Over on Evangel, Gayle Trotter has an interview with Bryan Caplan, professor of Economics at George Mason University, about his new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Throughout the book, Caplan shows that the “price” of high-quality kids is less than parents imagine. Then he asks and answers the question, “What does enlightened self-interest tell you to do when you find out that something is cheaper than you previously believed? Buy more.”
GT: Why are you trying to convince people to have more kids than they originally planned?
BC: I just discovered some very interesting scientific research on nature/nurture and realized that it has a lot to do with how many kids it makes sense to have. There’s about 40 years worth of research on kids who are adopted and twins, and what I found is that from this research, they really find that parents have surprisingly little long-term effect on kids. Which at first thought you might say, “What does that have to do with how many kids to have?” What it means is that parents who push themselves really hard and stress out a lot about pushing their kids to be something that they’re not — trying to change them — ultimately it doesn’t have that much effect on how kids turn out so it looks like parents are enduring a lot of needless unhappiness. And if you think about the main reasons why people seem so scared to have more kids, it seems like a lot of it is that they’re already really tired, and they just feel like another kid would be too much work. So I’m saying, “Look, a lot of this work that you think that you have to do for your kids isn’t really necessary for them to have a decent future.” And, once you rethink that, then you have an opportunity to have more kids without so much suffering. Maybe even enjoy them.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:18 pm
While I can wholeheartedly embrace the claim that having kids is more fun than I had ever thought it would be, as my lovely bride and I endure the “terrible twos” with our first edition of offspring, the “less work than you think” part reminds me of my old basketball coach’s exclamations of “What a great time we’re having!” while myself and my fellow Wildcats were barfing into a trashcan during preseason conditioning. Important? Worthwhile? Necessary? Sure. Less work than I had thought? Um, no.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:26 pm
Not a big Caplan fan….I think he wrote once that he thought cloning would be the greatest thing in the world because who wouldn’t want to raise a perfect copy of himself….but I think there’s a good point to be made for leavings kids to themselves more. For example:
1. I don’t think TV/music/idle talk needs to be microcensored lease anything ‘sexual or violent’ be overheard.
2. I don’t think parents need to idle their cars at bus stops with their kids in the back seat waiting for the school bus. If I had done that when I was a kid in grade school I’d be mercilessly teased….now I see HIGH SCHOOL kids’ parents doing it!!!!
3. I think kids should be allowed to wander around on their free time. They should learn about their neighborhoods and learn to make and manage friends an enemies.
4. I think there should be something ‘otherworldly’ about parents in the eyes of the kids. This requires there being something of a wall between the ‘kids stuff’ and the parents. Parents should not pretend to be interested in all the stuff kids are. They should not become micro-mediators in their kids relationships with other kids. A bit of detachment there does everyone some good. It teaches the kids to manage things themselves. It also teaches them that people are different, the world doesn’t revolve around their interests. And as Caplan points out, it makes parenting easier rather than harder.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:47 pm
“I think kids should be allowed to wander around on their free time.”
I think kids should be allowed free time.
My daughter again expressed too much concern she was going to get into too many activities this summer that would impinge on her literary explorations.
People with kids should consider adopting one or a few. Too often adoption is promoted as a “cure” for childlessness. The truth is that it is a remedy for being orphaned or abandoned.
June 3rd, 2011 | 1:16 pm
“they really find that parents have surprisingly little long-term effect on kids.”
You really have to be a PhD to believe an idea that collossally stupid. On the other hand, it is the perfect justification for “Shove ‘em in a daycare center because what you do doesn’t matter anyways.”
carl
June 3rd, 2011 | 2:28 pm
Jerry, there is hope!
I have two girls: one 4, the other 3. The 4 year-old has always been very demanding with attention, and cannot be left alone. As an infant, she routinely refused the pacifier, and wouldn’t sleep alone unless you could escape after she fell asleep. The 3 year-old, on the other hand, is often happy to wander off by herself and flip through the pages of a book. As an infant, she refused company at nap time: the pacifier would suffice.
When either was 2, it was pretty hard. Now, however, we let them into the back yard in the morning, and they’ll usually stay out there playing and exploring until she calls them in — sometimes against their will.
