January 9, 2025 • 50 mins
Today on ParentData, we're airing an episode from Raising Parents, Emily's limited series podcast in partnership with The Free Press. The episode is the last in the series, but the first question we all need to grapple with before engaging with all the others: should you have kids?
For most of human history, having kids wasn’t much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a couple of options: Have children, or join a convent. But the 1960s ushered in a big change. With better options for birth control and expanded career opportunities for women, many people for the first time could choose how many children to have, and whether they should have any at all.
Fast-forward to today: More people are choosing not to have children for a wide range of reasons. Having children, of course, is a personal choice. But it’s a choice that has broader implications. Everywhere across the globe—the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa—fewer children are being born. And strangely enough, having kids has become part of the culture wars. There are pro-natalist public figures like Elon Musk on one side saying everyone needs to have more kids now in order to save humanity. And on the other side, people like climate activist Greta Thunberg say rising sea levels are so catastrophic that having kids in this era is akin to genocide.
But there’s no debate that the fertility rate is plummeting in America and around the world. Presently, American women, on average, have 1.8 kids. In the 1950s, it was 3. The replacement rate in the United States, which is the fertility rate needed for a generation to replace itself without considering immigration, is approximately 2.1 births per woman. Around the world, the fertility rate fell by more than half between 1950 and 2021, as many countries became wealthier and women chose to have fewer children.
For economists like Emily, the speed with which the fertility rate is falling is cause for alarm. Economic growth depends, at least in part, on population growth. Retired people rely on generations of younger workers for support, through contributions to Social Security and taxes. With fertility rates in free fall, the math doesn’t add up.
That’s the big picture. Now back to our own families, and a fundamental question: Should we even have kids in the first place, and what happens if we don’t?
Resources from this episode:
• Bryan Caplan: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids (Bookshop)
• Gina Rushton The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty (Bookshop)
• Leah Libresco Sargeant
• Helena de Groot
• Ross Douthat
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster. Last fall, I
partnered with The Free Press to create and host an
incredible project, a limited series podcast called Raising Parents, where
we tackled hot button parenting issues from a data driven perspective.
We interviewed countless experts from all across the ideological spectrum,
(00:25):
many of whom both agreed and disagreed with one another
and with me and me with them, which is my favorite.
We looked at the impact of different parenting philosophies, from
gentle parenting to spanking. We looked at the role of
smartphones as it relates to our teens' mental health. We
looked at the different ways of feeding our kids, of
(00:45):
monitoring our kids, of medicating our kids. And the final
episode we released was ironically the biggest question of all,
the one that leads to all the others. Should you
have kids today? We're sharing this episode with you. The
focus is on the data. What's going on with our
(01:06):
global fertility rate, what we thought was going to happen
fifty years ago, that is overpopulation, and what has actually happened,
which is pretty much the opposite. We talk about climate
change and economic challenges and all the other reasons people
are waiting to have kids, if they plan to at all.
But we also get into the emotional side. I talk
(01:28):
to people who have made the decision not to have
kids and why. I talk about some of the reasons
we do have kids. We talk about how hard that
decision can be, both arriving at it and then defending it.
There's no right or wrong answer. As always, I am
a firm believer in doing what is best for you
(01:49):
and your family, whatever family means to you. It's what
makes the conversation so interesting and so important. I'm really
out of this series and especially of this episode, and
I am delighted to share it with you. You can
listen to the whole series on The Free Press's website
(02:10):
at THEFP dot com, slash Listen, Slash, Raising Dash Parents,
Dash with Dash, Emily dash Auster, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts. After the break, Raising Parents,
Episode eight, Should You Have Kids?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I always wanted to have kids. There was never a question.
So I got older. I know if I ever dated
someone who didn't want to have kids, I just probably
would have well, I know I would have ended it
because there was no point. It was just always there
for me. I wanted to be there for someone, and
it's very rewarding. Husband and father really two most important titles.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The idea of kids was literally that I would recoil
from the thought of that, because it seemed so phenomenally
on another planet that I was like, oh God, no,
there's no chance of that. I'm just living my life.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
I chose to have kids, I guess. I definitely thought
the world would be a better place with more of
me in it, no doubt.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I was in the boat of two is ideal. And
then I got pregnant with our third, and now I
realize how people have many, many, many children because one
two of your third you're like, oh yeah, we just
like keep going.
Speaker 6 (03:38):
We got this down, Like we can, we can do this.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It comes to talking about child free versus childless. For
some of us, it goes more towards the side of
oh yeah, I am so child free. I just never
thought about having children. Put my fist in the air
and declare with pride, Yeah, man, I am not responsible
for parenting anybody.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
For most of human history, having kids wasn't much of
a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited
autonomy for women delivered a limited set of options, say
have children or join the convent. But beginning in the
nineteen sixties, a combination of better birth control options and
(04:27):
better opportunities for women gave many more people a choice
about both how many children to have and whether they
should have any at all. Fast forward to today, many
more people are making the decision not to have children
at all, and for a wide range of reasons. People
tell me they don't want kids because of financial strain
(04:48):
or climate apocalypse. Others say they do want kids so
that they can heal generational trauma or give their first
kid a sibling. I once spoke to someone who told
me that it was important for him to have children
to pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that's an underlying motivation,
even if most people would not put it quite so directly.
(05:10):
Having children is a personal choice. However, it's a choice
that has broader implications. And what's undisputable is this Virtually
everywhere across the globe the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, fewer
children are being born. Having kids has become a strange
part of the culture wars. On one side, you have
(05:30):
pronatalist public figures like Elon Musk saying everyone needs to
have more kids now in order to save humanity. I
think he has twelve kids to date. And on the
other side you have people like climate activist Greta Thunberg
saying that the rising sea levels are so catastrophic that
having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But
(05:52):
what everyone can agree on is that the fertility rate
is plummeting in America but also around the world, and
in my life of work, the speed with which this
number is going down in the US is causing concern
for all of the economists in the room.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
Americans are not having babies anymore. The US fertility rate
fell to a record low, declining two percent from a
year ago. This marks the lowest rate recorded since the
government began tracking the data in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 8 (06:20):
Our fertility rate is below the replacement threshold. It's been
that way for several years since two thousand and seven,
which is basically the level our generation needs to replace itself.
And that falling birth rate and has implications obviously for
the economy For demographics, one.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Of the first effects we will see is when social
security funds are expected to run low in the twenty thirties.
The lower birth rate in twenty twenty two will have
long term effects. In a couple of decades, there could
be a shortage of young adult workers.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The basic problem is that economic growth relies at least
in part on population growth, Plus the older population relies
on the younger population for support through contributions to social
security and taxes. But before we all panic, what does
the data say. Presently, American women on average have one
(07:12):
point six kids. In the nineteen fifties, it was three.
The replacement rate in the United States, which is the
fertility rate needed for a generation to exactly replace itself
without considering immigration, is approximately two point one berths per woman.
The average age of first time mothers has increased to
about twenty seven years old, up from twenty one point
(07:35):
four years in nineteen seventy. The proportion of Americans aged
sixty five and older is projected to almost double, increasing
from sixteen percent in twenty nineteen to twenty three percent
by twenty sixty. This shift means that nearly one in
four Americans will be in the senior age bracket. And
(07:55):
this isn't just happening in the US. From nineteen fifty
to twenty twenty one, the global total fertility rate more
than halved, falling from four point eighty four to two
point two to three, as many countries grew wealthier and
women had fewer babies. Notable highlights from the data include
sub Sharran, Africa, which has the highest fertility rate in
(08:18):
the world, but has dropped from six point three in
nineteen ninety to four point seven children per woman today.
South Korea, with the world's lowest fertility rate, has only
zero point seven to eight children per woman. So today
birth rates, personal decisions and their broader implications. After a
(08:40):
whole series focused on the state of our children, we
cap things off with a fundamental question, should you have kids?
And what happens if we all don't. I'm Emila Astro
and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents.
Speaker 8 (09:00):
Emily aust and Economists by Trade has gathered the data,
crunch the numbers, and is now debunking some of the
most controversial myths about parenthood.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
They're like, can I drink? You know you shouldn't have
like a lot?
Speaker 8 (09:15):
Where is this data coming from?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
The fundamental answer is we get data on people by
asking people about their behaviors and what they do, and
by collecting information on how their kids do.
Speaker 9 (09:24):
Poster doesn't shy away from other charge topics.
Speaker 8 (09:26):
People are using your database as an example as to
why schools should reopen.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
What kind of reaction did.
Speaker 8 (09:33):
You get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It was a little controversial.
Speaker 10 (09:37):
Yes, you're an economist, You're not a doctor. I mean,
what do you think people are going to take away
from what you've written in this book?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
All that I'm trying to do here is really show women,
here is what the evidence is, and why don't you
think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode eight,
Should You Have Kids?
Speaker 11 (09:55):
I grew up in New Haven in the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties. At a certain point in high school,
I was assigned some kind of bulletin board project on
the intersection between science and some kind of major world
issue or trend, and I ended up choosing population.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
This is Ross Duthett. He's a New York Times columnist
and father of five children.
Speaker 11 (10:17):
And I went to the library as one did back
in the day, and went to the section of books
that were about that subject and Most of them seemed
to be written by Paul Erlik, who was quite famous
for a while as the profit of overpopulation and Doom.
And I checked out a number of those books, probably
(10:38):
The Population Bomb his original and then his follow up,
I think it was called The Population Explosion.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Those were sort of.
Speaker 11 (10:45):
Prophecies from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies about the
demographic tide overwhelming the world.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
That world population is increasing by twenty three people every
ten seconds.
Speaker 6 (10:57):
It's clear that world population both remains completely.
Speaker 9 (11:01):
Out of control. Look at what the year two thousand
will be.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Our cities are going to be choked with people. They're
going to be choked with traffic, they're going to be
choked with crime, they're.
Speaker 9 (11:10):
Going to be chokum with.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Pollution, and they will be impossible.
