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Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think
by
Bryan Caplan
Read between
February 10 - February 17, 2024
Women in their forties are about twice as likely to have one child—or none—as they were thirty years ago. Big families have all but disappeared. In 1976, 20 percent of women in their early forties had five or more kids; by 2006, less than 4 percent did.
The question is serious, but I’m going to dodge it. While I accept the natalist view that more births should be encouraged because they make the world a better place, asking others to sacrifice their happiness for the good of the world seems futile. Preaching against selfishness is usually about as productive as nagging a brick wall. When people weigh the costs and benefits of having another child, I’m not going to call them sinners for using a scale.
The claim of this book, rather, is that current and prospective parents have accidentally tipped their scales against fertility. We may feel sure that the pursuit of happiness and kids (or at least more kids) are incompatible, but it is in the average person’s enlightened self-interest to have more kids. That’s right—people are not having enough children for their own good. Prospective parents need to take another look before they decide not to leap. Current parents need to take another look before they decide not to leap again.
First, parents can sharply improve their lives without hurting their kids. Nature, not nurture, explains most family resemblance, so parents can safely cut themselves a lot of additional slack. Second, parents are much more worried than they ought to be. Despite the horror stories in the media, kids are much safer today than they were in the “Idyllic Fifties.” Third, many of the benefits of children come later in life. Kids have high start-up costs, but wise parents weigh their initial sleep deprivation against a lifetime of rewards—including future grandchildren. Last, self-interest and
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A second child always undermines parents’ belief in their power to mold their children, but child-rearing books hush this up because their market is first-time parents. —Steve Sailer, “The Nature of Nurture”
The lesson: It’s easy to change a child but hard to keep him from changing back. Instead of thinking of children as lumps of clay for parents to mold, we should think of them as plastic that flexes in response to pressure—and pops back to its original shape once the pressure is released.
Is parenthood good for you? The simple stubborn answer is, “It must be; otherwise people wouldn’t do it.”
When he was a boy, my dad rode his bike all over downtown Los Angeles. My friends and I had more supervision, but our moms still got us out of their hair by ordering us to play outside until dinner. My mom kindly let me read in my room, but the philosophy was the same: Entertaining myself was my job, not hers. Today, I almost never see kids playing outside without a watchful parent—and several have told me they wouldn’t have it any other way. Parents spend their weekends bringing their children to activities I never heard of when I was a kid: Tae Kwon Do classes, Pokemon tournaments, Mandarin
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According to time diaries, modern parents spend an incredible amount of time taking care of their kids. As expected, dads do a lot more than they used to. Since 1965, when the average dad did only three hours of child care per week, we’ve more than doubled our efforts. Given how little dads used to do, though, doubling wasn’t hard. What’s amazing is the change in the typical mother’s workload: Today’s mom spends more time taking care of children than she did in the heyday of the stay-at-home mom.
Turning off the baby monitor did not revolutionize our lives. Yet small changes add up, and they’re not hard to find. Review your most unpleasant chores: How many could you safely scale back? Review your least useful chores: How many could you safely forget? Don’t look for “solutions” for your problems; you’ll rarely find them. Look instead for sensible adjustments to brighten your days. Before you do something for your child, try asking yourself three questions. 1. Do I enjoy it? 2. Does my child enjoy it? 3. Are there any long-run benefits?
As Joshua Gans writes in Parentonomics: Sleep is a negotiation. We want sleep, while the baby wants attention. There is an inherent conflict here. The screams of a baby are like an offer: “I’ll stop screaming if you give me some attention.” And it is not a vague offer. Give the baby attention and the crying stops. After only a few goes, a little baby can train its parents nicely.
Getting your kids to sleep through the night is crucial for livable parenting. If you want better than livable, you’ll mandate regular naps until your kids are old enough to quietly entertain themselves for an hour. I don’t know how bad it is for toddlers not to nap. Many seem fine either way. What I do know is that if they don’t, it is bad for parents. Nap time gives parents of young children quiet time to catch up on their work, relax, or take a nap of their own.
The smart disciplinary adjustment to make is just the wisdom of the ages: Clarity, Consistency, and Consequences. Adopt firm rules, clearly explain the penalties for breaking the rules, and impose promised penalties to the letter. If your child punches or kicks you, you’ve got to tell your child that it’s against the rules and that the punishment for transgression is, say, one day without television. Every time your child breaks the rule, harden your heart and impose the punishment. Clear, consistent punishment isn’t foolproof, and some kids are tougher to crack than others, but it beats being
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The oil-change incident wasn’t merely a failure of common sense. We were moving to Princeton so I could finish my PhD in economics, yet the well-known fact that money can be exchanged for goods and services slipped my mind.
Parents might have a small effect on smoking, drinking, and drug problems.
