Just how Bad is Daycare? A Chilling Case Study & Literature Review

This episode critically examines the impact of daycare on children through personal experiences and broader research findings.

1. Daycare Costs: Daycare can be prohibitively expensive, with costs resembling a full-time salary, raising questions about its economic viability for many families.
2. Behavioral Impact: The Collins observed dramatic improvements in their children’s behavior when they moved away from traditional daycare to a community-based setup.
3. Health Considerations: Frequent illnesses are a common issue in daycare settings, impacting both children and parents.
4. Research Insights: Studies like the Tennessee pre-kindergarten program suggest that early benefits of structured programs may fade, with potential long-term negative effects.
5. Alternative Approaches: The episode advocates for community-based or less formal childcare arrangements, which may offer better outcomes for children’s development and well-being.

1: Introduction

The hosts introduce the topic and discuss their personal motivation for exploring daycare alternatives. Simone Collins: "Something really shocking happened to us recently."

2: The Cost of Daycare

Discussion on the high financial burden of daycare and its economic implications for families. Malcolm Collins: "It's insane, the costs are as if daycare is the only job your money is doing."

3: Behavioral and Health Changes

Analysis of changes in children’s behavior and health when moving away from daycare. Malcolm Collins: "We have graphs on all of his behavior, and it was night and day."

4: Societal and Research Perspectives

Exploration of broader societal impacts and research findings related to daycare and early childhood education. Simone Collins: "Research often shows short-term benefits but long-term drawbacks."

5: Conclusion and Personal Reflections

The hosts summarize their findings and reflect on personal lessons learned. Malcolm Collins: "This isn't just anecdotal; there's serious data supporting these observations."

1. Evaluate the True Cost of Daycare: Consider both direct costs and indirect impacts, like health and behavioral changes.
2. Explore Community-Based Alternatives: Look into less formal setups like childcare pools or community sharing.
3. Monitor Child Development Closely: Keep an eye on your child’s development and well-being, regardless of the care setting.
4. Consider Long-Term Impacts: Reflect on how early childhood care affects long-term academic and social outcomes.
5. Stay Informed on Research: Keep up with the latest studies and findings in early childhood education to make informed decisions.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone share their personal experience of taking a huge risk by pulling their three children out of daycare and opting for a more unconventional childcare arrangement with their neighbors. They discuss the staggering costs of daycare for middle-class families and the surprising improvements they noticed in their son's behavior and the family's overall health after making the switch. The couple also delves into the long-term effects of frequent illnesses in early childhood and the controversial findings of the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program study. Throughout the conversation, they offer practical advice on how to create a sustainable and mutually beneficial childcare arrangement within your community. Join Malcolm and Simone as they challenge conventional wisdom and share their insights on prioritizing children's well-being.

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Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

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Content Warnings:

Discussion of child behavior issues, daycare challenges, and alternative educational methods.

Malcolm Collins
We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this. We have graphs on all of his behavior, and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard, like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone.

It is wonderful to be here with you today. Something really shocking happened to us recently. We took a giant gamble on how we were handling our children's childcare. So before this, we were sending our children to a daycare facility. And if you are not at the lower end of income in Pennsylvania, that means you are paying for that all out of pocket.

So by the time we got to children number three at a, I'd say like a low range to mid range facility in terms of cost. Yeah, this cost, what was it, 5400 a month? It was. We paid 1193 every week. And that's $62,036 a year.

Simone Collins
Insane. Just for three kids? Just for three kids. With the fourth kid on the way, we basically decided this. And keep in mind, we're in suburban or really ex urban Pennsylvania.

Well, you know, friends of ours looked at our daycare bills and said, this is. You're so lucky. I wish I could be paying this. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Who would live in like, New York and Philadelphia? So this is almost as inexpensive as it gets. Unless you're in an extremely rural area. Yeah. Or unless you are low income.

Simone Collins
And we actually know people also actually, who intentionally manipulate their income in a way that probably the IR's would not be happy about to qualify for subsidized daycare because it makes that much of a difference. $62,000. That's a generous salary for someone that's. Yeah. And this is why a lot of people are like, why bother working when all of it would literally go to daycare?