Speaker 11 (11:15):
As a good student, I compared those books prophecies to
what was actually happening in the world. And this was
about twenty five or thirty years ago. And even then
it was quite clear that for various reasons, Erlk's prophecies
of doom had not been fulfilled. His demographic projections no
(11:37):
longer matched what was happening really anywhere around the world.
But definitely didn't match what was happening in the developed world.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Paul Erlik wrote his book The Population Bomb in nineteen
sixty eight. He described the impacts of overpopulation in a
very visceral way. It was easy to make it scary.
He wrote about people dying from hunger because there literally
wouldn't be enough food, defeat everyone, sufficient calories, major political upheavals.
(12:04):
Every inch of the world would be looking like Bangladesh
in terms of density, poverty, and disease.
Speaker 11 (12:10):
Everywhere, and back then, especially in Western Europe and to
some extent East Asia, especially Japan, where you could see
that the trends were likely to go in the entirely
opposite direction. Basically that population was peaking and was going
to pass a peak and start declining, that the richest
(12:31):
parts of the world were going to get old, very
very rapidly, and that, in fact, most likely the big
demographic challenge of the twenty first century was going to
be not population growth but population decline.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And it's sort of amazing. I mean, we're talking about
the nineteen eighties when this was already sort of somewhat visible,
but the decline in fertility rates in the sort of
period leading off to that and continuing is pretty astonishing
because it isn't just the decline in more developed countries
(13:07):
which have gone from replacement to under replacement, but it's
an enormous decline in many of the places that were
the highest fertility rates even in the nineteen eighties. So
places that had seven to eight kid fertility rates are
now down to three or four even two. I mean
that the magnitude of that change over relatively short period
has been pretty astounding.
Speaker 11 (13:30):
Yes, what you just described is the change that's happened
from my bulletin board project to the present. Right, So
twenty five twenty five years ago, in the nineteen nineties,
whenever I was doing this, it wasn't quite as clear
what was going to happen to population in China, South Asia,
and Latin America. It was clear that they were not
(13:51):
going to fulfill sort of Airlick's worst case scenarios from
his perspective, right of just you know, too many people,
too many men to feed. But yeah, at that point,
it was clear that rich countries were going to get
old quite quickly. And what's become clear since then is
that middle income and even poorer countries can follow the
(14:12):
same trajectory. You don't have to become Denmark or the
Netherlands or Japan to enter into a shift not just
to replacement level fertility, but something below replacement, maybe even
well below replacement.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
The replacement rate is the average birth per woman a
country needs to maintain its population. Erlck was alarming, and
he was following an alarming tradition. Thomas Malthus in the
eighteen hundreds had a similar set of dire overpopulation predictions.
Erlck was also wrong. The predictions he made haven't come
to pass, but the tenor of this argument hasn't gone away.
(14:53):
In a way, it's transferred from overcrowding concerns to environmental
arguments for lower population, and to moral arguments about human suffering.
Part of the legacy of this work is the sense
that having more humans is just in some way bad.
According to one new Pew survey of adults under fifty,
the primary argument against having children is I just don't
(15:16):
want to. All of this makes it harder for people
to see the real risks of a declining fertility rate.
Speaker 11 (15:23):
You know, I'm a conservative crank, right, so I've been
talking about it that way for some time, though I
would say the trends of the last five years have
been sort of more alarming even than I expected. People
are sort of still surprised when they're confronted with some
of these demographic trends. There's still sort of just an
expectation that overpopulation is the main problem, which also then
(15:48):
is entangled with anxiety about climate change, where people will
either say, you know, well, clearly, the places where population
is still increasing sub Saharan Africa above all, are still
going to create some kind of overpopulation problem and also
contribute to climate change, or people will say, okay, well,
maybe we're getting demographic decline, but because of the threat
(16:11):
of climate change, we should welcome it.
Speaker 12 (16:14):
Right.
Speaker 11 (16:14):
There's both a certain uncertainty shading into denial about whether
this is really happening, and a kind of desire to
put an optimistic environmentalist interpretation on it. For most places,
the more realistic vision is old people dying alone in
large numbers place is emptying. So many more ghost towns,
(16:40):
rural areas emptying, but also potentially parts of cities emptying.
It's just sort of a picture of not so much
worn famine as deppopulation decay, and also kind of a
clustering effect in an age of population decline. And let's
say you have, you know, a country with eight major cities.
(17:03):
It's not that each of those cities declines in population.
It's that three of them decline in population, three of
them have their population increase because everybody moves to them, right,
because nobody wants to be in the declining places, and
two of them turn into you know, Detroit at its emptiest.
That's a weird future to get your mind around, I think.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
And what's at stake if we do that? I mean,
why is that bad?
Speaker 11 (17:28):
You can frame it in sort of economist friendly terms
and say, okay, this is a world of declining population.
Is a world that's going to have slower economic growth.
It's going to have less dynamism and less innovation. Older
populations are more change averse. They're less likely to come
up with new inventions. You know, when you have a
(17:49):
smaller and smaller group of younger workers supporting the welfare
states that rich countries have built up, that gets harder
and harder to sustain. Those kind of societies are going
to be more stagnant, less dynamic, less interesting in creative
places to live. And then also they're going to be
on the evidence we have now lonelier and unhappier places
(18:11):
to live. Now, we only have sort of a generation's
worth of data on what life in virtual reality looks like.
And it's possible that once you know Mark Zuckerberg and
Tim Cook perfect virtual reality goggles, that the Internet will
become a different place than it's been so far. But
(18:32):
right now, all of the data we have, I would say,
suggests that young people growing up in virtual spaces, in
a social media dominated social landscape, hanging out less in person,
spending less time with friends in reality and more time
with friends in the virtual, are unhappier in ways that
(18:52):
in turn seem to be compounding the low fertility dilemma.
They're unhappier, they're forming fewer relationships, They're less likely to
have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They're less likely to
have sex, they're less likely to get married, they're less
likely to have kids, and so the low fertility trap
itself gets deeper.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Tell me your best theory for why people are not
having children.
Speaker 11 (19:15):
I mean there's like seventeen theories, right, seventeen.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I mean, it's give me the best one. Ross.
Speaker 11 (19:20):
So trying to really simplify it. One, you just expect
fertility rates to fall naturally in the transition from an
agricultural society where kids are a net economic benefit in
obvious ways because you have farms and you need kids
(19:41):
to work on farms, to a contemporary society where kids
are something that in order for them to do well
in life, you mostly have to invest in them and
get less back, and you don't need their support in
the same way at least, you know, until there's stopp
being no kids at all, as long as you have
(20:03):
social Security and Medicare and so on. So there's sort
of an economic basis for shrinking family size that you
would expect. There's a health and wellness basis where people
used to have larger families in part because fewer kids
survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was very high until quite
recently in our history. So it's not the case that
(20:25):
most people in seventeen thirty, we're having thirteen kids and
all those kids were surviving to adulthood. Your family size
of sort of kids who grew successfully to adulthood would
always tend to be four or five six kids, not ten,
eleven or twelve. So again you expect birth rates to
decline as infant mortality goes down. You expect birth rates
(20:47):
to decline as you get more professional and economic opportunities
for women. That's sort of an obvious expectation that has
been fulfilled in every country we can see. So when
you put all those things together, it's very easy to
see why you would go from people having ten kids
to having five, or from having six kids to having three.
(21:09):
The harder question is why does fertility go from two
to three kids, which is what most people still say
they want, not just men but also women, you know,
both sexes in rich countries. If you ask you know,
what is your desired fertility, it's still going to be
around let's say two point four two point five, not
(21:31):
one point two or something. You know, that's the trillion
dollar question, right, because if fertility rates settled at two
point five, then populations would be stable or slightly increasing,
and you wouldn't have this kind of depopulated wasteland future
looming ahead. And there, I think you have to get
into some mixture of essentially just the sheer scale of
(21:56):
wealth and immediate pleasures available to people modern life that
make having kids seem like a special kind of burden
that you are more likely to postpone until you feel
completely ready.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
One thing I wanted to add to Ross's analysis here
is the question of social support. It's not lost on
me or most of us that support for children in
the US is pretty lousy. There's no national paid maternity leave,
there's limited childcare support. A lot of US look to
places like Sweden with its seemingly unending support for parents
(22:32):
and say, surely with that support there would be more children.
But in fact, fertility rates have gone down as much,
often more in those places than in the US, and
in general, policies which have tried to increase childbearing by
offering incentives to do so have fallen flat. This leaves
me back to Ross's final point, It must be something
(22:53):
else which explains this.
Speaker 10 (22:56):
The main thing I noticed is that most people make
their decision about do I let another based upon I
feel exhausted right now. I mean, I just think that
a lot of times people are making these decisions impulsively.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Meet Brian Kaplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University,
a New York Times bestselling author, and a father of four.
In his book Selfish Reasons, to have more kids. He
argues that raising children is actually less demanding and stressful
than many people think. He suggests that the current trend
of having fewer children might be because parents overestimate how
(23:31):
hard it is to raise a successful adult. Brian tries
to ease parents' worries so they can enjoy their kids
in the short term and consider having more children for
long term happiness.
Speaker 10 (23:44):
Like you wouldn't say I'm too tired to go and
shop for a dishwasher because I'm doing too many dishes,
And it's like, well, if you just put a little
investment in and get the dishwasher, then your life's is
going to be easier every day. So, like a lot
of times, if your life is hard, you've got to
do something and makes it worse for a little while
in order to make it better after that. And I
think there's definitely some part of having kids to that.
(24:06):
I'm like, I'm not crazy or blind. I do know
that the first couple weeks of any kids is really hard.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Why should people have kids?
Speaker 10 (24:14):
I mean, my honest answer is not everybody should. It depends,
but I don't want to leave it with that total
cop out. In particular, I start with well, does this
idea have any appeal to you whatsoever? And there's a
few people just no, I just don't like it at all.
I'm like, that's fine. But out of people that are interested,
then a lot of it comes down to the question
(24:36):
of cost, not just financial, but also in terms of time.
