Broadsheet

Photo by Fibonacci Blue via Wikimedia Commons

In the 2010s, a bunch of right-wing types suddenly became big fans of Martin Luther King Jr.’s views on race. If you saw someone on Twitter quote MLK’s nostrum that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, it was almost certainly someone on the right — quite a change from the type of person who probably would have cited King’s words half a century earlier. This is from an Associated Press story back in 2013:

King’s quote has become a staple of conservative belief that “judged by the color of their skin” includes things such as unique appeals to certain voter groups, reserving government contracts for Hispanic-owned businesses, seeking more non-white corporate executives, or admitting black students to college with lower test scores.

Many progressives railed against the idea of a colorblind society, arguing that statistical disparities between racial groups — income gaps, wealth gaps, incarceration gaps, and so on — couldn’t be remedied without writing race into official policy and becoming much more race-conscious in our daily lives.

In the policy space, this idea manifested as DEI, which implemented racially discriminatory hiring policies across a broad swath of American business, government, academia, and nonprofits. In the media space, this manifested as a torrent of op-eds collectively criticizing white people as a group — “White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”, “It’s Time for White People to Understand Their Whiteness”, “What is Wrong With America is Us White People”, and so on. Reputable institutions brought in speakers who made claims like “Whites are psychopaths,” and so on. Making nasty jokes about white people carried few if any professional consequences.

In that kind of environment, it’s understandable that lots of people on the right would turn to individualist principles like the ones espoused by MLK in his famous speech. Asking to be judged by the content of your character is a reasonable defense against people who are trying to judge you based on your membership in a racial group.

Fast-forward a few years, however, and the shoe is on the other foot. The Wall Street Journal released an editorial urging us not to blame Afghan immigrants as a group for the Afghan man who shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. a week ago:

[I]t would be a shame if this single act of betrayal became the excuse for deporting all Afghan refugees in the U.S…Tens of thousands are building new lives here in peace and are contributing to their communities. They shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s powerful Homeland Security Advisor, responded with a dismissal of individualism and an indictment of Afghans as a group:

This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.

And that same week, it was revealed that some Somalis in Minnesota had committed a massive welfare fraud:

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic…At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse…But…Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided…Federal prosecutors say…more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen[.]

In the wake of those revelations, Trump condemned Somalis as a group:

Here are Trump’s exact words:

I don’t want em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks…I could say that about other countries too…We don’t want em…We have to rebuild our country. You know, our country’s at a tipping point. We could go bad…We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage…And from where they came from, they got nothing…When they come from Hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want em in our country. Let em go back to where they came from, and fix it.

Here you see the very same idea that Stephen Miller expressed. Trump and Miller both judge people by their ethnic group, and they judge those ethnic groups by the condition of their ancestral country. Somalia is a bad place, therefore Somalis are bad, therefore if you’re a Somali you’re bad and you shouldn’t be allowed into America. Afghanistan is a bad place, therefore Afghans are bad, therefore if you’re an Afghan you’re bad and you shouldn’t be allowed into America.

In fact, this idea was very popular a century ago, when America enacted harsh restrictions on immigration. Restrictionists argued that immigrants from South and East Europe were undesirable, because South and East Europe were relatively underdeveloped places. For example, here’s what Francis Walker, the president of MIT and a staunch opponent of immigration, wrote in The Atlantic in 1896:

Only a short time ago, the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one per cent of our immigration. To-day the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent…The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement…They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence…They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government. [emphasis mine]

This is a form of racial collectivism. It’s judging people by ethnic, racial, and national groups instead of as individuals. In his landmark 1955 book Strangers in the Land, which chronicles the anti-immigration movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historian John Higham labeled this attitude “racism”. Today, of course, we can’t use that word, since it has been repurposed to mean so many other things. But the word feels like a perfect fit — it’s an ideology (an “ism”) that holds that people are to be judged according to the collective accomplishments of their race.

When I see people on the right spouting this sort of rhetoric, I think: What happened to MLK? What happened to judging people based on the content of their character? What happened to the colorblind society? What happened between 2018 and now that makes collective judgment of racial groups suddenly ok?

The answer, of course, is “The right got the upper hand in American politics.” It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top. A lot of people really do believe in individualism, of course, especially in America. But a lot of others just use it as a cynical shield when they’re on the defensive. And we’re finding out that most of the MAGA movement was always the latter type.

MAGA’s overriding goal is immigration restriction. They care about this much more than any other policy issue — more than inflation, more than trade, more than crime, more than anything. And the reason they want immigration restriction, I believe, is because they think that Somalis and Afghans and Haitians and so on are going to make America more like those countries. When Trump and Miller talk about this, I think they’re being completely honest. And after Trump is gone, I think this idea will be at the core of the new right-wing ideology that will sustain the MAGA movement. Racial collectivism is absolutely at the core of their worldview.

