I think you may be overestimating gender differences here. Guys engage in a LOT of prestige competitions, and pretty rarely in dominance ones. Dominance competition is not usually a positive expected value move. Fights are chaotic situations and you can still bleed to death if you win. You also might need to cooperate with this person in future which is not easy if you have recently hurt them or their relatives. Yeah moms are doing it less but it's like going from 20% to 10%, whereas both genders are doing prestige competitions at like 50%+. Similarly, moms do have less spare resources to bargain with than non-mom women because of the demands of their kids, but dads are also resource-constrained in this way.
The other point I'd make is that, as the primary childcare provider in my family (my wife is the one with the career), I've got to say: caring for kids is really easy. I mean I've done a lot of difficult things in my life and this isn't one of them. I mean how could it be? Almost everyone (80%? 70%?) manages to turn their kids into intact, productive and law-abiding adults. But certainly not almost everyone can be in the top 20% of jobs. I mean by definition 80% of people cannot. I think employers that regard time spent in full-time childcare to be underwhelming on work history are accurately judging it. I'm not saying there are no brilliant, talented and capable stay-at-home moms and dads; of course there are. But I am saying that they are probably a smaller share of the stay-at-home parents than they are a share of the career-oriented folks.
The idea that good-enough parenting most of normal children, especially smaller ones, is this INCREDIBLY DEMANDING task, is I feel one of (subconscious mostly, zeitgeisty) attempts to give mothering higher status OR to account for a deep feeling of loss and grief that people who stop working in career jobs in order to parent experience (some of that grief could be because of loss of status too, or even for some parents moving from a prestige game you were winning to one you're losing, and less controllable).
I'm saying this as someone who never liked generic babies or small children (obviously I liked mine once they developed even vaguely human characteristics) and who did much early parenting of my both ones sometimes as a non working and sometimes as weirdly-working mother. The idea that being a non working mother was this super hard job in comparison to literally anything else I had done before (from manual labour to project management) seemed RIDICULOUS to me.
Obviously the context could be hard: socially isolated, unpredictable, harder to control/excel at, and depending on a partner for money could lead to conflict or insecurity if you couldn't trust them to provide for you or if they got controlling. But the WORK ITSELF? I entirely agree with you.
I feel you're overestimating the loss of value of imitating. Much parenting even nowadays, especially of small children and babies, where I feel the phenomenon you describe is most prevalent, has still very little to do with how they interact with technology long term, and much to do with practical tasks of daily management, care and feeding.
Also, copying of high prestige parent nowadays might not increase survival of offspring but might make your life easier simply because it saves you the cognitive labour of doing the research a decision making. Instead of spending 40 hours researching travel systems or bottle sterilisers you just copy. This might for example mean that you end up a less tired and stressed a parent, thus happier and more likely to have another child sooner rather than later?
I agree that sticking to local irl competition is optimal.
And prestige mother doesn't need to have the real solution to "how much if any at all screen time is ok for a 3 year old". They just need to establish a social standard for that. This is already valuable.
I think anxious mompetition has more to do with Universe 25 style evolved mechanisms for adversarial fertility suppression in overcrowded (and therefore likely locally zero-sum) conditions, than with transmission of parenting know-how. These adversarial motives end up confusedly mixed with prosocial info-sharing behaviors, because humans are complex and it's easier (and often more effectively concealed) to be confusedly adversarial than unconfusedly adversarial.
Some supporting evidence: my reproductive partner regularly gets harassed on the street by strangers for visibly being an attentive, loving, but non-neurotic mother, by people who are upset by this. Often it's very thinly veiled with the pretense of advice or concern.
Also, based on your earlier discussions of memetic evolution (hopefully I'm remembering correctly) you might like some of the same author's YouTube discussions: https://www.youtube.com/@Morphenius
> Mompetition is increasingly not a local competition but a global competition, and it increasingly takes place online. It’s much harder to win a competition between every mom on the internet than it is to be the best mom in your city’s Junior League.
There's a tradeoff between two styles of organizing:
Some people form close knit status groups centered on belonging and equality. Much more caring for the weak but also tall-poppy syndrome envy for the over-strong.
As opposed to large loose networks of acquaintances and competitors, with more explicit status hierarchies and extreme lopsided rewards.
The history of motherhood has always been the close knit one, local belonging based. But large feed-based social media forces the second type of interaction. The user can immediately see the "best" and most successful, but can't realistically do anything to neg them back into an equality social hierarchy. Hate/Envy comments imo are trying to bring the bragger back into their "proper place".
Same with the desire for more "realistic and honest" mom content. Fundamentally can't work because it's all parasocial, the anxious mother can't actively bring the creator down a peg. Fundamentally can't work on the feed based social media.