And that's the main thing that I focused on in
my research is whether the time that people are spending
with their kids is actually either needlessly unpleasant or just
failing to deliver the benefits that they think, in which
case there's just a lot of the costs are actually
artificial costs that are caused by people's own, in turn
(25:00):
life theories about what they have to do, which.
Speaker 13 (25:02):
Might not be true.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So people potentially overstate how expensive in the time sense,
in particular, it would be to have kids.
Speaker 10 (25:10):
Write that, and on top of it, anyone who thinks
that kid doesn't get private schools destined to be a loser, Well,
we've got data on that, and the benefits are at
least a lot smaller than people imagine. So it's not
true that if you don't give your kids fancy private
schools or they don't go to the very top colleges,
that they're doom for disaster mediocrity in life.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Would you say, relative to the people who ask you
would ask you this, more of them should have kids
than think they should.
Speaker 10 (25:37):
Yeah, absolutely so anything. Most people have an exaggerated notion
of how much their children's future depends upon them being
miserable during the kid's childhood. And once you set that aside,
then step on obviously as well. If I don't have
to be miserable, I'm not going to be miserable. But
step two is, well, if kids are not automatically coming
(25:57):
with this big package of suffering, maybe I should rethink
the number that I want to have.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So what's my If my job is not to suffer,
what is the role of the parents.
Speaker 10 (26:07):
Well, of course there's always a little bit of suffering.
I'm not fool enough to deny that. I would say
that you think about yourself as your child's companion. What
is a child? A child is someone who is with
you for a great many years of your life. A
child is your companion. A child is your friend. A
child is the person that you are putting hopes and
dreams into. And you can do this with a negative attitude,
(26:31):
which it's up to you but I strongly recommend to
do it with a positive attitude, like you would with
any other person that you have a good relationship with.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Some of this feels that gets wrapped up in if
I have a relationship that I like or that I
find manageable, I'm able to have more kids? Does that link?
Speaker 9 (26:48):
Well?
Speaker 1 (26:48):
How you see that?
Speaker 10 (26:50):
There's this wonderful evidence from adoption studies and twin studies
on what is the parents matter for, what are they
not matter for? And especially where's the dial? Normally they'll
be at least some slight effect, but the effects are
bigger on some things at others. And what I say is,
when you go through all of this evidence, the most
meaningful effect of parenting is just on appreciation how your
child feels about you, the kind of person they see
(27:12):
you as. And to me, this is really the heart
of being a parent. Is the main thing that's in
my power is this relationship, which makes a lot of sense.
If you think about a kid as being a person,
as you should, they are people. If you think about, well,
so I should marry this person in order to mold
them into some other person, it's not.
Speaker 9 (27:31):
A good idea.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Generally, you need to roughly accept them as they are,
maybe try to send off some rough edges, but mostly
focus on enjoying your time together. Same with friends, same
with almost any good relationship. Try to focus on leading
a fulfilling life together rather than molding them. So that's
what I think of as the real heart of parenting.
It's like great many other kinds of positive relationships where
(27:55):
you enjoy spending time together without sitting around saying, yeah,
but what's the long run payoff? The payoffs?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Now, mostly there's one piece I think we definitely agree on,
which is that a lot of the things that parents
sort of sit around and obsess about, or at least
the kinds of parents that I think we probably talked
to a lot sit around obsessed about, don't matter as
much as they think they do or at all, And
that it would be you know, investing a lot of
(28:22):
time in trying to get your kid to the Junior Olympics,
like they're not going to the Junior Olympics in anyway.
Speaker 10 (28:27):
Oh yeah, yeah. And also, of course it's not very
fun for your kid for the parent to be miserable.
One to me, very meaningful study that I came across
when I was doing my kid's book is something called
the Ask the Children's Survey. We just asked a lot
of kids to give reviews of their parents, and one
of the most revealing things to me anyway, was very
(28:48):
few kids complain their parents don't have time for them. Instead,
what kids complain is that their parents are too angry, tired,
and stressed. And I was reading that, it's like, yeah,
that's a lot like your parents go and they're driving
you around to a bunch of functions that they don't
really feel like taking you to, and then they flip
out at you because he's tried to change the radio station.
And then it's like, well, wouldn't been better to have
(29:10):
just had a nice night together and not taken the
kid to a sport he doesn't even enjoy very much,
and then you would have been happy.
Speaker 14 (29:19):
I think part of it is that we've shifted to
a model of parenting, especially in those upper economic trenches,
that just sets the bar for parenthood too high, and
it causes people to miss out on a lot of
joy that they would otherwise have earlier in their life.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
This is Leah Lobrasco, sergeant writer at Otherfeminisms dot com
and author of several books, including the upcoming The Dignity
of Dependence, which explores how to create a world that
welcomes women and children. She has three children under five
and is also the mother of six others whom she
lost through miscarriage. You tweeted about going to Yale to
(29:55):
convince students to have more kids at younger ages. What's
your first argument to the kids for why they should
have kids sooner.
Speaker 14 (30:03):
I think the most basic reason is because kids are good,
and that you know you should be suspicious by default
of a culture that's telling you that these are goods
you have to wait to enjoy for a long time,
And because there's a tendency to overstate our own control
over our lives and our children, and then we lose
out on those goods. Ultimately, saying yes to children and
(30:24):
openness to children is a yes to a certain amount
of chaos. And whether you succeed in having children or not,
Acknowledging that reality that life is not totally authored by
you or under your control opens you up to the
richness of what your life can be.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
How did the students respond to that, You know, it
was interesting.
Speaker 14 (30:41):
We have varying speeches. The two major themes, one of
which I respect and one of which I don't. One
of the rebuttals was more of an environmental one of
just kids are bad, humans are mostly bad. We should
have fewer of all of these. You know, the student
giving the speech was tiptoeing pretty close to kind of
suicidal civilizational logic. Each individual person avoided, each life cut shorter,
(31:06):
fewer person lives on Earth is a net improvement for
the planet. It's an extremely college attitude. I would say,
of just this, what if everyone is bad, but you
want more people to go out of it than I
think are currently making it through that refreshman nihilism. Now,
the argument I respected a lot more came from a
(31:27):
young woman who would I think, position herself also on
the left, but was making a different critique. And she
just said, look, whenever women opt into having children, their
lives are more strongly differentiated from men, And in a
sexist society, encouraging women to have children is encouraging them
essentially to make their womanhood more salient, and that's bad
(31:48):
for them. And I think she's descriptively right. Right, in
a world that's hostile to children, children are dangerous to women.
But the kind of the alternative she's putting forward is
a strain in mainstream feminism is women are essentially received
by society as deficient men, and the feminist project is
helping us better pass for men or remedying those deficiencies,
(32:11):
not making a world where women are welcome as women.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So let's talk about moms and whether they can have
it all? Can they can they have a career and
be it? What is your feeling? Can we have it all?
Speaker 14 (32:22):
No one can have it all, So you're making choices
about trade offs, and everyone has to make those choices.
I think our society asks unjust things of both men
and women, and the valance of that unjust demand is
a little different. Women face more pressure to have it all,
a high powered career and kids, and you love your kids,
but you can't see your kids. You go and you
(32:43):
should feel guilty about all these things. And men face
the opposite pressure of there's less room for men's grief
about their lack of fatherhood, whether it's because they don't
have kids or because they are succeeding in a non
parental career track and they come home as their kids
are going to bed and they miss that. But there's
not as much conversation about that being a real loss
for them. Right, we just don't put caregiving at the
(33:03):
center of our society, and everyone, men and women pay
a price for that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It would be one thing to come to everyone and say, look,
if you want to have children, it's going to require
these trade offs, and that's something we're all going to
grapple with. I think the sort of current setup for
many people feels like men aren't going to have that
at all and women are going to have it a lot.
Let me be that person a little bit, the student
(33:28):
basically who would say, and I think I would have
said this at that time, like I did want kids,
and I also wanted a career, and I wanted fairness,
And it feels like we should be able to get
farther than we are, and that that has to be
part of the societal bargain, that no one could have
(33:50):
it all, but like, why am I having none of it?
Speaker 14 (33:53):
This is where I see a lot of the most
fruitful collaboration between the feminist community and the disability community,
because they're both basically making the claim we build our
society around too narrow a range of bodies and experiences,
and the question isn't just will we help women fit
a male mold better? Will we help someone who's in
a wheelchair fit a walking mold better?
Speaker 1 (34:13):
But do we build our.
Speaker 14 (34:14):
Buildings, our expectations, our careers to accommodate a wider range
of lived experience. And that's where you get something that
isn't so much just okay, well, you do want to
have a baby, I guess, so I guess we'll make
this closet for you to pump in if we have to.
But water's pretty clean, so formula would be better for us.
(34:36):
I've got nothing against breast pumps, but I think a
lot of our expectations around them are built around how
they serve your boss, not around how they serve you.
And so the question is more all right, well we
start with the assumption you're a mom. What will it
look like to accommodate a mother in this job or
in this workplace? And I think COVID has helped a
little bit because it just was a hard reset on
a lot of expectations we have around work and let
(34:58):
people explore a broader range of models, not all of
what you're compensated at the same level, but just having
a broader range of accommodations is good for women. It's
good for people with physical disabilities because it means we're
not all fitting one narrow mold.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
After the break, we'll tackle more tough questions about deciding
whether to have children. How do you make such a
significant decision when the future feels so uncertain, and how
can you be sure you won't regret it?
Speaker 15 (35:28):
Stay with us.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
My husband was a only child, and I growing up
had a sibling, and I do feel like part of
everyone is we're always all trying to just recreate our childhoods.
So I kind of always assumed that if I had
any kids at all, I would have two, and I
think he always assumed that if he had any kids
at all, it would be one. But we did start later.
By some doctors standards, I was geriatric by the time I.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Was birthing my son at thirty five, and I kind
of came to.
Speaker 9 (36:10):
This realization recently that I wish that we had had
a second earlier. But for me, I am no longer
open to going through all that again.
