260 Because it's not easy to get kids in daycare.

00:05:00.040 That's the thing.

00:05:00.520 Like you pull your kids out.

00:05:01.580 That doesn't mean you can get them back in.

00:05:03.120 In fact, we've been on one daycare list.

00:05:05.380 I never bothered to take us off of it.

00:05:07.620 We've been on for over a year at this point.

00:05:10.600 So we started having our kids stay with them.

00:05:15.220 And fortunately for us, one of our kids who is autistic was in ABA therapy, which is a form of therapy for autism.

00:05:23.000 It's controversial because it basically just teaches kids how to mask that they're autistic and pretend that they're not.

00:05:28.320 And some people are like, autism rights.

00:05:30.360 People shouldn't have to pretend.

00:05:31.820 And it's.

00:05:32.140 Yeah, but they can do.

00:05:32.960 But if you need to get done, you got to fake it.

00:05:36.140 Yeah.

00:05:36.320 We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day.

00:05:43.420 The 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.

00:05:55.560 So we're talking tantrums plummeting.

00:05:58.600 Let's do some of these graphs on screen so people can see.

00:06:01.840 So I'll start with frequency of aggression.

00:06:04.700 Dotted line here is when he started staying at home.

00:06:09.960 Now, for those of you who are listening and cannot see this, it goes from a graph that's going up and down to a flat line on the X axis.

00:06:21.440 Yeah.

00:06:22.080 Just complete flat line.

00:06:23.420 A zero.

00:06:24.580 Okay.

00:06:25.020 So let's go to the next one.

00:06:27.240 Manding for break all done.

00:06:29.760 And that means requesting.

00:06:31.100 I don't know why they say manding, but it just means asking for a break or saying you're all done with something.

00:06:37.280 He never said it in the early days, but this is less extreme than the early ones, but it continues to go up after he's home.

00:06:42.960 But you do see some improvement before he goes home with this one.

00:06:46.640 I don't know what this one is about.

00:06:47.880 It doesn't have the mark.

00:06:49.240 Next one.

00:06:49.680 Frequency of tantrums.

00:06:52.320 This is my favorite.

00:06:53.200 Yeah, it is all over the place, but generally middling high.

00:06:57.880 It goes down to literally zero.

00:07:00.320 After 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.

00:07:11.700 Here 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.

00:07:26.640 Then we can look at vocal protest.

00:07:29.360 Again, up and down to almost nothing.

00:07:32.980 It was like one every third or fourth session.

00:07:35.700 That's just saying I don't like this, basically.

00:07:38.380 Yeah, refusing to do something, typically.

00:07:40.640 And when I look at things like this and tantrums, for example, right, it gets me thinking of, are tantrums a normal behavior?

00:07:52.540 The 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.

00:08:09.940 Are tantrums a phenomenon that is unique to children in the developed world who are living in these fragmented family models?

00:08:19.700 Yeah, I wonder about that.

00:08:22.660 I think there are two sides of this.

00:08:24.280 And 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.

00:08:35.900 That sitting in front of a computer all day is not something that we have evolved the capability of doing.

00:08:42.040 And so, of course, we're going to not be able to pay attention, and so, of course, we need medication.

00:08:46.260 Having 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.

00:08:53.900 It's not how kids are even naturally evolved, or we'll say just young mammals are naturally evolved to learn.

00:09:00.040 So, of course, they need to be medicated to make it work, or they're just going to really not do that well.

00:09:05.440 So, I think that's one part of it, which is that-

00:09:07.000 I would also love to send these graphs to Scott Alexander.

00:09:09.260 I bet he could do something fun with him for a post.

00:09:11.360 Yeah, maybe.

00:09:11.940 It is technically anecdata.

00:09:13.720 Like, it is data, but it's anecdotal.

00:09:16.040 It's pretty extreme anecdata, though.

00:09:18.220 I know.

00:09:18.620 Oh, here's the other part, though, that I think is really underrated with daycare, and this also shows up in homeschooling research.

00:09:26.200 Oh, yeah.

00:09:26.940 So, everyone always says, oh, but if you homeschool your kid, how are they going to be socialized?

00:09:32.480 And 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,

00:09:44.100 the homeschooled group finishes the task in an organized fashion.

00:09:47.920 They're mature about it.

00:09:48.900 They get it done.

00:09:50.060 It'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.

00:09:59.860 And 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.