And keep in mind, of course, it's post tax dollars. And I'd point in mind, this was only three kids. Yeah. This is the minimum number of kids we could have and be above replacement rate as a family. This is the.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, no, I mean, it's. It's insane. Yeah. So to be above replacement rate in the US, you and you are not in poverty, you need to be extremely wealthy. And this does part to show why you do get this higher fertility rates on the really low end, because there just isn't a cost to additional kids when the state's offering to pay for everything in the same way that there is an enormous cost to additional kids for the middle class.

But I need to go further with our experiment because something came down to we realized we couldn't keep affording this as we moved on with our family. So we're like, we need to find a new, sustainable solution. And this got really interesting for us because we had tried au pairs before and we had found that they were fairly entitled and living. It was just like having an extra kid. Yeah, babysitters live in nannies.

Simone Collins
All the whole thing, all of it. We tried everything. Even, like, PhD students, we tried bringing over to our house to work. And so we ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this. Here's what we ended up deciding to do and try.

And this was a big risk for us, is we have neighbors who were willing to basically do a childcare pool with us. And we know many families that have done this before, where they live right next to other families. In this case, it was actually a couple that was soon to have a family whose business we're helping to get started. And they're really interested in doing like some communal childcare, sharing of resources, things like that. So pooling resources together in that classic community way.

So some people are doing with this with friends. We did it with neighbors that we didn't really know that well. And so we were obviously, like, really nervous because everyone, whenever you go as a parent to the pediatrician, for example, and this is something only Malcolm does, I stay home and keep doing whatever it is I do. And Malcolm does all the kid errands. The pediatricians constantly shame him.

Like, how many words does this kid speak now? And what are their milestones with this? And so you are constantly afraid that if you do not have some kind of professional team making sure that your child meets these weird, arbitrary learning milestones, you're going to be the worst parent ever. And that if we went to a less structured education format or childcare format for our three kids, that things would just totally go off the rails. They'd be bored out of their mind.

They would complain about it. They wouldn't want to spend time with this couple. And I know what they do with the couple. So they do about an hour a day of teaching, learning to read or something like that. And other than that, the kids just basically do whatever they want.

Malcolm Collins
They've got a room to themselves and they play amongst themselves. So going into this situation, this was an enormous risk. Yeah, because it's not easy to get kids in daycare. That's the thing. Like, you pull your kids out, that doesn't mean you can get them back in.

Simone Collins
In fact, we've been on one daycare less. I never bothered to take us off of it. We've been on for over a year at this point. So we started having our kids stay with them. And fortunately for us, one of our kids who is autistic was in ABA therapy, which is a form of therapy for autism.

Malcolm Collins
It's controversial because it basically just teaches kids how to mask that they're autistic and pretend that they're not. And some people are. Like autism writes, people shouldn't have to pretend. And it's. Yeah, but they need to.

But let's be realistic. You gotta fake it. Yep. We have graphs on all of his behavior, and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.

So. And we're talking tantrums. Plummeting some of these graphs on screen. So people can see. So I'll start with frequency of aggression.

Dotted line here is when he started staying at home. Now, for those of you who are listening and cannot see this, it goes from a graph that's going up and down to a flat line on the x axis. Yeah, just complete flat line at zero. Okay, so let's go to the next one. Manding for break.

All done. And that means requesting. I don't know why they say manding, but it just means asking for a break or saying you're all done with something. He never said it in the early days, but this is less extreme than the early ones. But it continues to go up after he's home.

But you do see some improvement before he goes home with this one. I don't know what this one is about. It doesn't have the mark. Next one, frequency of tantrums. This is my favorite.

Yeah, it is all over the place, but generally middling high. It goes down to literally zero. After he started staying with this other couple, when he would come to our house and play with the ABA therapist for a few hours for them to collect data, it went to literally zero tantrums after this.

Here we have one for accepting no alternatives. And you see it goes from less than 50% of the time to almost every time after the transition. Then we can look at vocal protest again, up and down to almost nothing. Was like one every third or fourth session. That's just saying I don't like this, basically.

Simone Collins
Yeah. Refusing to do something, typically. And when I look at things like this and tantrums for example, right. It gets me thinking of are tantrums a normal behavior? The fact that his tantrums completely went away when he went to a more naturalist care situation, and this was a third party provider.

Malcolm Collins
Who's judging this? Not us, his parents, or anyone who really was acutely aware of how dramatically his lifestyle changed. Are tantrums a phenomenon that is unique to children in the developed world who are living in these fragmented family models? Yeah, I wonder about that. I think there are two sides of this, and Scott Alexander at one point wrote this piece.