But MAGA has a big problem: While that worldview has some appeal to Americans, overall they aren’t on board. Every poll we have shows pro-immigration sentiment on the rise again, after a dip during the Biden years:

A lot of Americans are also in favor of individualism — that is, of treating people based on their individual traits rather than what group they belong to. Americans of most races supported the recent Supreme Court decision banning racial preferences in university admissions; even black Americans were about evenly split. And while Americans disagree about lots of racial issues, they tend to overwhelmingly say they support things like equal opportunity regardless of race.

And although there are differences in American attitudes toward immigrants from different regions of the world, the differences aren’t huge, and they don’t perfectly line up with how developed the regions are. For example, here’s a 2015 poll by Pew, finding that immigration from Africa is viewed more favorably than immigration from the much more developed regions of Latin America and the Middle East:

Here’s a 2021 poll from Cato that finds the same pattern:

So although some Americans are probably evaluating immigrants based on their racial group and on the condition of their source country, like Trump and Miller are, Americans in general probably don’t think this way. They get mad at illegal immigration, and at the disorderly quasi-legal immigration that Biden tolerated — but illegal entry is an individual action, not a group trait.

Which makes sense. The U.S. immigration system is highly selective; Lazear (2017) shows that selectivity accounts for a very large fraction of the average educational attainment of different immigrant groups in America.

As Matt Yglesias points out, nowhere is this more evident than with Indian immigrants. The country of India is still poor; despite solid recent growth, its GDP per capita is lower than that of El Salvador or Guatemala. Infrastructure has improved a lot but is still subpar, and the country has pockets of startling poverty. By the racial-collectivist logic of Miller and Trump, or of the restrictionists of a century ago, Indian immigrants should be turning America into a third-world country.

And yet the exact opposite is happening. Indian Americans are arguably the most successful group in the United States. They have the highest median household income of any national ancestry group, and the highest average level of education. Even Indians who are poor when they arrive in America end up making well above the median — a level of mobility rivaled only by Chinese Americans. There are more billionaires in America from India than from any other ethnic group.

Nor has Indian immigration turned anywhere in America into a version of India. Fremont, California is probably the city over 100,000 population with the greatest percentage of Indians — about 29%. And yet Fremont is one of the cleanest, nicest, richest, safest towns in the whole country, with a murder rate so low that many European countries would envy it, and arguably the best public schools in the country. A recent survey identified Fremont as the happiest city in America.

Almost all of the MAGA people screaming about Indian immigration on the internet live in places less nice than Fremont.

A big part of this, of course, is because immigration from India is so selective. India is the world’s most populous country; it’s not too hard to grab a few million smart people from a country that big. But this isn’t the only reason. American institutions are also important.

As another example, take El Paso. The overwhelming majority of people in El Paso are of Mexican descent. Mexican immigration is among the least selective, because Mexico is so close to America and there was so much illegal immigration in the past. And yet despite being filled with ethnic Mexicans, El Paso looks absolutely nothing like Juarez, the Mexican city that sits right next to it on the opposite side of the border. El Paso’s murder rate is 3.8, very low for an American city, while Juarez is one of the most violent, chaotic cities on planet Earth.

Mexicans didn’t turn El Paso into Mexico, and the reason is American institutions. America’s economy offers El Paso’s residents the chance to get ahead without joining drug gangs. American culture is a more positive-sum, less violent culture than Mexico’s. And the U.S. Military has a big presence in El Paso, because Fort Bliss is there. Even without selectivity, institutions matter a lot.

So Stephen Miller is just flat-out wrong. Immigrants do not recreate the conditions of their homelands in America. Yes, there is some amount of carryover, including some negative influences like the old Sicilian mafia, or modern gangs like MS-13. But the differences between American immigrant populations and their source countries far outweigh the similarities.

In order for MAGA to win, they need to convince America otherwise — they need to persuade you, the American citizen, that the fiction that undergirds their ideology is actually true. To this end, they need to get you to judge people in terms of their group, rather than as individuals. So they keep looking around for a group they think they can convince you to fear, to disdain, and ultimately to hate.

Remember last year, during the campaign season, when Trump and JD Vance declared that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio?

It was all B.S., of course. News crews descended on Springfield, but not even the most right-wing reporters could find a credible report of a single pet being eaten. JD Vance awkwardly begged the internet to “keep the cat memes flowing”, and never apologized for smearing a whole group of people, but at some point everyone realized it was a hoax.

That’s why you didn’t hear anything about cat-eating Haitian-Ohioans before the campaign season of 2024. And that’s why you haven’t heard anything about it since then. It wasn’t real; you were being played.

Now they’re trying again, with the Somalis of Minnesota. This time, they probably have a better shot at success. For one thing, Somalis in America are much poorer than their Haitian-American counterparts — Haitians in the U.S. have slightly below average income and average education levels, they commit few crimes, and they’re not prominent in politics. They’re basically just quiet middle-class people living pretty normal American lives.

