Caves to be seen

This weekend I took the 8 year old and the 6 year old to the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I can't believe I have never been there myself. It is simply wonderful and these days not given its due on 'must see' sites in Australia.

The caves are spectacular but very accessible (well apart from last 8kms of road which was a bit stressful -- but not seemingly dangerous -- with small cars being preferable). Formed out of limestone, as our guide said, "with theories plenty but no real scientific fact on their origins" there are many chambers; so much so that there are 10 tours you can take. The tours seemed pricey at $57 a family but where worth every cent. The tours were there, however, not so much for information -- although that was useful -- but for policing. Put simply, there are easy pathways through the caves and to let everyone just go would surely lead to ruin. So they are policed under the guise of a tour.

We went on the Chifley tour which took as through seven or eight chambers and after an hour we had traversed more than 400 stairs. Each chamber was more spectacular than the next.

The guide aspect is OK for children but the acoustics mean that no comment goes unnoticed. My 6 year old son let out the biggest yawn at the end of the very first lecture prompting some good humour from all, including the guide. Then at the end of the tour as we were guided to the final gate he let out a "Finally!" which went through at least three chambers. But despite these comments, this was a big hit of an activity.

We also learned some fun facts. For instance, one cave possessed an electric light that was installed one year after Edison invented the light globe. Getting it there was not an inconsiderable feat in the nineteenth century. But it just goes to show how speedy technology adoption can be if we really want it too.

We immediately moved on to the Nettle Cave. This was a 'self-guided' tour of one hour that you could take with an electronic audio guide. The children were having none of that. It was a more robust cave both outside and in and we traversed it and its 600 steps in a mere 25 minutes. Then again the 8 year old did whole The Louvre in Paris in 45 minutes when she was just 1. We like our sightseeing at a blur!

Anyhow, if you are one of our visitors to Australia -- especially those invited by me in the past -- and are wondering, why didn't you tell us about this before? Well, I didn't know. You will just have to come back.

The Tooth Rate of Exchange

I have written about Tooth Fairies and their economic role before. Today, comes a barometer of economic prosperity from DeCare Dental. They conduct a yearly survey of tooth fairy per tooth payments and apparently this year, it is down 15 percent. (Here is the a video of the news or here). Sadly, the data does not appear to be available on their site.

As I noted in my earlier post, there is an issue as to what a tooth ought to be worth and, in my opinion, it will be highly correlated with dental costs. The DeCare data might allow us to test that but that is something for another day.

The news provoked me into reporting our pricing policy. It is this: some proportion (perhaps 100 percent) of the change I happen to be carrying. On the very first tooth I saw through an issue: whatever we set this time might drive future payments. Moreover, they could only be inflationary. If I didn't have the correct change, I might be tempted to up the deal. We paid $1 for the first tooth and went on from there.

So on the second tooth, our daughter got less. On the third tooth she got more. In each case, it was explained that the tooth payment was set by the tooth fairy and there was no reason to expect that to be consistent.

The beauty of this is that every time some child looses a tooth we don't have to think. No worry about what the last payment was, what other children got, etc. And let me tell you, we need less of this type of thinking in our lives. We can just delve into our pockets and pull out an amount and go from there. This frees us of much of the mess associated with tooth financial management.

So I recommend a floating arrangement on tooth pricing as the 'customer' will come to expect it (something businesses often forget to take advantage of).

Baby-sitting at the movies

In 2002, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff wrote the following in Forbes:

* Baby-sitting at movie theaters--

If Ikea can make this idea work, why can't the local cineplex? For a fee parents could drop off their tots and go beeper-in-hand to that R-rated movie. The kids might watch videos in a day care room or, better yet, be chaperoned to watch a G-rated movie in the next theater.

Well, we have 'crying rooms and sessions' now but that doesn't really make the movie experience much better. But a chain Muvico in the US has gone the Ikea route. For $9 extra (a big saving on baby sitters) you can drop the kids in a playroom. They can play and you can go to the movies. Indeed, they will even show them movies. How much would you pay to not have to see Meet the Robinsons?

