Latest / Wellness, Actually with Emily Oster & Perry Wilson, MD / ParentData Presents: Raising Parents - "Should You Have Kids?"

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ParentData Presents: Raising Parents - "Should You Have Kids?" · Wellness, Actually with Emily Oster & Perry Wilson, MD

0:00
Speaker 1: This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster. Last fall, I
0:07
Speaker 1: partnered with The Free Press to create and host an
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Speaker 1: incredible project, a limited series podcast called Raising Parents, where
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Speaker 1: we tackled hot button parenting issues from a data driven perspective.
0:20
Speaker 1: We interviewed countless experts from all across the ideological spectrum,
0:25
Speaker 1: many of whom both agreed and disagreed with one another
0:28
Speaker 1: and with me and me with them, which is my favorite.
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Speaker 1: We looked at the impact of different parenting philosophies, from
0:36
Speaker 1: gentle parenting to spanking. We looked at the role of
0:39
Speaker 1: smartphones as it relates to our teens' mental health. We
0:43
Speaker 1: looked at the different ways of feeding our kids, of
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Speaker 1: monitoring our kids, of medicating our kids. And the final
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Speaker 1: episode we released was ironically the biggest question of all,
0:55
Speaker 1: the one that leads to all the others. Should you
0:58
Speaker 1: have kids today? We're sharing this episode with you. The
1:03
Speaker 1: focus is on the data. What's going on with our
1:06
Speaker 1: global fertility rate, what we thought was going to happen
1:09
Speaker 1: fifty years ago, that is overpopulation, and what has actually happened,
1:14
Speaker 1: which is pretty much the opposite. We talk about climate
1:17
Speaker 1: change and economic challenges and all the other reasons people
1:21
Speaker 1: are waiting to have kids, if they plan to at all.
1:25
Speaker 1: But we also get into the emotional side. I talk
1:28
Speaker 1: to people who have made the decision not to have
1:31
Speaker 1: kids and why. I talk about some of the reasons
1:35
Speaker 1: we do have kids. We talk about how hard that
1:38
Speaker 1: decision can be, both arriving at it and then defending it.
1:43
Speaker 1: There's no right or wrong answer. As always, I am
1:46
Speaker 1: a firm believer in doing what is best for you
1:49
Speaker 1: and your family, whatever family means to you. It's what
1:53
Speaker 1: makes the conversation so interesting and so important. I'm really
2:00
Speaker 1: out of this series and especially of this episode, and
2:03
Speaker 1: I am delighted to share it with you. You can
2:07
Speaker 1: listen to the whole series on The Free Press's website
2:10
Speaker 1: at THEFP dot com, slash Listen, Slash, Raising Dash Parents,
2:15
Speaker 1: Dash with Dash, Emily dash Auster, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
2:21
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. After the break, Raising Parents,
2:27
Speaker 1: Episode eight, Should You Have Kids?
2:43
Speaker 2: I always wanted to have kids. There was never a question.
2:47
Speaker 2: So I got older. I know if I ever dated
2:49
Speaker 2: someone who didn't want to have kids, I just probably
2:52
Speaker 2: would have well, I know I would have ended it
2:54
Speaker 2: because there was no point. It was just always there
2:57
Speaker 2: for me. I wanted to be there for someone, and
2:59
Speaker 2: it's very rewarding. Husband and father really two most important titles.
3:03
Speaker 3: The idea of kids was literally that I would recoil
3:06
Speaker 3: from the thought of that, because it seemed so phenomenally
3:10
Speaker 3: on another planet that I was like, oh God, no,
3:14
Speaker 3: there's no chance of that. I'm just living my life.
3:16
Speaker 4: I chose to have kids, I guess. I definitely thought
3:19
Speaker 4: the world would be a better place with more of
3:21
Speaker 4: me in it, no doubt.
3:23
Speaker 5: I was in the boat of two is ideal. And
3:26
Speaker 5: then I got pregnant with our third, and now I
3:30
Speaker 5: realize how people have many, many, many children because one
3:35
Speaker 5: two of your third you're like, oh yeah, we just
3:37
Speaker 5: like keep going.
3:38
Speaker 6: We got this down, Like we can, we can do this.
3:41
Speaker 3: It comes to talking about child free versus childless. For
3:45
Speaker 3: some of us, it goes more towards the side of
3:48
Speaker 3: oh yeah, I am so child free. I just never
3:52
Speaker 3: thought about having children. Put my fist in the air
3:54
Speaker 3: and declare with pride, Yeah, man, I am not responsible
3:58
Speaker 3: for parenting anybody.
4:07
Speaker 1: For most of human history, having kids wasn't much of
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Speaker 1: a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited
4:14
Speaker 1: autonomy for women delivered a limited set of options, say
4:19
Speaker 1: have children or join the convent. But beginning in the
4:23
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, a combination of better birth control options and
4:27
Speaker 1: better opportunities for women gave many more people a choice
4:31
Speaker 1: about both how many children to have and whether they
4:34
Speaker 1: should have any at all. Fast forward to today, many
4:38
Speaker 1: more people are making the decision not to have children
4:41
Speaker 1: at all, and for a wide range of reasons. People
4:45
Speaker 1: tell me they don't want kids because of financial strain
4:48
Speaker 1: or climate apocalypse. Others say they do want kids so
4:52
Speaker 1: that they can heal generational trauma or give their first
4:55
Speaker 1: kid a sibling. I once spoke to someone who told
4:58
Speaker 1: me that it was important for him to have children
5:00
Speaker 1: to pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that's an underlying motivation,
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Speaker 1: even if most people would not put it quite so directly.
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Speaker 1: Having children is a personal choice. However, it's a choice
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Speaker 1: that has broader implications. And what's undisputable is this Virtually
5:19
Speaker 1: everywhere across the globe the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, fewer
5:24
Speaker 1: children are being born. Having kids has become a strange
5:27
Speaker 1: part of the culture wars. On one side, you have
5:30
Speaker 1: pronatalist public figures like Elon Musk saying everyone needs to
5:34
Speaker 1: have more kids now in order to save humanity. I
5:38
Speaker 1: think he has twelve kids to date. And on the
5:41
Speaker 1: other side you have people like climate activist Greta Thunberg
5:45
Speaker 1: saying that the rising sea levels are so catastrophic that
5:48
Speaker 1: having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But
5:52
Speaker 1: what everyone can agree on is that the fertility rate
5:55
Speaker 1: is plummeting in America but also around the world, and
5:59
Speaker 1: in my life of work, the speed with which this
6:02
Speaker 1: number is going down in the US is causing concern
6:05
Speaker 1: for all of the economists in the room.
6:07
Speaker 7: Americans are not having babies anymore. The US fertility rate
6:11
Speaker 7: fell to a record low, declining two percent from a
6:14
Speaker 7: year ago. This marks the lowest rate recorded since the
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Speaker 7: government began tracking the data in the nineteen thirties.
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Speaker 8: Our fertility rate is below the replacement threshold. It's been
6:23
Speaker 8: that way for several years since two thousand and seven,
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Speaker 8: which is basically the level our generation needs to replace itself.
6:29
Speaker 8: And that falling birth rate and has implications obviously for
6:33
Speaker 8: the economy For demographics, one.
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Speaker 4: Of the first effects we will see is when social
6:37
Speaker 4: security funds are expected to run low in the twenty thirties.