00:10:13.840 And that's ultimately a really big problem.

00:10:15.940 There is that problem, but we also see in our data that, for example, he is showing much less aggression and stuff like that.

00:10:23.400 And we haven't even talked about the data you collected.

00:10:26.240 And keep in mind, we're not just going to be going over anecdotes.

00:10:28.020 I'm starting with anecdotes as a framing device.

00:10:30.120 But the data on illnesses.

00:10:32.780 And the thing, yeah, no, before we get to illnesses, so why is it bad that kids are learning from other kids?

00:10:38.100 Often kids, certain kids in a class, and only one or two need to do this, pick up bad behaviors from adults at home.

00:10:44.500 And just like with sickness, which we're going to get to next, they can spread that bad behavior to everyone in their classroom.

00:10:49.300 So 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.

00:10:57.160 We just can't deal with him.

00:10:58.220 Or, oh, the ABA therapists aren't coming today.

00:11:00.300 I don't know if we can just have him here, which we actually got that from a couple daycares.

00:11:04.360 It just seemed like they were shirking from work.

00:11:06.120 Oh, we can get this free additional assistant.

00:11:08.120 Yes, I don't want to have to teach this kid or do any instruction with them while you're still paying through the nose for it.

00:11:14.900 I hated that so much.

00:11:15.900 But 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.

00:11:24.580 And then the ABA therapist would be like, yeah, he did right after one of his classmates did.

00:11:29.880 And nobody hears about that.

00:11:31.540 So the thing is, he was picking up this tantrum behavior, this aggression behavior from other kids in his class, which drove me nuts.

00:11:39.060 But hold on.

00:11:39.620 We have to get further with this, which is to say the sickness thing.

00:11:44.060 Can you go over your sickness chart?

00:11:45.420 Because you took a chart of how frequently in the year you were sick before he left daycare.

00:11:49.720 Yeah.

00:11:49.980 In June of 2023, the last year, as of the time of this podcast recording, I got really frustrated with how frequently we were sick.

00:11:58.580 So I decided I will just keep a spreadsheet of it.

00:12:01.540 And 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.

00:12:20.960 I was sick for 67 days.

00:12:23.740 You were sick for 25 days.

00:12:26.660 Titan, our daughter, was sick for 51 days.

00:12:29.380 Torsten was sick for 20.

00:12:30.400 And Octavian, miraculously, was only sick for three.

00:12:34.380 That was pink eye. 1.00

00:12:35.700 I forgot what percentage of the year was that for you, of the days.

00:12:38.840 So for me, that was 31.2% of that period of time.

00:12:44.960 Okay.

00:12:45.120 So when they were in child care and when I was measuring it, I was sick basically a third of the time.

00:12:50.940 And one of those times I was so sick that I could not get out of bed.

00:12:56.980 We need to go to the hospital, right?

00:12:58.980 Yeah.

00:12:59.180 Well, and I had to go to urgent care.

00:13:01.160 And of course, there were other times like the previous year I had norovirus for the second time that year on my birthday.

00:13:06.880 These were like, they're not good sicknesses.

00:13:08.880 So this isn't like mild.

00:13:10.100 This is like very sick.

00:13:11.560 So how sick were you after we took them out of daycare?

00:13:15.640 I haven't been sick since then.

00:13:17.740 Literally not one day.

00:13:20.100 No one in our house has been sick one day.

00:13:23.500 And we took them out, what, like six months ago at this point?

00:13:26.580 Yeah.

00:13:27.040 Although 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.

00:13:35.900 Oh, yeah.

00:13:36.980 After the diseases you caught on daycare.

00:13:39.340 But since you got rid of that, you haven't been sick one day.

00:13:41.420 I haven't been sick one day.

00:13:42.220 They haven't been sick one day.

00:13:43.480 And we still take them to parks.

00:13:44.940 We take them shopping.

00:13:45.720 We take them to libraries.

00:13:46.780 They're touching stuff.

00:13:47.720 They're eating.

00:13:48.560 They're being normal kids.

00:13:49.820 They are like in some hermetic bubble.

00:13:51.400 It turns out something specific about daycare is really bad for illnesses.

00:13:55.100 It's like ground zero.

00:13:56.400 I don't know what's going on.

00:13:57.580 I literally don't know how other kids are bringing that many illnesses into daycare.

00:14:03.720 I mean, I'm sure it's a math thing.

