My family regularly takes long trips up and down the east coast of the US. It takes us about 6 hours just to travel through Florida. We have several kids between the ages of 1 & 7 and we’ve got it down to a pretty good science. Here’s some great advice for travelling with children. A lot of it is OK advice if you cherry pick, but together their benefits compound.
1) Depart Early
It doesn’t matter if it’s a 3 hour trip or a two day trip. To us, ‘early’ means that our target departure time is 5 AM, but ‘early’ may mean something different for you and yours. Benefits include:
Kids may remain or resume sleeping for the first portion of the travel. That’s time that they are occupied.
Earlier arrival at your destination gives kids time to burn off some energy and adults time to decompress. For multi-day trips, we like to stop at a hotel that has a pool.
2) Carry-on Backpacks
Just as you would have a small personal item on an airplane, such as a purse, give each child a backpack that contains car-ride content (make sure that they put away one thing before beginning the next). Maybe ensure that each kid has a different color. This puts their stimulation in their own hands. The idea is not to avoid interacting with your kids. The idea is to help them take care of themselves. Here’s what to include:
Everyone feels like we throw away too much stuff. One small way to help is to try to find someone who can use the items before you toss them.
I’m happy to say that one of my economic ideas got to the policy implementation stage. I was staring at the Scout gear my son had grown out of and dreading the thought of throwing it away. I could donate it to Good Will, but I thought that the chances it would get to someone who wants it are very low. What parent wants exactly that stuff? So, I emailed our Pack leader and asked if we could start doing a gear swap.
Parents can bring any scout-related items that they do not want anymore to a pack meeting. It is organized on one table with clear information. Anyone can take anything for free if they can use it and store it.
This works better than posting to internet Buy Nothing groups because the scout parents are right there. No one has to drive across town for a “porch pick up.”
More sports teams or clubs should do this. Seize the moments when like-minded people are already together in one place.
Today I will write about something I care deeply about: the wellbeing of the moms of young children.
I can remember having a child enrolled in preschool. It was expensive but it was worth it, for us. What follows will be most relevant to readers who are working full-time and have children enrolled in full-time daycare/preschool. That is not the right choice for every family. If it’s the choice you made, then read on.
Do less for preschool. Save your energy and money for the years when your child will actually remember.
Henrik Karlsson read lots of biographies of geniuses and tried to sum up the things their childhoods had in common here. Some highlights:
At least two-thirds of my sample was home-educated (most commonly until about age 12), tutored by parents or governesses and tutors. The rest of my sample had been educated in schools (most commonly Jesuit schools).
As children, they were integrated with exceptional adults—and were taken seriously by them.
They had time to roam about and relied heavily on self-directed learning
A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.
They were heavily tutored 1-on-1
An important factor to acknowledge is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted.
There is lots of discussion of John Stuart Mill and John Von Neumann, who each had major contributions to economics:
When they were done, James Mill took his son’s notes and polished them into the book Elements of Political Economy. It was published the year John Stuart turned fifteen….
There is a moving scene in John Stuart Mill’s biography, when John Stuart is about to set out into the world and his father for the first time lets him know that his education had been . . . a bit particular. He would discover that others his age did not know as much as he did. But, his father said, he mustn’t feel proud about that. He’d just been lucky.
Let’s make more people lucky.
Other nice posts along similar lines are Erik Hoel’s “How Geniuses Used to Be Raised” (linked in Karlsson’s piece), and Scott Alexander’s review of Laszlo Polgar’s book “Raise a Genius” (about raising his 3 daughters to be chess grandmasters). Karlsson’s post, worth reading in full, is here.
We put my daughter on a waitlist for the daycare her siblings attended when she was one month old. Fourteen months later, she is still waiting, and we are looking around for other options. Almost every daycare I contact is full, with many saying their waitlists run into 2025.
This sounds like a classic shortage: demand exceeds supply at prevailing prices. But I am puzzled by such a shortage in the absence of price controls. Why don’t these daycares simply raise prices enough to eliminate their waitlists?
Theories:
The kind of person who runs a daycare is not inclined to act as a ruthlessly efficient profit maximizer. This probably explains some of it, but some of the daycares are literally publicly traded for-profit corporations, and they still have big waitlists.