Speaker 15 (36:22):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Having children was never really like a question for me.
Speaker 16 (36:26):
My mom was a type of mom that took parenting
really seriously. And she always told me and my sister
that raising us was her most important job, and that
was always something that just really stuck with me and
became something that I also wanted to take on.
Speaker 13 (36:43):
I didn't have kids because I never felt the urge.
My husband didn't either, and I've seen how much work
they are most of my closest friends or parents, and
the amount of drudgery involved in raising children really requires
you to want them, because otherwise I think you'd feel resentful.
In fact, one of my friends just told me she
regrets having kids, and she did it out of societal pressure.
(37:04):
It's a hard decision to stick to, so much so
that I felt myself wavering in my late thirties and
early forties. But I'm glad I stick to my guns
and didn't bow to the pressure. It was definitely the
right decision for me.
Speaker 12 (37:15):
I decided to have kids because unlike my friends who
think that the world is ending and therefore how could
we bring kids into it, I think that fundamentally, how
can we possibly have a future without bringing more humans
into this world? And I believe that we have a
moral and religious and spiritual imperative to do the thing
(37:41):
that is most essential to who we are, which is procreation.
And as a woman, I believe that my biology is
my destiny and I can't imagine an unfolding of life
without being one with my biology.
Speaker 17 (38:02):
I have been thinking, like, I don't have a desire
to move to a commune or something, but I have
thought so often like if society was a little bit
more communal and we didn't have to raise our children
sort of within the tiny, tiny confines of the nuclear family,
I might want.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
To have a child. This is Helena Dugrutz, a podcast
producer who lives in New York, and it's been working
on a series about not having kids.
Speaker 17 (38:28):
If I could share the burden of child rearing with
a village, right as the saying goes, maybe part.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Of what's so interesting for me about this conversation is
this thinking I didn't feel it, and I think that
I find really resonant because I sort of from the
other side. If you had asked me, you know, did
you feel like you want to have kids? I would
have said from the beginning, like I always knew that
was something that I wanted, And in some ways I
(38:58):
did think about some practical parts of it, but not
very much because it was like, we're going to do this,
and it's just about sort of structuring around you know,
exactly how it seems like your decision started at this
like I don't have this feeling, but then has many
practical There's like a lot of not overthinking is probably
(39:21):
not quite the word I'm looking for it.
Speaker 17 (39:23):
Like if people say overthinking, I've done a.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Lot about this, Yeah, yeah, yeah, do you think that's
new to the world.
Speaker 17 (39:31):
What I hear when you ask that question is do
you think there were people in you know, before we
had reproductive choice, which okay, we don't. You know, it's
sort of debatable where exactly some of it, yes, Monica,
But before we had any I I probably think there
(39:51):
were people who were just like me who just never
had that feeling, who never had that desire, And it
terrifies me to know that they had no choice. I mean,
maybe they couldn't even imagine it because there just wasn't
really that scenario for them as an option, But I
can so imagine that there were people who felt trapped
(40:12):
their entire life as parents in a life that didn't
fit them. I don't think everyone is made to be
a parent. I'm so relieved to be born.
Speaker 18 (40:23):
When I am, there was a combination of a total
social expectation that unless you were going to become a
monk or a nun, and sometimes even then, right, this
was sort of what you were going to do, joined
to an absence of reliable contraceptives that meant that even
(40:44):
if you didn't intend to do it, you probably would.
Speaker 17 (40:47):
You know, you were.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Likely to have kids ross do that again.
Speaker 11 (40:51):
But it's a relatively novel situation where there's this sort
of sense of this as like this very conscious choice
that you have to make, and you have to choose
what point in your life cycle you're doing it, which
you know, in your twenties or your thirties, how soon
after you get married, whether you're getting married at all,
(41:11):
all of these things.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, we just never had to confront that before, because
of course you were going to have kids, because that's
just what people do after sex.
Speaker 11 (41:21):
Right, And I mean there is a sense in which,
as someone who now has by contemporary standards a lot
of kids, like, there are times when I sort of
find it unfathomable that people don't want this or sort
of setting up their lives in such a way that
this is deprioritized because I literally cannot imagine what kind
(41:42):
of meaning my life as a mid forties professional would
carry if it was not organized around my kids. But again,
from an outsider's perspective, that can look like Stockholm syndrome. Right,
It's like, well, yeah, you have all these tiny you know,
these tiny humans, and they're holding you hostage. You've learned
to love them, right, but you love your captor.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
The central question is, you know, should I have a kid? Yes,
on her.
Speaker 6 (42:10):
But I think the actual question is how do you
make a decision about a future that feels precarious.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
This is Gina Rushtan. She's a reproductive rights and women's
health reporter from Sydney, Australia. Most recently she wrote The
Parenthood Dilemma, a book about procreation in an age of uncertainty.
Do you think there's a rational argument to have kids? Yeah,
of course.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
You know, you very rarely speak to people who will
say that they regret having their children, because I think
that few people do you.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Talk about this idea of the impoverished epistemic position, which
is that you know the thing And I will say,
I am a person who has kids, and sometimes when
people ask me to describe the experience of that. It's
that it's both much harder and harder for my job
and harder for my marriage, and harder for like everything
about my life then I anticipated it would be. And
(43:02):
it's also the joy and the sort of connection to
my kids is something I wouldn't really be able to describe,
Like it's just so much different than any other life experience.
And so that's the piece I think you mean by that,
which is just until you have that experience, maybe it's
hard to hard to visualize both sides of it actually,
(43:25):
which makes it such a hard choice. It's like I'm
going to go into this world where I know there's
really big pluses and really big minuses, and I have
no ability to evaluate either of them. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (43:33):
Absolutely, it's one of those decisions where you cannot make
a pros and cons list because you don't know how
having or not having kids will change it as a person. Therefore,
like you can't make a serious of judgments about that
because like having kids transform you and not having kids
transforms you, and you just haven't met those two people
that you could be, or those two lives that you
(43:53):
could lead. It is new in the sense that, particularly
for women with all the constraints around fertility or the
constrains around reproduct rights. Of course, this is the most
choice we've ever had, and it's the most access many
people have had to the technologies that will let them
put off this decision as well. And that's exciting and
really something to celebrate that that, like, it is more
of a choice than it's ever been in some senses.
(44:16):
I think the other thing that people there's a bit
of debate about, like, well, you know, people had kids
through all sorts of wars and all sorts of crisises,
and like why is this time particularly unstabable and isn't
this just like millennial naval gazing? And I think that
that is true in a sense, like, of course people
were deciding to have or not have kids in really
(44:37):
precarious situations. But I do think that there are a
few factors, particularly around the climate of something.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
That it's not a war with a beginning and an end.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
It's something that will get, as far as we can tell,
progressively worse over the time in a way that I
don't know we've had a particular you know, political or
financial crisis that's been the same.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
I'm curious if you think there's a way that this generation,
the sort of millennial generation, was raised that makes them
approach the topic differently, like almost think about it more
like this question of like what am I passing on?
And am I going to repeat the problems of my parents?
I don't feel like my parents thought about that. Maybe
(45:23):
they had many complicated questions, but it was not that question.
This actually goes on to raising kids in general. But
in this it's almost like there's there's so much thinking
and I just wonder how that plays into this.
Speaker 6 (45:36):
There is And it's funny because you know, some of
the feedback, particularly from older people, has been like you're
just thinking too much, Like just stop thinking and just
make the decision.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
So if I told you people are morally obligated to
have children, yes or no? Oh that's a high on.
Speaker 6 (45:55):
My instinct is to say no. But I do like
entertaining it because I do think that in a world
where we're entertaining it, we could perhaps be entertaining policies
that actually make mother but all parenthood more tenable for people.
Speaker 14 (46:08):
No, people are morally obligated to be hospitable to children,
and that might look like having them yourselves. But you
just can't be part of actively or complicitly and making
the world hostile to children, because it's wrong, because it's
breaking a compact that you were part of as someone
who is once a child. And whether or not you
should have children is partly a personal discernment and partly
(46:29):
the factor of things outside your control.
Speaker 11 (46:31):
I don't think everyone has a moral obligation. What I
would say to most people is, if you think you
have something in your future that is as important for
society as future generations of human beings and is as
good for your own moral development as having kids, then
by all means do that instead of having kids. But
(46:52):
the odds that you're going to find those things are
maybe a little bit lower than you would think.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
So where does this leave us. I can't tell you
whether or not to have kids. It's not my style.
It's a personal decision, but also a financial one, a
religious one, and for some a political one. I feel
lucky to be born in a time, as Helena says,
in which we have a choice, and I also agree
with Leah that we need to make it easier on parents,
(47:31):
especially moms, and with Brian that kids can be more
fun than we sometimes admit. I also really resonate with
Ross's point that it's both harder and more joyful than
anything else I've ever experienced. Earlier in this episode, I
said to a guest that I couldn't even explain the
feeling of being a parent, but let me try. The
fundamental thing for me, at least, is to feel someone
(47:55):
else's joy and sadness so much more than your own.
When things are going well with my children, other setbacks
matter much less, And when things are not going well,
it's all consuming and impossible to find joy outside of it.
As I'm recording this, both of my children are at
sleep away camp, and I am spending my time refreshing
(48:17):
the camp website to see if they had added pictures.
They are simply everything. As a parent, you want nothing
more than to do the right thing for your children
and make the best choices for them, And at the
same time, it can be impossible to know what those
best choices are. Things crop up that you never thought about,
(48:38):
even with a second kid, probably even with a fifth kid.