Somalis, on the other hand, are an extremely poor group, with very high poverty rates and much lower income than Haitians, or immigrants in general; this is due to the fact that most of them are refugees or descendants of refugees, which are the least selected type of immigrants. Somalis are Muslim, unlike Haitians, which makes them both visually distinct (because of the hijab) and mentally associated with civilizational conflict. They’re not known for violence, but now they’re associated with Minnesota’s massive organized welfare fraud.

And unlike the Haitians of Ohio, the Somalis of Minnesota are prominent and powerful in local politics. They managed to do a sort of takeover of the Minneapolis Democratic Party, nominating one of their own, Omar Fateh, as the Democratic candidate over incumbent mayor Jacob Frey. Frey managed to beat Fateh in the general election, but only by appealing to a rival Somali clan and making flamboyant appeals to the Somali community.

This is hardly unprecedented in American politics — Irish immigrants built political machines that dominated the politics of many American cities in the 19th century. Given many decades, it’s likely that Somalis will assimilate, the same way the Irish did, and turn the organizational skills that allowed them to swindle the state of Minnesota and take over the Minneapolis Democrats to some more constructive use, like building drone factories (or whatever humans are doing 80 years from now).

But “many decades” is a very long time for Americans to wait in order not to worry about culture clash. And Americans aren’t used to urban ethnic machine politics these days,1 and the notion of an iconic American city being at the mercy of clan rivalries from one of the world’s poorest and most violent nations will naturally lend force to Trump’s argument that Somalis are trying to make Minnesota into another Somalia.

If Trump and MAGA succeed in getting a critical mass of regular Americans to reject Somalis categorically, as a racial group, then they win a crucial victory — not over the Somalis, who pose them no actual threat, but in terms of changing the terms of the discourse around race and immigration in America.

Once MAGA can convince you that “Are the Somalis bad?” is a legitimate question to ask, they then pretty much automatically get to ask the same question about every other group in America. They get to ask “Are Afghans bad?”, and “Are Haitians bad?”. They’ll get to ask “Are Jews bad?”, “Are Indians bad?”, and “Are Chinese people bad?”. Eventually they might even get around to asking “Are Italians bad?”, and so on. They will push as far as they can.

Even if those questions get answered in the affirmative — even if Italians and Indians and Haitians can all successfully defend their right to be in America by appealing to the court of MAGA opinion — the mere fact that they had to defend themselves as racial groups, instead of as individuals, will redefine what America is all about. It will move America toward being an estate society — a society where groups are accorded rights and privileges instead of individuals.

In the 20th century, American liberals successfully overcame all of the people who wanted to make the country a racial estate society — Jim Crow was outlawed, immigration laws were made (more or less) race-neutral, and so on. Liberals accomplished this by appealing to Americans’ deep-seated value of individualism — of the idea that people shouldn’t be judged by the group they were born into. That idea, captured most eloquently in MLK’s famous speech but repeated ad infinitum by leaders, writers, and activists, ultimately carried the day and made America the liberal nation I grew up in.

What I fear is that by embracing identity politics in the 2010s, progressives have thrown away liberals’ ultimate weapon. Appeals to individualism carry much less moral force when the people making those appeals just spent the last decade decrying colorblindness as a tool of systemic racism (or embracing people who made that claim).

This is not to say that rightists’ push to turn America into a balkanized racial hierarchy is progressives’ fault — it isn’t. Rightists are always trying to do this sort of thing; it’s not a reaction to anything progressives did. But there’s a reason this sort of racial collectivism was defeated and suppressed for a hundred years, and there’s a reason it’s breaking through now when it couldn’t before.

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To be honest, they weren’t very relaxed about it in the 19th century either; anti-Irish sentiment resulted in vicious pogroms, gang wars, and whole newspapers devoted to spreading vicious anti-Irish rumors.

I’d have thrown OpenAI in that list of companies where it would have been surprising, but not shocking, for Dye to leave Apple for. But that simply wasn’t possible given Jony Ive’s relationship with Sam Altman, LoveFrom’s collaboration with OpenAI with the io project, and Ive’s utter disdain for Dye’s talent, leadership, and personality. ↩︎

Titles are just titles, and title inflation is a real problem at all big companies. But I always thought C-level executives by definition report directly to the CEO. That that was the whole point of a “chief whatever officer” title versus “senior vice president of whatever”. But according to Mark Gurman’s exclusive report at Bloomberg breaking this whole story (emphasis added):

With the Dye hire, Meta is creating a new design studio and putting him in charge of design for hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces. He will be reporting to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing wearable devices, such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Dye’s major focus will be revamping Meta’s consumer devices with artificial intelligence features.

