Okay, I wanted more children and I am now vasectomized and stuck at two. What I noticed is different about "these days" is that the kind of discipline that my wife and I experienced, and that our parents experienced even more, is no longer an option. I was scared of my dad, my wife was scared of her dad. My children are not scared of me. I will never hit them, I will never punish them in ways that could scare or upset them too much. To be clear, it is good in ways not to be feared. My children cuddle up to me, they draw pictures and write "I love you daddy" and give them to me just because they feel like it. I get a lot more warmth and love from my children than my dad did. The problem though is that everything is a negotiation. They get dressed, the older one does her homework etc, but it requires a level of persuasion and nagging that makes handling more than two impractical. What stops me from "detaching" is that we wouldn't get to school on time and homework wouldn't happen and they would get to bed at 11pm.
The widespread availability of cheap plastic toys collides catastrophically with the lower discipline. I let my kids have an hour or two of unstructured play time this morning (it's a holiday here in Canada) and there are sticker pads covering our dining room floor. Part of why I'm always taking them places like Jane is talking about is because they are constantly making messes they don't clean up and if they are somewhere else our house stays clean.
My understanding is that the fall in fertility is almost across the board, even Mormons in Utah are having fewer kids, and I think it's because they are ultimately plugged into the same culture. The Menonites and Haredim are the only people isolated enough to resist the trend.
This website is a nice mixing board for Blue and Red tribe, John and Jane and Trads reading this, how do you manage? Is there a way of having large families without unpleasant (and in Blue tribe circles, basically illegal) discipline?
I've been noodling on this all day because it's a holiday in the US too and I think you deserve a longer response than I can multitask with my thumbs. So here goes:
The big families I know tend to be relatively more minimalist about stuff and relatively more intense about doing as your parents say than the small families I know, but there's a middle ground between instant obedience borne from fear and the nagging/persuasion/negotiation of a nice parent. The precise technique is going to vary by kid -- I have one who will collapse into tears at a stern tone of voice, and another who cackles in delight at being defiant -- but it's okay to expect to be obeyed and to put them in time out, remove privileges, send them to their room, whatever works for this kid, if they don't listen. Of course this means not allowing yourself to issue commands you aren't willing to follow through on, and if you can contrive to create an incentive things usually happen faster! ("We can go out to the park as soon as you guys sweep up all the tiny bits of paper on the floor" or "let's watch another episode of our show, go put away your laundry first.") And voices do, alas, get raised. Occasionally things that consistently don't get cleaned up go away, for a while or permanently. But you can roll around on the floor goofing off together and then say it's bedtime! It's not an either/or.
All that said, I absolutely get my kids out of the house because they are driving me nuts. It's amazing how a change of scenery can make your brother fun instead of annoying! Or, you know, your son.
That is excellent advice, and largely what I was going to write myself.
I would just add that you really have to know what you are willing to go all the way on and what you aren't, and then not give ultimatums you are not willing to back up. In some sense that is just "don't micro manage" but sometimes you should micro manage a little. When it isn't important enough to put your kid in time out in the basement bathroom they are scared of for a few hours, then don't issue it as a demand, just make it clear it is a suggestion. Demands must be followed or else, but just "hey, I don't like the game you two are playing" is another matter.
It comes down to you yourself knowing what your rules are, and being able to articulate them to your children. Don't nag; if they break the rules (one of which might be "Do what dad says, and if he says 'Now' save your questions for after") enforce the rules. If they are not breaking one of the specific rules, just let them be and point out the undesirable results of their actions.
Then you can be both fun "Dad let's us play and do fun stuff!" AND scary "Do NOT break Dad's rules!" Dad.
The danger comes from trying to constantly control everything and having very vague, poorly thought out rules. If you tell kids "Do your homework, then you can play outside" and after they do their homework you don't let them play outside, you are done and they will fight you constantly. If you say "Get your homework done before we eat dinner at 630 and you can play outside" you are still good, even if they get done at 6:25. Just let them play for 5 minutes. They learn they can control their fate and that you will treat them fairly.
I know it seems obvious to write out, but too often I find it is the easier, expedient path to just make up whatever rules, and not follow your own rules, exacting punishment or not on a whim. Once you start that, it becomes a lot more work because the kids recognize that everything is a negotiation, and they are much more persistent negotiators than adults.
Yes, I also sign mine up for a lot of activities, but not because I think the activities are so great. It's to give myself a break!
I feel like people who can successfully execute low-effort parenting must have either a much better social context than me or just easier kids? Or there's something I'm doing wrong. Mine are needy all the time and will resist, protest, or sabotage any attempts at detachment.
I've found that you can get kids to clean up after themselves, at least above a certain age. You just have to make it clear what the carrots and sticks are.
The big thing I've found is you need to control screens. It's just too much stimulation for young kids to handle. If you allow your kids screens (we do for 30 min before bed and sometimes longer if they are sick or the weather is bad or we want to do a family movie) then you need to set clear boundries so they know not to ask when its not appropriate and when its expected to end. In the case of bedtime this can also work as a reward structure (no TV until dinner, bath, pajamas, teeth, etc are done and if you take too long there is none).
My biggest difficulty on the screens is other parents. My rule of thumb is that in my house we follow our rules and in other peoples houses they can follow theirs.
As to hitting, I don't hit my kids, but if they get totally out of control I have no problem physically forcing them into something. I've also found that a twist of the wrist elicits compliance without causing injury.
Despite the apparent failure of those efforts, I'm more of an optimist for the reasons you discuss. I have a couple of other anecdotal observations. First, my impression is that while having a bunch of kids is seen as low status, having a bunch of GRANDKIDS is high status. Conscientious, aging boomers who had 2 kids all seem quite enthusiastic to tell you about unusually high numbers of grandkids. It signals a kind of success as to their own parenting skills and demonstrates that they have a real legacy. It's also my experience that having, say, 5 kids today is actually less odd than it was 20 years ago. In my city today, for example, there are a large number of overlapping partially "seceded" communities where large families have become quite common and their kids are being raised around all these other large families. Nothing like that existed here 20 years ago. The social support network is much bigger. Some of these families now have kids entering adulthood and the culture they have created seems far "stickier" than I would have anticipated. The world they are creating is genuinely more appealing than the alternatives. Repeat the cycle for 2 or 3 generations and the future might be a real surprise.
