!Against competitive parenting --- agk's diary 25 January 2025 @ 14:10 UTC --- written on Evy's GPD Micro in the living room before going to work to pass meds on the detox unit --- I dropped first daughter at daycare, which we call school, a shorter word. She goes to an ordinary daycare, the closest to our house. Lots of foster kids go there, and they let us just pay for the days we take her. She usually goes twice a week. Probably half our friends have toddler or preschool kids, and none go to the closest daycare. They stay at home or go to the "best" the parents can afford, sometimes the best in town, sometimes the best in the county. They have different valuations of best. The Child Development Lab, Ms. Bridget's Montessori, or the Forest School are where their kids end up. Our friends aren't wealthy. One's a hardware store clerk, one's a public school teacher, one cleans out houses after evictions, one's a child protect- ive services case manager, one's a truck farmer, one's a bartender. When I tell people I do early childhood math with first daughter, I have to pad it with caveats. I'm not trying to get her into Harvard. Alexander Zvonkin, whose book *Math from Three to Seven* gave my ideas direction, reported his kids were middle of the road when they started formal school- ing, as it was of course more concerned with following directions than with abstract reasoning. I'm doing it because it's something we enjoy, because abstract play is a lovely break for me from repetitive imaginative play. I'm not competing with anyone. I'm not seeking a social advantage for my kid. Evy and I have resisted a lot of social pressure to live as we do. With her parents it's explicit, but it's implicit everywhere. We aren't buying a house or moving to some land. First daughter doesn't get the best of everything we can afford. We don't plan to homeschool or move to the best school district we can afford. We aren't parenting competitively. We rent cheaply, half a duplex where we've been a long time, in a town where the zoning board prohibits new duplex construction because they don't want "those kind of people." ("Us kind of people?" we ask during the comment period.) We have a roommate. We get around on bicycles and old cars. We cook (our friends also cook). I make twice as much money as a nurse as I made as a tech, so I can work less, save more as a prudent reserve, buy a few toys for our math games, and give away more as tithes and contributions that maintain a reciprocal/redistributive local economy. No need to get a new car, move, or take on debt. We live in a cheap part of the country for now. Let's enjoy it. I have become a little defensively judgmental of our friends who live in nicer houses than us, send their kids to "better" daycares, live on debt, and assume our choices are competitive. When I have to explain we live cheaply and work less so we can spend more of our time with each other reading, caving, involved in church and Evy's artsy stuff, playing politics, etc., I put myself as much in the shoes of my questioner as I can, imagine living like I think they live, and remember that even though I like them, like their house, their kid, or whatever, to me it feels precarious. I spent a long time as a squatter, living on less than five of my country's bucks a day. I made in a year what I now make in two weeks. What I didn't like about it was my vulnerability to violence by fellow lowlifes (theft, rape), police (arrest, harassment, assault), and organized crime (arson). Most everything else I liked, some of it better than how I live now. Friends of mine, fellow squatters, raised kids. I didn't like the absence of stability in those kids' lives. Each move, a new school. But they were cool kids. We don't need much for a good life. We have more than we need. Probably, so do most of our friends. Creditors have bottomless needs for more of our debt, but our and our friends' hungers are finite and can be fulfilled. Why choose competition and chase after the precarity we mostly left behind? We can make our life better much more simply than that: Less screen-time, tidier house, more bike rides together, fixing and mending, visiting the cool old ladies in our church, more splashing in the creek, more math games, more meals together, more singing together, more service. One summer day, maybe first daughter will run to the creek supervised only by a gang of kids of various ages. Lets prepare for that. And first daughter will have as good a life as anyone. She'll be no child's inferior, but no child's superior either.