If true, Dye doesn’t even report directly to Mark Zuckerberg. Oddly enough, after the retirement of COO Jeff Williams this year, Apple claimed the company’s design teams transitioned to reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. ↩︎
And man oh man am I curious who was involved with this decision, who had Tim Cook’s ear, and just how quickly they were forced to make it. Part of what made Stephen Lemay a popular choice within Apple’s ranks is that Lemay, by all accounts I’ve heard, isn’t a political operator and never angled for a promotion to a level of this prominence. His focus has always singularly been on the work. ↩︎︎
Sorrentino was featured in a two-minute-plus segment in this year’s WWDC keynote, starting at the 38:25 mark, introducing the new iOS Visual Intelligence features. His star was rising at Apple. And Dye himself, of course, was given the spotlight to introduce and effectively take credit for Liquid Glass itself. At least until recently, no one at Apple saw this coming. ↩︎︎
I have good reason to believe that Ive, in private, would be the first person to admit that. A fan of Liquid Glass Jony Ive is not. I believe he sees Dye as a graphic designer, not a user interface designer — and not a good graphic designer at that. I don’t think Alan Dye could get a job as a barista at LoveFrom. ↩︎︎
It’s worth recalling that Zuckerberg sorta kinda tried this poach-design-talent-from-Apple thing before. Mike Matas, the wunderkind designer who became a sensation with Delicious Library in 2005, soon thereafter moved on to work at Apple, where he designed such things as the “slide to unlock” interface on the original iPhone. Matas was a key designer on that glorious first version of the iPhone’s OS. He then left Apple and formed Push Pop Press, and wound up at Facebook in 2011 after Facebook acquired Push Pop — before it had even shipped its core product. (I saw a still-in-development version of Push Pop’s publishing system in 2011, before Facebook bought them and shut down the product, and it remains to this day one of the most impressive, exciting, “this is the future” demos I’ve ever seen. It’s not merely a shame but a goddamn tragedy that it never even shipped.) Zuckerberg wound up assembling around Matas an entire little superteam of “Delicious” era designers and design-focused developers. That team wound up shipping Facebook Paper in 2014 — an iOS-exclusive alternative client for Facebook that espoused the same principles of elegance, exquisite attention to detail, and, especially, direct manipulation of content in lieu of user interface chrome, that infused Push Pop Press’s publishing system. Facebook Paper was so good it almost — almost — made me sign up for a Facebook account just so I could use it. But Facebook Paper went nowhere, fast. Zuckerberg lost his boner for “design”, Facebook Paper was pulled from the App Store in 2016, and the team behind Paper disbanded.

Matas today works at LoveFrom, and remains, to my mind, one of the most singularly talented and interesting people in the field of interaction design. In some closer-to-ideal alternate universe, Matas would be running HI design at Apple today. ↩︎︎

Originally posted on November 29, 2025 by Dr. Christine Corbett Moran

When asked on The Cheeky Pint podcast how we educate our children, my husband Casey Handmer replied “benign neglect.” It’s a cheeky answer that captures something real: we’re neither tiger nor helicopter parents. But after seven years and three kids (with a fourth on the way), we’ve developed a more deliberate approach. Here’s what we’ve learned.

The Family as a System

If I’ve taken anything away from seven years of parenting, it’s this: the family is a system. Treating it as such, rather than asking “is X better than Y?”, leads to more effective choices.

For working parents who want to scale both career and family, three system-level principles matter most:

Reliability is non-negotiable: Even in a flexible workplace, unexpected time off creates disadvantages and logistical hassles. Any out-of-home option needs backup childcare (nanny or easy-to-access service) for inconvenient hours, school breaks, and illnesses. The younger the child, the more frequently you’ll need backup.
Over-invest in childcare: Optimizing for convenience, reliability, and family-fit is worth spending more than you’d think, even more than one parent’s salary in extreme examples. This keeps both careers on growth trajectories, builds retirement savings, and makes having more children feel manageable rather than overwhelming. The cost of a nanny grows sublinearly with the number of children.
Scalability matters: Decisions that work for one child may not scale to two or three. Time spent driving to individual activities multiplies. Costs of private schooling multiply. We’ve consistently preferred options that work better as our family grows.

The Caveats

This blog details our family preferences alone, which also change over time as we grow in number and maturity. We’re two startup executives with three kids (7, 5, and 2) and a fourth on the way. Our children are somewhat precocious, but otherwise don’t have special needs thus far.

My intention is that this post may provide helpful inspiration to find or tune your own family preferences. If I’ve taken anything away from the past seven years of parenting, it is that it’s helpful to think in terms of global, rather than local, hill climbing towards a better situation. With that, let’s kick things off.

Infancy (Birth to Age 2): Swapping Daycare for Nanny

Emily Oster’s Cribsheet covers from birth through early preschool, and is an excellent data driven read. A key takeaway regarding these years is:

Relative to pregnancy, there are fewer things here where the data will tell you what to do or avoid. Your family preferences will be more central.

What this means is that very few specific interventions actually matter for outcomes on a statistical level. The items which do are the overall quality of parenting and family life.