Excellent summary! I was nodding my head, agreeing with both of you all the way down the scroll bar. Some glosses and flourishes:-
John is not materialist enough, perhaps. Young adults are delaying childbirth. As simple as that. If you start having children at 18 or 20, you can have many more of them than if you start at 32 or 36. It's simple arithmetic and biology. People end up having fewer children than they want, because they start later than they want, or not at all.
This delay does not necessarily depend on the existence of the Pill, nor on procrastination *per se*. Especially if women exercise some agency in selecting mates. It's a consequence of urbanisation and daily lived experience.
In a village, a young woman may have a pool of say a hundred young men from whom to choose. On moving to a city, she sees thousands of men on a daily basis, and is aware of the existence of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of possibly suitable men, out there somewhere. More choice means more time spent choosing. Humans are weird that way.
Dating apps exacerbate this effect by their mere popularity, leaving aside the misaligned incentives of their makers (to keep people on the apps, not to find them a mate). The apps are an enormous virtual city in which there are suddenly millions of possible choices. That is why they are so awful for everyone (except their owners, bwahahaha jingle jingle).
You both came so close to using the c-word, credentialism, but both shied away at the last possible second. High-investment achievement-oriented parenting makes perfect sense in a credentialist world, which is inherently a zero sum arms race. It's incredibly stressful for the parents and produces damaged kids, but Moloch doesn't care.
(Credentialism explains the U shape of the curve of fertility versus income. I'm sceptical of the scepticism, it's looking like an isolated demand for rigor.)
In a credentialist world the incentives are to delay having children, once again. This explains the shift in marriage from cornerstone to capstone (Delano, 2013): from being an early event in the life of an adult to being the crowning achievement of a successful life.
Homo economicus is not a required assumption for any of this either. People copy what the people around them do.
Credentialism on both generations. The adults can't have kids until their education is done and their careers are going, which cuts down on time. And the kids are going to need private school, tutoring, etc. etc. etc. if they want to hold up the family name. The old days of investing everything in the oldest son and letting the others make their way is gone.
"the push for legible achievement over experience" is I think one of the under appreciated drivers here. Specifically, how legible achievement drives college admission, and college admission is seen as critical to the good life. I think that so long as college is a mostly necessary hoop to jump through for middle class lives and attending the "best" college is the path to levels above that, we are going to struggle to make having many kids lightly parented high status. Burning your kid's childhood on the alter of admissions essays will always result in better college admission results, so the high status (signaling) people will go for that.
Little Platoons by Matt Freeney has an interesting, albeit curmudgeonly, argument about the intersection of family life and college admission officers.
Seeing university as an uncool waste of time is well on the way though, at least in high status circles (highly paid people). That probably isn't translating into lower admissions because of by-now hard coded degree requirements Gen X put into everything, but it will probably translate soon into people not giving a shit about their kids getting into the "best" institutions, as there doesn't seem to be a real quality gap worth caring about.
I hope that is true, and it deserves to become the truth. I am skeptical, however, as such things have a lot of inertia. It would be great for me, and my kids, if indeed it becomes the case that college degrees are not critical to most careers, or even if just where you go matters a lot less, in the next decade. Here's hoping!
I fear the university system being a crutch for corporate recruiting to rely on when a hire goes poorly isn't going away soon enough, however.
“The other big objection to this theory, one Carney raises himself, is that if you do surveys of people, especially women, they report having fewer children than they want. So, the argument goes, it can’t just be birth control, because if it were people would have all the kids they want. But the answer to this is so obvious I’m shocked it isn’t apparent to Carney. People have high time-preference. People procrastinate.”
The more obvious answer is that the surveys are garbage. If there were a survey of how many Ferraris you wanted and, lo and behold, you have fewer Ferraris than you wanted, nobody would think that there’s a real gap to be explained. Putting that “Ferrari gap” as a dependent variable in a regression or using it as a prompt for a thousand efforts at explanation would be criminal. The real answer is that actions reveal preferences. There could be SDB where people have to say they’re more pro-children than they really are.
I once surveyed a thousand people slaving away in the salt mines. They all said they'd prefer to be doing anything else. But when I came back the next day, they were all still there. Actions reveal preferences, I said. Nothing more to be explained. And I threw away the survey, because it was clearly garbage.
One trick in surveys that ask voters about new government programs is to not include a few words about how it means voters will have to pay higher taxes. Without that, respondents think they get something for nothing but our decisions are actually all tradeoffs. Including verbiage about the cost of those extra programs produces more realistic answers.
If the slave salt mine question were: "Do you prefer to do any thing else, which likely means you'll be killed?" then, yeah, the slaves not leaving does reveal their preferences given the constraints.
Well, the trouble with that analogy is that you can't escape salt mine slavery via doing something fun and low cost. (Well... sorta low cost depending on the context.) Presuming one is in a position to create children, that being having a sexual partner and working reproductive organs, having additional children is something one has to actively avoid. Having children is much like, and entirely antagonistic to, having a clean living room: if you want it and clear the low bar for getting it, you can have it.
Ferraris and freedom from forced salt mining are both rather more difficult to attain, so it does make sense to say that while one may want it, the costs are such that they will rationally choose not to have it. Having kids is comparatively very low cost. High cost of ownership, perhaps, but man, the upfront cost is as damned near negative as you can get.
Low cost assuming they currently do have father-worthy partners. Otherwise it means a breakup and re-entering the dating pool, which is quite high cost.