Daycares deliberately underprice infant care as a loss leader to sell care to older kids. Sure, they could raise prices for infants and make more money today, but they want to make sure their preschool stays full down the road, and the easy way to do that is to keep infants as they age.
This is a temporary dislocation due to Covid. Demand fell off during Covid, some centers closed, then demand came back and the remaining centers are full. Perhaps opening a new center would be a good business, but regulation is slowing this down, or people just haven’t realized the opportunity yet.
I think there is something to each of these, but I still feel puzzled, especially since the most expensive locations seem to have the longest waits (at least here in Rhode Island). I can’t come up with a definite answer without lots more data on prices, waitlist sizes, entry, and exit. But I’d love to hear your theories.
Why do Americans eat a lot of junk food? Because it’s the easy way out.
Unhappy? Open a candy bar. You’ll feel happy again in seconds. Kid crying? Hand them a fun-sized candy bar. They will be quiet.
If you are struggling with paying bills or health (I know, the health one is ironic here), then you’ll tend to reach for anything that is fast and easy to deal with immediate problems.
For me, I decided to wait until my semester is over, so I won’t be attempting this while teaching or traveling. A 40-day sugar fast for the whole family technically began on May 1, but the grocery shopping changed earlier. The idea was to eat down junk and not buy new for over a week.
Forty days isn’t much in the big scheme. The idea is to make a deposit on health. Possibly, I’ll break a mild sugar addiction to the point where the body doesn’t expect it so much. Maybe something that we end up doing to meet this artifactual goal will end up getting into the routine on a regular part of the year when there is more travel and work. Part of the problem I identify is that there are points throughout the day where people feel unhappy. If sugar is on hand, then there is a tendency to reach for it. Part of what I’m going to do is insert more healthy food and activities, but of course that is a lot more work. If it’s just not there, people barely miss it.
I’m already so much happier at home. There is barely any sugary junk food left in the house. Now if the kids circulate the kitchen, I don’t have to stress out and yell at them to not eat cookies before dinner or whatnot.
Internet: So, you’re going to meal plan and not eat dessert for a month? This was worth telling everyone?
Me: I’ve been thinking about it constantly since Christmas.
Internet: Wasn’t this the site where we get more optimistic about the world?
Me: There are some things I read about and decided against. I will not worry about sugar in sauces (e.g. Chicken teriyaki bowl). I will not cut out bread or pasta. There is a sliding scale of how healthy you can be and how much time you are willing to put in. I have decided on a level of effort and a fixed amount of time. I’m not even going to turn down cookies if they are offered to us for free. The most important thing is to stop buying junk from the grocery store. It’s financially very cheap, but actually very costly.
P.S. It’s a small step toward getting my personal chef, but I saw an ad for Walmart “emeals” which is more intelligent grocery delivery plus recipes. I haven’t tried it myself, but it seemed like an update on What the Superintelligence Can Do For Us. When I have the equivalent of “former restaurateur, Frances,” in my house, then I just won’t need anything else and innovation can stop there, thanks.
There were not a lot of successful female writers and academics in the 1970’s. Maybe I underestimate how many there were, but obviously they would have been in the minority. I’m reading a chapter on the anthropologist Mary Douglas who somehow combined raising three children with remaining active in academia. I read a few pages while helping at the Cub Scout camping trip.
In one of her books, Douglas added an apology for professional duties eclipsing domestic ones: ‘All our things have fallen into neglect while I have been writing, floors unpolished, curtains falling off hooks. I am grateful to my family for their patience.’
page 130 of The Slain God by Timothy Larsen
It is irksome to hear this woman apologizing for working what is essentially two jobs and performing so well at each one. (I wouldn’t want to put anyone off reading Larsen, who admires her very much.)
I had planned to do this a year ago, but then I ended up writing papers on artificial intelligence and doing a bunch of related speaking engagements. (I love it – anyone who wants a speaker on ChatGPT should invite me out.) Anyway, I’m going to try to do the equivalent of fixing the “curtains falling off hooks.” The curtains really do fall down. You could have a well-functioning household and drawers full of clothes that fit your children… and then if someone is not engaged in constant warfare… it will all fall apart in about 6 months.
