The idea that fighting your friends with foam swords is a much better hobby than drinking is… an unbelievably based idea, and I love the way you’ve put it.
What if – and hear me out – we fight our friends with foam swords WHILE drinking?? Actually, now that I think of it, the local Renaissance fair to which I take my kids every year does get pretty saucy by the end of the day...
I must be the only guy in the world to have had a terrible experience as an outcast kid, bullied by a bunch of ugly, despicable kids, while the adults in the room were turning a blind eye.
Kids are adults in the making. They are just as terrible as the adults they become; their nefariousness is just limited by their size and influence.
I made a conscious decision not to have kids precisely because I did not want my offsprings to experience what I did at the hands of the wonderful and totally mythical creatures described in the piece.
Having kids is one mistake I did not make.
I will go have a glass of tap water now to celebrate this insignificant victory.
I think it's useful to point out that, if you were to have kids, you would then become one of those adults in the room. And therefore you would find yourself in a natural position to reduce the incidence of the sort of bullying you describe.
Also, I enjoyed the assertion "[kids] are just as terrible as the adults they become; their nefariousness is just limited by their size and influence" - maybe the best expression of misanthropy I have ever come across. It's not easy to convey an idea with both thoroughness and pithiness.
Agree on the merits of kids. Many things in life become magical when you do them with children. Ever go to the zoo by yourself? It's fine. But go with a four year old and it's an amazing wonderland. If you can set your ego aside and remember how to pretend, playing with a young child on a jungle gym is lots of fun too.
I would just add that adults are simply overgrown kids. How do you keep from turning into a sour, boring adult? Interact with kids!
The "do you have kids" response seems both completely wrong, and a very good explanation of what's going on. I have kids, and it has improved my life and led me to want more kids. I think people who have kids understand the downsides, but also I do think most parents recognize that on net kids are worth it. But at the same time, there's sort of like a propaganda war that takes kids as self-evidently bad.
I always remember the fake commercial going around with the 4 year old melting down at the grocery and at the end it says "use condoms." You never see a family enjoying a nice picnic and it say "don't get FOMO."
I, personally, wouldn't. I would take 5 or 10 happy outdoor trips with my favorite young relatives (no kids yet) in exchange for 1 Walmart meltdown. Maybe I would take 2 for 1. Hard to say. Probably.
Dunno... It feels that most responses from people who have kids are false because there's a high social cost to saying 'actually, I had children and it made my life worse, and didn't give it a meaning it didn't already have'.
As a (very) new father, so much of the reason people don't want kids has recently become obvious! Sleepless nights, no partner intimacy, more arguments, a big chunk of your freedom taken away, less time for other hobbies, and basically no plus-side except a cute, helpless, soulless little thing that can only communicate through wailing... and perhaps old ladies being a bit nicer to you for a few minutes a day.
Even as someone who: 1) Likes kids more than my median friend (I was a teacher for 5 years, and grew to like even the shittiest of the kids); 2) Is more "meaning-driven" and less hedonic than my median friend, and 3) has more parental/in-law pressure to have kids than my median friend, it still feels... perhaps not foolish, but just an odd choice.
As a choice, it feels less like getting married or deciding to go to do a masters degree, and more like committing to converting 100 acres of Amazonian farmland into jungle over a 15 year period. As in, I'm sure it will be interesting, fun (after a couple of years...) and a new challenge that might make my life more meaningful, but it in no way seems like a normal or obvious choice.
This probably explains why the birth rate will continue to decline. It will just seem like an increasingly strange, unintuitive choice to have kids.
I actually found more time for my hobbies when I had a newborn. All she did was sit there, so I could just play videogames all day with her in my lap. Occasionally I paused the game to change her, feed her, or do tummy time. It was awesome. I also got a lot of reading done and watched the highest grossing movies of the 1990s, and saw all the Bond films.
No idea why you think Tyler is implying adults are better than kids (they are of course, but I’ll get to that later). You don’t have to spend nearly as much effort and resources taking care of your adult friends as your kids, and you can get away from the firmer but are stuck with the latter all day, every day, for 20 years.
But also, children are horrible conversationalists, aren’t very intelligent, and rarely have interesting stories.
