We have loved and appreciated Beast Academy and Science Mom. Our oldest is about to move into the AOPs books whenever he finishes Beast Academy level 5 (sometime this year).
Some other resources that are great:
I don’t use Julia Bogarts’ courses or curricula (yet?) but I loved her book “Help My Kid Hates Writing”.
Every game put out by Math for Love (store on Amazon) is amazing.
I absolutely love Denise Gaskins’ philosophy of teaching math. Her book, Let’s Play Math, changed how I think about the topic.
Reading the Writing Revolution was also super helpful to me for one of my writing-resistant kids.
For teaching typing fluency the video game Epistory was great (recommend using a program to teach correct touch typing format first: there are many out there).
These are great! We're towards the beginning of BA5 now, but I have the sense that the transition from the fun cartoon presentation to the formal math textbook presentation of AOPS might not work well for us... I've been looking at Algebra Lab Gear, and the Arbor Center series (Jousting Armadillos, etc.) though I'm not sure how much overlap there is with BA.
When did you introduce typing? We haven't yet crossed that bridge!
Oh … also can’t forget the Mark Rober videos (so great on YouTube) and his monthly crate box for engineering … my kids love those. Also DuoLingo and letting them watch cartoons in the language they’re learning with English subtitles on.
Alas I can’t stop … the book series “Murderous Maths” is amazing. We’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of “The Cartoon History of the Universe.” The other books in the series are great also (my oldest loves The Cartoon History of Chemistry) but be warned that they are challenging and maybe best suited for slightly older kids.
How much social time does he get from other people his age, or a few years younger and older? That seems like a difficulty of being outside the school system.
On resources, I love PBS Eons - it’s a paleontology YouTube series that does a good job of not just stating facts, but also how we know about them and what questions remain. I haven’t seen how well it goes over with younger people though.
re: socialization, you need to explicitly plan for it, but I guess how difficult that is will depend on a lot of contingencies, incl. how many other homeschoolers are in your local area and how much "civic infrastructure" they've collectively built up in terms of meetup groups, ad hoc classes, maybe even microschooling "pods", etc.
Our kid is very introverted (like his parents!), and generally doesn't want to do *too* much with other people, but he enjoys several weekly small-group activities: a homeschool meetup/play group, an art class, sometimes a "fashion design" class (really a "making natural dyes from plants and then applying them" class) or a wilderness class (where the kids learn how to make stone tools, fire, herbal remedies, etc.); or of course just meeting up with a friend for an individual play-date.
Something that I guess is controversial, but that we appreciate, is that you get much more control over the peer culture your kid is exposed to. School culture is rather dystopian in a lot of ways (bullying, conformist, consumerist, anti-intellectual, etc.), so if you can find a community with better values/culture then that can really make a huge difference, especially for kids who are different from the norm along various dimensions.
I hope my comment doesn't appear tasteless – the point that I am about to bring up is purely philosophical and is not meant to be a personal judgment or anything like that.
If you are a utilitarian living in the United States of America, the cost of raising a child for 18 years is around $300,000. A quick Google search shows that the cost of saving a life is around $4,000. Additionally, the cost of raising a child in a developing country like Argentina is estimated to be around $41,000. For the amount of money that it would take to raise a child in the US, you could either save 75 lives or bring into existence 7 children in developing countries. Even if their lives are not as good as the lives of those in the US, it still seems that they are good enough to outweigh them.
The utilitarian calculus, therefore, says that you ought to refrain from raising children in developed countries and instead use the funds either to save lives or to bring about (or fund bringing about) children in developing countries.
As a utilitarian who chose to bring about a child in a country such as the US, do you think that my empirical premises are wrong, or do you just think that having children is one of the cases that should be exempt from utilitarian reasoning?
I don't know of any parent (myself included) who, had they refrained from having a child, would have donated an extra $300,000 to charity. The more realistic counterfactual is that they spend more on personal consumption (travel, entertainment, etc.).