6:40
Speaker 4: The lower birth rate in twenty twenty two will have
6:43
Speaker 4: long term effects. In a couple of decades, there could
6:46
Speaker 4: be a shortage of young adult workers.
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Speaker 1: The basic problem is that economic growth relies at least
6:53
Speaker 1: in part on population growth, Plus the older population relies
6:58
Speaker 1: on the younger population for support through contributions to social
7:02
Speaker 1: security and taxes. But before we all panic, what does
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Speaker 1: the data say. Presently, American women on average have one
7:12
Speaker 1: point six kids. In the nineteen fifties, it was three.
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Speaker 1: The replacement rate in the United States, which is the
7:19
Speaker 1: fertility rate needed for a generation to exactly replace itself
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Speaker 1: without considering immigration, is approximately two point one berths per woman.
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Speaker 1: The average age of first time mothers has increased to
7:32
Speaker 1: about twenty seven years old, up from twenty one point
7:35
Speaker 1: four years in nineteen seventy. The proportion of Americans aged
7:40
Speaker 1: sixty five and older is projected to almost double, increasing
7:44
Speaker 1: from sixteen percent in twenty nineteen to twenty three percent
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Speaker 1: by twenty sixty. This shift means that nearly one in
7:52
Speaker 1: four Americans will be in the senior age bracket. And
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Speaker 1: this isn't just happening in the US. From nineteen fifty
7:59
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty one, the global total fertility rate more
8:03
Speaker 1: than halved, falling from four point eighty four to two
8:06
Speaker 1: point two to three, as many countries grew wealthier and
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Speaker 1: women had fewer babies. Notable highlights from the data include
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Speaker 1: sub Sharran, Africa, which has the highest fertility rate in
8:18
Speaker 1: the world, but has dropped from six point three in
8:21
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety to four point seven children per woman today.
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Speaker 1: South Korea, with the world's lowest fertility rate, has only
8:30
Speaker 1: zero point seven to eight children per woman. So today
8:35
Speaker 1: birth rates, personal decisions and their broader implications. After a
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Speaker 1: whole series focused on the state of our children, we
8:43
Speaker 1: cap things off with a fundamental question, should you have kids?
8:47
Speaker 1: And what happens if we all don't. I'm Emila Astro
8:55
Speaker 1: and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents.
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Speaker 8: Emily aust and Economists by Trade has gathered the data,
9:03
Speaker 8: crunch the numbers, and is now debunking some of the
9:06
Speaker 8: most controversial myths about parenthood.
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Speaker 5: I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women.
9:12
Speaker 1: They're like, can I drink? You know you shouldn't have
9:14
Speaker 1: like a lot?
9:15
Speaker 8: Where is this data coming from?
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Speaker 1: The fundamental answer is we get data on people by
9:19
Speaker 1: asking people about their behaviors and what they do, and
9:22
Speaker 1: by collecting information on how their kids do.
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Speaker 9: Poster doesn't shy away from other charge topics.
9:26
Speaker 8: People are using your database as an example as to
9:30
Speaker 8: why schools should reopen.
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Speaker 1: What kind of reaction did.
9:33
Speaker 8: You get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial.
9:36
Speaker 1: It was a little controversial.
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Speaker 10: Yes, you're an economist, You're not a doctor. I mean,
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Speaker 10: what do you think people are going to take away
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Speaker 10: from what you've written in this book?
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Speaker 1: All that I'm trying to do here is really show women,
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Speaker 1: here is what the evidence is, and why don't you
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Speaker 1: think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode eight,
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Speaker 1: Should You Have Kids?
9:55
Speaker 11: I grew up in New Haven in the nineteen eighties
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Speaker 11: and nineteen nineties. At a certain point in high school,
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Speaker 11: I was assigned some kind of bulletin board project on
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Speaker 11: the intersection between science and some kind of major world
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Speaker 11: issue or trend, and I ended up choosing population.
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Speaker 1: This is Ross Duthett. He's a New York Times columnist
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Speaker 1: and father of five children.
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Speaker 11: And I went to the library as one did back
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Speaker 11: in the day, and went to the section of books
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Speaker 11: that were about that subject and Most of them seemed
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Speaker 11: to be written by Paul Erlik, who was quite famous
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Speaker 11: for a while as the profit of overpopulation and Doom.
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Speaker 11: And I checked out a number of those books, probably
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Speaker 11: The Population Bomb his original and then his follow up,
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Speaker 11: I think it was called The Population Explosion.
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Speaker 1: Those were sort of.
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Speaker 11: Prophecies from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies about the
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Speaker 11: demographic tide overwhelming the world.
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Speaker 4: That world population is increasing by twenty three people every
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Speaker 4: ten seconds.
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Speaker 6: It's clear that world population both remains completely.
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Speaker 9: Out of control. Look at what the year two thousand
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Speaker 9: will be.
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Speaker 1: Our cities are going to be choked with people. They're
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Speaker 1: going to be choked with traffic, they're going to be
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Speaker 1: choked with crime, they're.
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Speaker 9: Going to be chokum with.
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Speaker 2: Pollution, and they will be impossible.
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Speaker 11: As a good student, I compared those books prophecies to
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Speaker 11: what was actually happening in the world. And this was
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Speaker 11: about twenty five or thirty years ago. And even then
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Speaker 11: it was quite clear that for various reasons, Erlk's prophecies
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Speaker 11: of doom had not been fulfilled. His demographic projections no
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Speaker 11: longer matched what was happening really anywhere around the world.
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Speaker 11: But definitely didn't match what was happening in the developed world.
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Speaker 1: Paul Erlik wrote his book The Population Bomb in nineteen
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Speaker 1: sixty eight. He described the impacts of overpopulation in a
11:51
Speaker 1: very visceral way. It was easy to make it scary.
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Speaker 1: He wrote about people dying from hunger because there literally
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Speaker 1: wouldn't be enough food, defeat everyone, sufficient calories, major political upheavals.
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Speaker 1: Every inch of the world would be looking like Bangladesh
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Speaker 1: in terms of density, poverty, and disease.
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Speaker 11: Everywhere, and back then, especially in Western Europe and to
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Speaker 11: some extent East Asia, especially Japan, where you could see
12:19
Speaker 11: that the trends were likely to go in the entirely
12:23
Speaker 11: opposite direction. Basically that population was peaking and was going
12:27
Speaker 11: to pass a peak and start declining, that the richest
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Speaker 11: parts of the world were going to get old, very
12:33
Speaker 11: very rapidly, and that, in fact, most likely the big
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Speaker 11: demographic challenge of the twenty first century was going to
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Speaker 11: be not population growth but population decline.
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Speaker 1: And it's sort of amazing. I mean, we're talking about
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Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties when this was already sort of somewhat visible,
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Speaker 1: but the decline in fertility rates in the sort of
12:58
Speaker 1: period leading off to that and continuing is pretty astonishing
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Speaker 1: because it isn't just the decline in more developed countries
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Speaker 1: which have gone from replacement to under replacement, but it's
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Speaker 1: an enormous decline in many of the places that were
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Speaker 1: the highest fertility rates even in the nineteen eighties. So
13:16
Speaker 1: places that had seven to eight kid fertility rates are
13:19
Speaker 1: now down to three or four even two. I mean
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Speaker 1: that the magnitude of that change over relatively short period
13:27
Speaker 1: has been pretty astounding.