------------------------
Raising status and competition works great for the loose-acquaintance model because it sure does produce winners and losers who concentrate almost all the rewards. Sports super-stars, onlyfans, business ceos, politicians, streamers, writers, etc.
These all scale, and concentrate the reward and status, and produce clear signals for who to copy.
But what's the reward of motherhood? It's massive... to the family. Doesn't scale. Same problem why the best teachers don't get paid much at al, they can't scale the product.
Mom's today can get status within the (extended) family. But it's a local currency.
-----------
One solution is the "ignore it" mentioned. Backed by location based social media. Next-door, private facebook groups, etc. Deliberately seeking out the close knit peacocked conformist status hierarchies to restore the more traditional mompetitions.
One solution is to scale motherhood. Techno-futurist society capitalizing motherhood, competitive artificial wombs, AI based interersenal training, prediciton markets on life outcomes, huge competition where prospective mother-plan makers get rewarded based on outcomes (get a cut of their protege's taxed earnings?). Robin Hanson.
I think Heinrich's account is less plausible to people who are less dissociated, and more accustomed to practicing discernment with food. If you eat a food that's slightly poisonous, generally you feel worse. A lot of people are so anxious, and also so accustomed to eating foods optimized to transiently send signals of reward or titillation loud enough to be discernible through the anxiety, which frequently contain some element they do poorly with, that they just don't experience the sort of happy baseline that would a food's slight poisonousness obvious. Hence the miraculous effects of extreme elimination diets like the Kempner or carnivore diet.
Discussion of status frequently suffers from confusion of different simulacral levels. Keith Johnstone's Impro seems like an important factor here as he used it very specifically as an euphemism for dominance.
Actual capacity to win against someone in a fight, or actual displays of capacity that people want to emulate, doesn't need the "status" abstraction. Dominance is better understood as a *propensity* to make or submit to stereotyped threats. One convergent submission behavior is averting one's gaze (or more abstractly scrutiny), because if you're not assessing someone's vulnerabilities, that makes it harder to fight back.
I think you may be overestimating gender differences here. Guys engage in a LOT of prestige competitions, and pretty rarely in dominance ones. Dominance competition is not usually a positive expected value move. Fights are chaotic situations and you can still bleed to death if you win. You also might need to cooperate with this person in future which is not easy if you have recently hurt them or their relatives. Yeah moms are doing it less but it's like going from 20% to 10%, whereas both genders are doing prestige competitions at like 50%+. Similarly, moms do have less spare resources to bargain with than non-mom women because of the demands of their kids, but dads are also resource-constrained in this way.
The other point I'd make is that, as the primary childcare provider in my family (my wife is the one with the career), I've got to say: caring for kids is really easy. I mean I've done a lot of difficult things in my life and this isn't one of them. I mean how could it be? Almost everyone (80%? 70%?) manages to turn their kids into intact, productive and law-abiding adults. But certainly not almost everyone can be in the top 20% of jobs. I mean by definition 80% of people cannot. I think employers that regard time spent in full-time childcare to be underwhelming on work history are accurately judging it. I'm not saying there are no brilliant, talented and capable stay-at-home moms and dads; of course there are. But I am saying that they are probably a smaller share of the stay-at-home parents than they are a share of the career-oriented folks.
The idea that good-enough parenting most of normal children, especially smaller ones, is this INCREDIBLY DEMANDING task, is I feel one of (subconscious mostly, zeitgeisty) attempts to give mothering higher status OR to account for a deep feeling of loss and grief that people who stop working in career jobs in order to parent experience (some of that grief could be because of loss of status too, or even for some parents moving from a prestige game you were winning to one you're losing, and less controllable).
I'm saying this as someone who never liked generic babies or small children (obviously I liked mine once they developed even vaguely human characteristics) and who did much early parenting of my both ones sometimes as a non working and sometimes as weirdly-working mother. The idea that being a non working mother was this super hard job in comparison to literally anything else I had done before (from manual labour to project management) seemed RIDICULOUS to me.
Obviously the context could be hard: socially isolated, unpredictable, harder to control/excel at, and depending on a partner for money could lead to conflict or insecurity if you couldn't trust them to provide for you or if they got controlling. But the WORK ITSELF? I entirely agree with you.
Yeah I think having trouble coming up with a last paragraph is just the human condition.
I feel you're overestimating the loss of value of imitating. Much parenting even nowadays, especially of small children and babies, where I feel the phenomenon you describe is most prevalent, has still very little to do with how they interact with technology long term, and much to do with practical tasks of daily management, care and feeding.