So, you’re right that it is a lot of hard work the first two years, but it lets up afterwards.
June 3rd, 2011 | 3:02 pm
Jerry, I’ll second what Jack says — for a few years, it’s really hard. But it does average out to being “not as bad as you might think.” This is even true if you keep having them — by the time my youngest was born, my oldest was 10 and a net asset amidst the craziness.
But those first few years, up through the toddlerhood of my third….yeah. It was a sacrifice. It was hard. To be brutally honest, I don’t remember much between the time #3 was born and the time she turned 4 except for some very memorable moments. But it does get easier, long before you’re done.
June 3rd, 2011 | 3:12 pm
I don’t have kids. The biggest negative, for me personally, is I like to sleep 8-10 hours a day, hopefully uninterrupted and I feel crabby if I don’t get that much sleep. Though I suppose if I had a better diet I could do with less sleep.
A positive that I might miss is support of children in old age.
I do oft-find myself with a lot of time on my hands which permits me to work overtime. Excess time is one reason why I can spend a lot of time blogging my avocational research projects.
But I also find myself perhaps doing things not optimally the first best health wise choice because I don’t have kids. For instance, my Dad used to drink and go to bars but stop at 26 when he started having kids. I’m 38 and I still do this. But…I come from a fairly conservative lifestyle background. Excessive risk taking just isn’t in my blood.
June 3rd, 2011 | 3:16 pm
“You really have to be a PhD to believe an idea that collossally stupid.”
Maybe you can back up your argument with facts instead of an ad hominem. I know this does in some way go against common sense; however I’ve seen more lefty, fuzzy thinking, politically correct PhDs — or at least students trained by them — believe in the far stupider very opposite conclusion: That human nature is a tabla rasa, that genetics have little if anything to do with economic and personality outcomes.
June 3rd, 2011 | 3:58 pm
Except that kids COST MONEY. Not every one of us is a white collar knowledge worker. And also there is no “less work than you think” raising them. He is saying “Don’t worry about screwing up your kids.” But that’s not the source of the work, it’s the day to day trials and interactions with them. It’s work getting up at 3 a.m. because your kid is sick, and you can and will worry about him.
Especially now that people are starting to have kids in their thirties.
June 3rd, 2011 | 8:47 pm
After raising two of my own, I have learned that the “Terrible Two’s” are merely boredom. Younger children are happy to play with their toys on their own terms. At approx. 2, they realize the other people in their house are doing other things and want to know more. Letting a 2 yr old “set the table” or handing them laundry from the washer to “put in the dryer”, putting their own clothes into drawers, folding wash cloths, etc. allows them to take part and socialize as well as finding out how much “fun” can be shared with grown ups. The boredom of the same old toys can be changed for new fun forms and a feeling of accomplishment. The table might look a little lopsided and the drawers might be messy, but who cares. It worked for me!!!
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:03 pm
carl
You really have to be a PhD to believe an idea that collossally stupid. On the other hand, it is the perfect justification for “Shove ‘em in a daycare center because what you do doesn’t matter anyways.”
It’s not true in the extreme. Of course if you lock your kid in a closet and treat him like an animal from age 1 and up things are going to turn out very bad. It does appear to be true, though, that parenting styles seem to have no consistent effect. Just as you’ll find kids who turned out ‘bad’ with loose parenting styles, you’ll find ones that turned out good and vice versa. There is no formula to raising a good kid, at least one beyond don’t be grossly evil.
Fair balance here, I don’t have kids of my own but have a ‘pentamom’ in my family (well actually a mom whose a tri-bio one and duel-step one). All of them turned/are turning out quite different despite having roughly the same parenting style for better or worse. I think the message here is less “just don’t bother with parenting” and more “just parent in a reasonable manner, don’t get obsessed that all the little things you are doing are ‘the wrong way’” As Caplin is arguing, this is actually a positive message for those seeking to have more kids. It’s not an Olympic effort, or needn’t be (at least in the raising of them, I’ll let the women speak to the birthing).
JOn
That human nature is a tabla rasa, that genetics have little if anything to do with economic and personality outcomes.