Like many people writing on fertility, it just seems like you struggle to really comprehend that people have vastly different preferences from you. Many people just don’t really enjoy spending time with kids. It would be work. This seems akin to not grasping some people don’t share your taste in food or enjoy the same hobbies. It’s not that we’ve never met kids and have no idea what they’re like; I’ve been around a lot of kids and know that I wouldn’t enjoy spending most of my waking hours with small children. As others have pointed out, this is why such extensive subsidies are required to even modestly boost fertility: for many or most people, fraternizing with children simply isn’t as fun as it is for you.
I imagine an economist would analyze kids vs adults via revealed preference. When people have the option to interact with either, who do they choose to interact with?
Having kids & spending time with them was the biggest highlight of my husband’s & my lives. We both separately said we should’ve had another one after our youngest of four went off to college.
Notice a more basic problem with Tyler's comment. As Charley Hooper and I explain in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, you can't explain a change by pointing to something that's constant.
One thing that has changed, I think, are the expectations for parental time investments in children. If you look at the parenting strategies that many parents adopt (myself included), they simply cannot scale up to a large family. Thus, people seem completely baffled by how parents could possibly raise a family with six children, or more. There's an unstated assumption that some degree of neglect must be occurring. They don't realize that large families employ a different parenting technology. My grandfather was the third of fifteen children (all 15 from the same two parents). He did not spend hours of one-on-one time with his mom or dad doing "enrichment activities." He did spend a lot of time playing with his (many) siblings. And his parents did spend time with the children, though typically in a group setting of some sort (mom reading to all the children together, for instance).
I have seven, and beneath the surface level "are you insane?" and "are you super-religious?" (we're not religious at all) questions, there's always a stigma associated with big families, the idea that they can't control their children as well as people with two. Luckily, there are several other families who have five or six young kids in our town, and we look out for each other. But I always feel judged.
When a parent with 1-2 kids sees such a big family, it's an unsolicited reminder of their own decision against having more kids. And (for many people) that is one of those decisions they prefer to keep walled off from reconsideration, which is easier to do around other small families, and harder to do when your pack of howl-at-the-moon kids is running all over town withholding external validation, lol. Fwiw I think your happiness with those trade-offs will increase over time, cheers.
Funny thing is, I don't remotely care if you have 0 kids or 10, and neither does anyone in my big family friends. You do you--I'm too busy cleaning up spit up from the youngers and cheering on the olders to worry about someone else's choices.
I don't helicopter parent, but extra kids are extra expense. Especially once we got past two, it becomes hard for both parents to work. Daycare is crazy expensive. After 2020 we simply won't do public school, so that tuition bill keeps going even when they are five. You don't need to be a helicopter parent to want them to play some sports and do other activities growing up. You need an bigger hotel room, a bigger car, a bigger house.
A lot of these problems could be solved by just returning some of my taxes in acknowledgment of all these future social security revenue generators I'm paying to raise.
That depends on what you consider boring. What I want to do with my time mostly involves low-pressure, escapist-themed, tactical and strategic thinking. I.e. board games and computer games. My two year old son is not capable of this. What he wants to do is explore the laws of physics and pretend to engage in mundane activities like driving a car or washing dishes. Neither set of preferences is objectively "boring", but young children's preferred activites are likely to bore most adults.
> Kids are much more honest than adults.
Arrant nonsense. Kids lie routinely and constantly. They have no social censor, true. But they are definitely not honest.
> Kids are much less conformist than adults.
Again, this is nonsense. Kids are vastly more conformist by instinct than adults. Young children don't understand the rules they are expected to conform to. But that's not the same as being non-conformist.
> Kids have better imaginations than adults.
OK, this one is true.
> Kids have much better hobbies than adults. A large share of grown-up recreation revolves around alcohol consumption.
Plausibly true, but I suspect this is mostly because they have more free time.
> Kids hold far fewer grudges than adults.
I grant you this one as well.
> Kids express far more joy and love than adults.
I.e. they are more emotional. Definitely true, but I do not regard this as a virtue.
> Kids have more time for you than adults.
See more free time.
> Kids are more likely to teach you new things than adults.