The world and your child surprise you all the time,
and it's hard not to second guess yourself, even on
the small things. But here's the thing. You have way
less control than you think you do. You might ask, why,
if I know that to be true, have I spent
the last decades writing books about parenting. The answer is
(49:01):
that even if you don't have control, you have choices,
and those choices are important. The problem is that the
atmosphere about parenting rarely frames these choices in a way
that gives parents autonomy. We are not often given the
opportunity to think critically about the decisions we make. Instead,
we're expected to follow an arbitrary script, often without question,
(49:24):
and often one or two weak studies rapidly become conventional wisdom,
even if they're wrong. Parenting is among the most important
and meaningful experiences most of us will ever have, probably
the most important. I hope this series has taken some
of the stress out of parenting by arming you with
good information and perspectives that you don't often hear from
(49:47):
mainstream media or even from your parents or pediatrician. Because
we can do better, and data and information I hope
I've proven to you can help. Thanks for listening. Raising
(50:07):
Parents is a production in partnership with The Free Press.
It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks
as well to producer Tamar Abishai. The executive producer is
Candace Khan. Barry Weiss is the CEO and editor in
chief of the Free Press. And last, thanks to my
guest today Ross Juthat, Brian Kaplan, Leah Libresco Sargent, Helena Degrut,
(50:28):
and Gina Rushton. I'm Emily Ost. This has been raising
parents
This is parent data. I'm Emily Oster. Last fall, I
partnered with The Free Press to create and host an
incredible project, a limited series podcast called Raising Parents, where
we tackled hot button parenting issues from a data driven perspective.
We interviewed countless experts from all across the ideological spectrum,
(00:25):
many of whom both agreed and disagreed with one another
and with me and me with them, which is my favorite.
We looked at the impact of different parenting philosophies, from
gentle parenting to spanking. We looked at the role of
smartphones as it relates to our teens' mental health. We
looked at the different ways of feeding our kids, of
(00:45):
monitoring our kids, of medicating our kids. And the final
episode we released was ironically the biggest question of all,
the one that leads to all the others. Should you
have kids today? We're sharing this episode with you. The
focus is on the data. What's going on with our
(01:06):
global fertility rate, what we thought was going to happen
fifty years ago, that is overpopulation, and what has actually happened,
which is pretty much the opposite. We talk about climate
change and economic challenges and all the other reasons people
are waiting to have kids, if they plan to at all.
But we also get into the emotional side. I talk
(01:28):
to people who have made the decision not to have
kids and why. I talk about some of the reasons
we do have kids. We talk about how hard that
decision can be, both arriving at it and then defending it.
There's no right or wrong answer. As always, I am
a firm believer in doing what is best for you
(01:49):
and your family, whatever family means to you. It's what
makes the conversation so interesting and so important. I'm really
out of this series and especially of this episode, and
I am delighted to share it with you. You can
listen to the whole series on The Free Press's website
(02:10):
at THEFP dot com, slash Listen, Slash, Raising Dash Parents,
Dash with Dash, Emily dash Auster, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts. After the break, Raising Parents,
Episode eight, Should You Have Kids?
Speaker 2 (02:43):
I always wanted to have kids. There was never a question.
So I got older. I know if I ever dated
someone who didn't want to have kids, I just probably
would have well, I know I would have ended it
because there was no point. It was just always there
for me. I wanted to be there for someone, and
it's very rewarding. Husband and father really two most important titles.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
The idea of kids was literally that I would recoil
from the thought of that, because it seemed so phenomenally
on another planet that I was like, oh God, no,
there's no chance of that. I'm just living my life.
Speaker 4 (03:16):
I chose to have kids, I guess. I definitely thought
the world would be a better place with more of
me in it, no doubt.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
I was in the boat of two is ideal. And
then I got pregnant with our third, and now I
realize how people have many, many, many children because one
two of your third you're like, oh yeah, we just
like keep going.
Speaker 6 (03:38):
We got this down, Like we can, we can do this.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
It comes to talking about child free versus childless. For
some of us, it goes more towards the side of
oh yeah, I am so child free. I just never
thought about having children. Put my fist in the air
and declare with pride, Yeah, man, I am not responsible
for parenting anybody.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
For most of human history, having kids wasn't much of
a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited
autonomy for women delivered a limited set of options, say
have children or join the convent. But beginning in the
nineteen sixties, a combination of better birth control options and
(04:27):
better opportunities for women gave many more people a choice
about both how many children to have and whether they
should have any at all. Fast forward to today, many
more people are making the decision not to have children
at all, and for a wide range of reasons. People
tell me they don't want kids because of financial strain
(04:48):
or climate apocalypse. Others say they do want kids so
that they can heal generational trauma or give their first
kid a sibling. I once spoke to someone who told
me that it was important for him to have children
to pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that's an underlying motivation,
even if most people would not put it quite so directly.
(05:10):
Having children is a personal choice. However, it's a choice
that has broader implications. And what's undisputable is this Virtually
everywhere across the globe the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, fewer
children are being born. Having kids has become a strange
part of the culture wars. On one side, you have
(05:30):
pronatalist public figures like Elon Musk saying everyone needs to
have more kids now in order to save humanity. I
think he has twelve kids to date. And on the
other side you have people like climate activist Greta Thunberg
saying that the rising sea levels are so catastrophic that
having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But
(05:52):
what everyone can agree on is that the fertility rate
is plummeting in America but also around the world, and
in my life of work, the speed with which this
number is going down in the US is causing concern
for all of the economists in the room.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
Americans are not having babies anymore. The US fertility rate
fell to a record low, declining two percent from a
year ago. This marks the lowest rate recorded since the
government began tracking the data in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 8 (06:20):
Our fertility rate is below the replacement threshold. It's been
that way for several years since two thousand and seven,
which is basically the level our generation needs to replace itself.
And that falling birth rate and has implications obviously for
the economy For demographics, one.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
Of the first effects we will see is when social
security funds are expected to run low in the twenty thirties.
The lower birth rate in twenty twenty two will have
long term effects. In a couple of decades, there could
be a shortage of young adult workers.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The basic problem is that economic growth relies at least
in part on population growth, Plus the older population relies
on the younger population for support through contributions to social
security and taxes. But before we all panic, what does
the data say. Presently, American women on average have one
(07:12):
point six kids. In the nineteen fifties, it was three.
The replacement rate in the United States, which is the
fertility rate needed for a generation to exactly replace itself
without considering immigration, is approximately two point one berths per woman.
The average age of first time mothers has increased to
about twenty seven years old, up from twenty one point
(07:35):
four years in nineteen seventy. The proportion of Americans aged
sixty five and older is projected to almost double, increasing
from sixteen percent in twenty nineteen to twenty three percent
by twenty sixty. This shift means that nearly one in
four Americans will be in the senior age bracket. And
(07:55):
this isn't just happening in the US. From nineteen fifty
to twenty twenty one, the global total fertility rate more
than halved, falling from four point eighty four to two
point two to three, as many countries grew wealthier and
women had fewer babies. Notable highlights from the data include
sub Sharran, Africa, which has the highest fertility rate in
(08:18):
the world, but has dropped from six point three in
nineteen ninety to four point seven children per woman today.
South Korea, with the world's lowest fertility rate, has only
zero point seven to eight children per woman. So today
birth rates, personal decisions and their broader implications. After a
(08:40):
whole series focused on the state of our children, we
cap things off with a fundamental question, should you have kids?
And what happens if we all don't. I'm Emila Astro
and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents.
Speaker 8 (09:00):
Emily aust and Economists by Trade has gathered the data,
crunch the numbers, and is now debunking some of the
most controversial myths about parenthood.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
They're like, can I drink? You know you shouldn't have
like a lot?
Speaker 8 (09:15):
Where is this data coming from?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
The fundamental answer is we get data on people by
asking people about their behaviors and what they do, and
by collecting information on how their kids do.
Speaker 9 (09:24):
Poster doesn't shy away from other charge topics.
Speaker 8 (09:26):
People are using your database as an example as to
why schools should reopen.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
What kind of reaction did.
Speaker 8 (09:33):
You get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
It was a little controversial.
Speaker 10 (09:37):
Yes, you're an economist, You're not a doctor. I mean,
what do you think people are going to take away
from what you've written in this book?
Speaker 1 (09:42):
All that I'm trying to do here is really show women,
here is what the evidence is, and why don't you
think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode eight,
Should You Have Kids?
Speaker 11 (09:55):
I grew up in New Haven in the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties. At a certain point in high school,
I was assigned some kind of bulletin board project on
the intersection between science and some kind of major world
issue or trend, and I ended up choosing population.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
This is Ross Duthett. He's a New York Times columnist
and father of five children.
Speaker 11 (10:17):
And I went to the library as one did back
in the day, and went to the section of books
that were about that subject and Most of them seemed
to be written by Paul Erlik, who was quite famous
for a while as the profit of overpopulation and Doom.
And I checked out a number of those books, probably
(10:38):
The Population Bomb his original and then his follow up,
I think it was called The Population Explosion.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Those were sort of.
Speaker 11 (10:45):
Prophecies from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies about the
demographic tide overwhelming the world.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
That world population is increasing by twenty three people every
ten seconds.
Speaker 6 (10:57):
It's clear that world population both remains completely.
Speaker 9 (11:01):
Out of control. Look at what the year two thousand
will be.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Our cities are going to be choked with people. They're
going to be choked with traffic, they're going to be
choked with crime, they're.
Speaker 9 (11:10):
Going to be chokum with.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Pollution, and they will be impossible.
Speaker 11 (11:15):
As a good student, I compared those books prophecies to
what was actually happening in the world. And this was
about twenty five or thirty years ago. And even then
it was quite clear that for various reasons, Erlk's prophecies
of doom had not been fulfilled. His demographic projections no
(11:37):
longer matched what was happening really anywhere around the world.
But definitely didn't match what was happening in the developed world.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Paul Erlik wrote his book The Population Bomb in nineteen
sixty eight. He described the impacts of overpopulation in a
very visceral way. It was easy to make it scary.
He wrote about people dying from hunger because there literally
wouldn't be enough food, defeat everyone, sufficient calories, major political upheavals.
(12:04):
Every inch of the world would be looking like Bangladesh
in terms of density, poverty, and disease.