Leggo my lego

Over at Club Troppo, Don Arthur examines the controversy surrounding a Seattle school that banned Lego. Well, they didn't so much as ban Lego but put it aside for awhile while property rights rules could be established.

The teachers published an account of their decision in Rethinking Education:

A group of about eight children conceived and launched Legotown. Other children were eager to join the project, but as the city grew — and space and raw materials became more precious — the builders began excluding other children.

Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn’t play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. The other children didn’t complain much about this; when asked about Legos, they’d often comment vaguely that they just weren’t interested in playing with Legos anymore. As they closed doors to other children, the Legotown builders turned their attention to complex negotiations among themselves about what sorts of structures to build, whether these ought to be primarily privately owned or collectively used, and how “cool pieces” would be distributed and protected. These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation.

It is worth a read. Legotown was accidentally destroyed and the older children refused to relinquish their ownership of the pieces. The teachers intervened and banned lego. They were worried about the power relationships and thought the children needed some education on authority, ownership and inequality.

Now the kids here were aged between 5 and 9. The teachers were worried that the older ones didn't appreciate the power they had over the others and the apparently arbitrary nature of all this. They turned the Lego experience into a later trading game stacked up against the older kids which, and this shouldn't be a shcok, the older kids didn't like one bit. It turns out they didn't like being arbitrarily put at the bottom of society. Funny that, they are like people that way.

Reading this well-meaning account and I wasn't there to appreciate the whole situation, so it is probably not appropriate to be judgmental, but were they out of their friggin minds? Let's be very clear about this. A group of 8 older children undertook an activity that involved the creation of an entire town out of Lego that took them two months to build. They were protective of it and excluded younger children who quite plausibly might have spent much of them time destroying the older kids' vision. You only have to observe this behaviour first hand for yourself to see it arise. It happens all of the time. It is an issue of control.

So quite understandably, when faced with the destruction they had tried so long to prevent, the older childrens' immediate reaction was to maintain control. They didn't see it as an opportunity to spread the wealth in a brave new world. They were mourning their lost creation and were not ready to move on. And the result of this; they lost everything and then were subjected to "lessons" in power and authority as the losers in society.

What disturbs me is that this was, as these things go, a very positive activity. There were eight kids who had formed a group to build Legotown. They had taken pride in it and had learned to work together and protect themselves from outside interference. Most of the time, one kids takes over and all is lost quickly. This activity sustained itself and was well above average for collective behaviour. The fact that it involved age segregation is just too bad. You can't have everything.

The teachers didn't see it that way and moved in a way that seems to the reader to punish the older children. Their explanations about what is going on are no less sophisticated than most adults on the topic. They hadn't devolved into Lord of the Flies or anything like it.

As I see it, the issue was not about Legotown; the children who built that owned it and that is surely fine. The issue was about the legos themselves. That was the scarce resource. If the older children were monopolising that, then that was the issue. The appropriate response would be surely to have rationed the lego and distributed that more fairly. If the older children wanted more lego, then they would have to do a deal with others. The idea that the thing they owned was gone if it was destroyed is surely too much. Would they have to give up their land if the house on it burned down? Was that the message?

Some commentators have been ridiculously vitriolic in their critique of these teachers. Yes they wrote up their account but then again they were just trying to work out how to teach children about fairness and society. It isn't easy to do this. What worries me is not their views about that -- in my experience, many teachers share that -- it is that they might have chosen the wrong moment to have the lesson and so it may not have been effectively. It is also not clear even from their account that the children didn't understand the forces at work. They saw the inequality based on something real -- age -- something they suffered at the other end of -- rather than something random and clearly stacked against them -- something that the trading game gave.

So I also don't agree that this tells us something of the appropriate values of capitalism or what have you. There is no real basis for this as a commentary on how we should organise society. This didn't really reflect that.

Instead, it tells us more about how children view and respond to ownership. In my experience, different individuals respond in different ways. Let me go to my own experience. My eldest, 8 year old, sees ownership as an 'option value.' She likes to own things just in case she needs them later on. So she will hoard and acquire anything. Nothing is immune to that and her room is a monument to that. The sheer waste in resources to me is distressing but that is just how she is.

