As someone who grew up in a technically poor (meaning it didn't feel that way since they hid it well for us) with a comparable number of siblings (won't say exactly how many as to avoid fingerprinting), I know it can be done without military dicipline, because we had nothing of that.
How they did it is more of a mystery even if I saw it first hand. And today I feel I really struggle to let my children experience the fantastic childhood I had, even though I have less than half as many kids as my parents had - and a way better job.
This leads to a great paradox. I don't, on the surface, disagree with you. If everybody had 12 children the world would rapidly descend into chaos and dystopia. So it seems rather self evident that people should not have 12 children as a matter of, as you said, common sense. Yet the issue is that today there is a strong correlation between high religiosity, low education, low income and high fertility. This is worldwide and nation wide. For instance this [1] is a table of fertility by income in the US. People earning < $10k reproduce at a rate about 50% greater than those earning > $200k with a perfectly smooth transition between those two incomes. This is a source to also demonstrate the religiosity scaling, which is similarly smooth. [2]
Think about the lives of people growing up in those < $10k homes. Their parents are going to be disproportionately poorly educated and highly religious. And on the scale between completely irresponsible and completely responsible, where do you expect a person who chooses to have children when they have income of less than $10k to fall on average? And outside the home it's not going to be much better. They're likely to live disproportionately in high crime urban areas which tend to be viral. Dysgenic fertility also ties directly in to this all. The generation of tomorrow is determined in large part by the generation of today. What values will they be raised with? What will they think of education? What will be their views towards other people? Will their hereditary factors be favorable or unfavorable? These questions are largely answered by whom their parents are.
And so this leads to the great paradox. Those that would engage in 'responsible fertility' are the exact people that should be doing the exact opposite. If somebody has the willpower and social consideration to voluntarily cede the strongest urge available to a human, they need to pass their genes and views onto the next generation. Yet by engaging in responsible fertility, they are doing the exact opposite and effectively removing themselves from the gene pool or, at best, minimizing their effect upon it. If you look at any given baby we can view it as a lottery in determining who their parents are and consequently what life they will live. By engaging in 'responsibility fertility' we're all collectively rigging the game against these babies. Ultimately responsible fertility is paradoxically anything but.
Here are your chores. There are lots. Once you've done them and your schoolwork is good enough do whatever you want, by which I mean if I see you being idle I will find work for you so don’t let me see you being idle. That’s more or less how my parents were raised and they both care from big families. Military discipline it was not.
I can't help but agree. There is obviously a need for organization if you have so many kids you're basically running a kindergarten, but it sounds like these kids grew up in a military school or something. The best thing my parents ever did for me was to give me freedom to grow up on my own.
Is it fair to assume the author is a Mormon? From my limited understanding, large families are the norm for Mormons and I'm guessing there's a lot more structure in that kind of community.
By contrast, my father came from a much laxer 5 child family, and was the only one who went to university. I can't imagine how anyone would manage with 12.
Wow yeah. It seems that they did a good job of raising obeying children but the writer does not mention whether they taught their children to question their society and to rebel. Which I feel is utterly important.
Such a way to raise children does not seem to leave much room to flexibility and creativity. Children should learn to adapt in a moving and not completely defined environment anyway.
Also, are they able to cope with someone who sees things as (unspoken) agreements instead of (strict) rules?
And I feel if parents can pay for their children's studies, this is an opportunity to take. Life is easy when you can! At the beggining of your life it's difficult to get good money, so you struggle, but at the time your children goes to college, you may have a good income. So instead of paying your studies, you pay for your children's and they will do the same for theirs. Same amounts, a lot easier. Life is not meant to be hard (Granted it works best with fewer children). (Maybe it is not meant at all anyway but this is another question)
Anyway, it seems the children are doing well so if it works for them, great (we only have the point of view of the father - why "I" and not "we" in the title by the way?)
>We loved the children regardless of what they did. But would not prevent consequences of any of their actions. We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions.
>We were and are not our kids’ best friends. We were their parents.
By what metric did they not take care of them properly? I understand that the way they raised their children is not acceptable in your subculture but they’re not in your subculture. Is there some principle here? Getting all one’s children through college is more than a lot of people with two kids manage.
Sure. Is it ethical to force a sentience into this world (without asking it), then forcing it to live strictly by your rules for the next 18 years? To bring that sentience into a world which it will inevitably wither and die and lose everything dear to it, because it exists in a frail organic shell?
Consent is critical, and I don't think any life-event breaches consent more than existing in the first place. I do not think having children is a good thing, morally speaking. It is not possible to obtain the consent of a being before it exists - as such, the best route is to not bring said being into existence in the first place.