Speaker 11 (12:10):
Everywhere, and back then, especially in Western Europe and to
some extent East Asia, especially Japan, where you could see
that the trends were likely to go in the entirely
opposite direction. Basically that population was peaking and was going
to pass a peak and start declining, that the richest
(12:31):
parts of the world were going to get old, very
very rapidly, and that, in fact, most likely the big
demographic challenge of the twenty first century was going to
be not population growth but population decline.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And it's sort of amazing. I mean, we're talking about
the nineteen eighties when this was already sort of somewhat visible,
but the decline in fertility rates in the sort of
period leading off to that and continuing is pretty astonishing
because it isn't just the decline in more developed countries
(13:07):
which have gone from replacement to under replacement, but it's
an enormous decline in many of the places that were
the highest fertility rates even in the nineteen eighties. So
places that had seven to eight kid fertility rates are
now down to three or four even two. I mean
that the magnitude of that change over relatively short period
has been pretty astounding.
Speaker 11 (13:30):
Yes, what you just described is the change that's happened
from my bulletin board project to the present. Right, So
twenty five twenty five years ago, in the nineteen nineties,
whenever I was doing this, it wasn't quite as clear
what was going to happen to population in China, South Asia,
and Latin America. It was clear that they were not
(13:51):
going to fulfill sort of Airlick's worst case scenarios from
his perspective, right of just you know, too many people,
too many men to feed. But yeah, at that point,
it was clear that rich countries were going to get
old quite quickly. And what's become clear since then is
that middle income and even poorer countries can follow the
(14:12):
same trajectory. You don't have to become Denmark or the
Netherlands or Japan to enter into a shift not just
to replacement level fertility, but something below replacement, maybe even
well below replacement.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
The replacement rate is the average birth per woman a
country needs to maintain its population. Erlck was alarming, and
he was following an alarming tradition. Thomas Malthus in the
eighteen hundreds had a similar set of dire overpopulation predictions.
Erlck was also wrong. The predictions he made haven't come
to pass, but the tenor of this argument hasn't gone away.
(14:53):
In a way, it's transferred from overcrowding concerns to environmental
arguments for lower population, and to moral arguments about human suffering.
Part of the legacy of this work is the sense
that having more humans is just in some way bad.
According to one new Pew survey of adults under fifty,
the primary argument against having children is I just don't
(15:16):
want to. All of this makes it harder for people
to see the real risks of a declining fertility rate.
Speaker 11 (15:23):
You know, I'm a conservative crank, right, so I've been
talking about it that way for some time, though I
would say the trends of the last five years have
been sort of more alarming even than I expected. People
are sort of still surprised when they're confronted with some
of these demographic trends. There's still sort of just an
expectation that overpopulation is the main problem, which also then
(15:48):
is entangled with anxiety about climate change, where people will
either say, you know, well, clearly, the places where population
is still increasing sub Saharan Africa above all, are still
going to create some kind of overpopulation problem and also
contribute to climate change, or people will say, okay, well,
maybe we're getting demographic decline, but because of the threat
(16:11):
of climate change, we should welcome it.
Speaker 12 (16:14):
Right.
Speaker 11 (16:14):
There's both a certain uncertainty shading into denial about whether
this is really happening, and a kind of desire to
put an optimistic environmentalist interpretation on it. For most places,
the more realistic vision is old people dying alone in
large numbers place is emptying. So many more ghost towns,
(16:40):
rural areas emptying, but also potentially parts of cities emptying.
It's just sort of a picture of not so much
worn famine as deppopulation decay, and also kind of a
clustering effect in an age of population decline. And let's
say you have, you know, a country with eight major cities.
(17:03):
It's not that each of those cities declines in population.
It's that three of them decline in population, three of
them have their population increase because everybody moves to them, right,
because nobody wants to be in the declining places, and
two of them turn into you know, Detroit at its emptiest.
That's a weird future to get your mind around, I think.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
And what's at stake if we do that? I mean,
why is that bad?
Speaker 11 (17:28):
You can frame it in sort of economist friendly terms
and say, okay, this is a world of declining population.
Is a world that's going to have slower economic growth.
It's going to have less dynamism and less innovation. Older
populations are more change averse. They're less likely to come
up with new inventions. You know, when you have a
(17:49):
smaller and smaller group of younger workers supporting the welfare
states that rich countries have built up, that gets harder
and harder to sustain. Those kind of societies are going
to be more stagnant, less dynamic, less interesting in creative
places to live. And then also they're going to be
on the evidence we have now lonelier and unhappier places
(18:11):
to live. Now, we only have sort of a generation's
worth of data on what life in virtual reality looks like.
And it's possible that once you know Mark Zuckerberg and
Tim Cook perfect virtual reality goggles, that the Internet will
become a different place than it's been so far. But
(18:32):
right now, all of the data we have, I would say,
suggests that young people growing up in virtual spaces, in
a social media dominated social landscape, hanging out less in person,
spending less time with friends in reality and more time
with friends in the virtual, are unhappier in ways that
(18:52):
in turn seem to be compounding the low fertility dilemma.
They're unhappier, they're forming fewer relationships, They're less likely to
have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They're less likely to
have sex, they're less likely to get married, they're less
likely to have kids, and so the low fertility trap
itself gets deeper.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Tell me your best theory for why people are not
having children.
Speaker 11 (19:15):
I mean there's like seventeen theories, right, seventeen.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I mean, it's give me the best one. Ross.
Speaker 11 (19:20):
So trying to really simplify it. One, you just expect
fertility rates to fall naturally in the transition from an
agricultural society where kids are a net economic benefit in
obvious ways because you have farms and you need kids
(19:41):
to work on farms, to a contemporary society where kids
are something that in order for them to do well
in life, you mostly have to invest in them and
get less back, and you don't need their support in
the same way at least, you know, until there's stopp
being no kids at all, as long as you have
(20:03):
social Security and Medicare and so on. So there's sort
of an economic basis for shrinking family size that you
would expect. There's a health and wellness basis where people
used to have larger families in part because fewer kids
survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was very high until quite
recently in our history. So it's not the case that
(20:25):
most people in seventeen thirty, we're having thirteen kids and
all those kids were surviving to adulthood. Your family size
of sort of kids who grew successfully to adulthood would
always tend to be four or five six kids, not ten,
eleven or twelve. So again you expect birth rates to
decline as infant mortality goes down. You expect birth rates
(20:47):
to decline as you get more professional and economic opportunities
for women. That's sort of an obvious expectation that has
been fulfilled in every country we can see. So when
you put all those things together, it's very easy to
see why you would go from people having ten kids
to having five, or from having six kids to having three.
(21:09):
The harder question is why does fertility go from two
to three kids, which is what most people still say
they want, not just men but also women, you know,
both sexes in rich countries. If you ask you know,
what is your desired fertility, it's still going to be
around let's say two point four two point five, not
(21:31):
one point two or something. You know, that's the trillion
dollar question, right, because if fertility rates settled at two
point five, then populations would be stable or slightly increasing,
and you wouldn't have this kind of depopulated wasteland future
looming ahead. And there, I think you have to get
into some mixture of essentially just the sheer scale of
(21:56):
wealth and immediate pleasures available to people modern life that
make having kids seem like a special kind of burden
that you are more likely to postpone until you feel
completely ready.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
One thing I wanted to add to Ross's analysis here
is the question of social support. It's not lost on
me or most of us that support for children in
the US is pretty lousy. There's no national paid maternity leave,
there's limited childcare support. A lot of US look to
places like Sweden with its seemingly unending support for parents
(22:32):
and say, surely with that support there would be more children.
But in fact, fertility rates have gone down as much,
often more in those places than in the US, and
in general, policies which have tried to increase childbearing by
offering incentives to do so have fallen flat. This leaves
me back to Ross's final point, It must be something
(22:53):
else which explains this.
Speaker 10 (22:56):
The main thing I noticed is that most people make
their decision about do I let another based upon I
feel exhausted right now. I mean, I just think that
a lot of times people are making these decisions impulsively.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Meet Brian Kaplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University,
a New York Times bestselling author, and a father of four.
In his book Selfish Reasons, to have more kids. He
argues that raising children is actually less demanding and stressful
than many people think. He suggests that the current trend
of having fewer children might be because parents overestimate how
(23:31):
hard it is to raise a successful adult. Brian tries
to ease parents' worries so they can enjoy their kids
in the short term and consider having more children for
long term happiness.
Speaker 10 (23:44):
Like you wouldn't say I'm too tired to go and
shop for a dishwasher because I'm doing too many dishes,
And it's like, well, if you just put a little
investment in and get the dishwasher, then your life's is
going to be easier every day. So, like a lot
of times, if your life is hard, you've got to
do something and makes it worse for a little while
in order to make it better after that. And I
think there's definitely some part of having kids to that.
(24:06):
I'm like, I'm not crazy or blind. I do know
that the first couple weeks of any kids is really hard.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Why should people have kids?
Speaker 10 (24:14):
I mean, my honest answer is not everybody should. It depends,
but I don't want to leave it with that total
cop out. In particular, I start with well, does this
idea have any appeal to you whatsoever? And there's a
few people just no, I just don't like it at all.
I'm like, that's fine. But out of people that are interested,
then a lot of it comes down to the question
(24:36):
of cost, not just financial, but also in terms of time.
And that's the main thing that I focused on in
my research is whether the time that people are spending
with their kids is actually either needlessly unpleasant or just
failing to deliver the benefits that they think, in which
case there's just a lot of the costs are actually
artificial costs that are caused by people's own, in turn
(25:00):
life theories about what they have to do, which.
Speaker 13 (25:02):
Might not be true.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So people potentially overstate how expensive in the time sense,
in particular, it would be to have kids.
Speaker 10 (25:10):
Write that, and on top of it, anyone who thinks
that kid doesn't get private schools destined to be a loser, Well,
we've got data on that, and the benefits are at
least a lot smaller than people imagine. So it's not
true that if you don't give your kids fancy private
schools or they don't go to the very top colleges,
that they're doom for disaster mediocrity in life.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Would you say, relative to the people who ask you
would ask you this, more of them should have kids
than think they should.