What’s the connection between social media use and mental health, especially among young people? You’ve probably heard a lot about this recently, in the media, by politicians, and among friends chatting about their kids. Lots of assertions are made, but there is also a bit of research on this topic. As someone who frequently uses social media myself, as well as a parent of young children, and a teacher that works every week with young college students, I am particularly interested in this topic.
Jonathan Haidt and various co-authors have been trying to catalog all the research on the topic and figure out if there is a connection between the decline in teenage mental health and the rise of social media use. Haidt also has a new book on this topic, as well as the decline of “free play” among kids, which I have not yet read but I’ve looked through his documents that contain all of the underlying and summaries of the research he is citing. I’ll read the book soon, as I’m certainly part of the intended audience (see the last sentence of the above paragraph). And while this research is very much outside of my area of expertise, my training as an economist has taught me how to read academic papers and to be convinced by evidence, so once again I’m very much the intended audience on this score as well.
Please read this post as my attempt to understand the evidence and start to form conclusions and/or critique what Haidt is saying. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll write more as I read and think more about it.
Surely you have heard by now that a solar eclipse is coming. As the April 8 date approaches, the media/social media coverage will likely rise to a roar. I think we all know that the experience of being in the path of a total solar eclipse is eerie and memorable – – birds and insects can fall silent as night-like darkness falls, and a noticeable chill may be felt in the air.
Maps abound of the eclipse path across North America. For the U.S., it starts in Texas around 1:30 Central time, traverses southern Indiana and northern Ohio around 3:10 Eastern and ends in northern Maine about 3:30. Here is a snip I took from this NASA map, where I zoomed in the Midwest/Northeast section, and traced in red the lines of 90% totality:
If you really want the 100% experience, and if you want it to last the full four minutes, you must be in a relatively narrow strip. And if you want to have good chance of not having clouds obscure the fun, you may need to fly to central Texas. Buffalo, New York is in the middle of the eclipse path, but it is a notoriously overcast place.
But lots of folks, including residents of Chicago, Toronto, and the Boston-Washington corridor, live within the zone of (nearly) 90% totality, where you can see the moon sliding across most of the sun’s disk over the course of a few minutes, and experience significant darkening. The next solar eclipse to touch the U.S. will not be until 2044, and that will be barely visible from three less-populated states, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
So, I suggest you take the opportunity to enjoy this one to the max. This absolutely entails using special glasses with filters designed for safe viewing of the sun. Do not even think of looking at the sun without such glasses, and be alert lest children pick up the wrong cues and try to look at the sun.
The good news is that eclipse glasses are still available. I ordered some from Amazon a couple days ago that arrived two days later, and I saw them for sale in Lowe’s today. I got some extra to share with random friends and strangers. This can be a great chance to interact with neighbors and children.
The price per pair of glasses varies a lot, so do comparison shop. I look for ones that say “CE and ISO Certified” like these. Be safe and have fun!
Elementary school kids can miss a day of school. If they are doing something wholesome and constructive on their day off, no one would claim that it hurts the child who is doing the alternate activity.
Does it hurt other people? There is an ungated section of this Matt Yglesias post concluding that when rich people pull their kids out of school it “… ultimately harms less-privileged children.” For now, assume that is true. We could internalize the externality, like surge pricing on toll roads. Let parents pay a fine to take their kids out of school. The fine would fund programs that help everyone. Let parents pay back into the public good. Charge $25/day which could go toward buying classroom supplies for the inconvenienced teacher.
This flexibility might lead to richer families keeping their kids in conventional schools, which seems like a good thing. No one would have to pay the fine. There is and would still be a system for excusing absences due to unavoidable things like surgery.
Requiring a doctor’s note for excused absences is already a tax. Requiring a parent to miss half a day of work to go take a child to the doctor is more punishing than paying a $25 fine, for many families.
The fine could even increase with the number of missed days. Only super rich families would be able to afford to take 2 children on a 3-week trip. I wouldn’t be able to afford it. But I wouldn’t mind if our school generated revenue off of those who can. Those people would probably donate a new playground in exchange for a plaque.
Is another example where it would be reasonable to charge people to not use something? In a way, insurance companies try to fine people for not using the gym. Running with this example, paid private schools could easily call this a tuition reimbursement for high attendance. Unfortunately, I think it would be politically impossible to implement in public schools.
Economist Writing Every Day 
