Low Effort Parenting is Pronatalist (& Random Chat)

Malcolm and Simone discuss how AI and robots will transform childcare and parenting in the coming decades. They talk about existing kid-focused AIs like the doll that talks to children. They also cover how future home assistant AIs could help watch kids, allowing for more low-effort parenting styles.

Other topics include:

* Dollar store gifts & low-cost approaches to birthdays and holidays

* The dangers of helicopter parenting and benefits of giving kids independence

* Financial and lifestyle changes needed to have more kids

* Grimes' social media promoting AI for kids

* Funny stories of reckless college escapades at St Andrews

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] but I'm thinking, you know, in 20 years, I imagine we will have AI avatars, i. e. robots that are in your basically AI slaves that live in your house. That help with like parenting and stuff like that. Well,

Simone Collins: there's already one for kids.

There's like the, this, it's, it looks kind of like a doll and it's an AI that talks to your kid.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: By the way, we're at 1 0 5 now 1 0 5. What? Oh followers. 9,000 1 0 5.

Getting close to that 10 K number.

Simone Collins: Oh, gosh. Yeah. I'm excited about that. Well, okay. As, as a, when you were younger or even like when we first met. Did you think you were going to be a high effort or a low effort parent?

Malcolm Collins: Interesting. It never occurred to me. You

Simone Collins: didn't think about how you were going to approach things.

You just knew you were going to have a lot of kids.

Malcolm Collins: I kind of always thought I'd be super rich and super successful in like a major world figure. [00:01:00] So it never occurred to me.

Simone Collins: Because what, you would just have somebody else raise your kids?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If I needed to. Yeah. It never occurred to me growing up that I would be in any way constrained in anything I did as an adult.

Simone Collins: That's actually, that's actually really interesting. Because I think that you. And I I think you more by temperament are a low effort parent. Like you just, you outsource as a sort of natural part of your management of any project. You know, you're not about putting in maximum effort, performative, or otherwise you try to do things elegantly and efficiently.

And I admire that deeply. And so you never would naturally be a high effort parent, but I think that if you were really wealthy and you did have nothing but like nannies, like one nanny for each kid and like a lot of people on them, those kids would experience a high effort parenting. growing up, meaning that there would be someone [00:02:00] micromanaging and helicopter parenting them all the time.

Why? Even if you tell a nanny or a babysitter or whatever to like, Hey, be hands off, you know, let them make their own mistakes. It's okay. If they fall down, like, you know, don't make a big deal out of everything. They know that they will be fired or they will be. Well, and this

Malcolm Collins: is something that we've seen was a lot of the wealthy parents that we know, and it's a big problem that they have with child rearing is when they create environments where they have somebody else like living in their house and helping raise their kids, especially if they have multiple people who can sort of watch each other to an extent.

These people are almost sort of forced to overindulge the child. Because it, you know, it's quite one thing to say, Oh, I won't give into a child's tantrum, but when you know, the mom is looking at you and seeing this child just like absolutely destroyed, it can be really hard to not do anything about it.

Or the

Simone Collins: kid makes a mess and you're like, Hey, you know, Jimmy clean up the mess. And Jimmy doesn't clean up [00:03:00] the mess. And then, you know, you, you try to make a big thing about it. And then, you know, the parents come in and the house is a complete wreck. And. The kids are having a tantrum. You're going to look really bad as the nanny, you know?

And so we've seen this happen. We're like, okay, they're just now they're cleaning everything up for the kids. Now the kids are getting super spoiled and entitled. And they're also being watched at every second. Again, I also like, we say this to babysitters all the time. Like, you know, our kids get bumps and bruises.

Like they fall down, they rough house, like this happens. But they do not want to be the kind of babysitter or nanny that returns. That it sees the parents return and like the kid is a black guy, you know, like you're not going to get hired again. And, and even we would probably be like, Oh, what happened here?

You know, like, this is not great. Actually we're pretty chill about that. We understand because we know how rambunctious our kids are. But yeah, no, so, so I think that's really, that's an interesting observation here just specifically that. Even low effort style parents who like know better or parents who understand that a helicopter parenting or coddling a child is really [00:04:00] damaging if they choose to pay other people to raise their kids, or they send their kids to a public school, a private school, daycare, et cetera.

I think

Malcolm Collins: daycare and public and private school are quite different. So, one study that people may not be familiar with is typically the kids who get sent to like, kindergarten earlier. They did a great, like, controlled study on this recently because they couldn't take all the kids into this like state paid kindergarten program.

The kids who got in actually did much worse in terms of their academics, long term, their emotional development long term. And even though the stereotype is homeschooled kids do worse socially than non homeschooled kids. The reality is that if you look at the meta studies on this, while you'll get things on both sides of the line, the majority seem to trend towards homeschool kids, have better social skills than non homeschooled kids and better leadership skills and better emotional control.

And this is because they learn their social, socialization from watching adults, whereas the rest of the kids learn their social abilities from like this weird [00:05:00] Lord of the Flies situation in this evil bureaucracy you've thrown them into. I mean, our school system in most of the world is this weird Totalitarian bureaucracy.

You have to like live a portion of your life under like, almost like living in a prison system. It is absolutely bizarre that we think that this would have positive social emotional outcomes.

Simone Collins: Well, and, and the kids are also in a highly regimented environment because they have to be to like make everything work and they are being micromanaged a lot more.

And there are a lot more like sort of strict rules and like, here's how it's going to go. And I'm going to watch you and I'm going to tell you what to do

Malcolm Collins: again. Yeah. I mean, in public school these days, you have very low student to teacher ratios. I think

Simone Collins: that most Yeah, but there's still I'm sorry, you never went to public school.

Your classes were like I did go to public

Malcolm Collins: school. 15 kids. And most of the pressure on kids to behave in certain ways within public school comes from their peer group, not from adults.

Simone Collins: No, I totally disagree. In a classroom environment, you've got, you know, 31 kids [00:06