That's just it, having the kid is cheap, and thus not having one is suggestive of your priorities/preferences being revealed in a way that remaining in slavery is not. Ben's analogy is flawed, because escaping slavery is very high cost (the slavers are definitely opposed) so remaining in slavery does not reveal your preferences. Having a kid if you have a sexual partner is something that has to be actively avoided, so not having a child reveals your preferences, at least in so far as "you want more kids, but not NOW". Even more so for people with 1+ kids; if you would like more kids, and your equipment still works, why aren't you having more kids? The answer "I would like more kids, but I want this other stuff more" reveals your preferences.
This was a fun read. You repeatedly touched on one of my pet peeves, which is the tendency (best embodied by many helicopter parents!) to view decisions and policies only in view of their instrumental value to achieving some future payoff. No! Good things are often just intrinsically good! How we choose to behave as parents, including how we schedule our kids' time and how we relate to them, don't just matter for how it all might boost their odds of future success; it matters because that window of time accounts for like 1/4 of our expected lifespans, so it's really important to spend it well.
Similarly, I appreciated the nod to the idea that even if all these proposed ideas for making parenthood easier fail to raise the birthrate, it would still just be intrinsically good to make parents and kids' lives better. Like you say about "detached parenting", it's not merely instrumentally good for the sake of inspiring others to have kids. Parents are doing hard, important, costly (and yes, joyful, rewarding, beautiful, meaning-making) work that massively benefits society; society should pitch in to make things a bit easier for them when we can! Even if doing so inspires exactly 0 marginal extra childbirth decisions, it would be worthwhile to make life better for families with young kids.
That's a good point about childhood being roughly 1/4 of our expected life spans. I hadn't really thought about it like that before, but it is true, and also the only part we are guaranteed to get. Sacrificing quality of childhood for a grand or two more income in one's 50's seems like a bad deal from that perspective.
I'm skeptical that class dynamics will save us. For one thing, this seems to have been a feature of middle class striver types going back hundreds of years in, say, France (one of the places birth rates dropped earliest, and way before the pill!). And materialist reasons are commonly cited to explain that, too: moving from low investment to high investment parenting because children went more and more from being marginal labor to an expense. This is, of course, all the more true today, when in our wisdom we've banned all sorts of child work and planned out the next 20 to 30 years of credential chasing. I don't think fads can change this; the economic logic is just too strong. And it's not like fads in, well, literal fashion changed the way the classes dress *all* the time, either. It became cool at a certain point to wear hobo chic, but you still dress up for a wedding, a funeral, or most interviews.
Given the economic logic behind high investment parenting, in some sense you have to ask parents to not worry whether their child will be upwardly mobile, or even necessarily reach the same place. Understandably a tougher sell!
Nice article, but I think you complicate things way more than they really are. People not having a lot of children has nothing to do with "status" and everything to do with convenience (plus a little biology).
As much as we complain about the world, we live in a golden age. Most people live, more or less, comfortable lives. They have a job they enjoy or at least one that leaves them free time for activities they actually enjoy (long are the days of backbreaking 12+ hours/day). They have enough money to travel, to pursue their interests, to do whatever.
And then comes the kid and all this nice, enjoyable life goes down the trashcan (along with a ton of diapers and a little vomit). No more free time or energy until the kid reaches a certain age. The cherry you ask? The more kids you have, the more years you have to wait until all of them reach an independence age, the less total free time you will have in your life. Comfort reduced.
The biology part stems from the fact that most people start a family in their 30s, significantly reducing their chance of having a large family. Again the reason is comfort, not status or anything of that sort. Who wants to spend his/her twenties changing diapers? Very few people. Especially since there is no social pressure these days to do so.
As a research mathematician in his 30s who's about to become a father, I abhor the idea of having more than 2 children. It's not only because of the years of discomfort. It's also the fact that mathematics is a young man's game requiring a tremendous amount of uninterrupted concentration. I don't think I will get much precious time to focus in a house with 4-5 children for the next 15+ years and by then I would be too old to be a competent researcher.
Huh, this was nice. (Are any of those pics of you and the kids? ... if so then they are insufferably cute... like a pile of puppies, only better. :^) So as background, we didn't met and have kids till late in life. She popped out two kids as fast as she could and then stayed home with them and we lived modestly. Kids are great, grandkids (of which I have zero*) are the meaning of life. I live out in rural america, and it feels like a different world from the one you describe. Oh some of it sounds familiar, helicopter parents... There are a lot of single moms out here, or moms living with boyfriends. And all the moms are working... For moms not to be working we'd need better paying jobs for their boyfriends/ husbands. And a lot of the guys around here are making less than the women. And mostly guys suck at being moms... just like women aren't always as good at being dads. Better paying jobs for guys is the only way out I see... Other ideas welcome.
I promise our kids are even cuter than this, but the pictures are all AI generated. And boy do I wish I had a solution for male jobs that can support a family!
However, I'm happy to give you a reason for why I sign my kids up for stuff. Like most things that parents do, it hearkens back to my own childhood, as #4 of 5.
Since my older siblings all took piano for a grand total of 4 months each, nobody even offered me the option. My childhood was characterize by having interests and not knowing how to take them beyond puttering around the house. I wasn't even good at jumping rope, which was the dominant activity of the girls in school.
So yes... I found out which sport they play in my son's future school and I signed him up from a young age. He is not athletic, none of us have interest in sports, but during recess he can do what all the other boys are doing. It's as simple as that. He doesn't spend recess reading a book like I did.
For the rest, I want my kids to be able to advance their skills, and that means exposing them to people who know those skills. I don't want to ruin the fun by "lessonizing" everything, but I also know that most things stop being fun when you can't become good at them.
I am an adult who is not good at anything except school, although I dabble in several things poorly. I would like my kids to be able to do something in a way that makes them proud.
Activities are great, especially for things the parents know nothing about or that require a bunch of kids or a major capital commitment to work. At various times, we've done swim lessons, team sports, martial arts, and musical instruments, and I tried and failed to find somewhere nearby with a woodshop and lessons at a convenient time.
That's why my wife signs my kids up for things as well (and also acquires far too many things for them): she didn't have any opportunities for activities as a kid. There is a lot to be said for signing kids up for stuff they think they might like and seeing how it goes, then letting them drop it when they are no longer interested. That last bit seems to be very important, and often ignored by parents who get stuck in a sunk cost fallacy trap of "I've been driving you to this for years, you aren't giving it up now!"
