Kids are not miniature adults

Running around, laughing and yelling are suitable activities for kids to do in public

Credit: 20th Century Fox

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you were ever loud as a kid, this blog is for you. Subscribe.

We’ve got a multi-parter today. If one part isn’t your thing, keep on scrolling!

Kids are not miniature adults

A few weeks ago I saw a video online in which a woman looked into her camera and rolled her eyes. The woman was sitting outside, and off screen somewhere in the background kids were yelling and screaming — a noise that apparently bothered the woman.

Many of the comments on this video (which regretfully I did not bookmark at the time) argued that kids being noisy outside is just kids being kids. But there was another genre of comment making a different point: “We don’t mind kids, we mind parents who don’t parent.”

I’ve seen this sentiment expressed online with growing frequency in recent months. It pops up on videos of babies crying in airplanes, kids running around in airports, and toddlers struggling at restaurants. A year ago, I wrote that “kids belong in public” and that we should not — but often do — sequester children away from the adult world. But this “parents who don’t parent” argument is sort of an evolution of that same theme, almost even a response; it’s not that kids are the problem, the thinking goes, it’s that they act like kids and their parents don’t stop them.

I wasn’t planning on writing about this (hence why I didn’t bookmark all these videos), but then Jonathan Haidt — the oft-quoted author of The Anxious Generation, among other things — this week argued that we should “let kids be loud.” Haidt touches on demographic change and childhood development in making the case that loudness is a natural and good part of having children around. And he notes that parents are pressured into using screens to control their kids. We are not an iPad family ourselves, but I’m so sympathetic to parents who give their kids iPads because you’re really damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But I was struck most by this point in Haidt’s piece:

It’s easy to become annoyed by noise if you don’t spend time around children.

So, among all the many other issues at play here, annoyance with kids in public — with parents who allegedly “don’t parent” — reflects a breakdown in community. People are not living in villages with kids, so it seems like an imposition when they do have to interact with people who don’t act like adults.

And in any case, the problem isn’t so much that parents don’t parent (though of course some could do better), it’s that there’s pressure to make kids act like miniature adults. And that is not a pro-kid, pro-family, or pro-village attitude. We should let kids be loud, to borrow Haidt’s phrase, because that is fundamentally what kids are and what it means to live in a community.

One solution to the family housing crisis: federal land

A few days ago, the Institute for Family Studies posted a blog I wrote on using federal land — which generally can’t be developed — to build housing. It’s a multipart argument:

1. Families tend to prefer single-family homes. Whether this is right or wrong, or if it will change over time, is beside the point because it’s the reality right now.

2. Many expensive cities have added a lot of great infill housing in the form of apartment complexes, but have not added the kind of housing families, specifically, prefer. Many cities also don’t have a lot of land to build family housing.

3. Some western cities such as Salt Lake have federal land near urban areas. Small amounts of this land could be privatized and used to build thousands of houses. I did a little back of napkin math and came up with 0.06%. Actual numbers would vary, but the idea here is that we’re talking about a rounding error.

I wanted to add two things. First, there’s a debate about whether the federal government should manage public land or not, and if so how much. But this question of housing really is an entirely different debate. The amount of land needed to build housing is so small no one would even notice it — and so this doesn’t have to get into the stickier philosophical questions.

In fact, while I was writing the IFS piece, I discovered that different agencies provide different numbers regarding the size of federal land holdings in Utah (I was using Utah as an example). Here’s the BLM saying the feds manage 37.4 million acres. But here’s Congress.gov saying it’s actually 33.2 million. And here’s a policy institute from the University of Utah saying it’s 35.0 million.

I’m sure there’s a way to reconcile these numbers, but the point is that they vary by millions of acres — and no one seems to mind. And my point is that the argument that every single federal acre is precious and needs to be preserved forever falls apart when you realize that most of us don’t even know how much land there is. Should we reduce federal landholdings by 4 million acres? Perhaps not. But if I told you the feds manage 33.2 million acres instead of 37.4 million would you mind? Also perhaps not.

And anyway, none of these numbers would even change if we subtracted 20,000 acres. So again, we could build housing without meaningfully reducing the size of federal lands or wading into questions about the proper role of government.

The other thing I want to add is that if we don’t figure out a way to come together on a compromise solution, we are almost certainly going to get something inferior. That may mean either too much land gets developed, or not enough does (meaning housing supply remains needlessly constrained), but both sides refusing to budge means eventually someone will muscle through their preferred policy and no one will be thrilled.

"I feel like I got on the last boat"

I really don’t like catastrophizing. Many serious world challenges notwithstanding, I do think it’s still possible to live a rewarding and fulfilling life. I’ve certainly had a lot of good fortune — privilege, some would say — but there’s plenty of data out there suggesting many people are doing okay.

That caveat aside, though, I do want to pose a question: What if life gets harder, in ways large or small, for your kids? What if the life you lead is just a little bit more out of reach for them than it was for you?

I was thinking about this recently when I saw a tweet arguing that many upper middle class people feel stressed because despite high incomes they can’t afford upper middle class comforts like going on Disney vacations or buying the houses they want — even though they make more money than their parents. The tweet includes a passage from someone making more than $200,000 per year who says he feels like “I got on the last boat out.”

I sort of feel like that too. For example, I bought my current house in 2020 for under $600,000. I refinanced one year later and have a 2.8 percent mortgage. Today, most online real estate portals think the house is worth close to $1 million — while at the same time mortgage rates are in the high 6 percent range. I mentioned in my last post that most of my non-homeowning family members are moving out of my neighborhood and, well, that’s why. Today, if you wanted to buy my house and managed to save up a $180,000 down payment — 20 percent¹ — you’d be looking at monthly costs of $5,000 or more. Yikes.

All of which is just a long way of saying that it does kind of feel like I was the last middle class person to buy a house in my neighborhood. I feel like I got on the last boat out.

This is one of the main reasons I think families ought to focus on village building. There are of course many positive justifications for building a village. Life with loved ones is more fun. It’s easier to have supportive people around. A robust network can be a source of power.

But there’s also at least one negative motivator here, which is that maybe life will get harder for your kids, and what will they do then? Put another way, even if you don’t care about any of those positive motivators, fear should still be a good enough reason to build the infrastructure — the community, the village, the network — that will at least give them the option to succeed.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you’ve enjoyed this blog consider sharing it with a friend.

1. You can of course buy a house with less than 20% down, but doing so means paying private mortgage insurance, further raising the monthly costs.