As new parents in 2018, we had a lot to learn and had relatively simple criteria. Both of us wished to continue our careers with little interruption, so a parent staying at home was off the table. With that our initial considerations were:

Does it support both of us going back to work?
Is it convenient?
Is it sufficiently high quality and within our means?

One additional thing we tried to avoid was an abundance of electronic or “blinky” toys.

Childcare center

In the early days with our first child, we went with a child care center associated with JPL, the Children’s Educational Center, which fit the bill across the board. We both worked at JPL in person and it was just a minute away, on the way to work. I was able to visit at lunch to breastfeed. A fortunate accident of arriving on the CEC after our simple search was that as first time parents, we’ve since adopted much of their approach. They used a combination of RIE (Resources for Infant Educarers) and Montessori style methods as the children grew, as well as a focus on outdoor play even from the youngest age. Some key takeaways from their approach that we’ve consistently adopted:

Treating even the youngest infant as a unique human being, not as an object. This means talking to them, walking them through procedures, and sensitive observations of them to understand needs
Free movement vs seats, walkers swings or bouncers
Increasing independence through independent play and with meals (drinking early from cups, self feeding).
Open-ended, safe, passive toys.
Spending lots of time outside, with adequate sun protection.

We practice this at home too. Almost all of our house is freely accessible to all of our children, with adults only stuff kept either in a dedicated room or on higher shelves. Mattresses are initially on the floor and don’t have cot sides, only the stairs have gates for crawlers who haven’t yet learned how to safely descend. For infants, free movement means plenty of time on the floor where they can navigate independently. We also set things up generally such that the children can roam. There are no locks (outside of on unsafe areas like our office or garage). And after graduating from a bassinet, the children sleep on floor and later elevated beds they can get in and out of independently.

Although broader data doesn’t support this approach providing uniquely better outcomes than alternatives, thinking of the family as a system there are many key advantages for our family, that have shown up early but been enhanced as our family size grows.

Treating infants as humans makes caring for them more enjoyable, and makes it easier to spot their human needs and communication methods earlier
Talking to infants helps their language development and even before you could imagine they might understand, and seems to sooth them
Getting rid of dedicated entertainment and rather emphasizing observing (and intervening for safety) as the core parenting responsibility, makes parenting at this age more enjoyable. The infant will ask for attention when they need it, vs it being foisted upon them.
Self feeding and drinking from cups means mealtimes are more scalable.
Being able to get out of bed by themselves is easier for potty training and sibling interaction, and entertaining themselves on the rare occasion they wake before us.
The focus on simple toys means a house with aesthetic, useful, playthings that stand the test of time and span ages, appealing to our kids as they grow and even us as adults. Our favorites that begin at this age are magnetiles, blocks, a railway set, and duplo.

A scene from daycare – our eldest, then a baby, plays happily on the floor. Children sit on tables having meals (with light assistance) behind.

Why we switched to a nanny

With our subsequent children, we both had moved on from JPL; I worked remote and Casey quickly transitioned into an in person role leading his startup. Meanwhile, our income had grown along with the size of the family, so the costs and conveniences of a nanny came much closer to childcare, which ran us about $4000/month. We were able to hire a full time 1:1 caregiver, focused on ages 0-2, but available to assist with the other ages when out of school. With two (and soon to be more) children this more effectively supported us going back to work, was of the utmost convenience, was extremely high quality, and while expensive was within our means. The more children we had, the more this method made sense financially, logistically and emotionally, so we’ve “signed” our caregiver for the next 5 years or more.

Advantages of 1:1 care for our family system:

Attention sustainability: Neither Casey nor I can focus joyfully on an infant for their full waking hours. A professional who has chosen this calling can supplement our active attention.
Sibling time: When our nanny’s hours overlap with other children’s schedules, we can spend 1:1 time with the older kids.
Breastfeeding without pumping: Working from home with the infant at home made this seamless.
Zero transition friction: Dropoffs and pickups take seconds, no packing, no drama with a steady caregiver.
Household support: During nap times, our nanny helps with laundry, dishes, light cleaning, and inventory management. When we’re off work, we focus on children instead of chores.
Built-in backup care: As older children attend school, the nanny handles dropoffs, pickups, and care during scheduled or unscheduled days off.
99%+ work reliability: With kids in mixed settings, the chance someone is ill or off school is high. The nanny provides backup, so we consistently meet work commitments.
Upside for larger families: Without the short term difficulty of sole caregiving, we revel in family life, rejoice in our children, and want to have more! As we have more children, our childcare cost does not grow significantly. This means that once we’ve built this into our budget, having additional kids doesn’t substantially impact it further.

Infant Care Conclusion

Even considering the educational benefits of our childcare center, having experienced both, I’d choose a nanny for infants given the option. The emotional benefits for infant and parent, plus the system-level advantages, outweigh the learning benefits for first-time parents.

