Rational Parenting?

Bryan Caplan has a newish book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. The core argument is that people overestimate what they can do as parents, and so they enjoy parenting much less (and their children enjoy childhood much less) than they otherwise would.

The evidence for this is that twin studies reveal very small or nonexistent parenting effects for important life outcomes. People have a hard time accepting this. A lot of the activities parents force on their kids are actually about status maneuvering within the parents' peer group.

Something I've had to do is tell my son that lots of other people don't care about being rational and so he shouldn't always expect to be able to convince his classmates that he's right because he's provided a good argument. I did this after hearing my son getting in an argument with another child over the value of a pawn, with the other kid insisting that the pawn had zero value. My son was upset that the other kid wasn't responding to his arguments.

You don't want to teach your kids rationality skills, have them apply these skills when interacting with classmates and then realize that their classmates don't respond well to them. It's best, I think, to let your kids know that they should always be rational with you, that they are more likely to convince you to do something if they make rational arguments, that being rational gives them special powers in understanding the world, and that later in life there will be huge payoffs from them being rational.

Previously on this topic: On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists, On Juvenile Fiction, Study: Encouraging Obedience Considered Harmful.

From what I've read, it seems like the most important thing is making rationalist thought something the child genuinely enjoys. Giving them various rationalist exercises to do, for instance, is not very useful if they're not sufficiently motivated to continue with them by the time they're no longer living with you.

You could also try to instill a habit. The following is an anecdote from a self-help book so the source isn't the most reliable in the world, but it sounds plausible:

One of the things that is great about Leo is his continued persistence in asking himself a question that his father instilled in him when from the time he was a little boy. Each day at the dinner table, his father would ask, "Leo, what have you learned today?" Leo had to have an answer, and a quality one. If he hadn't learned something really interesting in school that day, he would run and get the encyclopedia to study something that he could share. He says that to this day he won't go to bed until he's learned something new that's of value. As a result he's constantly stimulating his mind, and a great deal of his passion and love for learning has come from this question, asked repeatedly, begun decades ago.

I have a mostly-inactive blog called "The Rational Parent" where I occasionally take notes when I'm researching parenting.

Raising them to share "rationalist thought" seems hard. Nearly everything I can think of seems to have a real risk of ending up being either password guessing or raising an overly enthusiastic contrarian.

The single most important lesson of rationality that I think a child can grasp intuitively through experience seems to be "beliefs should pay rent". But constructing lessons, engineering situations, setting an appropriate example and most importantly finding a peer network to reinforce this, appears to be... a difficult undertaking.

From a post on a child philosophy forum: "When she decides to leave her homework or other task for tomorrow, sometimes I tell her that "today Sophie" is not being nice for "tomorrow Sophie", leaving all that work for her."

My estimation is that if you are concerned enough, about how to parent in a rational way, to seek out advice, you are more likley than not already hitting diminishing returns on more intensive investments & involvement.

Troll answer: http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/

Serious answer: I would suggest taking a leaf from the HP:MoR fanfiction and exposing children to Feynman, hard sci-fi, Flatland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Godel, Escher, Bach, and some of the better popular science books. Of course, instilling a love of reading is a good way to get children to want to read those in the first place, so you may want to broaden the reading selection with some other (not directly related to rationality) books.

To the first part of your question, I feel as though trying to derive from first principles a correct response would be beyond my abilities. Perhaps simply taking care to not patronize children would be a good start, as well as making sure to send a consistent message vis-a-vis punishments and objectives?

Anyone else have ideas? I feel as though anything else I say would just be regurgitating cached deep wisdom.

(Edited for stupidity/typos).

raising a child who shares rationalist thought

Children tend to take on the values of their parents... Just living the "rationalist thought" value around your children will go most of the way to your goal.

What is really hard, IMHO, is raising children with values far different from the values their parents demonstrate. You may like tidiness, but not like cleaning up. Your kids will be probably messy too, no matter how much you want them to be tidy. They may also develop hypocritical tendencies...

You could try Dale McGowan's blog, or his books Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers.

I haven't read it, and suspect it might be of limited practical value, but it's on topic and probably of interest to the LW crowd: Parentonomics. It's an economist's account of raising his first child.

I have found Strategy of Conflict remarkably applicable to dealing with a toddler. And humans in general.

Also, small children are ruthless manipulators, for fairly obvious evolutionary reasons. You'll have plenty of material to sharpen your own rationality.

I'm currently trying to interest my daughter (just turned four) in reading. "You'll get all the stories!" It's easier and provides better entertainment value to get me or Mum to do the reading, though. But the Peter and Jane books are proving useful in getting her to read. Alphablocks and Sesame Street also actually work to teach kids the letters of the alphabet.

I liked this on letting kids develop self-sufficiency.

I'd think if you value / reward honesty and being reality-based, everything else should fall out of that. But mine are still too young to tell.

Science@home has some nice resources for science with very young kids.

Thanks all for the comments. I didn't actually mean to post this yet (my first original post). I thought I had saved it as a draft and was coming back to flesh it out...and there it was with comments and all.

Despite (or because of??) the terseness of my original post, I received many excellent upvotable replies.

I was going to expound a little more on the two points.

How do I go about defining and achieving realistic goals of parenting? This is the bigger question of the two since I feel more at sea with my 5 year old (also have a 2 year old, who's much "easier"). Some of the resources listed look like good places to start.

How do I encourage my children have a rationalistic worldview? That's something I'm more comfortable with but not really sure if I'm doing a great job.

Anyway, thanks again.