I don’t think this is necessarily the wrong conclusion. For example, one interesting theory I’ve read is that peer groups have far more influence on kid’s personalities than parents, kids adjust their personalities to their peers, they learn to just parrot what they believe their parents want to hear. The ‘tabla rasa’ theory could technically be true but it still wouldn’t matter as much what your parenting style is. Even if humans are tabla rasas, there are so many influencers as kids grow up that it’s nearly impossible to purposefully ‘manage’ the development of their personalities.
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:20 pm
But kids don’t cost AS MUCH MONEY as all those newspaper articles tell you. If they did, I wouldn’t have a roof over my head.
And yes, having to get up at 3 a.m., and all those lousy days when the baby won’t stop crying and the toddler is wrecking everything — those are real, and those are hard work to get through. But a lot of the perceived “work” of raising kids comes from strange ideas promulgated in society about what every kid “needs” in terms of *constant* interaction, constant planned and scheduled activity, expensive frills — any of which can be good but which are not necessary individually, let alone in toto. It’s simply beyond argument that the ideas of what’s necessary to raise kids promulgated in the media contain a lot of stuff that isn’t necessary, and that skews people’s impressions of how hard — and expensive — it is. And so, if you “think” those descriptions are accurate, then logically it’s “less work than you think.” Of course it’s not less work than you think if you think it’s going to be a breeze, but that’s not the vibe I get from most middle class Americans about their perceptions concerning child-rearing.
June 4th, 2011 | 12:47 am
I agree with the author that children are not computers to be programmed. This approach often backfires: the child rebells against overly strict parents by doing the exact opposite of what they say. I think children often imitate parents more often that actually listening to them. The child who feels powerless and controlled will naturally seek do to what has been denied him, to have power, in imitation of the parents who he sees as having control. So rather than try to train children like dogs (although this does have to be done from time to time, particularly when they are very young) it’s better to simply be the person that you want your child to be like.
June 4th, 2011 | 8:39 am
Another perspective: Mothers and fathers have a privilege and a great responsibility. They are the first and continuing educators of their children, and they hand on the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
If they have been fortunate enough to be rightly taught themselves, they will understand that “tradition is a living entity” containing within itself the ability to progress and adapt. But, if they have not been rightly taught, all is not lost. They themselves and their children can and do learn through daily experience. They can do this at least as long as their hearts are rightly inclined toward goodness.
Children do, I believe, understand and accommodate the errors of loving parents. They edit and adapt the things they are taught, changing that which is temporal while preserving that which is eternal (with as many “chances” to succeed in this as are necessary). It is never too late.
Perhaps the best gift children can be given is knowledge that a human person is a work in progress and that through the grace of God and their own prodigious effort, they can, so to speak, participate in the architecture of their own being.
If the greatest of God’s gifts is love, then a mother and a father are potentially the most fortunate people on earth. And, if God is love, as I believe he is, then loving parents are closest to him when they love one another and their children in him.
The rest, needless to say, follows. I cannot think of any endeavor of true value that does not require great expenditure of energy, discipline, and perseverance.
June 4th, 2011 | 9:01 am
Amen, Patrick. Of course that’s really an impossible proposition, which is why raising kids is essentially a work of grace.
June 4th, 2011 | 9:23 am
“Except that kids COST MONEY”
This didn’t used to be the case. A hundred years ago, kids were an excellent source of cheap labor on the farm. In facts, more kids meant more income. Years ago, you didn’t have to be the religious Quiverfull movement to think that 10 kids was a good thing.
June 4th, 2011 | 10:40 am
I really dislike the use of the phrase “buy more kids”.
It is not harmless or cute. Kids are not consumer goods.
June 4th, 2011 | 4:04 pm
Agree with the observation above on the inappropriateness of the choice of words ‘buying children’ – like they are pets !
The theme could have been on St.Paul’s promise of how motherhood sanctifies womanhood , helping them , when handled appropriately , to develop more trust and dependance on God which indirectly would be conveyed to the children .
Scriptures full of promises ‘for a thousand generation ‘ on those fear and revere The Lord , entrusting to Him what need to be , accepting the strenght on what one need to do .