Recommended reading: Janet Lansbury’s Elevating Childcare (use it as a menu of options, not a rigid philosophy) and Loose Parts.

Preschool

While the data is mixed whether communal care before preschool has positive, neutral, or negative impacts on outcome, some preschool starting around age two or three will improve the ease of transitioning to school (Cribsheet). Preschool could have a positive or negative impact on the family system depending on the setup. We again were influenced by our early childcare setting near work, which focused on outdoor play and child-led exploration. Some of the ways in which it aligned with our family’s focus were:

Social focus over academics: No drilling on letters, reading, or math. Our kids absorb academic content at home: we’re doing math, sounding out letters, and reading together. What they needed was learning to interact appropriately with peers and adults. Casey and I are unusual adults who didn’t have great social skills at that age, so this was the value-add. Plus, once academic focus starts for bright kids who are already “ahead,” it can be difficult to study alongside peers months or years behind. This has to start sometime, but there’s no reason it needs to before kindergarten.
Child-led exploration: with familiar routines and lots of self-directed play
Supervised risk-taking: cooking, climbing trees, jumping from heights
High quality staff with low turnover
No screens or “blinky” toys
Authoritative style: Authoritative parenting combines high expectations with high responsiveness: setting clear boundaries and rules while being warm, supportive, and responsive to the child’s needs and emotions. In contrast, other common styles include authoritarian which is high expectations/low responsiveness, and permissive is low expectations/high responsiveness.
Close proximity: 5-10 minutes drive or walking distance, so we don’t spend our lives in the car

How we found it: The NAEYC filter

When we needed something more local, we initially struck out. LA has social pressure for “feeder preschools” among our peer group, plus options with very different focuses, rigid schedules or heavy academic drilling.

In researching, I discovered our original preschool was NAEYC accredited. NAEYC accreditation is essentially a “gold standard” certification that preschools earn by meeting rigorous quality benchmarks focused on developmentally appropriate practices. Using this as a filter led us to a fantastic local option that happened to be a co-op.

The co-op advantage

In a co-op, parents volunteer in the classroom roughly three hours per week to supplement two lead teachers. There are day-consistent volunteers (I always took Wednesdays) with more responsibilities, and floaters who keep a general eye on things and escalate to permanent staff for anything major.

Compared to our previous preschool, the overall staff quality was higher especially post COVID. Parental volunteers were highly educated, empathetic parents who shared our philosophy (hence ending up at the same place), rather than entry-level staff. The permanent teachers had generally been there 10+ years. The atmosphere was more DIY, but they were excellent stewards of parent money, focusing on what matters for development over Instagram aesthetics.

Working from home with teams across the US, I shifted my schedule to start on East Coast hours a few days a week, stopping at close of business Pacific to accommodate Wednesday volunteering. Casey, lacking this flexibility, fulfilled his volunteer hours doing construction projects for the school.

Volunteering was sometimes tough work, but I got to see my kid and benefited from informal education in early childhood development watching the pros navigate the classroom. I’ve worked as a consistent volunteer in the 4-5 age classroom, the 3-4 age classroom, and soon the 2-3 age classroom. I’ll have learned all preschool ages firsthand.

Preschool Care Conclusion

Attending some preschool before formal schooling is probably good, but the data isn’t strong enough to stress if waiting makes more sense for your family. If you want a feeder school for private education or don’t have niche requirements, any school with good staff is probably fine.

If you have similar priorities to ours: play-focused, developmentally appropriate, searching for NAEYC accredited schools is an excellent starting point. Picking a school within 5-10 minutes of home has significant family-system advantages. If you can volunteer or participate in a co-op, the education in your own parenting development is valuable, and I believe investing time to volunteer at this stage benefits both parent and child more than volunteering at later stages.

Recommended reading: Cribsheet by Emily Oster

Kindergarten and Elementary: Maximizing the “Typical School Experience”

Our kids track 1-4+ grades above in reading, math, and other core academics, with the gap seeming to accelerate over time. They remain grade-level in handwriting, social skills, executive functioning (homework and test-taking diligence), and rule-following.

Why we chose public school while we still can

We want to take advantage of the time when this gap is manageable to focus on grade-level skills and give them a “typical school experience” as long as possible. We expect their schooling will need to deviate from typical more in the future.

There’s a perception that parents drive the acceleration of kids tracking above grade level. My experience is the opposite: kids like this thirst and hunger for knowledge, so acceleration is kid-driven. You’d no more deny it to a child thirsting for it than you would a glass of water.

Our values driving our elementary school choice have been

Convenience: Close to home with minimal driving.
Typical experience: Age-similar peers, similar routines, focus on basics over bells and whistles.
Flexibility: Amenable to various options for academic acceleration so we can keep this mode of education as long as it makes sense.
Quality: Basic quality of educators and system, with good odds of matching with teachers who work well with our kids.
Cost: This is where our systems thinking diverged from preschool/infant care. Investing heavily in a nanny or preschool makes life easier on the whole family: worth every dollar. Private elementary school wouldn’t increase reliability or convenience for us while offering marginal educational benefit and decreased normalcy. A nanny benefits multiple children for approximately the same cost; private schooling scales up with each child. When private school offers significant educational benefit and normalcy is no longer possible anywhere, we might reconsider (stay tuned!).