I'm both glad they found a system that worked, and very happy that I was not one of their kids. I agree with not babying your children (I was staying home alone after school by 10, and babysitting neighbors by 12), but having large amounts of unstructured time outside of school was actually incredibly positive for me overall. I was able to get a lot of introspection time in, and still got plenty of social time by engaging with the neighborhood kids in various shenanigans. Plus some people are just not cut out for sports.
FWIW, both me and my sister still grew up to meet this author's definition of financial independence & education "success", despite being picky eaters, having divorced parents, and never learning how to camp in the wild over vacation or take solo airplane trips as children (that stuff is expensive!).
I will soon have 12. Perhaps the loss of sanity comes before the kids? It might be a prerequisite. :-)
The first kid is a huge impact. The second two each have a modest impact. After that, the food costs slowly climb up but you only really notice an impact when you outgrow a car. So if you can manage 2 or 3, you might as well have a dozen.
A three-year-old isn't going to do a "good job" cleaning a bathroom; the article even says that. The point is to teach the kids that someone has to do those things, and to expect them to pull their weight in the household.
As for an eight-year-old doing laundry... why not? It's not like it's physically demanding.
I have a feeling you'd be either amazed or aghast at what my daughters (five and ten) do on their own.
My comment is in the context of the whole article. In general, I find that the laundry-list (pun intended) of chores and rules takes away from perhaps the most precious phase of life from the children. To have to wake up at 5:15 AM, do chores until you go to school, come back from school, and do chores almost until you go to sleep?
What time do the kids have left to themselves? There is no room left for the kids to organically prosper. There's simply no opportunity. The kids grow in only the direction the parents want them to grow in. There's no ingenuity, no room to rebel and "break the rules", and restricted room for natural curiosity to flourish.
I personally think it is almost the right of a child to grow in the way they want to, especially once they reach a high-school age. By depriving them of time, support, religious freedom, and the opportunity to learn things by themselves, you are also depriving your children of room to grow, freedom, and creativity/ingenuity.
This whole article reads to me as the author trying to turn his children into little Stormtrooper clones. And the moment they turn 18, they are loosed into the wild without a care, because the parents have "done their job". To me, this is antithetical to a concept of a family, or even parents. My personal belief is that parents exist to love, support, and encourage their child to grow and prosper. These folks seem to have the "love" part down but nothing else, which is why I find this family entirely dysfunctional.
> All the kids were required to take every Advanced Placement class there was.
This was probably a different time and place, but that'd be physically impossible at my school, not to mention seriously stressful and probably useless in the end.
> If children would come home and say that a teacher hated them or was not fair, our response was that you need to find a way to get along.
I hope this is simply a simplification or exaggeration, as it makes me a little sad. Complaining isn't just demanding rectification, but also a request to be heard and understood. If a kid complains and is immediately told to deal with it because that's how the world works, that's gonna provide a not great lesson on their problems being heard.
> Remember, for 15 years, she was either pregnant or just had a baby.
I'm in no place to judge how many kids one should have. But damn, that's intense.
There's this interesting contrast (I hesitate to use the world hypocrisy) between the emphasis on self actualization and responsibility and the strict rules. Like if you're raising a kid to be intellectually driven and curious, why not let them choose the AP courses? Or why force them to study for 2 hours every day if you're giving the whole "make mistakes and learn from it" spiel? How about they fail a test or two and then learn to study?
This ethos of gung-ho strict parenting isn't necessarily bad, but I want to ask these parents: "what if it didn't turn out alright?" What if one of the kids got addicted to drugs? What if they became depressed? Would they have stayed the course? Sure, it didn't happen, but I don't think that's because the parents made sure kids played sports and forced them to change their own oil. And I don't think that families where shit did happen were necessarily doing something wrong. While one can certainly credit the parents for their children's outcomes, there's an undeniable amount of luck involved.
> This was probably a different time and place, but that'd be physically impossible at my school, not to mention seriously stressful and probably useless in the end.
Can confirm. Took almost 20 AP classes in highschool, alongside some college classes once I had exhausted the entire highschool AP curriculum. All of my own accord - which I only mention because it would probably really get this author going. No one asked me, or even suggested it. I even had to go break through some bureaucratic tape to make it happen.
When I went to college, I realized it did not make me smarter, or more capable, or even have a better work ethic than my peers that took 2-4 AP classes throughout their whole highschool curriculum.
In fact, I found my work ethic was a bit worse - my work ethic was optimized for passing AP exam after exam rather than absorbing the information in-depth. I had become a master of heuristics/intuition, but class itself very much became an "in through one ear, out the other" affair, where I'd retain the minimum necessary key points and forget these shortly after the semester concluded.