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Speaker 11: Yes, what you just described is the change that's happened
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Speaker 11: from my bulletin board project to the present. Right, So
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Speaker 11: twenty five twenty five years ago, in the nineteen nineties,
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Speaker 11: whenever I was doing this, it wasn't quite as clear
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Speaker 11: what was going to happen to population in China, South Asia,
13:48
Speaker 11: and Latin America. It was clear that they were not
13:51
Speaker 11: going to fulfill sort of Airlick's worst case scenarios from
13:56
Speaker 11: his perspective, right of just you know, too many people,
13:59
Speaker 11: too many men to feed. But yeah, at that point,
14:02
Speaker 11: it was clear that rich countries were going to get
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Speaker 11: old quite quickly. And what's become clear since then is
14:07
Speaker 11: that middle income and even poorer countries can follow the
14:12
Speaker 11: same trajectory. You don't have to become Denmark or the
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Speaker 11: Netherlands or Japan to enter into a shift not just
14:22
Speaker 11: to replacement level fertility, but something below replacement, maybe even
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Speaker 11: well below replacement.
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Speaker 1: The replacement rate is the average birth per woman a
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Speaker 1: country needs to maintain its population. Erlck was alarming, and
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Speaker 1: he was following an alarming tradition. Thomas Malthus in the
14:39
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds had a similar set of dire overpopulation predictions.
14:44
Speaker 1: Erlck was also wrong. The predictions he made haven't come
14:48
Speaker 1: to pass, but the tenor of this argument hasn't gone away.
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Speaker 1: In a way, it's transferred from overcrowding concerns to environmental
14:58
Speaker 1: arguments for lower population, and to moral arguments about human suffering.
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Speaker 1: Part of the legacy of this work is the sense
15:05
Speaker 1: that having more humans is just in some way bad.
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Speaker 1: According to one new Pew survey of adults under fifty,
15:13
Speaker 1: the primary argument against having children is I just don't
15:16
Speaker 1: want to. All of this makes it harder for people
15:19
Speaker 1: to see the real risks of a declining fertility rate.
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Speaker 11: You know, I'm a conservative crank, right, so I've been
15:26
Speaker 11: talking about it that way for some time, though I
15:29
Speaker 11: would say the trends of the last five years have
15:31
Speaker 11: been sort of more alarming even than I expected. People
15:36
Speaker 11: are sort of still surprised when they're confronted with some
15:40
Speaker 11: of these demographic trends. There's still sort of just an
15:43
Speaker 11: expectation that overpopulation is the main problem, which also then
15:48
Speaker 11: is entangled with anxiety about climate change, where people will
15:53
Speaker 11: either say, you know, well, clearly, the places where population
15:58
Speaker 11: is still increasing sub Saharan Africa above all, are still
16:01
Speaker 11: going to create some kind of overpopulation problem and also
16:04
Speaker 11: contribute to climate change, or people will say, okay, well,
16:07
Speaker 11: maybe we're getting demographic decline, but because of the threat
16:11
Speaker 11: of climate change, we should welcome it.
16:14
Speaker 12: Right.
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Speaker 11: There's both a certain uncertainty shading into denial about whether
16:19
Speaker 11: this is really happening, and a kind of desire to
16:22
Speaker 11: put an optimistic environmentalist interpretation on it. For most places,
16:27
Speaker 11: the more realistic vision is old people dying alone in
16:33
Speaker 11: large numbers place is emptying. So many more ghost towns,
16:40
Speaker 11: rural areas emptying, but also potentially parts of cities emptying.
16:46
Speaker 11: It's just sort of a picture of not so much
16:49
Speaker 11: worn famine as deppopulation decay, and also kind of a
16:56
Speaker 11: clustering effect in an age of population decline. And let's
17:00
Speaker 11: say you have, you know, a country with eight major cities.
17:03
Speaker 11: It's not that each of those cities declines in population.
17:07
Speaker 11: It's that three of them decline in population, three of
17:11
Speaker 11: them have their population increase because everybody moves to them, right,
17:15
Speaker 11: because nobody wants to be in the declining places, and
17:17
Speaker 11: two of them turn into you know, Detroit at its emptiest.
17:21
Speaker 11: That's a weird future to get your mind around, I think.
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Speaker 1: And what's at stake if we do that? I mean,
17:27
Speaker 1: why is that bad?
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Speaker 11: You can frame it in sort of economist friendly terms
17:32
Speaker 11: and say, okay, this is a world of declining population.
17:36
Speaker 11: Is a world that's going to have slower economic growth.
17:40
Speaker 11: It's going to have less dynamism and less innovation. Older
17:44
Speaker 11: populations are more change averse. They're less likely to come
17:47
Speaker 11: up with new inventions. You know, when you have a
17:49
Speaker 11: smaller and smaller group of younger workers supporting the welfare
17:53
Speaker 11: states that rich countries have built up, that gets harder
17:56
Speaker 11: and harder to sustain. Those kind of societies are going
18:00
Speaker 11: to be more stagnant, less dynamic, less interesting in creative
18:04
Speaker 11: places to live. And then also they're going to be
18:08
Speaker 11: on the evidence we have now lonelier and unhappier places
18:11
Speaker 11: to live. Now, we only have sort of a generation's
18:16
Speaker 11: worth of data on what life in virtual reality looks like.
18:20
Speaker 11: And it's possible that once you know Mark Zuckerberg and
18:24
Speaker 11: Tim Cook perfect virtual reality goggles, that the Internet will
18:29
Speaker 11: become a different place than it's been so far. But
18:32
Speaker 11: right now, all of the data we have, I would say,
18:34
Speaker 11: suggests that young people growing up in virtual spaces, in
18:40
Speaker 11: a social media dominated social landscape, hanging out less in person,
18:45
Speaker 11: spending less time with friends in reality and more time
18:48
Speaker 11: with friends in the virtual, are unhappier in ways that
18:52
Speaker 11: in turn seem to be compounding the low fertility dilemma.
18:56
Speaker 11: They're unhappier, they're forming fewer relationships, They're less likely to
19:00
Speaker 11: have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They're less likely to
19:02
Speaker 11: have sex, they're less likely to get married, they're less
19:04
Speaker 11: likely to have kids, and so the low fertility trap
19:08
Speaker 11: itself gets deeper.
19:10
Speaker 1: Tell me your best theory for why people are not
19:12
Speaker 1: having children.
19:15
Speaker 11: I mean there's like seventeen theories, right, seventeen.
19:18
Speaker 1: I mean, it's give me the best one. Ross.
19:20
Speaker 11: So trying to really simplify it. One, you just expect
19:27
Speaker 11: fertility rates to fall naturally in the transition from an
19:32
Speaker 11: agricultural society where kids are a net economic benefit in
19:37
Speaker 11: obvious ways because you have farms and you need kids
19:41
Speaker 11: to work on farms, to a contemporary society where kids
19:45
Speaker 11: are something that in order for them to do well
19:48
Speaker 11: in life, you mostly have to invest in them and
19:52
Speaker 11: get less back, and you don't need their support in
19:57
Speaker 11: the same way at least, you know, until there's stopp
20:00
Speaker 11: being no kids at all, as long as you have
20:03
Speaker 11: social Security and Medicare and so on. So there's sort
20:06
Speaker 11: of an economic basis for shrinking family size that you
20:10
Speaker 11: would expect. There's a health and wellness basis where people
20:15
Speaker 11: used to have larger families in part because fewer kids
20:19
Speaker 11: survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was very high until quite
20:22
Speaker 11: recently in our history. So it's not the case that
20:25
Speaker 11: most people in seventeen thirty, we're having thirteen kids and
20:29
Speaker 11: all those kids were surviving to adulthood. Your family size
20:32
Speaker 11: of sort of kids who grew successfully to adulthood would
20:35
Speaker 11: always tend to be four or five six kids, not ten,
20:38
Speaker 11: eleven or twelve. So again you expect birth rates to
20:42
Speaker 11: decline as infant mortality goes down. You expect birth rates
20:47
Speaker 11: to decline as you get more professional and economic opportunities
20:52
Speaker 11: for women. That's sort of an obvious expectation that has
20:56
Speaker 11: been fulfilled in every country we can see. So when
20:59
Speaker 11: you put all those things together, it's very easy to
21:01
Speaker 11: see why you would go from people having ten kids
21:06
Speaker 11: to having five, or from having six kids to having three.