Definitely not my experience, but my children are pretty young (under 5). Could see this being true of older kids.
Kids are better than adults for sure, but I don’t know a single mom who isn’t completely overwhelmed. I think that’s the disconnect. As much as I love being around my nieces all the time and helping out as much as I can, I don’t want to be a parent. There’s not enough support.
When I was a child, I had little time for other children. Adults were more interesting, knew more, could offer useful insights when offered a crazy scenario. Most kids (boys) I knew wanted to talk about sports or, as they got older, rock bands (video games were a thing of the future). And then there were the bullies.
When I became an adult, I noticed that children were mostly fine - and appeared to think I was fine. But I seemed not to interest them, nor they me.
Then, through traumatic events affecting a young friend who had just finished college, I learned about "family law" and "child support".
Society's message was loud and clear: unless having a child is the most important priority in your life, do not risk fatherhood (in or out of wedlock) - because if you do and the mother so chooses, we will treat you like a felon on 20-year parole. For one child we will take a quarter (or so) of your pretax income potential. This will not be an additional income tax: it will be an assessment and you will owe it even if you earn less than we expect or are temporarily out of work. It will not actually go to the child, nor need any of it be spent on the child. It may greatly exceed the cost to raise the child yourself, and we will not limit it. We will subject you to regular intrusive monitoring of your income potential. If you fail to pay, you will go to jail. You will be accorded the rights of an income-generating human property (and there's a name for that). And, if you get married, or have more than one child, all that's just the beginning!
Like many young adults, I dreamed of finding "the one" and although I wasn't enthusiastic about children I knew that "the one" was likely to want some, which was a tradeoff I could make peace with. Kids, while uninteresting, seemed generally okay. I might even like them, who knew? It might be fun.
But at that price?
Before I was 30 - decades ago, now - I had very reluctantly arrived at my answer. I abandoned the search for "the one". I do not have children. Yes, I might well have been happier on the traditional path, had it worked out well. But society made its preferences very clear, and the penalties very compelling. I did what society wanted - so don't come to me now and ask why.
I worry that for many people, one overriding desire is to be left alone. Obviously there is a balance to be struck here - few or no people want to be really alone permanently. But people guard their alone time. And kids are a serious tax on that -- young kids in particular do not leave their parents be.
I think Bryan is right that there's more joy to be found in relating to other people than most realize. Modern society has swung too far towards atomization and a lack of close personal relationships. But those relationships can indeed be hard.
Oh, and on a different topic -- the fact that we can now have a meaningful option to have sex without having kids is historically anomalous.* Healthy young people generally want sex (the desire manifests differently in men versus women, but both are so feel sexual desire). For most of history, this would naturally lead to kids. Broad access to mostly-effective birth control puts us in uncharted territory.
*I am aware that birth control methods existed historically, but aside from straight abstinence, they were significantly less reliable than modern methods.
I’ve finally learned how to play chess properly in the process of teaching my son. Now we have a chess club with his buds. Kids are the best. Wish I had more and sooner.
The idea that fighting your friends with foam swords is a much better hobby than drinking is… an unbelievably based idea, and I love the way you’ve put it.
What if – and hear me out – we fight our friends with foam swords WHILE drinking?? Actually, now that I think of it, the local Renaissance fair to which I take my kids every year does get pretty saucy by the end of the day...
Might I direct your attention to SCA.org
I must be the only guy in the world to have had a terrible experience as an outcast kid, bullied by a bunch of ugly, despicable kids, while the adults in the room were turning a blind eye.
Kids are adults in the making. They are just as terrible as the adults they become; their nefariousness is just limited by their size and influence.
I made a conscious decision not to have kids precisely because I did not want my offsprings to experience what I did at the hands of the wonderful and totally mythical creatures described in the piece.
Having kids is one mistake I did not make.
I will go have a glass of tap water now to celebrate this insignificant victory.
: )
I think it's useful to point out that, if you were to have kids, you would then become one of those adults in the room. And therefore you would find yourself in a natural position to reduce the incidence of the sort of bullying you describe.
Also, I enjoyed the assertion "[kids] are just as terrible as the adults they become; their nefariousness is just limited by their size and influence" - maybe the best expression of misanthropy I have ever come across. It's not easy to convey an idea with both thoroughness and pithiness.