How it’s working

We chose the local public school. It’s walking distance or a short drive, has good ratings (matched by our kids being paired with great teachers), and is approximately free. All teachers are trained in gifted education, and while we don’t expect their clustered grouping approach (as opposed to academic streaming) to be especially useful, teachers have been flexible and creative about differentiated options. Our eldest does math warmups two grades ahead and accesses curriculum three grades ahead during math study time. Our younger gets books tailored to her reading level, alongside kids in her classroom receiving more or less advanced material during reading time.

They’ve made friends, including some similarly curious kids. Much of their school time involves moving between activities, recess, and enrichment classes: art, gardening, PE, music, classroom runs, alongside handwriting, spelling, and socialization with age peers. That is to say, the majority of their day doesn’t require differentiated curriculum, and the portion which does they blend in well with others receiving the same (at higher or lower levels).

The homework approach

There have been hiccups. We weren’t paying attention to kindergarten homework with our eldest until he complained math was boring. When I looked, I realized we needed to give him challenges (see Enrichment section below). After providing after-school opportunities to learn math in a structured way, he hasn’t complained since. In later grades we paired with his teacher to provide some of these opportunities at school as well.

Homework continues to be straightforward for both children. We debated requesting or inventing more challenging homework but decided against it. Instead, we go deep on the homework they do have, focusing on executive functioning, diligence, and improving at-grade-level skills. The math may be straightforward, but writing answers clearly, checking work carefully, paying attention to details, and completing and turning it in on time may not be. Since it is straightforward, this typically doesn’t take much time for anyone involved, and the time invested seems worth it for the returns.

Why this works for our family system

Public school requires no driving logistics that multiply with family size, and costs nothing while our children can still thrive there. The kids are picking up key social skills in additional to their educational advances and have the opportunity to experience a rite of passage shared by most Americans.

Recommended reading: The Family Firm by Emily Oster

Enrichment and Extracurriculars: Prioritizing Family Time

What we skip and why

We prioritize family time together, keeping weekends largely free. This means we can spend time as a family, taking advantage of the big family we’ve built, while keeping logistics manageable. Carting one child around from activity to activity can be overwhelming; carting a large family to individual activities can be prohibitive.

As simple as it sounds, this choice seems fairly unique among our friend group. As trivial an objection to scaling a family as it might seem (“Johnny never had a sister because we wanted him to play t-ball”), I get the sense it plays a huge factor when people with one or two heavily-scheduled kids say they could never imagine having a bigger family.

We opt out of group sports at elementary age. Families with sports as a core value would make different decisions. We do physical activities together: climbing, biking, hiking, walking, and physical play. We’ve had the fortune to move to a walkable community with sports options, so as the children grow older they can walk themselves to practices in areas of their interest.

What we offer at home

We focus enrichment activities on what’s available at home.

Piano A teacher comes once a week to our house and teaches our kids. We are a musical family and value the kids having piano as a foundation to electively build upon.
Math enrichment. While I prepare dinner, the older kids have the opportunity to self-study from books and online curricula. I’m available to mentor. It’s gotten to the point where my eldest enjoys mentoring my younger, which also cements concepts for him: win-win-win. We use a combination of:

Beast Academy: a math curriculum with comic books and online/offline options. It’s rigorous, creative, allows self-study, and is fun for our kids.
Adventures with Mr. Math: Zoom classes focusing on using analytical reasoning skills to solve difficult math problems and puzzles. This doesn’t teach math but rather teaches problem solving. The homework and coursework provide an awesome challenge.
Custom problems: We dive deep on exciting problems together some of which are hard for us to solve as mathematically advanced adults. The kids don’t always have the tools in their toolbox, but we approach them together.

Chess: Our eldest takes group chess classes at any level through International Chess Academy via Zoom. This wasn’t in the plan, but he participated in a chess activity at his homework club and when it was discontinued requested to find another option. We were delighted to stumble upon one online that has worked well
Strewing. We participate heavily in “strewing” both accidentally and on purpose:

Strewing is the intentional, casual placement of interesting materials (books, puzzles, art supplies, science kits, etc.) around the home environment where children will naturally encounter them. The key is that it’s done subtly—you’re creating an enriched environment without directing or requiring the child to engage with the materials.

We have a great variety of material on diverse topics at home and regularly visit the library to check out and strew more. As a result, we regularly hear “I’m sorry I got stuck in a book!” when following up on why a key activity (getting dressed, taking a shower, putting on shoes) wasn’t completed in a timely manner. There are worse problems to have.

