Scott Alexander

I wanted to know if my wife and I were doing something wrong or crazy, spending way more time with our kids than everyone else does.

Now, with all the data in front of me, I find them impossible to interpret.

What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds?

They can't exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they?

Or maybe everyone else's one-year-olds can and mine can't?

Or maybe I falsely think that mine can't and that's why I'm having so much trouble.

Or maybe one-year-olds without twin siblings can do it, but twins have to.

Kai!

Stop pulling Lyra's hair right now!

I'm trying to write a review of the book on how easy taking care of children is!

Here's a photograph of two children, very young, they're almost babies.

One child is grabbing the shirt of the other and has stuck its finger in his mouth.

And the other child is biting on the finger by the looks of it.

They both look pretty happy.

The caption reads, stop biting, stop enjoying being bitten.

And there's another photograph here showing two children in a pile holding onto these sort of cube-like toys that seem to have pictures printed on the different faces.

and the child on top seems to have pushed the other one over, banging his head on the side of the crib.

It's captioned, For more adorable child-on-child violence, see The Twins Join the Linguistic Symbolic Order, a subscriber-only post linked here.

The Wisdom of the Ancients The first chart finds that 1960s mothers, including many stay-at-home mums, spent only half as long on primary childcare as modern parents.

How could this be?