Speaker 10 (25:37):
Yeah, absolutely so anything. Most people have an exaggerated notion
of how much their children's future depends upon them being
miserable during the kid's childhood. And once you set that aside,
then step on obviously as well. If I don't have
to be miserable, I'm not going to be miserable. But
step two is, well, if kids are not automatically coming
(25:57):
with this big package of suffering, maybe I should rethink
the number that I want to have.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
So what's my If my job is not to suffer,
what is the role of the parents.
Speaker 10 (26:07):
Well, of course there's always a little bit of suffering.
I'm not fool enough to deny that. I would say
that you think about yourself as your child's companion. What
is a child? A child is someone who is with
you for a great many years of your life. A
child is your companion. A child is your friend. A
child is the person that you are putting hopes and
dreams into. And you can do this with a negative attitude,
(26:31):
which it's up to you but I strongly recommend to
do it with a positive attitude, like you would with
any other person that you have a good relationship with.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Some of this feels that gets wrapped up in if
I have a relationship that I like or that I
find manageable, I'm able to have more kids? Does that link?
Speaker 9 (26:48):
Well?
Speaker 1 (26:48):
How you see that?
Speaker 10 (26:50):
There's this wonderful evidence from adoption studies and twin studies
on what is the parents matter for, what are they
not matter for? And especially where's the dial? Normally they'll
be at least some slight effect, but the effects are
bigger on some things at others. And what I say is,
when you go through all of this evidence, the most
meaningful effect of parenting is just on appreciation how your
child feels about you, the kind of person they see
(27:12):
you as. And to me, this is really the heart
of being a parent. Is the main thing that's in
my power is this relationship, which makes a lot of sense.
If you think about a kid as being a person,
as you should, they are people. If you think about, well,
so I should marry this person in order to mold
them into some other person, it's not.
Speaker 9 (27:31):
A good idea.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Generally, you need to roughly accept them as they are,
maybe try to send off some rough edges, but mostly
focus on enjoying your time together. Same with friends, same
with almost any good relationship. Try to focus on leading
a fulfilling life together rather than molding them. So that's
what I think of as the real heart of parenting.
It's like great many other kinds of positive relationships where
(27:55):
you enjoy spending time together without sitting around saying, yeah,
but what's the long run payoff? The payoffs?
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Now, mostly there's one piece I think we definitely agree on,
which is that a lot of the things that parents
sort of sit around and obsess about, or at least
the kinds of parents that I think we probably talked
to a lot sit around obsessed about, don't matter as
much as they think they do or at all, And
that it would be you know, investing a lot of
(28:22):
time in trying to get your kid to the Junior Olympics,
like they're not going to the Junior Olympics in anyway.
Speaker 10 (28:27):
Oh yeah, yeah. And also, of course it's not very
fun for your kid for the parent to be miserable.
One to me, very meaningful study that I came across
when I was doing my kid's book is something called
the Ask the Children's Survey. We just asked a lot
of kids to give reviews of their parents, and one
of the most revealing things to me anyway, was very
(28:48):
few kids complain their parents don't have time for them. Instead,
what kids complain is that their parents are too angry, tired,
and stressed. And I was reading that, it's like, yeah,
that's a lot like your parents go and they're driving
you around to a bunch of functions that they don't
really feel like taking you to, and then they flip
out at you because he's tried to change the radio station.
And then it's like, well, wouldn't been better to have
(29:10):
just had a nice night together and not taken the
kid to a sport he doesn't even enjoy very much,
and then you would have been happy.
Speaker 14 (29:19):
I think part of it is that we've shifted to
a model of parenting, especially in those upper economic trenches,
that just sets the bar for parenthood too high, and
it causes people to miss out on a lot of
joy that they would otherwise have earlier in their life.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
This is Leah Lobrasco, sergeant writer at Otherfeminisms dot com
and author of several books, including the upcoming The Dignity
of Dependence, which explores how to create a world that
welcomes women and children. She has three children under five
and is also the mother of six others whom she
lost through miscarriage. You tweeted about going to Yale to
(29:55):
convince students to have more kids at younger ages. What's
your first argument to the kids for why they should
have kids sooner.
Speaker 14 (30:03):
I think the most basic reason is because kids are good,
and that you know you should be suspicious by default
of a culture that's telling you that these are goods
you have to wait to enjoy for a long time,
And because there's a tendency to overstate our own control
over our lives and our children, and then we lose
out on those goods. Ultimately, saying yes to children and
(30:24):
openness to children is a yes to a certain amount
of chaos. And whether you succeed in having children or not,
Acknowledging that reality that life is not totally authored by
you or under your control opens you up to the
richness of what your life can be.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
How did the students respond to that, You know, it
was interesting.
Speaker 14 (30:41):
We have varying speeches. The two major themes, one of
which I respect and one of which I don't. One
of the rebuttals was more of an environmental one of
just kids are bad, humans are mostly bad. We should
have fewer of all of these. You know, the student
giving the speech was tiptoeing pretty close to kind of
suicidal civilizational logic. Each individual person avoided, each life cut shorter,
(31:06):
fewer person lives on Earth is a net improvement for
the planet. It's an extremely college attitude. I would say,
of just this, what if everyone is bad, but you
want more people to go out of it than I
think are currently making it through that refreshman nihilism. Now,
the argument I respected a lot more came from a
(31:27):
young woman who would I think, position herself also on
the left, but was making a different critique. And she
just said, look, whenever women opt into having children, their
lives are more strongly differentiated from men, And in a
sexist society, encouraging women to have children is encouraging them
essentially to make their womanhood more salient, and that's bad
(31:48):
for them. And I think she's descriptively right. Right, in
a world that's hostile to children, children are dangerous to women.
But the kind of the alternative she's putting forward is
a strain in mainstream feminism is women are essentially received
by society as deficient men, and the feminist project is
helping us better pass for men or remedying those deficiencies,
(32:11):
not making a world where women are welcome as women.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So let's talk about moms and whether they can have
it all? Can they can they have a career and
be it? What is your feeling? Can we have it all?
Speaker 14 (32:22):
No one can have it all, So you're making choices
about trade offs, and everyone has to make those choices.
I think our society asks unjust things of both men
and women, and the valance of that unjust demand is
a little different. Women face more pressure to have it all,
a high powered career and kids, and you love your kids,
but you can't see your kids. You go and you
(32:43):
should feel guilty about all these things. And men face
the opposite pressure of there's less room for men's grief
about their lack of fatherhood, whether it's because they don't
have kids or because they are succeeding in a non
parental career track and they come home as their kids
are going to bed and they miss that. But there's
not as much conversation about that being a real loss
for them. Right, we just don't put caregiving at the
(33:03):
center of our society, and everyone, men and women pay
a price for that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
It would be one thing to come to everyone and say, look,
if you want to have children, it's going to require
these trade offs, and that's something we're all going to
grapple with. I think the sort of current setup for
many people feels like men aren't going to have that
at all and women are going to have it a lot.
Let me be that person a little bit, the student
(33:28):
basically who would say, and I think I would have
said this at that time, like I did want kids,
and I also wanted a career, and I wanted fairness,
And it feels like we should be able to get
farther than we are, and that that has to be
part of the societal bargain, that no one could have
(33:50):
it all, but like, why am I having none of it?
Speaker 14 (33:53):
This is where I see a lot of the most
fruitful collaboration between the feminist community and the disability community,
because they're both basically making the claim we build our
society around too narrow a range of bodies and experiences,
and the question isn't just will we help women fit
a male mold better? Will we help someone who's in
a wheelchair fit a walking mold better?
Speaker 1 (34:13):
But do we build our.
Speaker 14 (34:14):
Buildings, our expectations, our careers to accommodate a wider range
of lived experience. And that's where you get something that
isn't so much just okay, well, you do want to
have a baby, I guess, so I guess we'll make
this closet for you to pump in if we have to.
But water's pretty clean, so formula would be better for us.
(34:36):
I've got nothing against breast pumps, but I think a
lot of our expectations around them are built around how
they serve your boss, not around how they serve you.
And so the question is more all right, well we
start with the assumption you're a mom. What will it
look like to accommodate a mother in this job or
in this workplace? And I think COVID has helped a
little bit because it just was a hard reset on
a lot of expectations we have around work and let
(34:58):
people explore a broader range of models, not all of
what you're compensated at the same level, but just having
a broader range of accommodations is good for women. It's
good for people with physical disabilities because it means we're
not all fitting one narrow mold.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
After the break, we'll tackle more tough questions about deciding
whether to have children. How do you make such a
significant decision when the future feels so uncertain, and how
can you be sure you won't regret it?
Speaker 15 (35:28):
Stay with us.
Speaker 9 (35:42):
My husband was a only child, and I growing up
had a sibling, and I do feel like part of
everyone is we're always all trying to just recreate our childhoods.
So I kind of always assumed that if I had
any kids at all, I would have two, and I
think he always assumed that if he had any kids
at all, it would be one. But we did start later.
By some doctors standards, I was geriatric by the time I.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Was birthing my son at thirty five, and I kind
of came to.
Speaker 9 (36:10):
This realization recently that I wish that we had had
a second earlier. But for me, I am no longer
open to going through all that again.
Speaker 15 (36:22):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Having children was never really like a question for me.
Speaker 16 (36:26):
My mom was a type of mom that took parenting
really seriously. And she always told me and my sister
that raising us was her most important job, and that
was always something that just really stuck with me and
became something that I also wanted to take on.
Speaker 13 (36:43):
I didn't have kids because I never felt the urge.
My husband didn't either, and I've seen how much work
they are most of my closest friends or parents, and
the amount of drudgery involved in raising children really requires
you to want them, because otherwise I think you'd feel resentful.
In fact, one of my friends just told me she
regrets having kids, and she did it out of societal pressure.
(37:04):
It's a hard decision to stick to, so much so
that I felt myself wavering in my late thirties and
early forties. But I'm glad I stick to my guns
and didn't bow to the pressure. It was definitely the
right decision for me.