> What if one of the kids got addicted to drugs? What if they became depressed? Would they have stayed the course?
Apparently, they would have:
> "We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions."
I don't doubt that these parents have the best of intentions (and I'm glad it worked out for them and their children), but I wonder about the propriety of encouraging it in general: AFAIK, the strongest indicators of adulthood success are general familial stability and social class, not militaristic parenting or forcing your kids to eat their brussels sprout.
Similarly: the value of knowing that you have a place to call home should you fail in college is incalculable, even if your parents aren't paying your tuition directly. I know that feeling of safety helped me during times of stress, and that the absence of such certainty exacerbated similar feelings in less some of my friends.
With the increasing in income inequality, I don’t think a story like this will have a happy ending in the future. Those kids who will access to financial support, such as a paid for college education and time to focus on studies rather than chores will have an edge over those who don’t. Sure, many of those kids will be spoiled and not learn the value of hard work and flame out, but enough of them will be able to utilize that advantage that people in this situation will not be able to compete for the limited number of middle class jobs available.
The reality is these parents gave their kids exactly what the poorer kids never get; access to knowledge and to people who've achieved.
College tuition can be covered while you're in school if you're taught how (and if you're not carrying your parents burdens). Entire careers open up for those who know what to study and optimize for (how many kids want to grow up to be in finance or a consultant, unless it's what their parents do?).
Sure, it probably helps to have well developed discipline and a healthy approach to various aspects of life (if that's even what these kids ended up with), but the real value comes from the generational knowledge of how to work through the system to get to the top. After you do it once, it's 10x easier to guide someone else through it, even without giving them explicit help in the form of money or influence.
I'd think that kids crushed by responsibility and strict discipline from an early age would be more likely than normal kids to ultimately flame out or have a breakdown. Everyone has to find their own meaning in life and make peace with it. Kids that are railed along by uber-strict parents can have a really hard time when that constant driving pressure is removed.
And I agree that it's probably not very useful to have to do loads of chores as a kid and do menial labor (the only kind available as a teenager) to get through college. The kids who had the parental support to have time to read books and tinker with computers and electronics and such, and focus on school, will ultimately be better off I think. If this guy is so well-off that he's having 12 kids and buying cars for them and flying them all over the world, I'm sure he can afford to have a cleaning service come in once a week. His "tough love" approach just makes him seem like kind of an asshole. I'd be very curious to hear what his kids think about it. I've known a couple of people who had a similar upbringing and there's a lot of left-over resentment there.
It’s not clear to me based on the article how the 12 kids paid for college themselves in this situation. Did the parents co-sign the loans for student debt? Did the government offer financial aid? Were the kids forced to work full time on their own until they could pay for tuition?
I'm pretty sure twin research shows that unless you abuse your kids, your parenting decisions (besides your income) have little effect on their general life outcomes.
Indeed. I forget where I heard this, but my experience as a parent and seeing other parents has led me to think that (in the absence of abuse), this is true: parents tend to take both too much credit and too much blame for how their kids turn out.
I gather there was substantial unmentioned help from relatives. Otherwise I have to wonder how it's possible to have so many kids in a sport, club, and volunteering, given that one of them would have had to stay home with infants.
I highly doubt that, since they lived in 3 different states.
The solution is to drive a 15-passenger van loaded with 3 car seats. (these days, maybe 6 car seats, depending on local law)
The kids got cars at age 16. Once one kid has a car, the situation becomes easier.
Kids can be encouraged to do the same activities. There might be several kids in Boy Scouts, so that is just one trip.
They sound like the sort of family that would encourage kids to walk or bicycle to places on their own. That could include going to a friend's house, then getting a ride with the friend.
Unless everything was in convenient bicycle distance, you'd still need them all to be basically doing the same activities, which contradicts the assertion of letting the kids pick whatever they wanted.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do activities with a big family, but what's suggested in the text seems like it would require help in most US cities and towns.
You know, I think about how I might go about doing anything remotely like this, and I realize the biggest challenge would to get my wife on exactly the same page as me. We're not aligned at this level on anything!
It makes me think this was the product of a solo mind, one individual decided to be this rigid, and the other individual went along with it. I can't see any other way this could possibly happen/work.
They had 12 kids in 15 years, so 0.8 kids per year. A new Toyota Yaris Sedan is 16,000 MSRP. So paying sticker price on a new Toyota, you'll average 12,800 per year.
That is nothing compared to the cost of food, which will be about $48,000 per year. With careful shopping you might cut the food cost in half, but it is still about double the cost of the cars. The cars are not the difficulty here.