100% agree that the blame goes to birth control and the problem of choice. Choice is always good in small quantities and bad in large quantities. Today we have so much choice about so many aspects of our life that it's driving our kids insane: they even have to choose their gender!
As someone who isn't sure if she has as many kids as she wants, I give that section a big shrug. At the end of the day, having 12 kids you didn't choose (or 8 kids and four miscarriages because you got pregnant too quickly) is probably more miserable than having 3 kids when you think you might enjoy 4. Life is full of ambiguity and the thing about choice is that there will always be the road not travelled. I'm okay with that.
I think the point is a lot of people wind up with zero.
As for choosing gender: if you don't pick the one they assigned you at birth, you're looking at a lot of painful surgeries, and likely infertility. It's kind of a fake choice.
The explanation for your graph of fertility by income is that a marginal kid has no cost to either the poor or the rich.
For the poor the government pays for everything. They can even in theory end up better off financially. The husband isn't even involved in this equation.
For the rich the cost of a marginal child is a pittance relative to their income. And anyway they are at a level of income where the wife can stop working and you can still afford the house in the good school district. If it takes two incomes to afford that house you aren't going to have high fertility.
While I do think there are many ways parents can spend less over scheduling kids, an awful lot of costs are fixed. Housing is what it is. Childcare is what it is. Healthcare is what it is. Education is what it is. Your time is what it is. These are the big items, whether you do travel sports or not.
I could of course imagine changes to our society that could make housing, childcare, healthcare, education, etc cheaper. But that's a longer post.
Lastly, I don't think this matter is self correcting. I think what is going to happen is that as we have less kids the burden of providing for the retirements of the old will fall on smaller and smaller groups of people. They will respond to that pressure by cutting out childbearing to make ends meet. We won't be able to reform the system because the median voter will either be a retiree or close to it (already the case BTW, median voter it 55 years old). The whole thing will just death spiral.
If I were in Washington I would try to head this off in a big way as early as I could. For instance, in addition to expanded CTC proposals, I would refund half of FICA* taxes to families with two kids and refund 100% to families with 3+ kids. We can't try to plug our FICA hole by double taxing parents (they take on the cost of raising the next generation of FICA taxpayers as well as paying the taxes today).
*A median family would receive $8k for the second kid and $16k for 3+. In the most extreme case each earner hitting the FICA cap ($175k) would get $27k with 3+ kids, or $54k per couple. BTW, the SALT deduction could cover 90% of the cost of that.
I'm in the camp that money can work if its a lot of money with the right incentives and that its actually money (not in kind services parents may or may not value whatever the government spends on them). We know because the two groups with high fertility are the two were the marginal cost of a child is close to zero.
Lastly, I think there is a cultural element to this. Smart conservatives have close to replacement fertility. Smart liberal women have 0.6 TFR. That's a pretty big gap. And it seems to hold across cultures (conservative Koreans have more kids then liberal Koreans, conservative swedes more than liberal swedes). There is something in liberalism that is anti-child and getting worse, at least at the UMC level or higher.
Either liberalism needs to change itself or at least it needs to leave other subcultures alone. School Choice would be a good start here. In general lower government involvement and attempts to push liberal culture down everyones throats would help. It would probably help liberals the most BTW.
Damn this is great. As a therapist who works with kids I can say that constantly narrating your child’s life is BAD FOR THEM AND WORSE FOR YOU. Side note I’d have enjoyed this piece more without soulless AI art!
A lot of right-leaning writers use AI art because most artists are leftists and, if not unwilling to produce art for a blog like this, would have their career ended if it got around they did. There was a whole attempt to get people to stop using a cartoonist because someone found out they were pro-life.
Great article on a topic I have been thinking about obsessively for the last few months. We are expecting our first in what hopefully becomes a big family! We are in our mid/late twenties in a large liberal city and we don’t have any friends or even acquaintances under 39 who have kids or are trying. The biggest thing we are worried about is finding a community who have kids and are not trying to do hyper competitive helicopter parenting.
I think in analyzing the lack of kids you have to look at quite few different groups which in my experience have quite different reasons.
1. People who don't want kids or aren’t sure if they want kids
2. People who do want kids eventually but have not found a partner
3. Partners who want to start having kid(s) eventually but are waiting for now
4. Partners who have some kids but don’t want more
5. Partners who have kids, want more, but are waiting for now
6. People trying but having fertility issues
People in category 1 give all sorts of reasons (often ironically including both a dread of global warming and a desire to continue doing frequent international travel) but the underlying reason is a doubt about the inherent value of human life. I know many people in this category and in every case it is philosophical, not financial.
Category 2 is natural - it takes time to find the right person. But many are in this camp for a very long time due to dating market dynamics (later starting age for serious dating, vastly more choices, gender imbalance in socioeconomic status and desired lifestyles, etc).
Category 3 would not exist without birth control giving us the ability to procrastinate. This certainly has its benefits - we waiting a few years before trying and it allowed us to have a solid start to our marriage and careers before throwing kids into the mix, not to mention enabling lots of fun experiences that are harder to do with kids. The social aspect was also a factor. When we first got married, every person we knew was in category 1 or 2. Even though we are still going to be the first of our friends to have one we know people in category 3 now so, hopefully our friends will have kids in 2 years or so, not 6+.
Your post addresses lots of reasons people have to be in categories 4 and 5. One additional reason is less extended family involvement which could merit a whole post of its own.
The root cause of the increase of people in category 6 compared to the recent past is the increase in average age of would-be parents (in turn caused by staying longer on average in one of the other categories), though there may be environmental factors aside from age that have increased over time (such as poor diet).