21:09
Speaker 11: The harder question is why does fertility go from two
21:13
Speaker 11: to three kids, which is what most people still say
21:18
Speaker 11: they want, not just men but also women, you know,
21:22
Speaker 11: both sexes in rich countries. If you ask you know,
21:25
Speaker 11: what is your desired fertility, it's still going to be
21:28
Speaker 11: around let's say two point four two point five, not
21:31
Speaker 11: one point two or something. You know, that's the trillion
21:34
Speaker 11: dollar question, right, because if fertility rates settled at two
21:38
Speaker 11: point five, then populations would be stable or slightly increasing,
21:42
Speaker 11: and you wouldn't have this kind of depopulated wasteland future
21:47
Speaker 11: looming ahead. And there, I think you have to get
21:50
Speaker 11: into some mixture of essentially just the sheer scale of
21:56
Speaker 11: wealth and immediate pleasures available to people modern life that
22:01
Speaker 11: make having kids seem like a special kind of burden
22:06
Speaker 11: that you are more likely to postpone until you feel
22:10
Speaker 11: completely ready.
22:11
Speaker 1: One thing I wanted to add to Ross's analysis here
22:14
Speaker 1: is the question of social support. It's not lost on
22:17
Speaker 1: me or most of us that support for children in
22:19
Speaker 1: the US is pretty lousy. There's no national paid maternity leave,
22:24
Speaker 1: there's limited childcare support. A lot of US look to
22:27
Speaker 1: places like Sweden with its seemingly unending support for parents
22:32
Speaker 1: and say, surely with that support there would be more children.
22:36
Speaker 1: But in fact, fertility rates have gone down as much,
22:39
Speaker 1: often more in those places than in the US, and
22:42
Speaker 1: in general, policies which have tried to increase childbearing by
22:46
Speaker 1: offering incentives to do so have fallen flat. This leaves
22:50
Speaker 1: me back to Ross's final point, It must be something
22:53
Speaker 1: else which explains this.
22:56
Speaker 10: The main thing I noticed is that most people make
22:58
Speaker 10: their decision about do I let another based upon I
23:00
Speaker 10: feel exhausted right now. I mean, I just think that
23:04
Speaker 10: a lot of times people are making these decisions impulsively.
23:07
Speaker 1: Meet Brian Kaplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University,
23:11
Speaker 1: a New York Times bestselling author, and a father of four.
23:16
Speaker 1: In his book Selfish Reasons, to have more kids. He
23:20
Speaker 1: argues that raising children is actually less demanding and stressful
23:23
Speaker 1: than many people think. He suggests that the current trend
23:27
Speaker 1: of having fewer children might be because parents overestimate how
23:31
Speaker 1: hard it is to raise a successful adult. Brian tries
23:35
Speaker 1: to ease parents' worries so they can enjoy their kids
23:38
Speaker 1: in the short term and consider having more children for
23:42
Speaker 1: long term happiness.
23:44
Speaker 10: Like you wouldn't say I'm too tired to go and
23:46
Speaker 10: shop for a dishwasher because I'm doing too many dishes,
23:50
Speaker 10: And it's like, well, if you just put a little
23:52
Speaker 10: investment in and get the dishwasher, then your life's is
23:54
Speaker 10: going to be easier every day. So, like a lot
23:57
Speaker 10: of times, if your life is hard, you've got to
23:59
Speaker 10: do something and makes it worse for a little while
24:01
Speaker 10: in order to make it better after that. And I
24:03
Speaker 10: think there's definitely some part of having kids to that.
24:06
Speaker 10: I'm like, I'm not crazy or blind. I do know
24:09
Speaker 10: that the first couple weeks of any kids is really hard.
24:12
Speaker 1: Why should people have kids?
24:14
Speaker 10: I mean, my honest answer is not everybody should. It depends,
24:18
Speaker 10: but I don't want to leave it with that total
24:20
Speaker 10: cop out. In particular, I start with well, does this
24:25
Speaker 10: idea have any appeal to you whatsoever? And there's a
24:28
Speaker 10: few people just no, I just don't like it at all.
24:30
Speaker 10: I'm like, that's fine. But out of people that are interested,
24:34
Speaker 10: then a lot of it comes down to the question
24:36
Speaker 10: of cost, not just financial, but also in terms of time.
24:39
Speaker 10: And that's the main thing that I focused on in
24:41
Speaker 10: my research is whether the time that people are spending
24:44
Speaker 10: with their kids is actually either needlessly unpleasant or just
24:50
Speaker 10: failing to deliver the benefits that they think, in which
24:53
Speaker 10: case there's just a lot of the costs are actually
24:55
Speaker 10: artificial costs that are caused by people's own, in turn
25:00
Speaker 10: life theories about what they have to do, which.
25:02
Speaker 13: Might not be true.
25:03
Speaker 1: So people potentially overstate how expensive in the time sense,
25:08
Speaker 1: in particular, it would be to have kids.
25:10
Speaker 10: Write that, and on top of it, anyone who thinks
25:12
Speaker 10: that kid doesn't get private schools destined to be a loser, Well,
25:15
Speaker 10: we've got data on that, and the benefits are at
25:18
Speaker 10: least a lot smaller than people imagine. So it's not
25:21
Speaker 10: true that if you don't give your kids fancy private
25:24
Speaker 10: schools or they don't go to the very top colleges,
25:27
Speaker 10: that they're doom for disaster mediocrity in life.
25:31
Speaker 1: Would you say, relative to the people who ask you
25:33
Speaker 1: would ask you this, more of them should have kids
25:35
Speaker 1: than think they should.
25:37
Speaker 10: Yeah, absolutely so anything. Most people have an exaggerated notion
25:41
Speaker 10: of how much their children's future depends upon them being
25:44
Speaker 10: miserable during the kid's childhood. And once you set that aside,
25:48
Speaker 10: then step on obviously as well. If I don't have
25:51
Speaker 10: to be miserable, I'm not going to be miserable. But
25:53
Speaker 10: step two is, well, if kids are not automatically coming
25:57
Speaker 10: with this big package of suffering, maybe I should rethink
26:00
Speaker 10: the number that I want to have.
26:02
Speaker 1: So what's my If my job is not to suffer,
26:04
Speaker 1: what is the role of the parents.
26:07
Speaker 10: Well, of course there's always a little bit of suffering.
26:09
Speaker 10: I'm not fool enough to deny that. I would say
26:12
Speaker 10: that you think about yourself as your child's companion. What
26:16
Speaker 10: is a child? A child is someone who is with
26:19
Speaker 10: you for a great many years of your life. A
26:21
Speaker 10: child is your companion. A child is your friend. A
26:23
Speaker 10: child is the person that you are putting hopes and
26:27
Speaker 10: dreams into. And you can do this with a negative attitude,
26:31
Speaker 10: which it's up to you but I strongly recommend to
26:35
Speaker 10: do it with a positive attitude, like you would with
26:37
Speaker 10: any other person that you have a good relationship with.