Even simple ailments get transformed into occasions of heartfelt prayers , on behalf of all areas that has come into the lives of the child as well as the parents , including the past of the ancestors – thus , developing a closer bond with God and with those ancestors , as well as others who are afflicted .
Same so , even for taken for granted behaviors which can be written off or used as occasions for calling on The Name( better still , humming it, to calm a child , in the middle of the night ,thinking of all who are lost in darkness and thus being moved to call on The Spirit..
and why not ..
‘pray incessantly’ we are told ..such a role can make parenthood very fulfilling ..
and the ongoing spiritual communion with one’s children , even when the parent not able to be there , helping to alleviate the pangs of being separated ..
Discerning how many children can be a matter of trust which may not be there in the beginning ..thus , God in His mercy grants surprises :) ..that one can look back years later , to see that He was there , inspite of the parental imperfections ..and will be there for the years to come as well !
June 4th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
Jeremy:
That was before the industrial revolution. You also lost quite a few of those ten kids due to disease or other factors. Now ironically they are very much like a luxury good in that sense.
Penta:
You aren’t everyone. You also probably had to make serious financial sacrifices, and even then, it something happens, it can get worse: hospital stays, an accident.
He’s also talking about having more kids. Could you afford another with your current situation?
It’s not so much perception as you think. I think what he says really only applies to a certain type-A white collar dragon mom overachiever, who uses that as an argument not to raise more kids.
There’s a lot of valid reasons to point out why they aren’t: need to get post-secondary education for a decent job, making 30 the new 18. Astronomical rent costs and declining schools. Worry about the future. He could address those.
June 4th, 2011 | 11:31 pm
Dblade
It’s not so much perception as you think. I think what he says really only applies to a certain type-A white collar dragon mom overachiever, who uses that as an argument not to raise more kids.
Actually I think he’s making the opposite case. For the ‘dragon mom’ each kid is a lot of work, hence carries a ‘high price’, hence you only have a few. He’s making the ‘Family Guy dad argument. Because you DON’T need to stress out like a ‘dragon mom’ over your kids, you can sit back and be amused by them like Peter Griffen or Homer Simpson. Since kids are ‘low priced’ go ahead and have another one if you want.
June 5th, 2011 | 11:13 am
“You aren’t everyone. You also probably had to make serious financial sacrifices, and even then, it something happens, it can get worse: hospital stays, an accident.
He’s also talking about having more kids. Could you afford another with your current situation?”
You appear to be arguing against something I didn’t say. I didn’t say it was cheap or didn’t require sacrifices.
I’m saying the numbers thrown around in popular culture for “how much it costs to raise a child” add up to more money than my husband has yet earned in his lifetime, and we’re not done yet, yet we are managing fairly well, albeit with some debt and few luxuries. Perhaps it is IS different in urban areas or California, but then that’s just another reason why those numbers should not be taken as generally accurate for the general population.
Could we afford another kid? Possibly not. But we’re already at five, so the fact that we might not be able to doesn’t make a good argument against why ordinary middle Americans can’t (possibly) afford two or three kids.
June 5th, 2011 | 11:25 am
“It’s not so much perception as you think. I think what he says really only applies to a certain type-A white collar dragon mom overachiever, who uses that as an argument not to raise more kids. ”
I think I hang out on mommy sites enough, and observe my peers enough, to conclude that people think that more energy and money is required than really is required. Contrary to 21st century American non-tiger mom belief, a four year old doesn’t need you to be in her face, taking her to preschool, or otherwise entertaining her, all day long. You actually DO have time to nurse a baby while having a four year old, and you need to spend very little money on either her education or her entertainment. Not nothing, but a heckuva lot less than the American middle class standard.
This isn’t an argument for Homer Simpson parenting, it’s an argument for parenting the way 80-90% of parents a generation and a half ago did it. Supervise your kids, teach them, but let them learn independence and creativity on their own with minimal supplies and “activities.” Less professionalism, less technology, more modeling and letting them be kids. Oh, and more expectation that they’ll contribute to their own care and live within the practical abilities of their parents — I’m amazed at the prevalence of people who think that a mom’s job is roughly that of a maid plus chauffeur whether or not she’s employed elsewhere.