00:14:05.040 If 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.

00:14:15.040 Yeah, but they have a less strong immune system.

00:14:18.220 But 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.

00:14:27.380 But the long-term mental and physiological effects of being sick that frequently in early childhood cannot be small.

00:14:35.840 So 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.

00:14:46.880 Like 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.

00:15:06.280 Yeah. 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.

00:15:15.480 And 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.

00:15:23.640 And we're seeing from various bits of research on long COVID that there does appear to be lasting impacts from various illnesses.

00:15:31.380 So 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.

00:15:37.340 And outside of all this, there has been, this isn't just anecdata, right?

00:15:41.060 There have been actual really good studies on this.

00:15:44.600 The best of them that I have seen is the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program, often abbreviated to the TN-VPK.

00:15:54.580 The TN-VPK is a statewide pre-kindergarten program for four-year-old children aimed at providing free education.

00:16:01.940 The program ended up having more applicants than available spots in certain years, leading to the use of a lottery system for admission.

00:16:09.820 This 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.

00:16:21.980 The findings from this research have been widely discussed due to their implications.

00:16:26.280 Initially, children who attended TN-VPK program showed gains in academic achievements.

00:16:31.780 However, as these children retract over time, the initial benefits appeared to fade out.

00:16:37.460 And by third grade, some negative effects emerged.

00:16:40.340 Specifically, the research found that by third grade, children who attended TN-VPK programs were performing worse on academic measures compared to their peers,

00:16:51.220 who did not attend the program.

00:16:53.000 These results have sparked significant debate about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and their long-term impacts.

00:17:00.880 This is wild to me.

00:17:02.660 Everyone expected, like when this study was done, because the state thought they were being so magnanimous by putting kids into these programs,

00:17:11.040 and all the parents wanted their kids to be in this program,

00:17:14.200 no one on the research team expected this sort of a result.

00:17:16.880 No one expected they would end up long-term hurting kids.

00:17:20.700 And now, when we see our own anecdata, it seems to back what we're hearing there.

00:17:27.100 Like, putting kids in these group environments is just really bad for them.

00:17:31.240 And that they are actually better.

00:17:32.780 And parents, what if they get bored?

00:17:34.560 And 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.

00:17:48.760 And we have, there's a lot of cool toys for them to mess with and play with and fight over and stuff.

00:17:52.420 And I hope that soon, and this is a project I want to work on after the Collins Institute goes live,

00:17:58.240 is I'd like to work on a video camera that notes when kids are doing dangerous things and sets off alarms,

00:18:04.640 but that otherwise allows kids to just do their own thing without a lot of adult supervision.

00:18:09.740 What I want is, for those who've read Ian Biggs' culture series, a slap drone.

00:18:14.420 At least the book's surface detail.

00:18:16.040 I want to explain how this works to the audience.

00:18:18.000 A slap drone is basically, think of it like a flying drone that's fairly small, that you could talk to at any time.

00:18:24.240 Like, it's very intelligent, it's very smart, that will not intervene in your life unless you are about to harm someone else,

00:18:30.040 or something might cause harm to you.

00:18:31.800 So it'll make sure that you don't die from some kind of accident, crossing the street, being shot by someone, whatever.

00:18:36.640 It will totally protect you, but it will also stop you from hurting other people.

00:18:40.620 And I want that for all of our children so bad, so I just want to make slap drones happen.

00:18:44.520 It might not be far from that.

00:18:45.800 I can see simple drones following kids around, automatically re-docking.

00:18:49.800 I don't know.

00:18:50.940 We're finally embarking on that era.

00:18:52.880 Somebody bullies them, and the drone pulls down a video thing, and it shows the t-shirt.

00:18:57.780 Yeah.

00:18:58.780 I'm ready. 0.99

00:19:00.760 I'm okay with it teasing our kids if our kids are being dicks, too. 0.98

00:19:03.660 Dogs have those little shock collars. 0.99

00:19:05.320 You can have a little...

00:19:06.560 No kid can get away anymore with being like, he did it.

00:19:09.180 All the various other kids' drones fly out and start replaying.

00:19:13.080 So child number two, it was their turn.

00:19:16.500 But we'd build ours with an AI system to create fake video of the other kid bullying them.

00:19:21.880 And they'd be like, well, this is two different video feeds.

00:19:24.440 What is this?

