Because of the mental strain of resleeving before puberty, children are usually not allowed to resleeve (this was one of the causes of the "Lost" generation). Now certain factions don't have "children" in the traditional sense. Groups like the Scum and Ultimates merge alpha forks together and then resleeve this new entity into a custom morph. This new ego has the advantage of having both parent's memories and experiences, but can mould its own personality over time. Gives a new meaning to Brangalina.

:) I think the 'tangent' is fundamental to that question, is all. Let's assume that there's totally 'normal' pregnancy and birth, then. We know that kids have muses, ever-present nanny/tutor/deity things, so that covers education and child care. There's the mesh, so there's entertainment and socializing all the time. In what sense do people still 'work', in EP? Is there child labor? Are there child protection laws (obviously, a massively context-dependent question)? Apart from socializing, education (including cultural indoctrination), and let's call it 'reality acclimation', what else is childhood for? How about a little post-GATTACA: is psychosurgery used on kids, for the purpose of normalizing them (to what standard)? Muses do therapy, perhaps constantly, as part of some kind of optimized child-rearing program? TLDR version: I'm assuming individual-hyper-internet lifestyle is 'normal'. Probably there are primitivists and any number of unique enclaves, but that's the 'normal'.

I see children being less supervised than ever before. They'll likely be free to run around and go where they want since surveillance systems mean greater safety against random threats. For entertainment and education, their muse is always at their side to help them out. Even purchasing toys could be handled by providing the child's muse some instructions on what is and isn't allowed, as well as a basic budget or allotment. For education in particular, I could easily see taking a page from The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. For those who haven't read it , the book features a book called the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The book bonds itself with a girl and then interacts with her, customizing it to her interests. It draws upon recurring myths in human cultures the world over and uses their building blocks to construct a mythology directed at the child with the intention of educating them about the world around them and how it works. A muse could easily fill this same role and I would imagine it would be a great 'poor man's' way of educating children. With nostalgia being such a popular facet though, I would imagine those who are well off would still prefer a live teacher being available to their children in order to guide their learning. For me, looking at the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance brings to mind the idea of a nice 'family town'. I imagine a number of the older, more well of families amongst the LLA getting together and buying homes on a habitat built expressly to cater to families and family values. Couples looking to raise their children move in and are encouraged to become actively social in the community, visiting neighbors and signing on to the local social networks. Through out the day, parents send their children off to spend the day in the care of their teacher. Children are grouped together in bunches of 5 to 8 and spend the whole day together under the directed learning of their teacher. He or she might take them to the park where there are animals kept, or brought to classrooms with the appropriate tools on hand for dabbling in science. Parents use the time to work their jobs through telepresence while the children are gone and pack it in when they come home. From there, families are encouraged to mingle by perhaps gathering for some communal AR games or watching some vids. Local restaurants and hangouts are all built to accommodate play places for the children so the adults can socialize while the kids run about. During the Fall, habitats like these likely grew quite upset at having to pack in extra people fleeing Earth and only now are starting to breathe easy again after the refugees have moved on.

Quincey Forder wrote:

on the scumbarges my ruling is that children are raised collectively, as a clan. Children might or might not know who their biological parents are, but they are raised all together.

Have you read "The Republic"? This sounds a bit like Plato to me.

Well to be honnest, the idea of decentralized parenthood was inspired by Gargoyles episodes Avalon part 2, Monster and Sanctuary, where we discover that the main male character has a teenage daughter. Elisa, the main female character, ask him about the daughter's parents, and Goliath, the male character, tells her that hatchling are the children of the whole clan. Another big inspiration are the Quarran in Mass Effect. I posted an idea for a tradition inspired by them about a year ago

I completely disagree, Axel. Meshed muses and medichines are *exactly* what removes the need for parent/village. Even if you posit a physical need for bodily contact, that doesn't mean a mommy. This is the post-human future.

That, and there is impetus from the other side of the equation as well. Sure, some of the more tedious aspects of child rearing might be marginalized by the introduction of mature techniques such a muse assistance and genetic tinkering, but parents will still be rearing their own children simply because they want to. It is the same argument that I use against people using hyper accelerated time when raising a child. Most people do not have children so they have an adult mini-me. They do so for the experience of guiding the kid through early life, and that is not something that is likely to change any time soon (especially with the Futura disaster so clear in everyones memories.) In fact I would say that the introduction of a post-requirement-scarcity economy will only enforce this further. There are very few reasons to have a child, other than for the sake of raising one.