Okay, I wanted more children and I am now vasectomized and stuck at two. What I noticed is different about "these days" is that the kind of discipline that my wife and I experienced, and that our parents experienced even more, is no longer an option. I was scared of my dad, my wife was scared of her dad. My children are not scared of me. I will never hit them, I will never punish them in ways that could scare or upset them too much. To be clear, it is good in ways not to be feared. My children cuddle up to me, they draw pictures and write "I love you daddy" and give them to me just because they feel like it. I get a lot more warmth and love from my children than my dad did. The problem though is that everything is a negotiation. They get dressed, the older one does her homework etc, but it requires a level of persuasion and nagging that makes handling more than two impractical. What stops me from "detaching" is that we wouldn't get to school on time and homework wouldn't happen and they would get to bed at 11pm.
The widespread availability of cheap plastic toys collides catastrophically with the lower discipline. I let my kids have an hour or two of unstructured play time this morning (it's a holiday here in Canada) and there are sticker pads covering our dining room floor. Part of why I'm always taking them places like Jane is talking about is because they are constantly making messes they don't clean up and if they are somewhere else our house stays clean.
My understanding is that the fall in fertility is almost across the board, even Mormons in Utah are having fewer kids, and I think it's because they are ultimately plugged into the same culture. The Menonites and Haredim are the only people isolated enough to resist the trend.
This website is a nice mixing board for Blue and Red tribe, John and Jane and Trads reading this, how do you manage? Is there a way of having large families without unpleasant (and in Blue tribe circles, basically illegal) discipline?
I've been noodling on this all day because it's a holiday in the US too and I think you deserve a longer response than I can multitask with my thumbs. So here goes:
The big families I know tend to be relatively more minimalist about stuff and relatively more intense about doing as your parents say than the small families I know, but there's a middle ground between instant obedience borne from fear and the nagging/persuasion/negotiation of a nice parent. The precise technique is going to vary by kid -- I have one who will collapse into tears at a stern tone of voice, and another who cackles in delight at being defiant -- but it's okay to expect to be obeyed and to put them in time out, remove privileges, send them to their room, whatever works for this kid, if they don't listen. Of course this means not allowing yourself to issue commands you aren't willing to follow through on, and if you can contrive to create an incentive things usually happen faster! ("We can go out to the park as soon as you guys sweep up all the tiny bits of paper on the floor" or "let's watch another episode of our show, go put away your laundry first.") And voices do, alas, get raised. Occasionally things that consistently don't get cleaned up go away, for a while or permanently. But you can roll around on the floor goofing off together and then say it's bedtime! It's not an either/or.
All that said, I absolutely get my kids out of the house because they are driving me nuts. It's amazing how a change of scenery can make your brother fun instead of annoying! Or, you know, your son.
That is excellent advice, and largely what I was going to write myself.
I would just add that you really have to know what you are willing to go all the way on and what you aren't, and then not give ultimatums you are not willing to back up. In some sense that is just "don't micro manage" but sometimes you should micro manage a little. When it isn't important enough to put your kid in time out in the basement bathroom they are scared of for a few hours, then don't issue it as a demand, just make it clear it is a suggestion. Demands must be followed or else, but just "hey, I don't like the game you two are playing" is another matter.
It comes down to you yourself knowing what your rules are, and being able to articulate them to your children. Don't nag; if they break the rules (one of which might be "Do what dad says, and if he says 'Now' save your questions for after") enforce the rules. If they are not breaking one of the specific rules, just let them be and point out the undesirable results of their actions.
Then you can be both fun "Dad let's us play and do fun stuff!" AND scary "Do NOT break Dad's rules!" Dad.
The danger comes from trying to constantly control everything and having very vague, poorly thought out rules. If you tell kids "Do your homework, then you can play outside" and after they do their homework you don't let them play outside, you are done and they will fight you constantly. If you say "Get your homework done before we eat dinner at 630 and you can play outside" you are still good, even if they get done at 6:25. Just let them play for 5 minutes. They learn they can control their fate and that you will treat them fairly.
I know it seems obvious to write out, but too often I find it is the easier, expedient path to just make up whatever rules, and not follow your own rules, exacting punishment or not on a whim. Once you start that, it becomes a lot more work because the kids recognize that everything is a negotiation, and they are much more persistent negotiators than adults.
Yes, I also sign mine up for a lot of activities, but not because I think the activities are so great. It's to give myself a break!
I feel like people who can successfully execute low-effort parenting must have either a much better social context than me or just easier kids? Or there's something I'm doing wrong. Mine are needy all the time and will resist, protest, or sabotage any attempts at detachment.
I've found that you can get kids to clean up after themselves, at least above a certain age. You just have to make it clear what the carrots and sticks are.
The big thing I've found is you need to control screens. It's just too much stimulation for young kids to handle. If you allow your kids screens (we do for 30 min before bed and sometimes longer if they are sick or the weather is bad or we want to do a family movie) then you need to set clear boundries so they know not to ask when its not appropriate and when its expected to end. In the case of bedtime this can also work as a reward structure (no TV until dinner, bath, pajamas, teeth, etc are done and if you take too long there is none).
My biggest difficulty on the screens is other parents. My rule of thumb is that in my house we follow our rules and in other peoples houses they can follow theirs.
As to hitting, I don't hit my kids, but if they get totally out of control I have no problem physically forcing them into something. I've also found that a twist of the wrist elicits compliance without causing injury.
Excellent discussion of a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time. Your timing is good because WSJ just posted a big report today on the failing attempts by Hungary and Norway to boost TFR: https://www.wsj.com/world/birthrate-children-fertility-europe-perks-family-04aa13a0?mod=hp_lead_pos7
Despite the apparent failure of those efforts, I'm more of an optimist for the reasons you discuss. I have a couple of other anecdotal observations. First, my impression is that while having a bunch of kids is seen as low status, having a bunch of GRANDKIDS is high status. Conscientious, aging boomers who had 2 kids all seem quite enthusiastic to tell you about unusually high numbers of grandkids. It signals a kind of success as to their own parenting skills and demonstrates that they have a real legacy. It's also my experience that having, say, 5 kids today is actually less odd than it was 20 years ago. In my city today, for example, there are a large number of overlapping partially "seceded" communities where large families have become quite common and their kids are being raised around all these other large families. Nothing like that existed here 20 years ago. The social support network is much bigger. Some of these families now have kids entering adulthood and the culture they have created seems far "stickier" than I would have anticipated. The world they are creating is genuinely more appealing than the alternatives. Repeat the cycle for 2 or 3 generations and the future might be a real surprise.