Yes, there are people who really can't afford $400, but...
For much of that 40%, this is sort of a choice. They can't budget. Some of those 40% are even very highly paid, earning well over $100,000 per year. We don't teach home economics much anymore.
The 40th percentile household income is $50,000 in the USA. That $400 is about 2 work days of income. It is less than 1% of yearly income.
Clearly, some people immediately blow their whole paycheck.
With proper budgeting, it seems likely that a person at the 40th percentile could actually afford all those cars. It'd be a quarter of their income.
What they could not afford would be food. I suppose there is help though. Perhaps WIC or something would make things possible.
> Perhaps WIC or something would make things possible
This comment, excuse me, shows your ignorance.
"Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs."
- John Scalzi [1]
Strongly recommend reading more about this. 40% of the country being poor is no longer an "individual choice," it's a systemic problem. Furthermore, being poor disadvantages you to make long term choices. When you can only afford the $5 boots that break every month instead of the $100 boots that last for years, you end up spending a lot more just to stay in place.
Earning $50,000 per year is not poor. You can live fine on that. You can even buy all those cars on that. You can buy a house on that. What you can't do is feed 12 children on that. Also, don't even think about San Francisco or Manhattan.
I know this because I've checked the numbers. I haven't needed to check WIC, so I don't know that one, but I do know that it costs about $48,000 to feed a family with 12 kids. That is for a mid-range supermarket with modest bargain hunting. One could try harder, really reducing the food quality, but it won't be cheap.
It isn't at all normal for any income segment of the population to have 12 kids, and arguably that is a choice. Putting huge families aside, it is clear that 40% being "poor" is a choice. They aren't all poor. Most of them just can't budget well.
Are you really saying that a family should spend 96% of their income on food alone and also buy each of those children a car? That seems incredibly detached from a reality of emergency room visits, unexpected damages to house or vehicles, and childcare / educational expenses.
Regardless, it's obvious from the article that the family in question is from a wealthy family.
"nothing compared to the cost of food [...] still about double the cost of the cars. The cars are not the difficulty here."
"What they could not afford would be food."
"What you can't do is feed 12 children on that."
However they could actually buy the cars. Relative to food, cars are cheap. There is often help available for food though, so maybe a family of 12 could actually get by at the 40th percentile income.
More realistically, a family with 4 children can do just fine. That would be $12,000 on food using my rate, although careful shopping might cut that in half. THIS IS NOT POVERTY. Poverty is more like that person who posted to Hacker News last week that they lived on $20,000 per year, in Manhattan of all places, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with other people. Well, they did have a roof and a place in a fancy area, so that is the better end of poverty.
Here, a typical budget (from smartasset.com) for the 40th percentile in my part of the USA, both per-year and per-month, with 2 adults and 3 kids:
9192 766 child care
3948 329 medical
11580 965 housing
5952 496 food
6960 580 transportation
2724 227 other
3024 252 savings
6480 540 taxes
It's a bit high for housing due to me being in a fancy beach town with a median house price of $250,000. The median house price is $150,000 in the adjacent town, 4 to 6 miles from the beach. According to zillow.com that would be about $904 per month, or $10,848 per year. This is a mortgage, including taxes and PMI and other insurance. It'll be a stand-alone 3-bedroom house with a yard.
For those who are serious about a family, the mother usually stays home. That cuts income, but it also sets the child care expenses to zero. Numerous benefits become available and the taxes go way down. Adding in the 4th kid is quite possible. Nobody will need to starve. I just checked Texas, and this example family would qualify for $10872 each year in SNAP food benefits. Heck, that is a profit! More than $400 can be saved every month, so being unable to cover that kind of expense is a choice.
The family from the article is unlikely to be wealthy. He was a skilled engineer for a government contractor. I'll guess that there was a salary of about $150,000 to $250,000 in today's dollars. That is below the typical Hacker News standard of Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
> The family from the article is unlikely to be wealthy.
You argue that $50,000/yr is above the poverty line and therefore "not poor" and yet you also argue that $150,000 to $250,000 is not wealthy. You also go from estimating for 12 kids down to 3 kids. That is moving the goalposts. The author is wealthy, full stop. I think the biggest place where we do not see eye to eye is that for most of the world, including America, a salary of $150,000 to $250,000 per year is considered extremely wealthy.
poor: below $25,000 (below an E-4 in the military)
lower middle: that $50,000
middle: around $70,000
upper middle: $150,000 to $500,000
rich or wealthy: doesn't matter, could be $0 because assets, but probably over $1,000,000
The poor are way worse off than the 40th percentile family earning $50,000 per year, and the rich are way better off than the 95th percentile family earning $250,000 per year.