The most remarkable examined about 2,000 pairs of American twins who served in World War II, plus their grown children. The results? Genes matter a lot for educational success. If you’re more educated than four out of five people, you can expect your separated identical twin to be more educated than three out of four. Upbringing makes little difference. Only two nurture effects stand out in the veteran twins study. First, if your father is a professional or manager instead of an unskilled worker, you typically complete one more year of education. Second, every extra sibling depresses your
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This seems like clear selection effect rather than the normal definition of nature
If either parent gets an extra year of education, you get four or five extra weeks. If your family has an extra kid, you complete three fewer weeks.
This whole notion of weeks seems weird. I assume this is more like 5 weeks = 10% chance of an extra year
While twin and adoption studies usually find that your family has a small effect on how far you get in school, exceptions exist. Some twin research reports that upbringing used to be more important and continues to be more important for women. An early study of Norwegian twins found strong family effects for female twins born before 1961, and male twins born before 1940. During the prewar era, if you had one extra year of education, you could expect your adopted sibling to have about six extra months. Researchers using the Minnesota Twin Family Registry and the Finnish Twin Cohort Study
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This implies more about high growth and massive educational expansion of boomers/gen x /millennials than it does fundamentals
(The catch phrase is “assortative mating.”) The slightly yucky implication is that most of us are the fruit of mild incest.
No it doesnt. Wtf
After adjusting for spouses’ educational similarity, it found that family environment has no effect on how far you get in school.
This is "other than this critical piece of nurture, focus on nuture"
Second, most children of criminals don’t become criminals; in the Danish adoption study, over three-fourths of the boys born of and raised by people with criminal convictions weren’t convicted themselves. You don’t have to be hopeful about parenting to be hopeful about your children’s future.
25% criminality is a ton!! This is one of my general issuues here. Small effect sizes matter and stack
Nurture effects were small for religious activities and zero for religious occupations. A recent follow-up found similar results.
The occupation one is interesting to me. Id expect parenting to have a large effect on career choice especially for high status high education professions.
The NLSY study similarly found only a small nurture effect for American men born between 1958 and 1965. If you waited longer than 80 percent of boys, the NLSY study estimated that your adopted brother would wait longer than 53 percent.
Im so skeptical of generalizing these results because i think its obvious that coming of age in the 70s would have a much larger effect than parenting.
While the Australian study of almost 7,000 female twins found that parents had a moderate effect on the pregnancy of teens born between 1964 and 1971, parents had zero effect on the pregnancy of teens born between 1893 and 1964. A study of about 2,000 female Swedish twins born in the Fifties also found zero effect of upbringing on teen pregnancy.
If these countries are like the US there’s massive changes in marriage rates of teens. The thing we probably actually care about is out of wedlock or accidental pregnancy and thats a moving variable that id also expect to outweigh parenting effects. Pre-1950 the rate is flat meaning theres no parenting or cultural experience.
Parents may have a small effect on sexual orientation. Psychologists used to label homosexuality a mental illness caused by overprotective mothers and distant fathers. Now we tend to see sexual orientation as a preference inherent in our genes. When you look at the evidence, however, neither story quite works. Genes definitely play a strong role—every major twin study finds that identical twins are more alike in their sexual orientation than fraternal twins. Yet genes are far from the whole story—if you’re gay, your identical twin is usually still straight. Upbringing might make a difference,
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Changing mores and base rates of professing homosexuality probably matters a ton here
A research team asked 1,000 female Swedish twins and their spouses about the quality of their marriages. The women’s parents had no effect on the marital satisfaction of their daughters, but they did have a small effect on the marital satisfaction of their sons-in-law. You might infer that some parents raise unusually good wives, but the simpler story is that some parents are unusually good in-laws.
Parents have little or no effect on childbearing. I often half jokingly tell my three sons that they’re required to have three kids each, but twin studies say I’m wasting my breath. While fertility runs in families, the reason nowadays is almost entirely genetic. A major study of Danish twins born in 1870–1910 found moderate nurture effects on family size. Half a century later, though, these nurture effects had disappeared. Upbringing had a tiny influence on when Danes tried to start a family, but none on the total number of children produced by those thirty-five to forty-one years old. A
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This is incredibly counter intuitive. You'd expect in a pre birth control era to have a larger nature impact and in a birth control era to have a larger nurture impact....
The odds that my efforts pay off are pretty good. Both twin and adoption studies confirm that parents affect how their children perceive and remember them. When adoptees in the Colorado Adoption Project were ten to twelve years old, researchers asked both biological and adopted children questions about their families. How loving, communicative, and conflict-prone were they? Siblings gave fairly similar answers whether or not they were biologically related. Suppose you rated your family more positively than 80 percent of kids. Expect your adopted sibling to rate your family more positively than
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In other contexts hed b playing these numbers off as only a very minor effect size. Its "moderate" and thus he can play it either way
Out of all the wishes on the Parental Wish List, “good memories” are one of the few that clearly depend upon how you raise your child. Don’t forget it.