00:19:25.640 Well, what I would say is if we're looking more broadly, if we're doing a meta-study of the research on daycare interventions,

00:19:31.640 a lot of research does suggest or indicate various, mostly short-term benefits.

00:19:37.920 And most of those short-term benefits are measured in the form of academic performance in similarly structured school environments later on,

00:19:44.480 which is misleading because it makes you think, oh, yeah, they're doing so well.

00:19:49.060 But it's no.

00:19:50.380 They're learning how to live in a bureaucracy and deal with this system, and they haven't yet been kicked out of it.

00:19:55.840 That's what you're seeing.

00:19:57.560 I do think, in general, what the research says that shows is more robust is that for lower-income people,

00:20:05.040 basically if your home environment is unsafe or bad, daycare is a good thing because it's better than that, right?

00:20:11.400 It's better than an abusive household.

00:20:13.380 It's better than an impoverished or dangerous household where there are drug users, whatever.

00:20:16.780 So 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.

00:20:25.900 However, the effects, the positive effects of daycare appear to wear off over time, even in academic environments,

00:20:35.020 so even when it comes to dealing with bureaucracies.

00:20:37.980 And this only seems to have an effect on lower socioeconomic children.

00:20:42.800 It's not really helpful to kids who have a good home environment already.

00:20:46.780 Which is fascinating to me.

00:20:51.420 Poor Malcolm.

00:20:52.080 You've been up since 2 a.m.

00:20:53.480 You haven't had a nap.

00:20:54.420 You've been entertaining your dad and the kids today.

00:20:58.120 Yeah.

00:20:58.560 Doing work.

00:20:59.260 Calling the IRS for our businesses.

00:21:01.120 Thank you.

00:21:02.180 I appreciate the appreciation, but you're going in to give birth tomorrow, so, you know, which one of us deserves a gold star here?

00:21:10.280 I don't know.

00:21:10.740 When they immobilize you and put you on a table, we're not going to do anything.

00:21:13.960 The question I have is, how do you make a situation like this realistic for your average person?

00:21:18.580 I would say a couple things.

00:21:20.040 One is, you need to be willing to work with people who are very culturally different from you.

00:21:26.100 Like, the people who we are working with to do this are not of the similar socioeconomic background or similar socioeconomic status to us.

00:21:34.020 I'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.

00:21:43.800 And that's okay, because what we do share is they're expecting their first kid later this month.

00:21:49.460 I'm having our fourth kid.

00:21:50.380 Like, 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.

00:22:00.700 Yeah.

00:22:01.200 And I'd say that this is the key thing.

00:22:04.000 You need somebody who is going to actually appreciate the help you are giving them.

00:22:09.400 And you need to actually appreciate the help they're giving you.

00:22:12.140 Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't do one of those two things.

00:22:16.440 They either see it as transactional, which removes the utility in how something like this can be structured, or they commodify it in some way.

00:22:25.060 And that's something we've been very careful not to do.

00:22:27.280 That's something that we saw.

00:22:28.480 And I guess you even experienced yourself being largely raised by babysitters and nannies as a kid.

00:22:34.220 And 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.

00:22:45.080 Because 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.

00:22:56.920 Yeah.

00:22:57.560 Didn't you have one called the enforcer, or was that what you called your dog?

00:23:01.100 No, my mom called one the enforcer, yeah.

00:23:05.160 Okay. 0.92

00:23:06.320 But anyway, I called your dog the hallucinator.

00:23:08.300 Get the hallucinator.

00:23:09.140 No, yeah, no.

00:23:09.740 So I think with a lot of these, yeah, it's something I wonder about, because I've noticed that I think was in women particularly. 0.99

00:23:16.940 Yeah.

00:23:17.140 Some women seem to have a psychological profile where they, to an extent, get off on being really cruel to kids. 1.00

00:23:25.100 And this is something I've just seen both in terms of teachers.

00:23:28.240 I've seen this in terms of, I was recently watching the eight passengers situation. 0.93

00:23:32.600 And the woman who clearly, like, what?

00:23:36.720 The therapist or the mother?

00:23:37.860 The therapist.

00:23:38.660 Clearly got off on being cruel to kids.

00:23:41.940 And it's something that I think appears in women much more than it appears in men.

00:23:45.700 No, I didn't have that many, I didn't have any severe cases of this growing up.

00:23:49.740 Like, I wasn't, like, traumatized by this or something.