None of those people in the 40th to 95th percentile range are either rich or poor. There are not many poor people in America, and there are very few rich people in America. Most people are in the middle, where they can get by just fine if they spend wisely and don't hit an abnormal disaster.
It takes about $450,000 to be a 1%er, up at the 99th percentile. Even that isn't "rich" or "wealthy". It's just the high end of upper middle class. It is almost certain that the author was at the lower end of upper middle class. At the low end of the class we find senior engineering talent (like the author), family doctors, lousy lawyers, experienced actuaries, senior 747 pilots, and In-N-Out restaurant managers. At the high end of the class we find specialist doctors, competent lawyers, and many business owners. Nobody in this class is buying a Gulfstream private jet.
Yes I did change from 12 kids to 4 kids, because 12 would be a little bit nuts on a lower-middle income. I think that 12 actually can be done. It gets tight. Skip the child care, add the $10,872 in SNAP food benefits, and I think it works. This includes home ownership. With that lower-middle income, fancy colleges are free. The kids can go to Ivy League schools.
He also mentions that no kid ever got a speeding ticket, despite the fact that all the kids cars had at least 450 horsepower.
An exaggeration like that puts the whole article into question for me. I actually have built and driven late 1960s and early 1970s Fords with over 400 horsepower. Using a car like that as a daily driver is beyond insane.
"We have helped them with contacts in corporations, but they have to do the interviews and “earn” the jobs."
What?
I'd bet there's way more "failures" (for whatever reasonable definition) out there that would have succeeded with a few good contacts than there are "failures" that would have blown it given the chance.
There's a lot of other red flags in this article too. The section about how kids got to make their own rules sounds good, but the two examples they gave really don't sound like rational decisions that would be made by young children. Maybe they were subtlely encouraged to go in that direction by mum and dad, or maybe the children did naturally elect to go with those rules. Hopefully if they did, it was all 12 of them, because all I can think about is Paul Graham's article on good vs bad procrastination. If only 10 wanted to go along with it, what would the other 2 have accomplished instead if they didn't have to clean their room every single night of the first two decades of their lives? I haven't vacuumed my room in 6 weeks and I bet I earn more than at least half of these kids, if that's how we're measuring success. Maybe that half should have spent less time cleaning and more time playing puzzle games or manipulating the pokemon card market at school.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadHow they did it is more of a mystery even if I saw it first hand. And today I feel I really struggle to let my children experience the fantastic childhood I had, even though I have less than half as many kids as my parents had - and a way better job.
Think about the lives of people growing up in those < $10k homes. Their parents are going to be disproportionately poorly educated and highly religious. And on the scale between completely irresponsible and completely responsible, where do you expect a person who chooses to have children when they have income of less than $10k to fall on average? And outside the home it's not going to be much better. They're likely to live disproportionately in high crime urban areas which tend to be viral. Dysgenic fertility also ties directly in to this all. The generation of tomorrow is determined in large part by the generation of today. What values will they be raised with? What will they think of education? What will be their views towards other people? Will their hereditary factors be favorable or unfavorable? These questions are largely answered by whom their parents are.
And so this leads to the great paradox. Those that would engage in 'responsible fertility' are the exact people that should be doing the exact opposite. If somebody has the willpower and social consideration to voluntarily cede the strongest urge available to a human, they need to pass their genes and views onto the next generation. Yet by engaging in responsible fertility, they are doing the exact opposite and effectively removing themselves from the gene pool or, at best, minimizing their effect upon it. If you look at any given baby we can view it as a lottery in determining who their parents are and consequently what life they will live. By engaging in 'responsibility fertility' we're all collectively rigging the game against these babies. Ultimately responsible fertility is paradoxically anything but.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
[2] - https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/income-di...
By contrast, my father came from a much laxer 5 child family, and was the only one who went to university. I can't imagine how anyone would manage with 12.
12 is a lot. Like a lot.
[1]: https://qz.com/296701/how-to-keep-your-wealth-from-ruining-y...
> My wife and I are religious and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints [...]
> With no religious upbringing, [children] have no way to measure the goodness of other organizations, as they have no foundation.
> They participated in the religious activities: we were the parents, they did not have a choice.
[1]: https://qz.com/296701/how-to-keep-your-wealth-from-ruining-y...
Such a way to raise children does not seem to leave much room to flexibility and creativity. Children should learn to adapt in a moving and not completely defined environment anyway.
Also, are they able to cope with someone who sees things as (unspoken) agreements instead of (strict) rules?