26:40
Speaker 1: Some of this feels that gets wrapped up in if
26:43
Speaker 1: I have a relationship that I like or that I
26:45
Speaker 1: find manageable, I'm able to have more kids? Does that link?
26:48
Speaker 9: Well?
26:48
Speaker 1: How you see that?
26:50
Speaker 10: There's this wonderful evidence from adoption studies and twin studies
26:54
Speaker 10: on what is the parents matter for, what are they
26:56
Speaker 10: not matter for? And especially where's the dial? Normally they'll
26:59
Speaker 10: be at least some slight effect, but the effects are
27:02
Speaker 10: bigger on some things at others. And what I say is,
27:05
Speaker 10: when you go through all of this evidence, the most
27:07
Speaker 10: meaningful effect of parenting is just on appreciation how your
27:10
Speaker 10: child feels about you, the kind of person they see
27:12
Speaker 10: you as. And to me, this is really the heart
27:16
Speaker 10: of being a parent. Is the main thing that's in
27:18
Speaker 10: my power is this relationship, which makes a lot of sense.
27:21
Speaker 10: If you think about a kid as being a person,
27:23
Speaker 10: as you should, they are people. If you think about, well,
27:27
Speaker 10: so I should marry this person in order to mold
27:29
Speaker 10: them into some other person, it's not.
27:31
Speaker 9: A good idea.
27:31
Speaker 10: Generally, you need to roughly accept them as they are,
27:36
Speaker 10: maybe try to send off some rough edges, but mostly
27:38
Speaker 10: focus on enjoying your time together. Same with friends, same
27:41
Speaker 10: with almost any good relationship. Try to focus on leading
27:45
Speaker 10: a fulfilling life together rather than molding them. So that's
27:48
Speaker 10: what I think of as the real heart of parenting.
27:51
Speaker 10: It's like great many other kinds of positive relationships where
27:55
Speaker 10: you enjoy spending time together without sitting around saying, yeah,
27:58
Speaker 10: but what's the long run payoff? The payoffs?
28:00
Speaker 1: Now, mostly there's one piece I think we definitely agree on,
28:06
Speaker 1: which is that a lot of the things that parents
28:10
Speaker 1: sort of sit around and obsess about, or at least
28:12
Speaker 1: the kinds of parents that I think we probably talked
28:14
Speaker 1: to a lot sit around obsessed about, don't matter as
28:16
Speaker 1: much as they think they do or at all, And
28:19
Speaker 1: that it would be you know, investing a lot of
28:22
Speaker 1: time in trying to get your kid to the Junior Olympics,
28:24
Speaker 1: like they're not going to the Junior Olympics in anyway.
28:27
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, yeah. And also, of course it's not very
28:30
Speaker 10: fun for your kid for the parent to be miserable.
28:33
Speaker 10: One to me, very meaningful study that I came across
28:37
Speaker 10: when I was doing my kid's book is something called
28:38
Speaker 10: the Ask the Children's Survey. We just asked a lot
28:41
Speaker 10: of kids to give reviews of their parents, and one
28:44
Speaker 10: of the most revealing things to me anyway, was very
28:48
Speaker 10: few kids complain their parents don't have time for them. Instead,
28:51
Speaker 10: what kids complain is that their parents are too angry, tired,
28:54
Speaker 10: and stressed. And I was reading that, it's like, yeah,
28:57
Speaker 10: that's a lot like your parents go and they're driving
29:00
Speaker 10: you around to a bunch of functions that they don't
29:02
Speaker 10: really feel like taking you to, and then they flip
29:04
Speaker 10: out at you because he's tried to change the radio station.
29:07
Speaker 10: And then it's like, well, wouldn't been better to have
29:10
Speaker 10: just had a nice night together and not taken the
29:12
Speaker 10: kid to a sport he doesn't even enjoy very much,
29:14
Speaker 10: and then you would have been happy.
29:19
Speaker 14: I think part of it is that we've shifted to
29:22
Speaker 14: a model of parenting, especially in those upper economic trenches,
29:26
Speaker 14: that just sets the bar for parenthood too high, and
29:29
Speaker 14: it causes people to miss out on a lot of
29:31
Speaker 14: joy that they would otherwise have earlier in their life.
29:34
Speaker 1: This is Leah Lobrasco, sergeant writer at Otherfeminisms dot com
29:38
Speaker 1: and author of several books, including the upcoming The Dignity
29:42
Speaker 1: of Dependence, which explores how to create a world that
29:46
Speaker 1: welcomes women and children. She has three children under five
29:49
Speaker 1: and is also the mother of six others whom she
29:52
Speaker 1: lost through miscarriage. You tweeted about going to Yale to
29:55
Speaker 1: convince students to have more kids at younger ages. What's
29:58
Speaker 1: your first argument to the kids for why they should
30:01
Speaker 1: have kids sooner.
30:03
Speaker 14: I think the most basic reason is because kids are good,
30:07
Speaker 14: and that you know you should be suspicious by default
30:09
Speaker 14: of a culture that's telling you that these are goods
30:13
Speaker 14: you have to wait to enjoy for a long time,
30:16
Speaker 14: And because there's a tendency to overstate our own control
30:19
Speaker 14: over our lives and our children, and then we lose
30:21
Speaker 14: out on those goods. Ultimately, saying yes to children and
30:24
Speaker 14: openness to children is a yes to a certain amount
30:27
Speaker 14: of chaos. And whether you succeed in having children or not,
30:31
Speaker 14: Acknowledging that reality that life is not totally authored by
30:34
Speaker 14: you or under your control opens you up to the
30:36
Speaker 14: richness of what your life can be.
30:38
Speaker 1: How did the students respond to that, You know, it
30:41
Speaker 1: was interesting.
30:41
Speaker 14: We have varying speeches. The two major themes, one of
30:44
Speaker 14: which I respect and one of which I don't. One
30:47
Speaker 14: of the rebuttals was more of an environmental one of
30:50
Speaker 14: just kids are bad, humans are mostly bad. We should
30:54
Speaker 14: have fewer of all of these. You know, the student
30:57
Speaker 14: giving the speech was tiptoeing pretty close to kind of
31:01
Speaker 14: suicidal civilizational logic. Each individual person avoided, each life cut shorter,
31:06
Speaker 14: fewer person lives on Earth is a net improvement for
31:09
Speaker 14: the planet. It's an extremely college attitude. I would say,
31:14
Speaker 14: of just this, what if everyone is bad, but you
31:18
Speaker 14: want more people to go out of it than I
31:19
Speaker 14: think are currently making it through that refreshman nihilism. Now,
31:24
Speaker 14: the argument I respected a lot more came from a
31:27
Speaker 14: young woman who would I think, position herself also on
31:30
Speaker 14: the left, but was making a different critique. And she
31:33
Speaker 14: just said, look, whenever women opt into having children, their
31:36
Speaker 14: lives are more strongly differentiated from men, And in a
31:40
Speaker 14: sexist society, encouraging women to have children is encouraging them
31:44
Speaker 14: essentially to make their womanhood more salient, and that's bad
31:48
Speaker 14: for them. And I think she's descriptively right. Right, in
31:52
Speaker 14: a world that's hostile to children, children are dangerous to women.