Simone Collins
Maybe I think it was about ADHD that talked about, okay, yeah, maybe people need medication now, but also it's because they're being forced to do stuff that is inhumane, that sitting in front of a computer all day is not something that we have evolved the capability of doing. And so of course we're going to not be able to pay attention. And so of course we need medication. Having a kid sit in this structured environment in daycare or then sit at a desk in school is not something kids are designed to do. It's not how kids are even naturally evolved.

Or we'll say just young mammals are naturally evolved to learn. So of course they need to be medicated to make it work or they're just going to really not do that. Well. So I think that's one part of. It, which is I would also love to send these graphs to Scott Alexander.

Malcolm Collins
I bet he could do something fun with him for a post. Yeah, maybe it is technically anecdot, like it's, it is data, but it's anecdotal. It's pretty extreme anecdote. I know. Here's the other part though, that I think is really underrated with daycare.

Simone Collins
And this also shows up in homeschooling research. Oh yeah. So everyone always says, oh, but if you homeschool your kid, how are they going to be socialized? And what they don't realize is when researchers actually look at this and they give two groups of kids a task, one group being homeschooled, the other group being conventionally schooled, the homeschooled group finishes the task in an organized fashion, they're mature about it, they get it done. It's Lord of the flies chaos in the not real story, but fake book story way.

When you give this task to the, to the schooled kids. And the general conclusion is it's not actually common throughout history for kids to grow up only around other kids in this like, environment where there's just one or two adults and then 25 to 30 kids. And that's ultimately a really big problem. There is that problem, but we also see in our data that, for example, he is showing much less aggression and stuff like that. And we haven't even talked about the data you collected.

Malcolm Collins
And keep in mind, we're not just going to be going over anecdotes. I'm starting with anecdotes as a framing device with the data on illnesses. Yeah, no, before we get to illnesses. So why is it bad that kids are learning from other kids? Often kids, certain kids in a class, and only one or two need to do this, pick up bad behaviors from adults at home.

Simone Collins
And just like with sickness, which we're going to get to next, they can spread that bad behavior to everyone in their classroom. So we would often get calls about our eldest son, who you're, whose graphs you're seeing from the daycare saying, oh, we're going to have to send him home, we just can't deal with him. Or, oh, the ABA therapists aren't coming today. I don't know if we can just have him here, which we actually got that from a couple daycares. It just seemed like they were shirking from work.

Oh, we can get this free additional assistant. Yes. I don't want to have to teach this kid or do any instruction with them while you're still paying through the nose for it. I hated that so much. But anyway, I would then bring this up with the ABA therapist and say, oh, they said Octavian pushed somewhere.

They said Octavian did this thing or that thing. And then the ABA therapist would be like, yeah, he did. Right after one of his classmates did. And nobody hears about that. So the thing is, he was picking up this tantrum behavior, this aggression behavior from other kids in his class, which drove me nuts.

Malcolm Collins
But hold on, we have to get further with this, which is to say the sickness thing. Can you go over your sickness chart? Because you took a chart of how frequently in the year you were sick before he left daycare. Yeah, in June of 2023. So last year, as of the time of this podcast recording, I got really frustrated with how frequently we were sick.

Simone Collins
So I decided I will just keep a spreadsheet of it. And then from then through mid January. So from June 2023 through mid January, which is when the last of our childcare conceived or contract. Sorry. When our child, after the last of our childcare contracted, illnesses had disappeared, finally, I kept a record of this.

I was sick for 67 days. You were sick for 25 days. Titan, our daughter was sick for 51 days, Torsten was sick for 20, and Octavian, miraculously, was only sick for three. That was pink eye. I forgot.

Malcolm Collins
What percentage of the year was that for you? Of the day? Yeah. So for me, that was 31.2% of that period of time. Okay, so when they were in childcare and when I was measuring it, I was sick basically a third of the time.

Simone Collins
And one of those times, I was so sick that I could not get out of bed. I was. We had to go to the hospital, right? Yeah. Well, I had to go to urgent care.

And of course, there were other times, like, the previous year, I had norovirus for the second time that year on my birthday. These were like, they're not good sicknesses. This isn't, like, mild. This is, like, very sick. So how sick were you after we took them out of daycare?

