Children Aren't Important?

I keep seeing this come up, and I do not understand why there is not more public outcry over it.  It started with Trump's tax reform.  Now, Trump's tax reform helped a lot of people.  It increased refunds for a lot of lower income working Americans.  Unfortunately, however, it also neglected children.  In a sense, it counted adults as worth more, reducing the total amount of refund for lower income working families with more children than average.  (We saw more than a 10% decrease in our refunds, despite getting a little more back from the EITC.)  After Trump it was Yang, with a Freedom Dividend plan that would have given adults a basic income worth around half of a living wage but just plain did not even count children as people.  Now we have plans for an economic stimulus package with a relief element for individuals, and yet again, children are being treated as unimportant.

Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it.  This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children.  Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children.  Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans.  Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities.  But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing.  Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant?  This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.

There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong.  The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children.  This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children.  Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.

The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children.  I have two responses to this.  The first is, that is straight up false.  I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska.  I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.  The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year.  (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.)  No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math.  Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD.  (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there.  My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.)  The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that.  It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*.  My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children?  Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work.  If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child.  That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week.  Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children.  If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week.  (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary.  They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.)  A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay.  $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward.  It is not even fair wages for services rendered!  And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now.  The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime).  The replacement rate is 2.1.  That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population.  Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not.  To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation.  Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline.  The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy.  We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.

(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs.  In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare.  The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)

Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words.  Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults.  The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families.  A maximum of four children can be counted.  Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck.  Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each.  My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult.  Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults.  Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens.  It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap.  (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family.  But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)

The fact is, children are not just important.  They are critical.  We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it.  Number are important.  Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline.  And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children.  The fact is, children need relief too.  If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.

Gamers the New Social Group?

Gamers are notoriously anti-social.  It turns out, however, that notoriety for something does not make it true.  The anti-social basement gamer of the '90s hardly even exists anymore, with the advent of MMOs.  Serious gamers that play modern games must be social to be successful in their games.  Multi-player first person shooters typically pit teams of players against each other, requiring team work to win.  MMOs, perhaps the most popular genre of games among modern gamers, frequently present players with challenges that require them to work together.  While modern gamers may often had poor face-to-face social skills, their team work skills are awesome.

Only children are not notoriously anti-social, but it turns out that the lack of face-to-face interactions is causing behavior that is normally considered anti-social.  Only children do tend to be more self absorbed than children with siblings of similar age.  Their interactions are primarily with adults, and some psychologists have claimed that this may make them more mature.  They also tend to be happier living along, and studies have also found that only children are more prone to strong anxiety in face-to-face interactions with others.  Only children are becoming far more common in the US, and while some benefits have been correlated to being an only child, some experts are suggesting that the next generation may be composed primarily of people who live along and conduct nearly all of their social interactions online.

Here is the kicker: Gamers are already well suited to this kind of social interaction, but most Americans are not.  Gaming helps build online social skills, and it can also help improve face-to-face social skills, as LAN parties and face to face gaming groups are becoming more popular among gamers.  Non-gamers do not have this kind of social web that includes a common activity to connect them.  Unless a majority of the next generation are gamers (it could happen), gamers may be the next generation's social class.  And don't expect public school social interactions to help.  Many people build social networks in high school and even college, but very few high school social relationships last far past graduation and many college social relationships are lost or become long distance online relationships after college.

What can we do to ease only children into this, so they do not suffer from a lack of social skills?  In some cases it may not matter.  Telecommuting is becoming more common, making face-to-face social skills matter less.  From the perspective of careers, the need for social skills depends on the career.  Close personal relationships, however, nearly always require face-to-face social skills.  While people who have interacted closely for a long time might be able to manage without decent social skills, establishing such a long term relationship does require some face-to-face social skills.  Japan and Korea are already having a problem with this, and it is resulting in birthrates low enough that economic collapse is becoming a serious concern.  The governments of both countries have started campaigns designed to help people meet, establish relationships, and get married.  Our recent recession may even be a consequence of an unsustainably low birth rate.  If we just ignore the problem (or even embrace it, as some advocates of single child families do), it will eventually come back around with far more severe consequences.

I am no psychologist, but I do have some suggestions that may help: Parents of only children should find opportunities for face-to-face social interaction for their children.  This does not necessarily have to be with children of the same age, since most social relationships after adulthood are not with people the same age.  A great opportunity for social interaction is games.  I prefer table top games, but sports can work as well.  A good blend of competitive and cooperative games is ideal, as competition and team work are both important in work and non-work relationships.  For proactive parents who want to give their child the best chance, I would even recommend socially oriented computer games, and the parents should have some involvement as well.  MMOs are great options, because the opportunity for social interaction is extremely high.  Many real time strategy games (like Starcraft and Starcraft 2) can be fairly social as they are naturally competitive but also provide the opportunity for team work.  There are some entirely cooperative games, like Minecraft, that can be very beneficial to social skills when played with other people.  I want to stress that parents should be involved with their children in these games.  One reason is to moderate potentially unhealthy social interactions, which do sometimes occur.  Another reason is to make sure the child is interacting in a beneficial way (when I play MMOs, I tend to play on my own; this is not very beneficial for social skills).  A third reason is to make sure that the child is not spending an unhealthy amount of time playing the game.  Social skills are great, but only if they are often used for interactions in the real world as well as the game.  This has several benefits.  One is that it will help the child learn to communicate effectively using an electronic platform.  If most social interaction is online in the future, knowing how to interact online will be important.  It will also help improve team work skills.  If done with significant parental involvement, it can also help form a more lasting long term relationship between parents and their children  Overall, the right online games will help improve general social skills and online social skills, while face-to-face games will help counter the anxiety common in only children during face-to-face social interactions.

As a gamer, it does not bother me that gamers are likely the new social class of the future.  It does bother me that many non-gamers may have a hard time functioning in society as a consequence of limited social skills though.  Really, we probably need more research on this, however, until that happens, my suggestions should be helpful, and they are based on research on the affects of gaming on people.