Also, copying of high prestige parent nowadays might not increase survival of offspring but might make your life easier simply because it saves you the cognitive labour of doing the research a decision making. Instead of spending 40 hours researching travel systems or bottle sterilisers you just copy. This might for example mean that you end up a less tired and stressed a parent, thus happier and more likely to have another child sooner rather than later?
I agree that sticking to local irl competition is optimal.
And prestige mother doesn't need to have the real solution to "how much if any at all screen time is ok for a 3 year old". They just need to establish a social standard for that. This is already valuable.
I think anxious mompetition has more to do with Universe 25 style evolved mechanisms for adversarial fertility suppression in overcrowded (and therefore likely locally zero-sum) conditions, than with transmission of parenting know-how. These adversarial motives end up confusedly mixed with prosocial info-sharing behaviors, because humans are complex and it's easier (and often more effectively concealed) to be confusedly adversarial than unconfusedly adversarial.
Some supporting evidence: my reproductive partner regularly gets harassed on the street by strangers for visibly being an attentive, loving, but non-neurotic mother, by people who are upset by this. Often it's very thinly veiled with the pretense of advice or concern.
Universe 25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
"The Hostile Telepath Problem" from LessWrong does a good job of covering the confusedly adversarial stuff.
Also re the OP, we had a reward or award called "Caught Being Good" at our elementary school, which my mom sort of disliked.
Also, based on your earlier discussions of memetic evolution (hopefully I'm remembering correctly) you might like some of the same author's YouTube discussions: https://www.youtube.com/@Morphenius
The internet has a deep shift mompetition:
> Mompetition is increasingly not a local competition but a global competition, and it increasingly takes place online. It’s much harder to win a competition between every mom on the internet than it is to be the best mom in your city’s Junior League.
There's a tradeoff between two styles of organizing:
Some people form close knit status groups centered on belonging and equality. Much more caring for the weak but also tall-poppy syndrome envy for the over-strong.
As opposed to large loose networks of acquaintances and competitors, with more explicit status hierarchies and extreme lopsided rewards.
The history of motherhood has always been the close knit one, local belonging based. But large feed-based social media forces the second type of interaction. The user can immediately see the "best" and most successful, but can't realistically do anything to neg them back into an equality social hierarchy. Hate/Envy comments imo are trying to bring the bragger back into their "proper place".
Same with the desire for more "realistic and honest" mom content. Fundamentally can't work because it's all parasocial, the anxious mother can't actively bring the creator down a peg. Fundamentally can't work on the feed based social media.
------------------------
Raising status and competition works great for the loose-acquaintance model because it sure does produce winners and losers who concentrate almost all the rewards. Sports super-stars, onlyfans, business ceos, politicians, streamers, writers, etc.
These all scale, and concentrate the reward and status, and produce clear signals for who to copy.
But what's the reward of motherhood? It's massive... to the family. Doesn't scale. Same problem why the best teachers don't get paid much at al, they can't scale the product.
Mom's today can get status within the (extended) family. But it's a local currency.
-----------
One solution is the "ignore it" mentioned. Backed by location based social media. Next-door, private facebook groups, etc. Deliberately seeking out the close knit peacocked conformist status hierarchies to restore the more traditional mompetitions.
One solution is to scale motherhood. Techno-futurist society capitalizing motherhood, competitive artificial wombs, AI based interersenal training, prediciton markets on life outcomes, huge competition where prospective mother-plan makers get rewarded based on outcomes (get a cut of their protege's taxed earnings?). Robin Hanson.
I think Heinrich's account is less plausible to people who are less dissociated, and more accustomed to practicing discernment with food. If you eat a food that's slightly poisonous, generally you feel worse. A lot of people are so anxious, and also so accustomed to eating foods optimized to transiently send signals of reward or titillation loud enough to be discernible through the anxiety, which frequently contain some element they do poorly with, that they just don't experience the sort of happy baseline that would a food's slight poisonousness obvious. Hence the miraculous effects of extreme elimination diets like the Kempner or carnivore diet.
Discussion of status frequently suffers from confusion of different simulacral levels. Keith Johnstone's Impro seems like an important factor here as he used it very specifically as an euphemism for dominance.
Actual capacity to win against someone in a fight, or actual displays of capacity that people want to emulate, doesn't need the "status" abstraction. Dominance is better understood as a *propensity* to make or submit to stereotyped threats. One convergent submission behavior is averting one's gaze (or more abstractly scrutiny), because if you're not assessing someone's vulnerabilities, that makes it harder to fight back.
My solution is just to do what other yuppie moms do (even when I think it's a bit silly), but don't try to outdo them. I wrote a story that's a bit about this. https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/the-laptop-class-has-a-very-distinct
It doesn't seem like there's much of a downside to being a mediocre, but still acceptable, mom.