And I feel if parents can pay for their children's studies, this is an opportunity to take. Life is easy when you can! At the beggining of your life it's difficult to get good money, so you struggle, but at the time your children goes to college, you may have a good income. So instead of paying your studies, you pay for your children's and they will do the same for theirs. Same amounts, a lot easier. Life is not meant to be hard (Granted it works best with fewer children). (Maybe it is not meant at all anyway but this is another question)
Anyway, it seems the children are doing well so if it works for them, great (we only have the point of view of the father - why "I" and not "we" in the title by the way?)
>We loved the children regardless of what they did. But would not prevent consequences of any of their actions. We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions.
>We were and are not our kids’ best friends. We were their parents.
So I guess they wouldn't take their kids to the hospital if they broke their leg or something?
That sounds like child abuse.
It's a responsibility, and if you can't/won't take care of them properly then you shouldn't impose the burden on them or yourself.
Consent is critical, and I don't think any life-event breaches consent more than existing in the first place. I do not think having children is a good thing, morally speaking. It is not possible to obtain the consent of a being before it exists - as such, the best route is to not bring said being into existence in the first place.
FWIW, both me and my sister still grew up to meet this author's definition of financial independence & education "success", despite being picky eaters, having divorced parents, and never learning how to camp in the wild over vacation or take solo airplane trips as children (that stuff is expensive!).
Everyone need exercise though. Maybe they didn't have to do team sports.
The first kid is a huge impact. The second two each have a modest impact. After that, the food costs slowly climb up but you only really notice an impact when you outgrow a car. So if you can manage 2 or 3, you might as well have a dozen.
A three-year-old isn't going to do a "good job" cleaning a bathroom; the article even says that. The point is to teach the kids that someone has to do those things, and to expect them to pull their weight in the household.
As for an eight-year-old doing laundry... why not? It's not like it's physically demanding.
I have a feeling you'd be either amazed or aghast at what my daughters (five and ten) do on their own.
What time do the kids have left to themselves? There is no room left for the kids to organically prosper. There's simply no opportunity. The kids grow in only the direction the parents want them to grow in. There's no ingenuity, no room to rebel and "break the rules", and restricted room for natural curiosity to flourish.
I personally think it is almost the right of a child to grow in the way they want to, especially once they reach a high-school age. By depriving them of time, support, religious freedom, and the opportunity to learn things by themselves, you are also depriving your children of room to grow, freedom, and creativity/ingenuity.
This whole article reads to me as the author trying to turn his children into little Stormtrooper clones. And the moment they turn 18, they are loosed into the wild without a care, because the parents have "done their job". To me, this is antithetical to a concept of a family, or even parents. My personal belief is that parents exist to love, support, and encourage their child to grow and prosper. These folks seem to have the "love" part down but nothing else, which is why I find this family entirely dysfunctional.
That mustang had 200-289 horsepower. I find it hard to believe a teenager rebuilt it to 450hp.
This was probably a different time and place, but that'd be physically impossible at my school, not to mention seriously stressful and probably useless in the end.
> If children would come home and say that a teacher hated them or was not fair, our response was that you need to find a way to get along.
I hope this is simply a simplification or exaggeration, as it makes me a little sad. Complaining isn't just demanding rectification, but also a request to be heard and understood. If a kid complains and is immediately told to deal with it because that's how the world works, that's gonna provide a not great lesson on their problems being heard.
> Remember, for 15 years, she was either pregnant or just had a baby.
I'm in no place to judge how many kids one should have. But damn, that's intense.
There's this interesting contrast (I hesitate to use the world hypocrisy) between the emphasis on self actualization and responsibility and the strict rules. Like if you're raising a kid to be intellectually driven and curious, why not let them choose the AP courses? Or why force them to study for 2 hours every day if you're giving the whole "make mistakes and learn from it" spiel? How about they fail a test or two and then learn to study?
This ethos of gung-ho strict parenting isn't necessarily bad, but I want to ask these parents: "what if it didn't turn out alright?" What if one of the kids got addicted to drugs? What if they became depressed? Would they have stayed the course? Sure, it didn't happen, but I don't think that's because the parents made sure kids played sports and forced them to change their own oil. And I don't think that families where shit did happen were necessarily doing something wrong. While one can certainly credit the parents for their children's outcomes, there's an undeniable amount of luck involved.
Can confirm. Took almost 20 AP classes in highschool, alongside some college classes once I had exhausted the entire highschool AP curriculum. All of my own accord - which I only mention because it would probably really get this author going. No one asked me, or even suggested it. I even had to go break through some bureaucratic tape to make it happen.