31:57
Speaker 14: But the kind of the alternative she's putting forward is
32:00
Speaker 14: a strain in mainstream feminism is women are essentially received
32:04
Speaker 14: by society as deficient men, and the feminist project is
32:08
Speaker 14: helping us better pass for men or remedying those deficiencies,
32:11
Speaker 14: not making a world where women are welcome as women.
32:14
Speaker 1: So let's talk about moms and whether they can have
32:18
Speaker 1: it all? Can they can they have a career and
32:20
Speaker 1: be it? What is your feeling? Can we have it all?
32:22
Speaker 14: No one can have it all, So you're making choices
32:25
Speaker 14: about trade offs, and everyone has to make those choices.
32:28
Speaker 14: I think our society asks unjust things of both men
32:31
Speaker 14: and women, and the valance of that unjust demand is
32:34
Speaker 14: a little different. Women face more pressure to have it all,
32:37
Speaker 14: a high powered career and kids, and you love your kids,
32:41
Speaker 14: but you can't see your kids. You go and you
32:43
Speaker 14: should feel guilty about all these things. And men face
32:45
Speaker 14: the opposite pressure of there's less room for men's grief
32:48
Speaker 14: about their lack of fatherhood, whether it's because they don't
32:51
Speaker 14: have kids or because they are succeeding in a non
32:54
Speaker 14: parental career track and they come home as their kids
32:57
Speaker 14: are going to bed and they miss that. But there's
32:58
Speaker 14: not as much conversation about that being a real loss
33:01
Speaker 14: for them. Right, we just don't put caregiving at the
33:03
Speaker 14: center of our society, and everyone, men and women pay
33:06
Speaker 14: a price for that.
33:07
Speaker 1: It would be one thing to come to everyone and say, look,
33:10
Speaker 1: if you want to have children, it's going to require
33:13
Speaker 1: these trade offs, and that's something we're all going to
33:15
Speaker 1: grapple with. I think the sort of current setup for
33:19
Speaker 1: many people feels like men aren't going to have that
33:22
Speaker 1: at all and women are going to have it a lot.
33:25
Speaker 1: Let me be that person a little bit, the student
33:28
Speaker 1: basically who would say, and I think I would have
33:30
Speaker 1: said this at that time, like I did want kids,
33:32
Speaker 1: and I also wanted a career, and I wanted fairness,
33:38
Speaker 1: And it feels like we should be able to get
33:41
Speaker 1: farther than we are, and that that has to be
33:46
Speaker 1: part of the societal bargain, that no one could have
33:50
Speaker 1: it all, but like, why am I having none of it?
33:53
Speaker 14: This is where I see a lot of the most
33:54
Speaker 14: fruitful collaboration between the feminist community and the disability community,
33:58
Speaker 14: because they're both basically making the claim we build our
34:01
Speaker 14: society around too narrow a range of bodies and experiences,
34:05
Speaker 14: and the question isn't just will we help women fit
34:08
Speaker 14: a male mold better? Will we help someone who's in
34:10
Speaker 14: a wheelchair fit a walking mold better?
34:13
Speaker 1: But do we build our.
34:14
Speaker 14: Buildings, our expectations, our careers to accommodate a wider range
34:18
Speaker 14: of lived experience. And that's where you get something that
34:21
Speaker 14: isn't so much just okay, well, you do want to
34:24
Speaker 14: have a baby, I guess, so I guess we'll make
34:28
Speaker 14: this closet for you to pump in if we have to.
34:31
Speaker 14: But water's pretty clean, so formula would be better for us.
34:36
Speaker 14: I've got nothing against breast pumps, but I think a
34:37
Speaker 14: lot of our expectations around them are built around how
34:39
Speaker 14: they serve your boss, not around how they serve you.
34:42
Speaker 14: And so the question is more all right, well we
34:44
Speaker 14: start with the assumption you're a mom. What will it
34:47
Speaker 14: look like to accommodate a mother in this job or
34:49
Speaker 14: in this workplace? And I think COVID has helped a
34:52
Speaker 14: little bit because it just was a hard reset on
34:55
Speaker 14: a lot of expectations we have around work and let
34:58
Speaker 14: people explore a broader range of models, not all of
35:01
Speaker 14: what you're compensated at the same level, but just having
35:04
Speaker 14: a broader range of accommodations is good for women. It's
35:07
Speaker 14: good for people with physical disabilities because it means we're
35:11
Speaker 14: not all fitting one narrow mold.
35:15
Speaker 1: After the break, we'll tackle more tough questions about deciding
35:19
Speaker 1: whether to have children. How do you make such a
35:22
Speaker 1: significant decision when the future feels so uncertain, and how
35:26
Speaker 1: can you be sure you won't regret it?
35:28
Speaker 15: Stay with us.
35:42
Speaker 9: My husband was a only child, and I growing up
35:45
Speaker 9: had a sibling, and I do feel like part of
35:48
Speaker 9: everyone is we're always all trying to just recreate our childhoods.
35:51
Speaker 9: So I kind of always assumed that if I had
35:53
Speaker 9: any kids at all, I would have two, and I
35:55
Speaker 9: think he always assumed that if he had any kids
35:57
Speaker 9: at all, it would be one. But we did start later.
36:01
Speaker 9: By some doctors standards, I was geriatric by the time I.
36:06
Speaker 1: Was birthing my son at thirty five, and I kind
36:10
Speaker 1: of came to.
36:10
Speaker 9: This realization recently that I wish that we had had
36:15
Speaker 9: a second earlier. But for me, I am no longer
36:20
Speaker 9: open to going through all that again.
36:22
Speaker 15: Now.
36:22
Speaker 1: Having children was never really like a question for me.
36:26
Speaker 16: My mom was a type of mom that took parenting
36:29
Speaker 16: really seriously. And she always told me and my sister
36:33
Speaker 16: that raising us was her most important job, and that
36:37
Speaker 16: was always something that just really stuck with me and
36:40
Speaker 16: became something that I also wanted to take on.
36:43
Speaker 13: I didn't have kids because I never felt the urge.
36:46
Speaker 13: My husband didn't either, and I've seen how much work
36:49
Speaker 13: they are most of my closest friends or parents, and
36:51
Speaker 13: the amount of drudgery involved in raising children really requires
36:55
Speaker 13: you to want them, because otherwise I think you'd feel resentful.
36:59
Speaker 13: In fact, one of my friends just told me she
37:01
Speaker 13: regrets having kids, and she did it out of societal pressure.
37:04
Speaker 13: It's a hard decision to stick to, so much so
37:07
Speaker 13: that I felt myself wavering in my late thirties and
37:09
Speaker 13: early forties. But I'm glad I stick to my guns
37:12
Speaker 13: and didn't bow to the pressure. It was definitely the
37:14
Speaker 13: right decision for me.
37:15
Speaker 12: I decided to have kids because unlike my friends who
37:19
Speaker 12: think that the world is ending and therefore how could
37:22
Speaker 12: we bring kids into it, I think that fundamentally, how
37:26
Speaker 12: can we possibly have a future without bringing more humans
37:31
Speaker 12: into this world? And I believe that we have a
37:34
Speaker 12: moral and religious and spiritual imperative to do the thing
37:41
Speaker 12: that is most essential to who we are, which is procreation.
37:45
Speaker 12: And as a woman, I believe that my biology is
37:50
Speaker 12: my destiny and I can't imagine an unfolding of life
37:56
Speaker 12: without being one with my biology.