Speaker 12 (37:15):
I decided to have kids because unlike my friends who
think that the world is ending and therefore how could
we bring kids into it, I think that fundamentally, how
can we possibly have a future without bringing more humans
into this world? And I believe that we have a
moral and religious and spiritual imperative to do the thing
(37:41):
that is most essential to who we are, which is procreation.
And as a woman, I believe that my biology is
my destiny and I can't imagine an unfolding of life
without being one with my biology.
Speaker 17 (38:02):
I have been thinking, like, I don't have a desire
to move to a commune or something, but I have
thought so often like if society was a little bit
more communal and we didn't have to raise our children
sort of within the tiny, tiny confines of the nuclear family,
I might want.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
To have a child. This is Helena Dugrutz, a podcast
producer who lives in New York, and it's been working
on a series about not having kids.
Speaker 17 (38:28):
If I could share the burden of child rearing with
a village, right as the saying goes, maybe part.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Of what's so interesting for me about this conversation is
this thinking I didn't feel it, and I think that
I find really resonant because I sort of from the
other side. If you had asked me, you know, did
you feel like you want to have kids? I would
have said from the beginning, like I always knew that
was something that I wanted, And in some ways I
(38:58):
did think about some practical parts of it, but not
very much because it was like, we're going to do this,
and it's just about sort of structuring around you know,
exactly how it seems like your decision started at this
like I don't have this feeling, but then has many
practical There's like a lot of not overthinking is probably
(39:21):
not quite the word I'm looking for it.
Speaker 17 (39:23):
Like if people say overthinking, I've done a.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Lot about this, Yeah, yeah, yeah, do you think that's
new to the world.
Speaker 17 (39:31):
What I hear when you ask that question is do
you think there were people in you know, before we
had reproductive choice, which okay, we don't. You know, it's
sort of debatable where exactly some of it, yes, Monica,
But before we had any I I probably think there
(39:51):
were people who were just like me who just never
had that feeling, who never had that desire, And it
terrifies me to know that they had no choice. I mean,
maybe they couldn't even imagine it because there just wasn't
really that scenario for them as an option, But I
can so imagine that there were people who felt trapped
(40:12):
their entire life as parents in a life that didn't
fit them. I don't think everyone is made to be
a parent. I'm so relieved to be born.
Speaker 18 (40:23):
When I am, there was a combination of a total
social expectation that unless you were going to become a
monk or a nun, and sometimes even then, right, this
was sort of what you were going to do, joined
to an absence of reliable contraceptives that meant that even
(40:44):
if you didn't intend to do it, you probably would.
Speaker 17 (40:47):
You know, you were.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Likely to have kids ross do that again.
Speaker 11 (40:51):
But it's a relatively novel situation where there's this sort
of sense of this as like this very conscious choice
that you have to make, and you have to choose
what point in your life cycle you're doing it, which
you know, in your twenties or your thirties, how soon
after you get married, whether you're getting married at all,
(41:11):
all of these things.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, we just never had to confront that before, because
of course you were going to have kids, because that's
just what people do after sex.
Speaker 11 (41:21):
Right, And I mean there is a sense in which,
as someone who now has by contemporary standards a lot
of kids, like, there are times when I sort of
find it unfathomable that people don't want this or sort
of setting up their lives in such a way that
this is deprioritized because I literally cannot imagine what kind
(41:42):
of meaning my life as a mid forties professional would
carry if it was not organized around my kids. But again,
from an outsider's perspective, that can look like Stockholm syndrome. Right,
It's like, well, yeah, you have all these tiny you know,
these tiny humans, and they're holding you hostage. You've learned
to love them, right, but you love your captor.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
The central question is, you know, should I have a kid? Yes,
on her.
Speaker 6 (42:10):
But I think the actual question is how do you
make a decision about a future that feels precarious.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
This is Gina Rushtan. She's a reproductive rights and women's
health reporter from Sydney, Australia. Most recently she wrote The
Parenthood Dilemma, a book about procreation in an age of uncertainty.
Do you think there's a rational argument to have kids? Yeah,
of course.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
You know, you very rarely speak to people who will
say that they regret having their children, because I think
that few people do you.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Talk about this idea of the impoverished epistemic position, which
is that you know the thing And I will say,
I am a person who has kids, and sometimes when
people ask me to describe the experience of that. It's
that it's both much harder and harder for my job
and harder for my marriage, and harder for like everything
about my life then I anticipated it would be. And
(43:02):
it's also the joy and the sort of connection to
my kids is something I wouldn't really be able to describe,
Like it's just so much different than any other life experience.
And so that's the piece I think you mean by that,
which is just until you have that experience, maybe it's
hard to hard to visualize both sides of it actually,
(43:25):
which makes it such a hard choice. It's like I'm
going to go into this world where I know there's
really big pluses and really big minuses, and I have
no ability to evaluate either of them. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (43:33):
Absolutely, it's one of those decisions where you cannot make
a pros and cons list because you don't know how
having or not having kids will change it as a person. Therefore,
like you can't make a serious of judgments about that
because like having kids transform you and not having kids
transforms you, and you just haven't met those two people
that you could be, or those two lives that you
(43:53):
could lead. It is new in the sense that, particularly
for women with all the constraints around fertility or the
constrains around reproduct rights. Of course, this is the most
choice we've ever had, and it's the most access many
people have had to the technologies that will let them
put off this decision as well. And that's exciting and
really something to celebrate that that, like, it is more
of a choice than it's ever been in some senses.
(44:16):
I think the other thing that people there's a bit
of debate about, like, well, you know, people had kids
through all sorts of wars and all sorts of crisises,
and like why is this time particularly unstabable and isn't
this just like millennial naval gazing? And I think that
that is true in a sense, like, of course people
were deciding to have or not have kids in really
(44:37):
precarious situations. But I do think that there are a
few factors, particularly around the climate of something.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
That it's not a war with a beginning and an end.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
It's something that will get, as far as we can tell,
progressively worse over the time in a way that I
don't know we've had a particular you know, political or
financial crisis that's been the same.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
I'm curious if you think there's a way that this generation,
the sort of millennial generation, was raised that makes them
approach the topic differently, like almost think about it more
like this question of like what am I passing on?
And am I going to repeat the problems of my parents?
I don't feel like my parents thought about that. Maybe
(45:23):
they had many complicated questions, but it was not that question.
This actually goes on to raising kids in general. But
in this it's almost like there's there's so much thinking
and I just wonder how that plays into this.
Speaker 6 (45:36):
There is And it's funny because you know, some of
the feedback, particularly from older people, has been like you're
just thinking too much, Like just stop thinking and just
make the decision.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
So if I told you people are morally obligated to
have children, yes or no? Oh that's a high on.
Speaker 6 (45:55):
My instinct is to say no. But I do like
entertaining it because I do think that in a world
where we're entertaining it, we could perhaps be entertaining policies
that actually make mother but all parenthood more tenable for people.
Speaker 14 (46:08):
No, people are morally obligated to be hospitable to children,
and that might look like having them yourselves. But you
just can't be part of actively or complicitly and making
the world hostile to children, because it's wrong, because it's
breaking a compact that you were part of as someone
who is once a child. And whether or not you
should have children is partly a personal discernment and partly
(46:29):
the factor of things outside your control.
Speaker 11 (46:31):
I don't think everyone has a moral obligation. What I
would say to most people is, if you think you
have something in your future that is as important for
society as future generations of human beings and is as
good for your own moral development as having kids, then
by all means do that instead of having kids. But
(46:52):
the odds that you're going to find those things are
maybe a little bit lower than you would think.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
So where does this leave us. I can't tell you
whether or not to have kids. It's not my style.
It's a personal decision, but also a financial one, a
religious one, and for some a political one. I feel
lucky to be born in a time, as Helena says,
in which we have a choice, and I also agree
with Leah that we need to make it easier on parents,
(47:31):
especially moms, and with Brian that kids can be more
fun than we sometimes admit. I also really resonate with
Ross's point that it's both harder and more joyful than
anything else I've ever experienced. Earlier in this episode, I
said to a guest that I couldn't even explain the
feeling of being a parent, but let me try. The
fundamental thing for me, at least, is to feel someone
(47:55):
else's joy and sadness so much more than your own.
When things are going well with my children, other setbacks
matter much less, And when things are not going well,
it's all consuming and impossible to find joy outside of it.
As I'm recording this, both of my children are at
sleep away camp, and I am spending my time refreshing
(48:17):
the camp website to see if they had added pictures.
They are simply everything. As a parent, you want nothing
more than to do the right thing for your children
and make the best choices for them, And at the
same time, it can be impossible to know what those
best choices are. Things crop up that you never thought about,
(48:38):
even with a second kid, probably even with a fifth kid.
The world and your child surprise you all the time,
and it's hard not to second guess yourself, even on
the small things. But here's the thing. You have way
less control than you think you do. You might ask, why,
if I know that to be true, have I spent
the last decades writing books about parenting. The answer is
(49:01):
that even if you don't have control, you have choices,
and those choices are important. The problem is that the
atmosphere about parenting rarely frames these choices in a way
that gives parents autonomy. We are not often given the
opportunity to think critically about the decisions we make. Instead,
we're expected to follow an arbitrary script, often without question,
(49:24):
and often one or two weak studies rapidly become conventional wisdom,
even if they're wrong. Parenting is among the most important
and meaningful experiences most of us will ever have, probably
the most important. I hope this series has taken some
of the stress out of parenting by arming you with
good information and perspectives that you don't often hear from
(49:47):
mainstream media or even from your parents or pediatrician. Because
we can do better, and data and information I hope
I've proven to you can help. Thanks for listening. Raising
(50:07):
Parents is a production in partnership with The Free Press.
It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks
as well to producer Tamar Abishai. The executive producer is
Candace Khan. Barry Weiss is the CEO and editor in
chief of the Free Press. And last, thanks to my
guest today Ross Juthat, Brian Kaplan, Leah Libresco Sargent, Helena Degrut,
(50:28):
and Gina Rushton. I'm Emily Ost. This has been raising
parents
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