childrearing marketplace

http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009542.html

The specialization/standardization process explains a lot. When a person or groups of people can do something better than others it's more economical for them to specialize in that area. They then have to trade/interface with other specialists for their outputs using some sort of standard (money, SAT scores, HTTP protocol, etc).

The effects of standardization are a higher average output (per total cost, the bread at the baker's is much cheaper than homemade) and lower variability (the baker's bread is never a bust [my dough doesn't always rise], and yet never as good as the best homemade bread [my best pizza crusts are to die for]).

Applied to childrearing there are a number of ways this process works ...

(a) When there are two parents doing all the childrearing, each will specialize in some aspect of the project at hand and standardize to coordinate activities. For example, one parent will play bad cop (disciplinarian) while the other plays good (experientialist). That works remarkably well as long as there is coordination/communication to keep the balance (a weekly Sunday dinner discussion/project management meeting, say).

(b) Single parents who try to do *all* the childrearing work will find they do none of the tasks particularly well, or as well as they could if they could narrow their focus. Though there will be some single parent households who are better than two parent ones, there will be a lot of duds too. And the average childrearing output will be lower.

(c) When parent(s) outsource childrearing, childrearing becomes normalized to the standard of care. Since almost everyone outsources their kids' education, the discussion of outsourcing is about how much is outsourced not whether it so. Here the same s/s process works too ... schools are accredited, split into education levels, level are integrated using standards (grades, SAT scores, and a development that came after me - the state boards, Regent's Exams). The average output is higher with lower variability (no more Aristotles or Leonardos, I'm afraid).

Same with nannies ... a parent wants them to meet a minimum standard (that they are not pedophiles, for example) that parents themselves don't need to meet to become parents! Again, higher overall average, yet lower variability - an accreditted, well-referenced nanny will never be as great as the best parent, nor will she be as bad as that mother who drowned her kids in the bathtub.

What works against a nanny specialization/standardization process is that people believe they are better parents than they really are. More than half of parents believe they are above median in their skills. Oh well, it's not the first belief economics had to jump over - people believed that financial specialization (charging interest rates on loans) was immoral too.

For single or full-time working parents, a nanny can be a further godsend - she adds variety to the skills exchange. She can be the disciplinarian while the parents are the permissive ones. Or vice versa, she can be the lenient, kind, experience-focused one, where what the parents bring to the exchange is their superior disciplinarian skills. It's additional data that the nanny literary stereotypes - Shakespeare, Jane Eyre, etc - fall into own of those two groups (and problem arise not because of speciaization, but because of poor coordination of standards).

(d) What is the goal of childrearing? Does anyone know? I'd propose that the goal is to raise the child to be a specialist (at a sufficient level) in a society where specialists interact through exchange stanards. Same process - the average citizen is more self-actualized while there are fewer outcasts or Alexanders the Great. Yet it only works if agreements on exchange standards are met. How very self-referential. :)

Lastly, I don't know how many hours a week it takes to raise a child - is it 80 as Jane hints at? Are two parents enough? Does it take a village? Is that they way our brains evolved way back when?

What I do believe is that childrearing task isn't different from any other economic activity and divvying up its work *is* an overall benefit, as long as coordination/standardization is met. I believe that the village, functioning as skills exchange, can raise a child better than one or two parents who believe in isolationism and keep their child away from the childrearing marketplace.