As an actualist, my view is that we should assess the moral advisability of X by comparing X to what one *actually would have done otherwise*. By this standard, I think parenting is clearly good and advisable. Anyone saying, "You should not have children!" for utilitarian reasons is confused and mistaken.
It may still be true that "donating more to charity" would have been *even better* (as one can say of all personal spending). You may truly say, "You should give more to charity - so much that you could no longer afford to have children." But, given actualism, it does not follow from this that one shouldn't have children. It depends entirely on what one would actually do if one didn't have children. Nobody (even those who endorse utilitarianism as the correct moral view) always does what utilitarianism implies would be best. For more on this point, see my post "Imperfection is OK": https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/imperfection-is-ok
First, your actualist defense proves far too much. Say I’m a deeply jealous or vindictive person and it's psychological true that if I don't beat you up or steal your fancy car I would eventually kill you. Are you saying we need to praise the assault/theft because in actuality they would have done something worse otherwise?
Sure, maybe you can insist “no no, I don't mean the assault is a good thing only that it is less bad than the murder that would have otherwise happened.”. Fair enough, but now you no longer get the result you want which is to say it's a good thing to be a parent. I mean you aren't fighting the claim that it might not have been even better to donate all that money to charity.
Second, I think it is pretty plausible that if you don't have kids you feel a greater need to save enough money to be sure not to go destitute in old age and that when you die that usually goes to charity.
Third, that ignores the net impact of bringing another child into the world now. It seems perfectly plausible that it is a net negative because you aren't stopping others from having kids and more people use up resources faster relative to progress [1]. OTOH maybe if you live in Europe or Japan not having a kid harms people in your country (assuming they will never just admit more immigrants).
---
1: Yes more people mean progress tends to happen faster but that seems to answer the wrong question. We don't want progress per year, that's arbitrary, we want the most experience years to be lived at the most comfortable levels of civilization and it seems very plausible that a smaller population achieves that better because there is only a limited ability to parralelize discovery.
Actualism just addresses the question of 'advisability'. I agree one needs to do something else to determine where to draw the baseline between 'less bad' and 'actually good'. That's something I've discussed here: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/the-value-of-an-action
Yes I agree with what you said. But then surely referencing actualism alone is not enough to justify the claim you made that "parenting is good and advisable." That would require meeting the higher burden.
In a vibes way I ultimately agree with you. I just think the argument is a bit more subtle.
Like the don't use AI discussion it has the flavor of focusing down on one aspect of life and then asking whether it is good or bad rather than comparing it to the things we usually do to enjoy our lives. What I think is clearly true is that having children is within the normal ratio of personal enjoyment to expenditure range accepted in our society.
And I think that is the right defense to give so it doesn't turn on questions about how much people who don't have kids donate. Even if it was true that on net you could make the world a bit better by not having children -- well there are a lot of ways we aren't making the world better and isolated demands for goodness above the average distort the conversation imo.
Sure, I was taking it for granted that parenting is clearly on the "good" rather than "bad" side of the common-sense ledger, and the challenge was just whether we should nonetheless discourage it *simply* because something else might be *even better*.
I don't think this accounts for the good a child born in the US could have done for society. People born in the US are much more richer than the rest of the world, so this child could in the future donate a lot more than $300,000 in their lifetime. It also doesn't account for potential exceptional achievements they may contribute by opening a successful business, doing research, founding more efficient NGOs, etc. which do a lot of good at scale. And these things are easier to achieve for someone who is born in a richer country and has had more resources (in terms of education, healthcare, upbringing) invested into them.
If the utilitarian and his spouse are high earners, the return on having and raising a child in the US is so high that it’s plausible the utilitarian calculus dictates doing it over donating the money.
Fascinating, Richard!
We have loved and appreciated Beast Academy and Science Mom. Our oldest is about to move into the AOPs books whenever he finishes Beast Academy level 5 (sometime this year).