38:02
Speaker 17: I have been thinking, like, I don't have a desire
38:05
Speaker 17: to move to a commune or something, but I have
38:08
Speaker 17: thought so often like if society was a little bit
38:11
Speaker 17: more communal and we didn't have to raise our children
38:15
Speaker 17: sort of within the tiny, tiny confines of the nuclear family,
38:19
Speaker 17: I might want.
38:20
Speaker 1: To have a child. This is Helena Dugrutz, a podcast
38:23
Speaker 1: producer who lives in New York, and it's been working
38:25
Speaker 1: on a series about not having kids.
38:28
Speaker 17: If I could share the burden of child rearing with
38:31
Speaker 17: a village, right as the saying goes, maybe part.
38:36
Speaker 1: Of what's so interesting for me about this conversation is
38:39
Speaker 1: this thinking I didn't feel it, and I think that
38:43
Speaker 1: I find really resonant because I sort of from the
38:45
Speaker 1: other side. If you had asked me, you know, did
38:47
Speaker 1: you feel like you want to have kids? I would
38:49
Speaker 1: have said from the beginning, like I always knew that
38:53
Speaker 1: was something that I wanted, And in some ways I
38:58
Speaker 1: did think about some practical parts of it, but not
39:01
Speaker 1: very much because it was like, we're going to do this,
39:04
Speaker 1: and it's just about sort of structuring around you know,
39:07
Speaker 1: exactly how it seems like your decision started at this
39:13
Speaker 1: like I don't have this feeling, but then has many
39:17
Speaker 1: practical There's like a lot of not overthinking is probably
39:21
Speaker 1: not quite the word I'm looking for it.
39:23
Speaker 17: Like if people say overthinking, I've done a.
39:25
Speaker 1: Lot about this, Yeah, yeah, yeah, do you think that's
39:28
Speaker 1: new to the world.
39:31
Speaker 17: What I hear when you ask that question is do
39:34
Speaker 17: you think there were people in you know, before we
39:38
Speaker 17: had reproductive choice, which okay, we don't. You know, it's
39:42
Speaker 17: sort of debatable where exactly some of it, yes, Monica,
39:46
Speaker 17: But before we had any I I probably think there
39:51
Speaker 17: were people who were just like me who just never
39:54
Speaker 17: had that feeling, who never had that desire, And it
39:57
Speaker 17: terrifies me to know that they had no choice. I mean,
40:01
Speaker 17: maybe they couldn't even imagine it because there just wasn't
40:04
Speaker 17: really that scenario for them as an option, But I
40:09
Speaker 17: can so imagine that there were people who felt trapped
40:12
Speaker 17: their entire life as parents in a life that didn't
40:16
Speaker 17: fit them. I don't think everyone is made to be
40:18
Speaker 17: a parent. I'm so relieved to be born.
40:23
Speaker 18: When I am, there was a combination of a total
40:31
Speaker 18: social expectation that unless you were going to become a
40:34
Speaker 18: monk or a nun, and sometimes even then, right, this
40:38
Speaker 18: was sort of what you were going to do, joined
40:41
Speaker 18: to an absence of reliable contraceptives that meant that even
40:44
Speaker 18: if you didn't intend to do it, you probably would.
40:47
Speaker 17: You know, you were.
40:48
Speaker 1: Likely to have kids ross do that again.
40:51
Speaker 11: But it's a relatively novel situation where there's this sort
40:55
Speaker 11: of sense of this as like this very conscious choice
41:00
Speaker 11: that you have to make, and you have to choose
41:03
Speaker 11: what point in your life cycle you're doing it, which
41:05
Speaker 11: you know, in your twenties or your thirties, how soon
41:08
Speaker 11: after you get married, whether you're getting married at all,
41:11
Speaker 11: all of these things.
41:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just never had to confront that before, because
41:16
Speaker 1: of course you were going to have kids, because that's
41:18
Speaker 1: just what people do after sex.
41:21
Speaker 11: Right, And I mean there is a sense in which,
41:23
Speaker 11: as someone who now has by contemporary standards a lot
41:26
Speaker 11: of kids, like, there are times when I sort of
41:29
Speaker 11: find it unfathomable that people don't want this or sort
41:34
Speaker 11: of setting up their lives in such a way that
41:36
Speaker 11: this is deprioritized because I literally cannot imagine what kind
41:42
Speaker 11: of meaning my life as a mid forties professional would
41:47
Speaker 11: carry if it was not organized around my kids. But again,
41:51
Speaker 11: from an outsider's perspective, that can look like Stockholm syndrome. Right,
41:55
Speaker 11: It's like, well, yeah, you have all these tiny you know,
41:57
Speaker 11: these tiny humans, and they're holding you hostage. You've learned
42:01
Speaker 11: to love them, right, but you love your captor.
42:05
Speaker 1: The central question is, you know, should I have a kid? Yes,
42:08
Speaker 1: on her.
42:10
Speaker 6: But I think the actual question is how do you
42:13
Speaker 6: make a decision about a future that feels precarious.
42:16
Speaker 1: This is Gina Rushtan. She's a reproductive rights and women's
42:19
Speaker 1: health reporter from Sydney, Australia. Most recently she wrote The
42:23
Speaker 1: Parenthood Dilemma, a book about procreation in an age of uncertainty.
42:28
Speaker 1: Do you think there's a rational argument to have kids? Yeah,
42:31
Speaker 1: of course.
42:32
Speaker 6: You know, you very rarely speak to people who will
42:35
Speaker 6: say that they regret having their children, because I think
42:37
Speaker 6: that few people do you.
42:40
Speaker 1: Talk about this idea of the impoverished epistemic position, which
42:44
Speaker 1: is that you know the thing And I will say,
42:46
Speaker 1: I am a person who has kids, and sometimes when
42:48
Speaker 1: people ask me to describe the experience of that. It's
42:52
Speaker 1: that it's both much harder and harder for my job
42:56
Speaker 1: and harder for my marriage, and harder for like everything
42:59
Speaker 1: about my life then I anticipated it would be. And
43:02
Speaker 1: it's also the joy and the sort of connection to
43:06
Speaker 1: my kids is something I wouldn't really be able to describe,
43:09
Speaker 1: Like it's just so much different than any other life experience.
43:15
Speaker 1: And so that's the piece I think you mean by that,
43:17
Speaker 1: which is just until you have that experience, maybe it's
43:21
Speaker 1: hard to hard to visualize both sides of it actually,
43:25
Speaker 1: which makes it such a hard choice. It's like I'm
43:26
Speaker 1: going to go into this world where I know there's
43:28
Speaker 1: really big pluses and really big minuses, and I have
43:30
Speaker 1: no ability to evaluate either of them. Yeah.
43:33
Speaker 6: Absolutely, it's one of those decisions where you cannot make
43:36
Speaker 6: a pros and cons list because you don't know how
43:40
Speaker 6: having or not having kids will change it as a person. Therefore,
43:43
Speaker 6: like you can't make a serious of judgments about that
43:46
Speaker 6: because like having kids transform you and not having kids
43:49
Speaker 6: transforms you, and you just haven't met those two people
43:51
Speaker 6: that you could be, or those two lives that you
43:53
Speaker 6: could lead. It is new in the sense that, particularly
43:56
Speaker 6: for women with all the constraints around fertility or the
43:59
Speaker 6: constrains around reproduct rights. Of course, this is the most
44:01
Speaker 6: choice we've ever had, and it's the most access many
44:04
Speaker 6: people have had to the technologies that will let them
44:06
Speaker 6: put off this decision as well. And that's exciting and
44:10
Speaker 6: really something to celebrate that that, like, it is more
44:13
Speaker 6: of a choice than it's ever been in some senses.