My 6 six year old son, on the other hand, sees ownership as the ability to deny others access. He couldn't care less about owning stuff and won't try and take ownership from others. But give him ownership of something and he just loves it. He uses the toy and thing and takes care of it. It is exactly what we want ownership to mean.

The two extremes here represent what is right and wrong about ownership but not perhaps in the way you think. My son's view emphasises the caring and use role of ownership -- it encourage things to be used efficiently and appropriately. My daughter's view emphasises the accumulation and creating role of ownership -- it encourages things to be made and acquired in the first place. Society requires both to function efficiently. Just having one leads to inefficiency -- through either waste or forgone opportunity.

The kids at Hilltop employed both. They owned enough material to create and they excluded enough others to maintain what they were doing. If only more adults could work out that compromise as effectively.

Mr Me, Continued

Following up from my earlier post, I am now at the end of my spouse free week. You will be pleased to know that my daughter at last discovered a scientific way out of her brother's diet. This morning (a Saturday) I got up to find all three of them sitting at breakfast. The usual idea is that if they get themselves up, they can choose what they want to eat. Sadly, due to the constraints of my son's 'preservative free' diet, that didn't leave a lot of good options. However, apparently, there was one thing they all knew was preservative free, melting cooking chocolate pieces. And so they simply substituted for the usual cereal and had pieces, milk all in a bowl. My daughter also put in 'preservative full' chocolate into her bowl and her younger sisters to test whether their behaviour would get worse. Suffice it to say, it was going to be a heroic effort if no one's behaviour was worse! As it turned out, they were all pretty well behaved even during a trip to the supermarket which is just asking for trouble.

So with the science over, I am optimistic we can free ourselves of the dietary explanations for the fact that my son sometimes doesn't listen to us and go back to the usual age-related reasons; that is, he is six and suffers from an older sister who is on the extreme of listening. (Hmm, perhaps she is preservative deficient?)

On to other matters. One thing that interests me about times like this -- and this has happened every time -- is the reaction of others. Put simply, most people treat me as if my spouse had suddenly passed away. I get lots of:

"Oh I heard about that, how are you coping?" in a tone that suggests that the funeral was yesterday.

"Do the kids understand what has happened?" Yes, their Mummy has gone to a better place; a spa resort!

"What are you doing for food?" Well at the moment I have dangled the two year old outside as bait to see if we can catch something, it is what their mother would have wanted.

And so on. Fortunately, I expect her to be resurrected tomorrow. Something that will apparently surprise everyone.

Now when I have to go away (always for work by the way and not for fun), my wife doesn't get that same reaction. It is more like "oh that bastard, he's abandoned you and the children for fun and games." Basically, as if I had walked out and left everyone to fend for themselves. Then she gets lots of "you'll be better off without him anyway" and "it is not like he really did anything useful." She gets the sympathy reserved for deliberately abandoned as opposed to the tragically taken away in her prime that I receive. Anger versus sorrow. It is unclear that either is helpful.

When it comes down to it, the appropriate reaction is: "oh dear, there goes the division of labour." I'd like to think that that would have been Adam Smith's reaction to these things. The problem is that tasks have to be done and there is no time for any emotion. Now, most tasks just take more time. Then again, there is time freed up from dealing with each other, so that it is not all bad.

It is the tasks and routine activities that really require both of us that are an issue. Driving children around to various activities was the main thing. If they occur at the same time, you are stuffed. If they occur during someone's sleep time, you are stuffed. If they occur too late in the day, you are stuffed. If they occur during school pick up time, you are stuffed. If they require memory (we had a tooth loss this week and a tooth fairy that needed remembering to come), you are most likely stuffed. You just need two or more adults for certain things.

So I miss her very much; I could use the extra pair of hands.

Mr Mum, Not -- Mr Me

So the mother of my children has abandoned us this week. She went off today for a week at a spa. The kids asked me "why?" Going with the truth, I said that she wanted to get away from us. "Hopefully, she'll be back." We will just have to wait and see.

Others react to this in a common manner. "So you are Mr Mum this week?" I don't think so. They are talking as if I don't and never did anything; looking at me surely being unable to cope. Indeed, I'll tell you that I have been there before -- and for a four year stretch too.