Some other resources that are great:
I don’t use Julia Bogarts’ courses or curricula (yet?) but I loved her book “Help My Kid Hates Writing”.
Every game put out by Math for Love (store on Amazon) is amazing.
I absolutely love Denise Gaskins’ philosophy of teaching math. Her book, Let’s Play Math, changed how I think about the topic.
Reading the Writing Revolution was also super helpful to me for one of my writing-resistant kids.
For teaching typing fluency the video game Epistory was great (recommend using a program to teach correct touch typing format first: there are many out there).
These are great! We're towards the beginning of BA5 now, but I have the sense that the transition from the fun cartoon presentation to the formal math textbook presentation of AOPS might not work well for us... I've been looking at Algebra Lab Gear, and the Arbor Center series (Jousting Armadillos, etc.) though I'm not sure how much overlap there is with BA.
When did you introduce typing? We haven't yet crossed that bridge!
Hi Helen! We did typing in third grade … not for any special reason, just that’s when I learned it.
Oh … also can’t forget the Mark Rober videos (so great on YouTube) and his monthly crate box for engineering … my kids love those. Also DuoLingo and letting them watch cartoons in the language they’re learning with English subtitles on.
Alas I can’t stop … the book series “Murderous Maths” is amazing. We’ve also gotten a lot of mileage out of “The Cartoon History of the Universe.” The other books in the series are great also (my oldest loves The Cartoon History of Chemistry) but be warned that they are challenging and maybe best suited for slightly older kids.
Ha, good stuff. Thanks for all the suggestions! :-)
I think Eutopia might be to be reincarnated as Richard and Helen's kid 😩
Ha, well, I can assure you that he doesn't always feel that way!
How much social time does he get from other people his age, or a few years younger and older? That seems like a difficulty of being outside the school system.
On resources, I love PBS Eons - it’s a paleontology YouTube series that does a good job of not just stating facts, but also how we know about them and what questions remain. I haven’t seen how well it goes over with younger people though.
Thanks, I'll check it out!
re: socialization, you need to explicitly plan for it, but I guess how difficult that is will depend on a lot of contingencies, incl. how many other homeschoolers are in your local area and how much "civic infrastructure" they've collectively built up in terms of meetup groups, ad hoc classes, maybe even microschooling "pods", etc.
Our kid is very introverted (like his parents!), and generally doesn't want to do *too* much with other people, but he enjoys several weekly small-group activities: a homeschool meetup/play group, an art class, sometimes a "fashion design" class (really a "making natural dyes from plants and then applying them" class) or a wilderness class (where the kids learn how to make stone tools, fire, herbal remedies, etc.); or of course just meeting up with a friend for an individual play-date.
Something that I guess is controversial, but that we appreciate, is that you get much more control over the peer culture your kid is exposed to. School culture is rather dystopian in a lot of ways (bullying, conformist, consumerist, anti-intellectual, etc.), so if you can find a community with better values/culture then that can really make a huge difference, especially for kids who are different from the norm along various dimensions.
I hope my comment doesn't appear tasteless – the point that I am about to bring up is purely philosophical and is not meant to be a personal judgment or anything like that.
If you are a utilitarian living in the United States of America, the cost of raising a child for 18 years is around $300,000. A quick Google search shows that the cost of saving a life is around $4,000. Additionally, the cost of raising a child in a developing country like Argentina is estimated to be around $41,000. For the amount of money that it would take to raise a child in the US, you could either save 75 lives or bring into existence 7 children in developing countries. Even if their lives are not as good as the lives of those in the US, it still seems that they are good enough to outweigh them.
The utilitarian calculus, therefore, says that you ought to refrain from raising children in developed countries and instead use the funds either to save lives or to bring about (or fund bringing about) children in developing countries.
As a utilitarian who chose to bring about a child in a country such as the US, do you think that my empirical premises are wrong, or do you just think that having children is one of the cases that should be exempt from utilitarian reasoning?