44:16
Speaker 6: I think the other thing that people there's a bit
44:19
Speaker 6: of debate about, like, well, you know, people had kids
44:22
Speaker 6: through all sorts of wars and all sorts of crisises,
44:25
Speaker 6: and like why is this time particularly unstabable and isn't
44:29
Speaker 6: this just like millennial naval gazing? And I think that
44:32
Speaker 6: that is true in a sense, like, of course people
44:35
Speaker 6: were deciding to have or not have kids in really
44:37
Speaker 6: precarious situations. But I do think that there are a
44:40
Speaker 6: few factors, particularly around the climate of something.
44:43
Speaker 1: That it's not a war with a beginning and an end.
44:46
Speaker 6: It's something that will get, as far as we can tell,
44:51
Speaker 6: progressively worse over the time in a way that I
44:54
Speaker 6: don't know we've had a particular you know, political or
44:59
Speaker 6: financial crisis that's been the same.
45:01
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you think there's a way that this generation,
45:06
Speaker 1: the sort of millennial generation, was raised that makes them
45:10
Speaker 1: approach the topic differently, like almost think about it more
45:13
Speaker 1: like this question of like what am I passing on?
45:15
Speaker 1: And am I going to repeat the problems of my parents?
45:18
Speaker 1: I don't feel like my parents thought about that. Maybe
45:23
Speaker 1: they had many complicated questions, but it was not that question.
45:26
Speaker 1: This actually goes on to raising kids in general. But
45:29
Speaker 1: in this it's almost like there's there's so much thinking
45:33
Speaker 1: and I just wonder how that plays into this.
45:36
Speaker 6: There is And it's funny because you know, some of
45:39
Speaker 6: the feedback, particularly from older people, has been like you're
45:42
Speaker 6: just thinking too much, Like just stop thinking and just
45:45
Speaker 6: make the decision.
45:46
Speaker 1: So if I told you people are morally obligated to
45:48
Speaker 1: have children, yes or no? Oh that's a high on.
45:55
Speaker 6: My instinct is to say no. But I do like
45:58
Speaker 6: entertaining it because I do think that in a world
46:01
Speaker 6: where we're entertaining it, we could perhaps be entertaining policies
46:05
Speaker 6: that actually make mother but all parenthood more tenable for people.
46:08
Speaker 14: No, people are morally obligated to be hospitable to children,
46:11
Speaker 14: and that might look like having them yourselves. But you
46:14
Speaker 14: just can't be part of actively or complicitly and making
46:18
Speaker 14: the world hostile to children, because it's wrong, because it's
46:21
Speaker 14: breaking a compact that you were part of as someone
46:23
Speaker 14: who is once a child. And whether or not you
46:26
Speaker 14: should have children is partly a personal discernment and partly
46:29
Speaker 14: the factor of things outside your control.
46:31
Speaker 11: I don't think everyone has a moral obligation. What I
46:35
Speaker 11: would say to most people is, if you think you
46:38
Speaker 11: have something in your future that is as important for
46:42
Speaker 11: society as future generations of human beings and is as
46:47
Speaker 11: good for your own moral development as having kids, then
46:50
Speaker 11: by all means do that instead of having kids. But
46:52
Speaker 11: the odds that you're going to find those things are
46:56
Speaker 11: maybe a little bit lower than you would think.
47:09
Speaker 1: So where does this leave us. I can't tell you
47:12
Speaker 1: whether or not to have kids. It's not my style.
47:15
Speaker 1: It's a personal decision, but also a financial one, a
47:18
Speaker 1: religious one, and for some a political one. I feel
47:23
Speaker 1: lucky to be born in a time, as Helena says,
47:25
Speaker 1: in which we have a choice, and I also agree
47:29
Speaker 1: with Leah that we need to make it easier on parents,
47:31
Speaker 1: especially moms, and with Brian that kids can be more
47:35
Speaker 1: fun than we sometimes admit. I also really resonate with
47:38
Speaker 1: Ross's point that it's both harder and more joyful than
47:42
Speaker 1: anything else I've ever experienced. Earlier in this episode, I
47:45
Speaker 1: said to a guest that I couldn't even explain the
47:48
Speaker 1: feeling of being a parent, but let me try. The
47:51
Speaker 1: fundamental thing for me, at least, is to feel someone
47:55
Speaker 1: else's joy and sadness so much more than your own.
48:00
Speaker 1: When things are going well with my children, other setbacks
48:03
Speaker 1: matter much less, And when things are not going well,
48:07
Speaker 1: it's all consuming and impossible to find joy outside of it.
48:12
Speaker 1: As I'm recording this, both of my children are at
48:14
Speaker 1: sleep away camp, and I am spending my time refreshing
48:17
Speaker 1: the camp website to see if they had added pictures.
48:21
Speaker 1: They are simply everything. As a parent, you want nothing
48:26
Speaker 1: more than to do the right thing for your children
48:28
Speaker 1: and make the best choices for them, And at the
48:31
Speaker 1: same time, it can be impossible to know what those
48:34
Speaker 1: best choices are. Things crop up that you never thought about,
48:38
Speaker 1: even with a second kid, probably even with a fifth kid.
48:42
Speaker 1: The world and your child surprise you all the time,
48:45
Speaker 1: and it's hard not to second guess yourself, even on
48:48
Speaker 1: the small things. But here's the thing. You have way
48:52
Speaker 1: less control than you think you do. You might ask, why,
48:55
Speaker 1: if I know that to be true, have I spent
48:57
Speaker 1: the last decades writing books about parenting. The answer is
49:01
Speaker 1: that even if you don't have control, you have choices,
49:04
Speaker 1: and those choices are important. The problem is that the
49:08
Speaker 1: atmosphere about parenting rarely frames these choices in a way
49:12
Speaker 1: that gives parents autonomy. We are not often given the
49:15
Speaker 1: opportunity to think critically about the decisions we make. Instead,
49:19
Speaker 1: we're expected to follow an arbitrary script, often without question,
49:24
Speaker 1: and often one or two weak studies rapidly become conventional wisdom,
49:30
Speaker 1: even if they're wrong. Parenting is among the most important
49:34
Speaker 1: and meaningful experiences most of us will ever have, probably
49:37
Speaker 1: the most important. I hope this series has taken some
49:41
Speaker 1: of the stress out of parenting by arming you with
49:43
Speaker 1: good information and perspectives that you don't often hear from
49:47
Speaker 1: mainstream media or even from your parents or pediatrician. Because
49:52
Speaker 1: we can do better, and data and information I hope
49:56
Speaker 1: I've proven to you can help. Thanks for listening. Raising
50:07
Speaker 1: Parents is a production in partnership with The Free Press.
50:10
Speaker 1: It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks
50:13
Speaker 1: as well to producer Tamar Abishai. The executive producer is
50:17
Speaker 1: Candace Khan. Barry Weiss is the CEO and editor in
50:20
Speaker 1: chief of the Free Press. And last, thanks to my
50:23
Speaker 1: guest today Ross Juthat, Brian Kaplan, Leah Libresco Sargent, Helena Degrut,
50:28
Speaker 1: and Gina Rushton. I'm Emily Ost. This has been raising
50:32
Speaker 1: parents