You see we had our first two kids while their mother was studying part-time for her MBA. That took four long years. And during those years, I did everything (yes, including baby feeds but, no, not carrying to unborn children). But I did the cooking, washing, and other sundry activities on top of working. So I'll cope with this week just fine.

Now, I didn't expect any awards for this. It is what you should do. Although, I should also tell you that the day of her last exam for that MBA, I was fired. Yes, 'fired.' My services for most of these things were no longer required.

It turns out that I hadn't been doing a good enough job. It was adequate and by any normal standard exemplary. But, as I have blogged before, that isn't the standard of aspiration in our household. It is a higher standard. For four long years, she silently steamed at my poor performance, knowing full well that she didn't have the time or energy to wrest any tasks from me. But it was all over when that MBA was done.

So this week represents a move back to the past. Take, for example, the dishwasher. For the past four years, the philosophy has been that it can't handle the task itself. Instead, dishes need to be clean before they go in the washer. I have pointed out the environmental inefficiency of all this. I have also engaged in the two obvious errors: I have put 'dirty' dishes away and put clean dishes on another load. It is, quite frankly, hard to tell.

Indeed, sometimes I rush to get a load on, get it done and then put away before anyone finds out. But even then it is hard. I have to do more washing because there is always that one time in a thousand that some bit of food doesn't come off but gets baked on. Then the finger is pointed squarely at you know who and I have to apologise for thinking I could ever manage this task on my own.

Anyhow, this week, I can constrain the dish use and go through all this and cover for my own mistakes. And so that is what has been happening.

But things are not as unconstrained as when I did this the first time. A few weeks back, a hypothesis emerged that our son's, sometimes, poor behaviour might be the result of preservatives in his diet. I haven't read the science behind this. There currently is no point; he is on a diet. And let me tell you, there are lots of stuff with preservatives in it. I have no idea really. So the usual thing that might have occurred, some McDonald's to smooth the waters, isn't happening. Why, you might ask? She has converted our son this cause.

Our son knows that sometimes he doesn't listen and do what he is told. With everyone else around him doing that, it has also concerned him. The preservatives hypothesis has freed him from responsibility for his actions and he knows this. He happily tells me if he is not well behaved that perhaps there were some preservatives in his breakfast cereal or that someone at school gave him something he shouldn't have eaten.

Now, if he was more strategic, he might take this to another level and not keep me honest on his diet. Let me give him whatever and he would have some sort of free behavioural license. But no. He has a zealot to the cause and so we are constrained in our eating habits.

This fact is not lost on our eldest daughter who is strategic. Initially, she loved the diet because it satisfied her notion of fairness; "no one should get more than her." So she would still get the same food while her brother's meal changed to, let's face it, a less appetising variety. This was all to her liking and so she embraced the diet theory.

But that it all over. As the house was slowly cleared of food with preservatives, she realised that this was going to impact on her. In particular, she knew that when Mummy was away, there was a good chance of 'party time.' Now, with the writing on the wall, she is trying to move household opinion.

Here is what she has tried.

• "It's unfair. Can't he just come to McDonald's and have a salad?" "Well, I don't know if those are sufficiently preservative free."
• "Maybe we could go while he was somewhere else." "Well, that doesn't sound that fair."
• "How do we know the preservatives were causing his bad behaviour? He is not that well behaved now." "Well, it may take a while to work."
• "But still, to be sure, we should re-introduce preservatives to his diet and then see if his behaviour gets worse." "A randomised experiment, huh. Actually, that is pretty scientific."

That last one has the support of her brother who was also happy to test the theory more conclusively. It was pointed out to him that if we don't experiment then he will never have anything good to eat again. From this basis, an insurgency is brewing.

As I write this, I find their arguments compelling but the consequences of the several week's investing in a de-tox and reversing it with a single Happy Meal worry me. Sure, the theory might be wrong. But it could also be right. And the last thing I want is the responsibility for his poor behaviour to be shifted from everyone else to me. So for the moment, the regime is hold from afar; a stronghold Rome could have used.

Coming soon?

OK, so you knew it was coming. Here is Parentonomics, the preview site.