I haven't been sick since then. Literally, not one day. No one in our house has been sick one day. And we took them out, what, like, six months ago at this point, yeah. Although I will say that the lasting impact of daycare was still there, because on our final day of daycare, I had a sinus infection that never went away.

That turned into pneumonia. But then. Oh, yeah, after the diseases, you caught daycare. But since you got rid of that, you haven't been sick one day. I haven't been sick one day.

Malcolm Collins
They haven't been sick one day. We still take them to parks. We take them shopping, we take them to libraries. They're touching stuff. They're eating.

They are, like, in some hermetic bubble. It turns out something specific about daycare is really bad for illness. It's like ground zero. I don't know what's going on. I literally don't know how other kids are bringing that many illnesses into daycare.

Simone Collins
I'm sure it's a math thing. If you have this many kids in a small environment and, like, the. In terms of, like, contact tracing, like, any family member, anyone else that they have contact with that could get them sick. Yeah. They have a less strong immune system.

Malcolm Collins
But I suspect what we're actually looking at here, which is really interesting, is. And this is just something that no one's going to look at because they're afraid, I think, of what the data might say, but the long term mental and physiological effects of being sick that frequently in early childhood cannot be small.

So I suspect what we're actually seeing as a result of this is probably pretty pronounced in adults who are in these situations. Lower IQ scores, lower like, it is insane that somebody would put so much effort into doing something like breastfeeding and then send their kids to daycare when the daycare, if you're familiar with data that looks at illnesses in early childhood, is almost certainly having a dramatically more profound effect on pretty much all of the same metrics. Yeah, you would hear about this more profoundly in historical context, like Helen Keller being blind and deaf after having a really terrible fever and stuff. And now obviously we have better healthcare treatments and medications for things like this. That, that doesn't mean that sicknesses don't still leave an impact.

Simone Collins
And we're seeing from various bits of research on long Covid that there does appear to be lasting impacts from various illnesses. So yeah, it's better to not get ill. And there are probably lasting impacts that we don't realize cause they're hard to track. And outside of all this, there has been. This isn't just anecdot right there.

Malcolm Collins
There have been actual really good studies on this. The best of them that I have seen is the Tennessee volunteer pre kindergarten program, often abbreviated to the TN VP VPK. The TN VPK is a statewide pre kindergarten program for four year old children aimed at providing free education. The program ended up having more applicants than available spots in certain years, leading to the use of a lottery system for admission. This lottery system inadvertently created a natural experiment, allowing researchers to compare outcomes between those who were offered a spot in the program, the treatment group, and those who are not the control group, thus providing a controlled sample.

The findings from this research have been widely discussed due to their implications. Initially, children who attended TNVPK program showed gains in academic achievements. However, as these children retract over time, the initial benefits appeared to fade out and by third grade, some negative effects emerged. Specifically, the research found that by third grade, children who attended NVPK programs were performing worse on academic measures compared to their peers who did not attend the program. These results have sparked significant debate about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and their long term impacts.

This is wild to me. Everyone expected, like when this study was done, because the state thought they were being so magnanimous by putting kids into these programs and all the parents wanted their kids to be in this program. No one on the research team expected this sort of a result. No one expected they would end up long term hurting kids. And now when we see our own anecdote, it seems to back what we're hearing there, like putting kids in these group environments is just really bad for them and that they are actually better and parents, what if they get bored?

And I think that this is the thing, is that we think that kids need constant instruction and. And stimulation. Instead of being in a room with a bunch of their siblings and some perfunctory level of observation. There's a lot of cool toys for them to mess with and play with and fight over and stuff. And I hope that soon.

And this is a project I want to work on after the Collins Institute goes live, is I'd like to work on a video camera that notes when kids are doing dangerous things and sets off alarms, but that otherwise allows kids to just do their own thing without a lot of adult supervision. What I want is, for those who've read Ian Banks culture series, a slap drone, at least the book surface detail. I want to explain how this works. To the audience is basically, think of it like a flying drone that's fairly small, that you could talk to at any time. Like, it's very intelligent, it's very smart.

Simone Collins
That will not intervene in your life unless you are about to harm someone else or something might cause harm to you. So it'll make sure that you don't die from some kind of accident, crossing the street, being shot by someone, whatever. It will totally protect you, but it will also stop you from hurting other people. And I want that for all of our children so bad. So I just want to make slap drones.

