Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners

I have done both things with my boys. 

My kids like sleeping in the living room - but often don't clean up in the morning. I used a bond for that and it worked. In a family conference, we later decided on a ban to not sleep in the living room for a week if it is not cleaned up but that was not my preferred way. 

I also often require a bond if the kids want to borrow money or something but e.g. have open dues. 

I bet with them quite often and they bet among themselves - including nonequal odds. I win more often than not and they learned from that. I once did lose 50 EUR at 10:1 odds to my oldest son because I was very confident about one of our house rules but it turned out my wife had changed it shortly before. With the smaller boys, I require that they do the bet in front of an arbiter and I may limit the amount they bet.

We also play Bluff, Yahtzee, and other board games with dice and I guess that also helps with an understanding of probability. 

Kind of related to that: A fun game is "random walks": Talk a walk and at every corner throw a die and continue into the randomly chosen direction. Repeat as desired. Can lead to interesting places especially in parks.

This is an awesome idea! i really love your parenting posts and I'm not even close to that stage in life, you're doing something very much right :)

p.s - Somewhat related, when i was little i used to offer my mom bets all the time, but she was already used to losing bets with my older brothers so she never took any of them (i still find myself wanting to offer her bets sometimes, but she doesn't see bets the same way rationalists do).

Curated.

This is my second "jefftk parenting post" that I've curated. Last time [LW · GW], I cited some reasons this seemed relevant:

I think there is actually something fairly important about the topic of raising kids, which is relevant to more common LessWrong themes. First, there is a sense in which raising a family is one of the core things humanity is about. Many LW folk don't seem to have kids, and part of me is worried that all our philosophy and strategy is sort of missing something important if we don't have a background sense of "what raising kids is like" subtly informing our judgments.

There is also a sense in which this post is about "how to raise an agent", which I think ties pretty directly into core LW themes. I felt like reading the article fit into my overall worldview that includes robust agents and rationality and learning to think independently. (I think this effect was weaker than the previous “why artists study anatomy” curation, but similar in type)

This time, I'm much more explicitly excited about how the second point ties into core LessWrong themes. I'm interested in both how coordination schemes work when children interact with them, and the prospect of teaching good habits on how to think probabilistically.

wow this is so cute

Interesting discussion on the repost on FB by Kaj.

I think this is an awesome parenting strategy, especially with the "posting bond" idea :) One question I have about the "bee bet" is whether you'd shared your explanation for why there wouldn't be any bees with her before you offered to bet?

The only real concern I'd have about betting is if it became a way to circumvent having to actually teach them about the world. Bets make the most sense to me when they're either fun for their own sake, or to add stakes to a dispute that we've already tried hard to resolve through argument and study.

I have tried something similar but not with money (I find my kids aren't very motivated by money - not sure why). In our case the losing party usually has to formally acknowledge the victor with some silly phrase - "Dad is an amazing human / genius" or "Mark is a pro and I'm a noob". This doesn't allow for different odds (maybe I could tailor different phrases to achieve this?) although I will sometimes offer it without them being held to anything if I am sufficiently confident.

I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money

I was worried about this too but similarly haven't actually experienced it - I don't think my kids have the willpower / concentration to keep this up for long enough!

So you...sold insurance to your daughter? That's kind of awesome. She's going to be a savvy consumer of financial instruments.

As I said in my original comment here, I'm not a parent, so I didn't get a chance to try this. But now I work at a kindergarten, and was reminded of this post by the review process, so I can actually try it! Expect another review after I do :)

I wish I'd had this idea when my kids were young. I had a lot of trouble interesting them in money, as they rightly pointed out that they knew I would see to their needs. I think it would have helped them understand about the value of money as well as whatever else we were addressing. They would have been motivated by the opportunity to demonstrate that they were right. [In their mid-late 20's, they are both much smarter about money than I ever was or will be; not sure exactly how that happened]. 

This does remind me, though, of how useful data and actuarial principles can be for dealing with rationally inclined children. A close family friend died unexpectedly of an aneurysm at age 44. My budding Rationalist daughter was 7 at the time, and already filled with existential dread. Less than a year later, a 37-year-old teacher's aide at her elementary school died in the same way. She was afraid to let me sleep. She was sure I wasn't going to wake up because this thing that kept happening around her was certain to happen to me. So I found some data and helped her calculate the chance that I, too, was going to succumb to an aneurysm. She could see how tiny the number was, and that soothed her.  Aside from this daughter, we were not a very math-oriented family, but that was clearly the way to help her come to terms with what looked like a terrible trend but wasn't. 

This is an excellent post. I have been doing bets with my 4y old daughter already as well (and I am following your projects for a quite some time already)!

I've appreciated your parenting posts, thank you for sharing. Curious if you can share any resources you've found helpful for raising kids? Anything helps, as you seem to be creative in this department.

Aren't you afraid that this might backfire in some way? They seem to be rather trusting of your bets, so later on they might become too trusting when it comes to betting larger amounts of money. They might be tricked into taking on a bet that's too much in favor of the opposite side, because they learned from you that they could trust willingness to bet, even though that might not translate to other people.

Honestly... parenting goals!

This is adorable.

I've been making bets with my just-turned-5yo for about a year now to put a stop to arguments. I wholeheartedly endorse using bonds as well, and I intend to do so, though I wouldn't have thought of it on my own (having never really been exposed to the concept before). Thanks for that!

What other financial tools can we adapt in this way?

Yes! Bets – and even just 'modeling' owning-up to being wrong – are wonderful tools, especially for children (as they haven't learned that most people avoid them).

This 'area' came up (in my mind) most recently in a disagreement about something my child was taught in school. We didn't bet tho and the outcome turned out to neither fully support either 'side' – but that's a good opportunity too for learning about disagreement and updating on new evidence.

I haven't yet spotted an opportunity for using 'bonds' but now I'll look for them even more vigorously!

I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money, or say they are having a bad time and they are actually not, but this isn't something we've run into.

I've run into this – in 'pre-bet' circumstances – but it seemed easy enough to 'strategically dissuade' by expressing skepticism of their sentiments; that's resulted in honest confessions the few times it's come up.

I like this a lot. Most of life's decisions are about managing risk, and the bond strategy both teaches the kid and gives some peace of mind to the parent. There's nothing inherently about wagering, either. Harm only happens when wagering habitually against bad odds; the younger they learn how to calculate their advantage, the better.

I am curious about how you introduced money to your kids? Do you have some "framework" for that? I did a small research and didn't end up with any really novel ideas (I am happy to share my findings and conclusions, but it's a fairly small page in roam).

Basically, what I want to do with my daughter:

• give her an opportunity to earn money by doing age-appropriate jobs (helping me to clean the kitchen), but not for things that she's expected to do for "reasonable reasons", such as cleaning her toys in common areas, rather lower allowance (but some)
• make it clear that she can make more by doing more elaborate stuff (for which she might have to learn a few things first - happy to help), encourage her to come up with new ideas by herself (entrepreneurship!)
• introduce saving mechanism, e.g. giving her interest for money she's gonna put into my pocket
• she can make more by betting and bonds as per your posts
• she can do what she wants with her money (as long as it's safe, but can't really think about anything I would consider "forbidden"), let her do mistakes

I checked the marginal revolution repost and saw a few things that could go wrong...

Any other ideas?

Super awesome that your parenting style actually gives your children agency! Not that I'm a parent, but not belittling or not respecting that children can make informed, rational decisions is something we as a society do all the time and we need to strive to do better:)

I'm curious how you've taught them to value money such that this works?