Excellent summary! I was nodding my head, agreeing with both of you all the way down the scroll bar. Some glosses and flourishes:-
John is not materialist enough, perhaps. Young adults are delaying childbirth. As simple as that. If you start having children at 18 or 20, you can have many more of them than if you start at 32 or 36. It's simple arithmetic and biology. People end up having fewer children than they want, because they start later than they want, or not at all.
This delay does not necessarily depend on the existence of the Pill, nor on procrastination *per se*. Especially if women exercise some agency in selecting mates. It's a consequence of urbanisation and daily lived experience.
In a village, a young woman may have a pool of say a hundred young men from whom to choose. On moving to a city, she sees thousands of men on a daily basis, and is aware of the existence of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of possibly suitable men, out there somewhere. More choice means more time spent choosing. Humans are weird that way.
Dating apps exacerbate this effect by their mere popularity, leaving aside the misaligned incentives of their makers (to keep people on the apps, not to find them a mate). The apps are an enormous virtual city in which there are suddenly millions of possible choices. That is why they are so awful for everyone (except their owners, bwahahaha jingle jingle).
You both came so close to using the c-word, credentialism, but both shied away at the last possible second. High-investment achievement-oriented parenting makes perfect sense in a credentialist world, which is inherently a zero sum arms race. It's incredibly stressful for the parents and produces damaged kids, but Moloch doesn't care.
(Credentialism explains the U shape of the curve of fertility versus income. I'm sceptical of the scepticism, it's looking like an isolated demand for rigor.)
In a credentialist world the incentives are to delay having children, once again. This explains the shift in marriage from cornerstone to capstone (Delano, 2013): from being an early event in the life of an adult to being the crowning achievement of a successful life.
Homo economicus is not a required assumption for any of this either. People copy what the people around them do.
Credentialism on both generations. The adults can't have kids until their education is done and their careers are going, which cuts down on time. And the kids are going to need private school, tutoring, etc. etc. etc. if they want to hold up the family name. The old days of investing everything in the oldest son and letting the others make their way is gone.
Well done. No notes.
"the push for legible achievement over experience" is I think one of the under appreciated drivers here. Specifically, how legible achievement drives college admission, and college admission is seen as critical to the good life. I think that so long as college is a mostly necessary hoop to jump through for middle class lives and attending the "best" college is the path to levels above that, we are going to struggle to make having many kids lightly parented high status. Burning your kid's childhood on the alter of admissions essays will always result in better college admission results, so the high status (signaling) people will go for that.
I hope I am wrong, though.
Little Platoons by Matt Freeney has an interesting, albeit curmudgeonly, argument about the intersection of family life and college admission officers.
I will have to check that out, thanks!
Seeing university as an uncool waste of time is well on the way though, at least in high status circles (highly paid people). That probably isn't translating into lower admissions because of by-now hard coded degree requirements Gen X put into everything, but it will probably translate soon into people not giving a shit about their kids getting into the "best" institutions, as there doesn't seem to be a real quality gap worth caring about.
I hope that is true, and it deserves to become the truth. I am skeptical, however, as such things have a lot of inertia. It would be great for me, and my kids, if indeed it becomes the case that college degrees are not critical to most careers, or even if just where you go matters a lot less, in the next decade. Here's hoping!
I fear the university system being a crutch for corporate recruiting to rely on when a hire goes poorly isn't going away soon enough, however.
“The other big objection to this theory, one Carney raises himself, is that if you do surveys of people, especially women, they report having fewer children than they want. So, the argument goes, it can’t just be birth control, because if it were people would have all the kids they want. But the answer to this is so obvious I’m shocked it isn’t apparent to Carney. People have high time-preference. People procrastinate.”
The more obvious answer is that the surveys are garbage. If there were a survey of how many Ferraris you wanted and, lo and behold, you have fewer Ferraris than you wanted, nobody would think that there’s a real gap to be explained. Putting that “Ferrari gap” as a dependent variable in a regression or using it as a prompt for a thousand efforts at explanation would be criminal. The real answer is that actions reveal preferences. There could be SDB where people have to say they’re more pro-children than they really are.
I once surveyed a thousand people slaving away in the salt mines. They all said they'd prefer to be doing anything else. But when I came back the next day, they were all still there. Actions reveal preferences, I said. Nothing more to be explained. And I threw away the survey, because it was clearly garbage.
One trick in surveys that ask voters about new government programs is to not include a few words about how it means voters will have to pay higher taxes. Without that, respondents think they get something for nothing but our decisions are actually all tradeoffs. Including verbiage about the cost of those extra programs produces more realistic answers.
If the slave salt mine question were: "Do you prefer to do any thing else, which likely means you'll be killed?" then, yeah, the slaves not leaving does reveal their preferences given the constraints.
Well, the trouble with that analogy is that you can't escape salt mine slavery via doing something fun and low cost. (Well... sorta low cost depending on the context.) Presuming one is in a position to create children, that being having a sexual partner and working reproductive organs, having additional children is something one has to actively avoid. Having children is much like, and entirely antagonistic to, having a clean living room: if you want it and clear the low bar for getting it, you can have it.
Ferraris and freedom from forced salt mining are both rather more difficult to attain, so it does make sense to say that while one may want it, the costs are such that they will rationally choose not to have it. Having kids is comparatively very low cost. High cost of ownership, perhaps, but man, the upfront cost is as damned near negative as you can get.
Low cost assuming they currently do have father-worthy partners. Otherwise it means a breakup and re-entering the dating pool, which is quite high cost.