When I went to college, I realized it did not make me smarter, or more capable, or even have a better work ethic than my peers that took 2-4 AP classes throughout their whole highschool curriculum.
In fact, I found my work ethic was a bit worse - my work ethic was optimized for passing AP exam after exam rather than absorbing the information in-depth. I had become a master of heuristics/intuition, but class itself very much became an "in through one ear, out the other" affair, where I'd retain the minimum necessary key points and forget these shortly after the semester concluded.
> What if one of the kids got addicted to drugs? What if they became depressed? Would they have stayed the course?
Apparently, they would have:
> "We let them suffer consequences and would not try to mitigate the consequences because we saw them suffering. We would cry and be sad, but would not do anything to reduce the consequences of their actions."
Similarly: the value of knowing that you have a place to call home should you fail in college is incalculable, even if your parents aren't paying your tuition directly. I know that feeling of safety helped me during times of stress, and that the absence of such certainty exacerbated similar feelings in less some of my friends.
College tuition can be covered while you're in school if you're taught how (and if you're not carrying your parents burdens). Entire careers open up for those who know what to study and optimize for (how many kids want to grow up to be in finance or a consultant, unless it's what their parents do?).
Sure, it probably helps to have well developed discipline and a healthy approach to various aspects of life (if that's even what these kids ended up with), but the real value comes from the generational knowledge of how to work through the system to get to the top. After you do it once, it's 10x easier to guide someone else through it, even without giving them explicit help in the form of money or influence.
And I agree that it's probably not very useful to have to do loads of chores as a kid and do menial labor (the only kind available as a teenager) to get through college. The kids who had the parental support to have time to read books and tinker with computers and electronics and such, and focus on school, will ultimately be better off I think. If this guy is so well-off that he's having 12 kids and buying cars for them and flying them all over the world, I'm sure he can afford to have a cleaning service come in once a week. His "tough love" approach just makes him seem like kind of an asshole. I'd be very curious to hear what his kids think about it. I've known a couple of people who had a similar upbringing and there's a lot of left-over resentment there.
The solution is to drive a 15-passenger van loaded with 3 car seats. (these days, maybe 6 car seats, depending on local law)
The kids got cars at age 16. Once one kid has a car, the situation becomes easier.
Kids can be encouraged to do the same activities. There might be several kids in Boy Scouts, so that is just one trip.
They sound like the sort of family that would encourage kids to walk or bicycle to places on their own. That could include going to a friend's house, then getting a ride with the friend.
I'm not saying it's impossible to do activities with a big family, but what's suggested in the text seems like it would require help in most US cities and towns.
It makes me think this was the product of a solo mind, one individual decided to be this rigid, and the other individual went along with it. I can't see any other way this could possibly happen/work.
Seems like the key, as usual, is to be rich and come from a rich family.
They had 12 kids in 15 years, so 0.8 kids per year. A new Toyota Yaris Sedan is 16,000 MSRP. So paying sticker price on a new Toyota, you'll average 12,800 per year.
That is nothing compared to the cost of food, which will be about $48,000 per year. With careful shopping you might cut the food cost in half, but it is still about double the cost of the cars. The cars are not the difficulty here.
For much of that 40%, this is sort of a choice. They can't budget. Some of those 40% are even very highly paid, earning well over $100,000 per year. We don't teach home economics much anymore.
The 40th percentile household income is $50,000 in the USA. That $400 is about 2 work days of income. It is less than 1% of yearly income.
Clearly, some people immediately blow their whole paycheck.
With proper budgeting, it seems likely that a person at the 40th percentile could actually afford all those cars. It'd be a quarter of their income.
What they could not afford would be food. I suppose there is help though. Perhaps WIC or something would make things possible.
This comment, excuse me, shows your ignorance.
"Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs."
- John Scalzi [1]
Strongly recommend reading more about this. 40% of the country being poor is no longer an "individual choice," it's a systemic problem. Furthermore, being poor disadvantages you to make long term choices. When you can only afford the $5 boots that break every month instead of the $100 boots that last for years, you end up spending a lot more just to stay in place.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15041758
I know this because I've checked the numbers. I haven't needed to check WIC, so I don't know that one, but I do know that it costs about $48,000 to feed a family with 12 kids. That is for a mid-range supermarket with modest bargain hunting. One could try harder, really reducing the food quality, but it won't be cheap.
It isn't at all normal for any income segment of the population to have 12 kids, and arguably that is a choice. Putting huge families aside, it is clear that 40% being "poor" is a choice. They aren't all poor. Most of them just can't budget well.
Regardless, it's obvious from the article that the family in question is from a wealthy family.