Malcolm Collins
You might not be far from that. I can see simple drones following kids around, automatically redocking. No, no, there's, there. We're finally embarking on that era. Somebody bullies them, and the drone pulls down a video thing, and it shows, yeah, I'm ready.

Simone Collins
I'm okay with it. Teasing our kids if our kids are being dicks, too. Dogs have those little shock collars. You can have a little. No kid can get away anymore with being like he did it.

Malcolm Collins
Replaying. So, child number two, it was their. Turn, but we'd build ours with an AI system to create fake video of the other kid bullying them. And they'd be like, this is two different video feeds. What this?

Simone Collins
Well, what I would say is, if we're looking more broadly, if, like, we're doing a meta study of the research on daycare interventions, a lot of research does suggest or indicate various, mostly short term benefits. And most of those short term benefits are measured in the form of academic performance in similarly structured school environments later on on, which is. It's misleading because it makes you think, oh, yeah, they're doing so well. But it's no, they're learning how to live in a bureaucracy and deal with this system, and they haven't yet been kicked out of it. That's what you're seeing.

I do think that in general, what the research says that shows is more robust is that for lower income people, basically, if your home environment is unsafe or bad, daycare is a good thing because it's better than that, right? It's better than an abusive household. It's better than an impoverished or dangerous household where they're drug users, whatever. So I am glad that daycare does is mostly subsidized in the United States for lower income houses where you're more likely to see situations like that. However, the effects, the positive effects of daycare appear to wear off over time, even in academic environments.

So even when it comes to dealing with bureaucracies, and this only seems to have an effect on lower socioeconomic children, it's not really helpful to kids who have a good home environment already, which. Is fascinating to me. Poor Malcolm, you've been up since 02:00 a.m. you haven't had a nap. You've been entertaining your dad and the kids today.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. Calling the IR's for our businesses. Thank you. I appreciate the appreciation. But you're going in to give birth tomorrow, so you know which one of us deserves a gold star here.

Simone Collins
I don't know when they immobilize you and put you on a table for them. Question I have is how do you make a situation like this realistic for your average person? I would say a couple things. One is you need to be willing to work with people who are very culturally different from you. Like the people who we are working with to do this are not of the similar socioeconomic background or similar socioeconomic status to us.

I'm sure they think that we're the weirdest nerds in the entire world, basically don't share a single hobby or intellectual interest. And that's okay, because what we do share is they're expecting their first kid later this month. I'm having our fourth kid. What we all care about is our kids and family and starting sustainable businesses and sharing resources and being smart about the way that we live our lives. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
And I'd say that this is the key thing. You need somebody who is going to actually appreciate the help you are giving them. And I think that a lot of. You actually appreciate the help they're giving you. Yeah.

And I think a lot of people don't do one of those two things. They either see it as transactional, which removes the utility and how something like this can be structured or they. They commodify it in some way. And that's something we've been very careful not to do. That's something that we saw.

Simone Collins
And I guess you even experienced yourself being largely raised by babysitters and nannies as a kid. And you were actually really. You've always been very against the idea of, I guess we'll say, traditionally compensated, like non community based childcare, because you just found that especially the more experienced nannies and babysitters you had who turned it into a career, who weren't, like, first timers, who actually cared, were pretty mean. Yeah. Didn't you have one called the enforcer?

Or was that what you called your dog? No, my mom called one the enforcer. Yeah. Okay. But hallucinator.

Malcolm Collins
Get the hallucinator. No. Yeah. No. So I think with a lot of these.

Yeah. It's something I wonder about, because I've noticed that I think was in women particularly, some women seem to have a psychological profile where they, to an extent, get off on being really cruel to kids. And this is something I've just seen both in terms of teachers. I've seen this in terms of, I was recently watching the eight passengers situation and the woman who clearly, like, what. The therapist or the mother therapist clearly.

Got off on being cruel to kids. And it's something that I think appears in women much more than it appears in men. Now, I didn't have that many. I didn't have any severe cases of this growing up. Like, I wasn't, like, traumatized by this or something.

But I definitely say that something about that psychological profile seems to disproportionately sort these individuals into paid childcare roles outside of the school system. That makes sense because there's. There are few. There's less oversight. Yeah.