Beast Academy – a math curriculum with comic books and online/offline options. It’s rigorous, it’s creative, it allows self study and it’s fun for our kids.

A Brief Note On Screen time

We take a selective approach to screen time, emphasizing tools over passive consumption, and focusing on moderation. The thinking: learning to use these powerful tools is a modern skill, and in the right contexts, they can function as an Illustrated Primer in service of personal growth and education. The kids use screens while in view.

Outside the home: No screens. Including none on roadtrips.
Passive media at home: We watch together occasionally: rocket launches, documentaries, Veritasium, chess videos, Mark Rober (limited: more edutainment than education), and other media of broad interest that is education adjacent. The kids don’t watch media alone.
Active learning with screens: Starting around age two, we introduced limited computer or iPad time.

Useful apps and sites we’ve found:

Ages 2-4: Khan Academy Kids on iPad. Free, ad-free content mixing fun with education. Extensive library of books with read-aloud option available offline.
Ages 4+: Beast Academy online options. The online version is particularly engaging and offers read-aloud mode for pre-fluent readers. The kids use the books as well, but when given the choice gravitate toward the computer version.
Post-fluency readers: Scratch.mit.edu for coding concepts, Replit for AI guided programming (limited, more edutainment than education), Google Colab for advanced coding concepts, Onshape for 3D printing, ChessKid for chess, Google Docs for typing and notes, Gmail for communicating with grandparents.

Finding resources: the Davidson community

I have a friend whose children seemed so similar to ours, we swapped educational tips frequently, and I have her to thank for stumbling upon many. On top of that, she introduced us to the Davidson Young Scholars community which offers a variety of free resources to families with gifted children as well as a community forum. Since her kids were eligible and seemed so similar to ours it was no surprise when we qualified as well. This has been helpful in seeing that there is no perfect educational fit for similar kids, as well as discovering new potential enrichment areas.

Bottom line on enrichment

Our approach maximizes convenience (everything at home or via Zoom except one piano teacher visit), keeps weekends free, and scales well with family size. Kids pursue what interests them without the pressure or logistics of scheduled activities all over town.

Recommended resources: Beast Academy, Adventures With Mr. Math, International Chess Academy, Davidson Young Scholars Program and Forums

Beyond Elementary: Our Evolving Plan

We haven’t crossed this bridge yet as our children are solidly thriving in infant care, preschool, and elementary school. But based on the Davidson Forums and our research, beyond elementary is where things get complex, requiring a tapestry of approaches with none of the off-the-shelf options (whether private or public, gifted or not) being a perfect fit.

Our current thinking

We’re inspired by research including Bloom’s two sigma problem, the finding that students taught one-on-one with mastery learning perform two standard deviations better than students in traditional classrooms. We’re also drawn to the observation that high-quality 1:1 tutoring alongside self-directed learning can be significantly less expensive than private schooling.

We’re not setting aside money for private school at the middle school, high school, or college level. In our experience, this can be a family size limiter (“Jane never had a younger brother because we wanted her and siblings to signal high status by attending $40k/year schooling for a decade”). We expect to prefer investing that capital differently and forego status signaling, focusing on educational outcomes instead.

That said, for the right educational outcomes, we’d consider investing. Our priorities will likely be:

Actual learning over credentialing: Brian Caplan’s The Case Against Education argues that the majority of education’s value at upper levels comes from signaling versus actual learning. We’re inclined to focus on the learning.
Kid -driven and kid-led: We expect our children’s education to be driven by our children’s needs, not our own desires for status or projections of our desires onto theirs.
Mix and match approaches: We expect to weave together coursework at various levels, 1:1 tutoring, self-directed study, and possibly dual enrollment or online options.
Maintaining social connection: Whatever we do, we want our kids to have peers and community, not just academic advancement in isolation.
Flexibility as needs evolve: What works at 12 may not work at 15. We’re prepared to adjust.

We don’t have it all figured out

We’re learning from families a few years ahead of us and staying open to creative solutions. I’ll write an update to this blog when we have more life experience to back up our initial thoughts.

Recommended reading: The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan

Executive Summary

Infancy: Nanny or 1:1 caregiver if you can swing it. Daycare also works fine developmentally, pick one you can learn from and have backup childcare options.
Preschool: NAEYC accredited preschool close to home. Prioritize social skills over academics.
Elementary: Local public school if it matches your values. We considered this when choosing where to live.
Enrichment and Extracurriculars: Prioritize family time over individual extracurriculars. Offer optional academic enrichment at home. Thoughtful, limited, supervised screen time.
Beyond Elementary: Mix and match schooling options focused on actual learning over credentialing. Weave in coursework at various levels and 1:1 tutoring rather than private school.
Key Resources: Elevating Childcare, Loose Parts, Cribsheet, The Family Firm, The Case Against Education, Beast Academy, Adventures With Mr. Math, International Chess Academy, Davidson Young Scholars