"nothing compared to the cost of food [...] still about double the cost of the cars. The cars are not the difficulty here."
"What they could not afford would be food."
"What you can't do is feed 12 children on that."
However they could actually buy the cars. Relative to food, cars are cheap. There is often help available for food though, so maybe a family of 12 could actually get by at the 40th percentile income.
More realistically, a family with 4 children can do just fine. That would be $12,000 on food using my rate, although careful shopping might cut that in half. THIS IS NOT POVERTY. Poverty is more like that person who posted to Hacker News last week that they lived on $20,000 per year, in Manhattan of all places, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with other people. Well, they did have a roof and a place in a fancy area, so that is the better end of poverty.
Here, a typical budget (from smartasset.com) for the 40th percentile in my part of the USA, both per-year and per-month, with 2 adults and 3 kids:
It's a bit high for housing due to me being in a fancy beach town with a median house price of $250,000. The median house price is $150,000 in the adjacent town, 4 to 6 miles from the beach. According to zillow.com that would be about $904 per month, or $10,848 per year. This is a mortgage, including taxes and PMI and other insurance. It'll be a stand-alone 3-bedroom house with a yard.For those who are serious about a family, the mother usually stays home. That cuts income, but it also sets the child care expenses to zero. Numerous benefits become available and the taxes go way down. Adding in the 4th kid is quite possible. Nobody will need to starve. I just checked Texas, and this example family would qualify for $10872 each year in SNAP food benefits. Heck, that is a profit! More than $400 can be saved every month, so being unable to cover that kind of expense is a choice.
The family from the article is unlikely to be wealthy. He was a skilled engineer for a government contractor. I'll guess that there was a salary of about $150,000 to $250,000 in today's dollars. That is below the typical Hacker News standard of Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
You argue that $50,000/yr is above the poverty line and therefore "not poor" and yet you also argue that $150,000 to $250,000 is not wealthy. You also go from estimating for 12 kids down to 3 kids. That is moving the goalposts. The author is wealthy, full stop. I think the biggest place where we do not see eye to eye is that for most of the world, including America, a salary of $150,000 to $250,000 per year is considered extremely wealthy.
poor: below $25,000 (below an E-4 in the military)
lower middle: that $50,000
middle: around $70,000
upper middle: $150,000 to $500,000
rich or wealthy: doesn't matter, could be $0 because assets, but probably over $1,000,000
The poor are way worse off than the 40th percentile family earning $50,000 per year, and the rich are way better off than the 95th percentile family earning $250,000 per year.
None of those people in the 40th to 95th percentile range are either rich or poor. There are not many poor people in America, and there are very few rich people in America. Most people are in the middle, where they can get by just fine if they spend wisely and don't hit an abnormal disaster.
It takes about $450,000 to be a 1%er, up at the 99th percentile. Even that isn't "rich" or "wealthy". It's just the high end of upper middle class. It is almost certain that the author was at the lower end of upper middle class. At the low end of the class we find senior engineering talent (like the author), family doctors, lousy lawyers, experienced actuaries, senior 747 pilots, and In-N-Out restaurant managers. At the high end of the class we find specialist doctors, competent lawyers, and many business owners. Nobody in this class is buying a Gulfstream private jet.
Yes I did change from 12 kids to 4 kids, because 12 would be a little bit nuts on a lower-middle income. I think that 12 actually can be done. It gets tight. Skip the child care, add the $10,872 in SNAP food benefits, and I think it works. This includes home ownership. With that lower-middle income, fancy colleges are free. The kids can go to Ivy League schools.
An exaggeration like that puts the whole article into question for me. I actually have built and driven late 1960s and early 1970s Fords with over 400 horsepower. Using a car like that as a daily driver is beyond insane.
What?
I'd bet there's way more "failures" (for whatever reasonable definition) out there that would have succeeded with a few good contacts than there are "failures" that would have blown it given the chance.
There's a lot of other red flags in this article too. The section about how kids got to make their own rules sounds good, but the two examples they gave really don't sound like rational decisions that would be made by young children. Maybe they were subtlely encouraged to go in that direction by mum and dad, or maybe the children did naturally elect to go with those rules. Hopefully if they did, it was all 12 of them, because all I can think about is Paul Graham's article on good vs bad procrastination. If only 10 wanted to go along with it, what would the other 2 have accomplished instead if they didn't have to clean their room every single night of the first two decades of their lives? I haven't vacuumed my room in 6 weeks and I bet I earn more than at least half of these kids, if that's how we're measuring success. Maybe that half should have spent less time cleaning and more time playing puzzle games or manipulating the pokemon card market at school.