That's just it, having the kid is cheap, and thus not having one is suggestive of your priorities/preferences being revealed in a way that remaining in slavery is not. Ben's analogy is flawed, because escaping slavery is very high cost (the slavers are definitely opposed) so remaining in slavery does not reveal your preferences. Having a kid if you have a sexual partner is something that has to be actively avoided, so not having a child reveals your preferences, at least in so far as "you want more kids, but not NOW". Even more so for people with 1+ kids; if you would like more kids, and your equipment still works, why aren't you having more kids? The answer "I would like more kids, but I want this other stuff more" reveals your preferences.
This was a fun read. You repeatedly touched on one of my pet peeves, which is the tendency (best embodied by many helicopter parents!) to view decisions and policies only in view of their instrumental value to achieving some future payoff. No! Good things are often just intrinsically good! How we choose to behave as parents, including how we schedule our kids' time and how we relate to them, don't just matter for how it all might boost their odds of future success; it matters because that window of time accounts for like 1/4 of our expected lifespans, so it's really important to spend it well.
Similarly, I appreciated the nod to the idea that even if all these proposed ideas for making parenthood easier fail to raise the birthrate, it would still just be intrinsically good to make parents and kids' lives better. Like you say about "detached parenting", it's not merely instrumentally good for the sake of inspiring others to have kids. Parents are doing hard, important, costly (and yes, joyful, rewarding, beautiful, meaning-making) work that massively benefits society; society should pitch in to make things a bit easier for them when we can! Even if doing so inspires exactly 0 marginal extra childbirth decisions, it would be worthwhile to make life better for families with young kids.
That's a good point about childhood being roughly 1/4 of our expected life spans. I hadn't really thought about it like that before, but it is true, and also the only part we are guaranteed to get. Sacrificing quality of childhood for a grand or two more income in one's 50's seems like a bad deal from that perspective.
Great review!
I'm skeptical that class dynamics will save us. For one thing, this seems to have been a feature of middle class striver types going back hundreds of years in, say, France (one of the places birth rates dropped earliest, and way before the pill!). And materialist reasons are commonly cited to explain that, too: moving from low investment to high investment parenting because children went more and more from being marginal labor to an expense. This is, of course, all the more true today, when in our wisdom we've banned all sorts of child work and planned out the next 20 to 30 years of credential chasing. I don't think fads can change this; the economic logic is just too strong. And it's not like fads in, well, literal fashion changed the way the classes dress *all* the time, either. It became cool at a certain point to wear hobo chic, but you still dress up for a wedding, a funeral, or most interviews.
Given the economic logic behind high investment parenting, in some sense you have to ask parents to not worry whether their child will be upwardly mobile, or even necessarily reach the same place. Understandably a tougher sell!
Nice article, but I think you complicate things way more than they really are. People not having a lot of children has nothing to do with "status" and everything to do with convenience (plus a little biology).
As much as we complain about the world, we live in a golden age. Most people live, more or less, comfortable lives. They have a job they enjoy or at least one that leaves them free time for activities they actually enjoy (long are the days of backbreaking 12+ hours/day). They have enough money to travel, to pursue their interests, to do whatever.
And then comes the kid and all this nice, enjoyable life goes down the trashcan (along with a ton of diapers and a little vomit). No more free time or energy until the kid reaches a certain age. The cherry you ask? The more kids you have, the more years you have to wait until all of them reach an independence age, the less total free time you will have in your life. Comfort reduced.
The biology part stems from the fact that most people start a family in their 30s, significantly reducing their chance of having a large family. Again the reason is comfort, not status or anything of that sort. Who wants to spend his/her twenties changing diapers? Very few people. Especially since there is no social pressure these days to do so.
As a research mathematician in his 30s who's about to become a father, I abhor the idea of having more than 2 children. It's not only because of the years of discomfort. It's also the fact that mathematics is a young man's game requiring a tremendous amount of uninterrupted concentration. I don't think I will get much precious time to focus in a house with 4-5 children for the next 15+ years and by then I would be too old to be a competent researcher.
let a million simon sarisses (saris'es?) bloom, i say!
Huh, this was nice. (Are any of those pics of you and the kids? ... if so then they are insufferably cute... like a pile of puppies, only better. :^) So as background, we didn't met and have kids till late in life. She popped out two kids as fast as she could and then stayed home with them and we lived modestly. Kids are great, grandkids (of which I have zero*) are the meaning of life. I live out in rural america, and it feels like a different world from the one you describe. Oh some of it sounds familiar, helicopter parents... There are a lot of single moms out here, or moms living with boyfriends. And all the moms are working... For moms not to be working we'd need better paying jobs for their boyfriends/ husbands. And a lot of the guys around here are making less than the women. And mostly guys suck at being moms... just like women aren't always as good at being dads. Better paying jobs for guys is the only way out I see... Other ideas welcome.
I promise our kids are even cuter than this, but the pictures are all AI generated. And boy do I wish I had a solution for male jobs that can support a family!
However, I'm happy to give you a reason for why I sign my kids up for stuff. Like most things that parents do, it hearkens back to my own childhood, as #4 of 5.
Since my older siblings all took piano for a grand total of 4 months each, nobody even offered me the option. My childhood was characterize by having interests and not knowing how to take them beyond puttering around the house. I wasn't even good at jumping rope, which was the dominant activity of the girls in school.
So yes... I found out which sport they play in my son's future school and I signed him up from a young age. He is not athletic, none of us have interest in sports, but during recess he can do what all the other boys are doing. It's as simple as that. He doesn't spend recess reading a book like I did.
For the rest, I want my kids to be able to advance their skills, and that means exposing them to people who know those skills. I don't want to ruin the fun by "lessonizing" everything, but I also know that most things stop being fun when you can't become good at them.
I am an adult who is not good at anything except school, although I dabble in several things poorly. I would like my kids to be able to do something in a way that makes them proud.
Activities are great, especially for things the parents know nothing about or that require a bunch of kids or a major capital commitment to work. At various times, we've done swim lessons, team sports, martial arts, and musical instruments, and I tried and failed to find somewhere nearby with a woodshop and lessons at a convenient time.