I don't know of any parent (myself included) who, had they refrained from having a child, would have donated an extra $300,000 to charity. The more realistic counterfactual is that they spend more on personal consumption (travel, entertainment, etc.).
As an actualist, my view is that we should assess the moral advisability of X by comparing X to what one *actually would have done otherwise*. By this standard, I think parenting is clearly good and advisable. Anyone saying, "You should not have children!" for utilitarian reasons is confused and mistaken.
It may still be true that "donating more to charity" would have been *even better* (as one can say of all personal spending). You may truly say, "You should give more to charity - so much that you could no longer afford to have children." But, given actualism, it does not follow from this that one shouldn't have children. It depends entirely on what one would actually do if one didn't have children. Nobody (even those who endorse utilitarianism as the correct moral view) always does what utilitarianism implies would be best. For more on this point, see my post "Imperfection is OK": https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/imperfection-is-ok
First, your actualist defense proves far too much. Say I’m a deeply jealous or vindictive person and it's psychological true that if I don't beat you up or steal your fancy car I would eventually kill you. Are you saying we need to praise the assault/theft because in actuality they would have done something worse otherwise?
Sure, maybe you can insist “no no, I don't mean the assault is a good thing only that it is less bad than the murder that would have otherwise happened.”. Fair enough, but now you no longer get the result you want which is to say it's a good thing to be a parent. I mean you aren't fighting the claim that it might not have been even better to donate all that money to charity.
Second, I think it is pretty plausible that if you don't have kids you feel a greater need to save enough money to be sure not to go destitute in old age and that when you die that usually goes to charity.
Third, that ignores the net impact of bringing another child into the world now. It seems perfectly plausible that it is a net negative because you aren't stopping others from having kids and more people use up resources faster relative to progress [1]. OTOH maybe if you live in Europe or Japan not having a kid harms people in your country (assuming they will never just admit more immigrants).
---
1: Yes more people mean progress tends to happen faster but that seems to answer the wrong question. We don't want progress per year, that's arbitrary, we want the most experience years to be lived at the most comfortable levels of civilization and it seems very plausible that a smaller population achieves that better because there is only a limited ability to parralelize discovery.
Actualism just addresses the question of 'advisability'. I agree one needs to do something else to determine where to draw the baseline between 'less bad' and 'actually good'. That's something I've discussed here: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/the-value-of-an-action
Yes I agree with what you said. But then surely referencing actualism alone is not enough to justify the claim you made that "parenting is good and advisable." That would require meeting the higher burden.
In a vibes way I ultimately agree with you. I just think the argument is a bit more subtle.
Like the don't use AI discussion it has the flavor of focusing down on one aspect of life and then asking whether it is good or bad rather than comparing it to the things we usually do to enjoy our lives. What I think is clearly true is that having children is within the normal ratio of personal enjoyment to expenditure range accepted in our society.
And I think that is the right defense to give so it doesn't turn on questions about how much people who don't have kids donate. Even if it was true that on net you could make the world a bit better by not having children -- well there are a lot of ways we aren't making the world better and isolated demands for goodness above the average distort the conversation imo.
Sure, I was taking it for granted that parenting is clearly on the "good" rather than "bad" side of the common-sense ledger, and the challenge was just whether we should nonetheless discourage it *simply* because something else might be *even better*.
I don't think this accounts for the good a child born in the US could have done for society. People born in the US are much more richer than the rest of the world, so this child could in the future donate a lot more than $300,000 in their lifetime. It also doesn't account for potential exceptional achievements they may contribute by opening a successful business, doing research, founding more efficient NGOs, etc. which do a lot of good at scale. And these things are easier to achieve for someone who is born in a richer country and has had more resources (in terms of education, healthcare, upbringing) invested into them.
If the utilitarian and his spouse are high earners, the return on having and raising a child in the US is so high that it’s plausible the utilitarian calculus dictates doing it over donating the money.