On the subject of the Lost, I would suspect that the techniques cited might still work, but public backlash against using their philosophy as a whole would experience severe public backlash. The people as a whole didn't just say aw shucks, the program didn't work. They were horrified and Cognite is still smarting PR-wise from the affair. It's not that the individual components are necessarily flawed in any way, it's that the public fear them. Yerameyahu, your ideas of post-parenting interest me and I'd like to hear more about them. If the child no longer has a parent designated, where does the child live? Does anyone monitor the child's progress on education? Do the children have a designated person to turn to if they encounter a problem, or are they expected to turn to the same authorities as the adults? For example, if a bully pushes them around, are they to deal with it themselves or take it to station security? Since I went Lunar Conservative with the last sample I did, let me take a stab now at a more Titanian example. Perhaps with the Titanian Commonwealth, each child is deemed a ward of the State by default. Parents who gave birth to them may apply for access to the child to act in the role of a mother or father. Due to the transitory relationship of people in this neck of space, only one parent is typically awarded guardianship. The parent must pass a basic psychological exam and prove that their living space and lifestyle is no clear and present threat to the child. If the Titanian officials approve the application, the child is surrendered to that parent to be raised. Until the child reaches the age of 18, subjective time based upon the child's perspective, their parents make decisions on their behalf much like a guardian would today. Traditionally, once they are old enough, the child begins to accompany the parent throughout the whole day so as to learn how the parent lives. Parents talk their children through the tasks of habitat maintenance, rocket piloting, AR design, or whatever other profession they practice. As well, the child gets a direct chance to observe how their parent acts and reacts to social situations. At about age 13, the child is then sent with other adults that the parent trusts to experience life amongst a wide variety of professions and lifestyles and give the child a chance to learn what appeals to them. If the child remains a ward of the state, they instead accompany volunteers that sign up for the task in exchange for Titanian Kroner. Once the child becomes 18, they are then free of guardianship, either by state or parent, and are allotted a sum of Kroner to begin their new life as full adults of the Commonwealth.

Mammalian children are generally dependent on their parents not just for food and protection, but for emotional and social bootstrapping. Rat pups and monkeys lacking in skin/fur contact with their mother develop a lifelong high stress level and become generally neophobic: anything new and unexpected is experienced as bad. The same is likely true with human children, although controlled randomized trials have not been done. Even more important are the various critical periods when the infant picks up social cues and especially language - if they don't get the right stimuli during this period they fail at learning them more or less permanently. So while technically you could just manufacture children and have their muses and habitat systems keep them fed and safe, that is a recipe for feral children. Think of the Lost, but without the education and psi, just stunted social and emotional growth. Having a community adopt children works, provided they get chance to intimate bonding with enough people. However, this requires the community to have the right culture to share responsibilities properly. Family ties usually provide these obligations. The old mammalian parental bonding system is a pretty efficient way of ensuring that adults will care for children despite their messiness, and vice versa making the children dependent on emotional feedback that also makes them want to learn from their parents. It can perhaps be extended through the judicious use of social enhancement drugs, especially when you want to enlarge the 'circle of concern' to a group or ensure that assigned parents feel for their kid. Of course, if you think this is messy and inefficient you could try hacking those pesky mammalian brains. Why keep those bonding systems anyway, if they can interact as equals on a credit or reputation market, produce offspring by design and seek out fellow minds that are interesting or useful to them? OK, the resulting child would be sociopathic, but that is not necessarily bad if combined with enough intelligence and self-control, and some training in how the majority mammals see things. You would need to revamp the emotional system a bit too, to get around that excessive need for intimacy and tendency to stress up about social status - in fact, let's rewire those to useful thinks like learning skills and improving quantifiable assets useful for survival and goal-fulfilment. This way they will consistently keep their eyes on the ball of personal enhancement. I can totally see some hardcore extropians thinking this is a good idea, not understanding at all why everybody else are appalled or calling the result exhuman. Homo economicus, here we come!