That's why my wife signs my kids up for things as well (and also acquires far too many things for them): she didn't have any opportunities for activities as a kid. There is a lot to be said for signing kids up for stuff they think they might like and seeing how it goes, then letting them drop it when they are no longer interested. That last bit seems to be very important, and often ignored by parents who get stuck in a sunk cost fallacy trap of "I've been driving you to this for years, you aren't giving it up now!"
100% agree that the blame goes to birth control and the problem of choice. Choice is always good in small quantities and bad in large quantities. Today we have so much choice about so many aspects of our life that it's driving our kids insane: they even have to choose their gender!
As someone who isn't sure if she has as many kids as she wants, I give that section a big shrug. At the end of the day, having 12 kids you didn't choose (or 8 kids and four miscarriages because you got pregnant too quickly) is probably more miserable than having 3 kids when you think you might enjoy 4. Life is full of ambiguity and the thing about choice is that there will always be the road not travelled. I'm okay with that.
I think the point is a lot of people wind up with zero.
As for choosing gender: if you don't pick the one they assigned you at birth, you're looking at a lot of painful surgeries, and likely infertility. It's kind of a fake choice.
The explanation for your graph of fertility by income is that a marginal kid has no cost to either the poor or the rich.
For the poor the government pays for everything. They can even in theory end up better off financially. The husband isn't even involved in this equation.
For the rich the cost of a marginal child is a pittance relative to their income. And anyway they are at a level of income where the wife can stop working and you can still afford the house in the good school district. If it takes two incomes to afford that house you aren't going to have high fertility.
While I do think there are many ways parents can spend less over scheduling kids, an awful lot of costs are fixed. Housing is what it is. Childcare is what it is. Healthcare is what it is. Education is what it is. Your time is what it is. These are the big items, whether you do travel sports or not.
I could of course imagine changes to our society that could make housing, childcare, healthcare, education, etc cheaper. But that's a longer post.
Lastly, I don't think this matter is self correcting. I think what is going to happen is that as we have less kids the burden of providing for the retirements of the old will fall on smaller and smaller groups of people. They will respond to that pressure by cutting out childbearing to make ends meet. We won't be able to reform the system because the median voter will either be a retiree or close to it (already the case BTW, median voter it 55 years old). The whole thing will just death spiral.
If I were in Washington I would try to head this off in a big way as early as I could. For instance, in addition to expanded CTC proposals, I would refund half of FICA* taxes to families with two kids and refund 100% to families with 3+ kids. We can't try to plug our FICA hole by double taxing parents (they take on the cost of raising the next generation of FICA taxpayers as well as paying the taxes today).
*A median family would receive $8k for the second kid and $16k for 3+. In the most extreme case each earner hitting the FICA cap ($175k) would get $27k with 3+ kids, or $54k per couple. BTW, the SALT deduction could cover 90% of the cost of that.
I'm in the camp that money can work if its a lot of money with the right incentives and that its actually money (not in kind services parents may or may not value whatever the government spends on them). We know because the two groups with high fertility are the two were the marginal cost of a child is close to zero.
Lastly, I think there is a cultural element to this. Smart conservatives have close to replacement fertility. Smart liberal women have 0.6 TFR. That's a pretty big gap. And it seems to hold across cultures (conservative Koreans have more kids then liberal Koreans, conservative swedes more than liberal swedes). There is something in liberalism that is anti-child and getting worse, at least at the UMC level or higher.
Either liberalism needs to change itself or at least it needs to leave other subcultures alone. School Choice would be a good start here. In general lower government involvement and attempts to push liberal culture down everyones throats would help. It would probably help liberals the most BTW.
Damn this is great. As a therapist who works with kids I can say that constantly narrating your child’s life is BAD FOR THEM AND WORSE FOR YOU. Side note I’d have enjoyed this piece more without soulless AI art!
A lot of right-leaning writers use AI art because most artists are leftists and, if not unwilling to produce art for a blog like this, would have their career ended if it got around they did. There was a whole attempt to get people to stop using a cartoonist because someone found out they were pro-life.
Great article on a topic I have been thinking about obsessively for the last few months. We are expecting our first in what hopefully becomes a big family! We are in our mid/late twenties in a large liberal city and we don’t have any friends or even acquaintances under 39 who have kids or are trying. The biggest thing we are worried about is finding a community who have kids and are not trying to do hyper competitive helicopter parenting.
I think in analyzing the lack of kids you have to look at quite few different groups which in my experience have quite different reasons.
1. People who don't want kids or aren’t sure if they want kids
2. People who do want kids eventually but have not found a partner
3. Partners who want to start having kid(s) eventually but are waiting for now
4. Partners who have some kids but don’t want more
5. Partners who have kids, want more, but are waiting for now
6. People trying but having fertility issues
People in category 1 give all sorts of reasons (often ironically including both a dread of global warming and a desire to continue doing frequent international travel) but the underlying reason is a doubt about the inherent value of human life. I know many people in this category and in every case it is philosophical, not financial.
Category 2 is natural - it takes time to find the right person. But many are in this camp for a very long time due to dating market dynamics (later starting age for serious dating, vastly more choices, gender imbalance in socioeconomic status and desired lifestyles, etc).
Category 3 would not exist without birth control giving us the ability to procrastinate. This certainly has its benefits - we waiting a few years before trying and it allowed us to have a solid start to our marriage and careers before throwing kids into the mix, not to mention enabling lots of fun experiences that are harder to do with kids. The social aspect was also a factor. When we first got married, every person we knew was in category 1 or 2. Even though we are still going to be the first of our friends to have one we know people in category 3 now so, hopefully our friends will have kids in 2 years or so, not 6+.
Your post addresses lots of reasons people have to be in categories 4 and 5. One additional reason is less extended family involvement which could merit a whole post of its own.
The root cause of the increase of people in category 6 compared to the recent past is the increase in average age of would-be parents (in turn caused by staying longer on average in one of the other categories), though there may be environmental factors aside from age that have increased over time (such as poor diet).
Thank you for this post!