And yeah, right now I’ve got a kid in college. We’ve yet to pay a dime on her actual tuition and room/board. We help with some living expenses, pay her car insurance, and some stuff around the edges. She selected an affordable school, earned some academic scholarships, works full time in the summers, and has a reasonable amount of college debt. Maybe without those last two siblings, she’d be debt free — but is that a good tradeoff?
Anyway, as I said, I’m not saying it’s easy or cheap. I’m saying the truth is somewhere between that, and the astronomical expectations of money and time that modern parents — and probably even more so non-parents or prospective parents — attribute to child-rearing.
June 6th, 2011 | 8:58 am
Pentamom, Are you a stay-at-home mom? If not, how many hours a week do you spend at your employed job? (And just for the record, I think being a stay-at-home mom is perfectly fine, and working outside the home is fine too.)
June 6th, 2011 | 10:09 am
Jeremy, I’m a homeschooling (of my two younger kids) SAHM. One is in college, the middle two in high school.
June 6th, 2011 | 12:12 pm
Jerry Beckett –
Well, the ‘marginal cost’ in time decreases with each additional kid, at least in our experience.
The jump from zero to one is vast, certainly. But the jump from one to two – while substantial – isn’t anything like twice the effort. Ditto for numbers three and four… there’s an increase, but four kids do not take anywhere near four times the effort to raise as one. Leaving aside increasing experience on the part of the parents… kids grow in independence, and older kids can – and do – help in raising the younger ones.
I suspect pentamom can confirm this.
June 6th, 2011 | 2:27 pm
@pentamom
If you had to work a 40-hour a week job in addition to your current mom duties, wouldn’t you feel stressed out? Mothering is at least a full-time job in itself.
Also, I think a lot of women just aren’t cut out to be mothers. And with that being the case, these women should limit their children or not have children at all. When these women have children, it’s a lose situation for everyone.
June 6th, 2011 | 10:58 pm
Jeremy — I would certainly feel stressed out in that situation. But a mom who did that and let her kids play outside by themselves most of the time and realized that her four year old didn’t need two hours of “mom time” every day and her six year old could fix a sandwich just fine or the eight year old could keep an eye on the baby while she grabs a shower would be a heck of a lot *less* stressed out than one who spent half her time outside work thinking her kids needed either her constant attention or her constant chauffeuring to various activities and entertainments and that her kids couldn’t do anything by themselves.
That’s my point — not that good parenting is easy in any situation, but that it is not *as hard as* certain unnecessary modern expectations about what it requires make it, or make it appear.
June 6th, 2011 | 11:01 pm
Homework’s another big one. I hear a lot about how tiring it is to come home from working all day and have to spend all evening helping kids with homework. Huh? Used to be, kids did their homework by themselves unless they hit a rough spot. Now the normal expectation is that it will not generally happen unsupervised or unassisted at least until high school.
June 7th, 2011 | 12:44 am
And I’m not necessarily endorsing the idea that everyone “should” have at least one more kid — I’m just agreeing with the idea that it’s not as hard as most people think, and that failure to have more kids is *often* driven by misconceptions about how hard it needs to be, because as a culture we’ve been sold a bill of goods about what children “need.” Maybe a lot of the people I know are exceptionally uptight (though none of them are remotely tiger-parents) and all those articles about how it costs multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a kid have no market, but somehow I doubt either is the case. Kids need a LOT of love, and time, and energy, but they don’t need slaves to their every moment, relentless supervision past the toddler years, or a lot of professionalized accoutrements to a loving home and a decent basic education.
June 8th, 2011 | 12:29 pm
I am disturbed by the author’s glib advocacy of assisted reproduction. Sperm and egg donation is an injustice that permanently severs the link between the child and one of his parents so that he’ll never know the source of half his biological origins. IVF results in embryo destruction and selective abortions if too many implant in the uterus after being transferred. Surrogacy is another example of treating a human person as an object of use. Aspiring parents shouldn’t manufacture life in this way.
June 10th, 2011 | 10:18 am
Noelle — agreed 100%.
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