I'm not saying that children are raised in isolation. They will certainly have peers and other people to interact with at all stages. I'm saying that it's fully possible for them not to have a nuclear family or parents (argument #1), and that this doesn't *also* mean that the village model is necessary (argument #2). I want to reiterate that both of those models are of course possible. The basic problem of this thread is that we're talking about many (good) ideas at once. Everything depends on the specific combination of local conditions, which is only reasonable. The problem is that we're each assuming specific sets of conditions that fit whatever we happen to be talking about. :) To various people: I think you're really underestimating the ability of an omnipresent voice in your head with access to the mesh/comms to teach anything, including right from wrong. I think you're underestimating the ability of the mesh (with VR, remember) and intentional non-'family' socializing to support meaningful social relationships. I further think you're *over*-estimating the resource investment of reproduction. Again, there are certainly communities in which these conditions are *not* a good fit. Certainly there are places that are extra-dangerous, or where conception indeed costs thousands and must be personally intentional, or where resources are limited so that a child needs economic sponsorship. And so on. Those exceptions don't make this model impossible. It really feels like there's a lot of emotional (meaning irrational), 21st-century 'conservatism' about this, though.

Yerameyahu wrote:

To various people: I think you're really underestimating the ability of an omnipresent voice in your head with access to the mesh/comms to teach anything, including right from wrong. I think you're underestimating the ability of the mesh (with VR, remember) and intentional non-'family' socializing to support meaningful social relationships. I further think you're *over*-estimating the resource investment of reproduction.

1) The omniscient voice in your head isn't the one that actually creates the children. No discussion about how children are raised would be complete without identifying where the children come from in the first place - i.e., someone conceives, engineers or adopts them, through a good deal of personal labor. If we accept that, we have to ask 'what is a person who is going to go out of their way to do this likely to do with said child?' I don't see that discussed at all in your arguments. 2) 'Omniscient voice in head' lacks the tactile data necessary for proper growth, as aremantouneoeru showed. Hence, having, if not a family, at least regular people regularly to physically nurture, is a requirement.

Quote:

I don't feel like more sousveillance would necessarily translate into more nosy parents. With those options available, the parents don't necessarily make use of them.

I would tend to consider automated filters and logs 'nosey', even if they aren't directly monitored by the parent - and which parent would not put these basic controls in place? The only reason most parents aren't more nosey with their kids now is the cost involved in following them around. That no longer applies - you have the muse do it for you.

For my own setting (and maybe issue #3 of The Eye) I'm developing the Bureau of Youth Promotion for the Planetary Consortium that is managing the population's reproduction They're in charge of the artificial wombs and which family is given custody of which baby. Think of it like a between New Olympus' bioroids factory in Appleseed and how things are done in Toward Terra (an anime I've referred to several times in the past year) Children are "born" in Splicer body and aren't allowed to resleeve until 16, barring accident. That way, there is new Ego introduced in the flow AND provide cheaper, second-hand morph for contractures to wear. I think flats and splicers, and maybe Exalt are fertile by default. Other morphs are sterile unless given a "genetic plug-in" that cost as much as the morph itself and cover the treatment bill plus trademark and copyright reproduction license

Aha! I made that exact point at the beginning of this thread, and you've fallen for my clever ruse. Admit it, you didn't bother reading the thread. :) Seriously though, I agree. I did address the suggested scenarios of 'love child' and 'group child' (including 'citizen factory') earlier, but the thread headed in a different direction. I do think, though, that there's the potential for substantial disconnect between infancy and childhood in the setting; a 'love child' could still be raised in a 'ultra free-range child' method, effectively parent-less. Yes, it does seem pretty weird, but that's not the same as 'can't work'. 'Can't work' is the specific argument I've been opposing, not 'seems unlikely'.

I can't remember what I did this morning, muchless what you posted a week ago!! I do definitely agree, it can and probably does happen. I have no issue with a character concept like that. It just probably isn't the "average" (not that there IS an average in EP!)

Yerameyahu wrote:

You would have the consent of the user. You signed the EULA.

EULAs probably won't work for morphs, at least not in the outer systems. The problem being that EULAs presume that the object is not the explicit property of the purchaser, and they are merely licensors. You might see this sort of thing occur in the inner system, but the anarchists groups and the Titanian Commonwealth won't let that crap fly.

Yerameyahu wrote:

I was speaking more metaphorically, anyway. :) You're selling a product, and someone is agreeing to buy it. If it can't reproduce, they're still agreeing to that. The only things that could alter that are massive consumer rejection of such products (boycotts), or government regulation (not very @-rep-y). My point was that it's *not* without the user's consent at all.

That depends on whether it's an advertised feature. The first time a morph shows signs of infertility, outer system laws might require immediate rectification. On the other hand, it's very likely that most outer system morphs are open-sourced, with all genetic flaws readable by any people who wish to inquire on the features of the morph. Hypercorps that don't dig the open source movement probably don't deal morphs out there.