00:23:51.580 But I definitely say that something about that psychological profile seems to disproportionately sort these individuals into paid childcare roles outside of the school system.

00:24:05.040 That makes sense, because there's less oversight.

00:24:07.980 Yeah.

00:24:08.900 Yeah.

00:24:09.180 I think that this is, this can be more toxic than people realize.

00:24:13.020 And 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.

00:24:27.060 Even 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.

00:24:33.880 Oh, no.

00:24:34.340 And we've been, let's be honest, we've been trying since before our first son was born.

00:24:41.060 There 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.

00:24:53.420 And then there was another one who we bought a fight for. 0.99

00:24:57.800 And 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.

00:25:04.020 This is what we talk about, the entitlement of Gen Alpha.

00:25:07.880 That was so bad.

00:25:09.220 It was so bad.

00:25:11.180 Oh, and then we've had a bunch of, a bunch, so many failures.

00:25:14.020 But here's the thing, even on the side of daycare, it was terrible.

00:25:17.780 And 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.

00:25:27.960 Like, they would shut down classrooms.

00:25:31.360 They were understaffed.

00:25:32.920 So they would sometimes rotate people between classrooms and be like, nope, sorry.

00:25:36.580 Understaffed today, sorry.

00:25:38.300 Yeah, your kid can't come in.

00:25:39.820 And so we're still paying for all that.

00:25:42.100 And 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.

00:25:54.680 That was taken away.

00:25:56.020 So you'll be away for one, two weeks on vacation.

00:25:58.460 You're still paying for full-time daycare during that time. 0.97

00:26:00.820 That really sucks.

00:26:02.200 And then they would send our kids home at the drop of a hat. 0.99

00:26:05.540 Not just because they were like, oh, it's too hard.

00:26:08.060 Yeah, they'd frequently be like, oh, he's just too hyper today.

00:26:12.280 I'm like, well, that's why he's not home.

00:26:15.680 On the days where he's not hyper, he can stay home.

00:26:18.820 Yeah.

00:26:20.160 Yeah.

00:26:20.640 Or they'd be like, he had a bug bite and I'm worried about it.

00:26:24.020 And so we're going to send him home.

00:26:25.120 There were also the times where they were actually sick because, of course, they got the sickness from daycare where they'd be sent home.

00:26:31.500 And it made us so angry because we're like, why is he sick?

00:26:34.320 Obviously, thanks to you.

00:26:35.780 So keep him, all right?

00:26:36.900 You're the incubus of viral plague, not us.

00:26:40.420 So realistically, where do people find individuals like this who they can work with without their families?

00:26:45.560 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:26:47.200 I think they need to find people early in their careers or at transition points that they can help move to the next stage of their career.

00:26:53.700 Well, yeah.

00:26:54.520 If 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.

00:27:03.900 I 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.

00:27:20.940 Then it's with this one.

00:27:21.660 So 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.

00:27:27.760 You just have to rotate.

00:27:28.760 So proximity is really important as well.

00:27:31.240 I 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.

00:27:46.380 And I think that's underrated.

00:27:49.120 Anything that we did through care.com, anything that we did through Craigslist, anything that we did online, which is how we do everything.

00:27:55.120 Yeah, was not good.

00:27:57.460 And I think that might have larger implications.

00:27:59.500 This is a totally different podcast subject in terms of community building and how people can form relationships that actually lead to.

00:28:08.940 This is a problem when people community build, they try to community build with peers, individuals who are near or close equivalents to them.

00:28:18.680 This is the worst group you can community build with because there is no arbitrage in terms of community exchanges.

00:28:27.920 So you consider something like our neighbors.

00:28:29.900 We can do things like help put together their companies, help with their tax filings, help with marketing.

00:28:34.740 And they can do things like change our oil, for example, take care of our kids, fix our car when it breaks. 0.66

00:28:40.800 These 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.

00:28:53.940 But this is something that is allowed because our backgrounds are so different.

00:28:58.320 And 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.

00:29:19.900 Totally.

00:29:21.340 I think that's solid advice.

00:29:22.480 Get 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.

00:29:39.680 Yeah.

00:29:39.960 But anyway, daycare, not so great.

00:29:43.480 Not so great.

00:29:44.900 Anyway, love you.

00:29:46.000 I love you too.

Based Camp - July 02, 2024

Just how Bad is Daycare？ A Chilling Case Study & Literature Review

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