Simone Collins
Yeah. I think that this is. This can be more toxic than people realize. And within the daycare system itself, once you get to kid number three, I think pretty much everyone is going to be able to find a more cost effective option that is more in their kids best interest if they are willing to take that leap. Even though I can understand that leap can be so enormously difficult, and it may not work out the first couple times, which it didn't for us.

Oh, no. And we've been. Let's be honest, we've been trying since before our first son was born. There was that person who maybe was a real person and maybe wasn't, who said they were going first to Saudi Arabia to work at a school and even sent us photos and spoke with us on the phone and then just disappeared. Yeah.

And then there was another one who we bought a fight for. And the day that she was supposed to fly out to come and be a living nanny, decided she just didn't feel like it. This is what we talk about, the entitlement of Jin Alpha. It was so bad. It was so bad.

Oh, and then we've had a bunch of. A bunch. So many failures. But here's the thing. Even on the side of daycare, it was terrible.

And this is something that maybe was just associated with the daycare that our kids were at, although I don't think so is they would close at the drop of a hat. Like, they would shut down classrooms. They were understaffed, so they would sometimes rotate people between classrooms and be like, nope, sorry, this understaffed today. Sorry. Yeah, your kid can't come in.

And so we're still paying for all that. But. And when we first, before the pandemic, daycares often would say, okay, you can have one week where you don't have to pay your daycare dues while still being enrolled, where you can take a family vacation that was taken away, so you'll be away for one, two weeks on vacation. You're still paying for full time daycare during that time. That really sucks.

And then they would send our kids home at the drop of a hat. Not, they were like, yeah, yeah. They'd frequently be like, oh, he's just too hyper today. I'm like, that's why he's not home. On the days where he's not hyper, he can stay home.

Yeah, yeah. Or they be like, he had a bug bite, and I'm worried about it, and so we're gonna send him home. They were also the times where they were actually sick because, of course they got the sickness from daycare where they'd be sent home. And it made us so angry because we're like, why is he sick? Obviously, thanks to you.

So keep him. All right. You're the incubus of viral plague, not us. So realistically, where do people find individuals like this who they can work with? Is that their families?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think they need to find people early in their careers or at transition points that they can help move to the next stage of their career. And, yeah, if you are the one who has a more stable career and income, finding a couple that you can work with to help get their careers off the line while they watch your kids is one thing you can do. I think other people also have multiple, a group of multiple families where one parent in each family works part time, is totally capable of creating a homeschool pod or a childcare pod where there's just a rotation of when this parent has a day off, then it's with this one. So like nurses, firemen, people with part time jobs where they don't work every single day of the week, that is something that's super feasible.

You just have to rotate. So proximity is really important as well. I think the only, the way too that we found, the couple that we're doing all this with now is just by texting people in our community too, that we met through various other random Facebook groups or running into them, et cetera. And I think that's underrated. Anything that we did through care.com comma, anything that we did through Craigslist, anything that we did online, which is how we do everything.

Yeah. Was not good. And I think that might have larger implications. This is a totally different podcast subject in terms of community building and how people can form relationships that actually lead. To this is a problem.

Malcolm Collins
When people community build, they try to community build with peers, individuals who are near or close equivalent to them. This is the worst group you can community build with because there is no arbitrage in terms of community exchanges. So you consider something like our neighbors, we can do things like help put together their companies, help with their tax filings, help with marketing, and they can do things like change our oil, for example, take care of our kids, fix our car when it breaks. These are two skill sets where we can no more do what they can do for us than they can do. Then they can do what we can do for them.

Which means that both sides genuinely appreciate the relationship. But this is something that is allowed because our backgrounds are so different. This is why same background communities allow for so little depth to form within them, which is what really contrasts these intentional, cult like EA communities and stuff like that. These more traditional religious communities that exist across socio economic lines and sort of career pathways. Totally.

Simone Collins
I think that's solid advice. Get to know your local community and don't expect to. Unless you're doing one of these things where you're all nurses and firemen and you're the same socioeconomic status, but you happen to have a spouse in each house who has a part time job and is willing to watch kids, then this is not going to work with people who are your peers. Yeah, but anyway, daycare, not so great. Not so great.

Malcolm Collins
Anyway, love you. I love you. Too.

Simone Collins
Too.