“Parents have little long-run effect on their kids.”
BUT HE HASNT SHOWN THIS!! HEs shown they have a moderate impact!
And: For every kid who yields to parental pressure, there’s probably another who rebels against it.
This caveat possibly undermines the whole project! Noonee is average (and effects Might stack). And broad macro trends probably dwarf any effect size. The issue is that our intuition of a "large" effect is of by an order of magnitude not that our intuition of the direction is wrong
The research is a little sparse, but studies of intelligence, income, crime, and religion all find that upbringing matters less as we grow up.
Income and criminality are highly path dependent. Values and religion must less so. Inteligence is intuitively nature. Its translating that intelligence to outcomes which people think is nurture
The Colorado Adoption Project provides an especially vivid illustration of fade-out. Nurture effects were already visible when the children were one to two years old and peaked when they were three to four years old. Toddlers adopted by parents in the 80th percentile of IQ scored about 7 percentage points higher than average. By the time the adoptees were age seven, however, two-thirds of this nurture effect was gone. By twelve, nothing was left. As the researchers bluntly concluded, “Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle
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This is an indictment of iq measures not of anything else
Suppose you earn more than 80 percent of your peers. You should expect your adopted brother to make more money than 58 percent of his peers when he is twenty to twenty-two years old, and 55 percent when he is twenty-three to twenty-five years old.
The fat curve of income means 80 and 56 percentiles are relatively close, at least in the USA...
The most important weakness of behavioral genetics, though, is simply that research focuses on middle-class families in First World countries. The results might not generalize.
For policymakers, the restricted range in twin and adoption studies is a major blind spot. But middle-class parents in First World countries needn’t worry. Families like yours have been studied to death. In your corner of the world, you can safely rely on the postcard version of behavioral genetics: The chief cause of family resemblance is heredity, not upbringing—and while the short-run effects of upbringing are self-evident, they leave little lasting impression.
Small effect sizes might matter alot if were only looking at the fat middle!
A good rule of thumb: If your parenting style passes the laugh test, your kids will be fine.
Or take education. The Korean adoption study found that if a mom has an extra year of education, her adoptee gets five more weeks. To raise her child’s educational attainment by a single year, a mom would need more than a decade of extra schooling. That’s practically an entire childhood. Even ignoring the massive cost for the mother, it’s a lonely life for the child.
WHAT DOES 5 WEEKS MEAN. Princeton semesters are 12 weeks. Cornell at 15. The average school year can differ across states by 5 days a year!
I’m almost saying the same thing, except that I’m advising you to step back and trust not in your parenting but in your genes.
Its not genes, its the law of large numbers combineed with macro trends!
In any case, if other parents openly disapprove of you, the consequences are mild. In modern society, we meet most of our needs in the marketplace, not our neighborhoods.
Eek
CHOOSE A SPOUSE WHO RESEMBLES THE KIDS YOU WANT TO HAVE
The most effective way to get the kind of kids you want is to pick a spouse who has the traits you want your kids to have. Genes have a large effect on almost everything on the Parental Wish List. The right spouse is like a genie who grants wishes you are powerless to achieve through your own efforts.
People sometimes ask me, “So you mean it doesn’t matter how I treat my child?” They never ask, “So you mean it doesn’t matter how I treat my husband or wife?” and yet the situation is similar. I don’t expect that the way I act toward my husband is going to determine what kind of person he will be ten or twenty years from now. I do expect, however, that it will affect how happy he is to live with me and whether we will still be good friends in ten or twenty years.
And what does enlightened self-interest tell you to do when you find out that something is cheaper than you previously believed? Buy more.
Only if marginal utility is higher. You can't get a partial kid. Plus the variance might be high even if the average is good. Plus you might be particularly risk adverse because downside utility maybe very bad . He hasn't shown this yet
WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN? KIDS TODAY ARE SAFER THAN EVER
The world is safe—and keeps getting safer. We fear for our children because journalists and screenwriters are scary—and keep getting scarier.
Last conducted during 1999, this survey found a total of 115 stereotypical kidnappings for the year.
Thats a long time ago!
If human beings had zero foresight, we would have lots of unprotected sex, and plenty of kids. If we foresaw only the initial downside of kids—nothing but sleepless nights, temper tantrums, and dirty diapers—we’d be childless, if not celibate.
Gen z in a nutshell
The child-free often see this as an argument against kids, but it cuts both ways. People who want kids they can’t have are just as “trapped” as people who have kids they don’t want. In fact, irreversibility cuts in favor of kids. As we’ve seen, regret is abnormal for people who have kids, and normal for people who missed their chance.
The claim I stand by: Typical parental feelings paired with high foresight imply more kids than typical parental feelings paired with moderate foresight.