Have you found the valance of your adult social experience to be similar?
Agree on the merits of kids. Many things in life become magical when you do them with children. Ever go to the zoo by yourself? It's fine. But go with a four year old and it's an amazing wonderland. If you can set your ego aside and remember how to pretend, playing with a young child on a jungle gym is lots of fun too.
I would just add that adults are simply overgrown kids. How do you keep from turning into a sour, boring adult? Interact with kids!
I hope you realise that if I describe that as a very childish article, it is a huge compliment.
;-)
The "do you have kids" response seems both completely wrong, and a very good explanation of what's going on. I have kids, and it has improved my life and led me to want more kids. I think people who have kids understand the downsides, but also I do think most parents recognize that on net kids are worth it. But at the same time, there's sort of like a propaganda war that takes kids as self-evidently bad.
I always remember the fake commercial going around with the 4 year old melting down at the grocery and at the end it says "use condoms." You never see a family enjoying a nice picnic and it say "don't get FOMO."
Right - because people have loss aversion, and downsides matter more emotionally and are more salient than upsides.
So people would happily give up 2, or 5, or 10 picnics with kids to avoid one public meltdown.
I, personally, wouldn't. I would take 5 or 10 happy outdoor trips with my favorite young relatives (no kids yet) in exchange for 1 Walmart meltdown. Maybe I would take 2 for 1. Hard to say. Probably.
Dunno... It feels that most responses from people who have kids are false because there's a high social cost to saying 'actually, I had children and it made my life worse, and didn't give it a meaning it didn't already have'.
As a (very) new father, so much of the reason people don't want kids has recently become obvious! Sleepless nights, no partner intimacy, more arguments, a big chunk of your freedom taken away, less time for other hobbies, and basically no plus-side except a cute, helpless, soulless little thing that can only communicate through wailing... and perhaps old ladies being a bit nicer to you for a few minutes a day.
Even as someone who: 1) Likes kids more than my median friend (I was a teacher for 5 years, and grew to like even the shittiest of the kids); 2) Is more "meaning-driven" and less hedonic than my median friend, and 3) has more parental/in-law pressure to have kids than my median friend, it still feels... perhaps not foolish, but just an odd choice.
As a choice, it feels less like getting married or deciding to go to do a masters degree, and more like committing to converting 100 acres of Amazonian farmland into jungle over a 15 year period. As in, I'm sure it will be interesting, fun (after a couple of years...) and a new challenge that might make my life more meaningful, but it in no way seems like a normal or obvious choice.
This probably explains why the birth rate will continue to decline. It will just seem like an increasingly strange, unintuitive choice to have kids.
You are in the midst of the hardest part of the journey. It will get better
And if you create a sibling (or more) for your kid, it gets even easier
And sometimes you get lucky and get a newborn who sleeps through the night at 4 weeks. Good luck!
I actually found more time for my hobbies when I had a newborn. All she did was sit there, so I could just play videogames all day with her in my lap. Occasionally I paused the game to change her, feed her, or do tummy time. It was awesome. I also got a lot of reading done and watched the highest grossing movies of the 1990s, and saw all the Bond films.
Agree during the day. How was her sleep at night?
No idea why you think Tyler is implying adults are better than kids (they are of course, but I’ll get to that later). You don’t have to spend nearly as much effort and resources taking care of your adult friends as your kids, and you can get away from the firmer but are stuck with the latter all day, every day, for 20 years.
But also, children are horrible conversationalists, aren’t very intelligent, and rarely have interesting stories.
Like many people writing on fertility, it just seems like you struggle to really comprehend that people have vastly different preferences from you. Many people just don’t really enjoy spending time with kids. It would be work. This seems akin to not grasping some people don’t share your taste in food or enjoy the same hobbies. It’s not that we’ve never met kids and have no idea what they’re like; I’ve been around a lot of kids and know that I wouldn’t enjoy spending most of my waking hours with small children. As others have pointed out, this is why such extensive subsidies are required to even modestly boost fertility: for many or most people, fraternizing with children simply isn’t as fun as it is for you.
I expect your kids are far from representative.
I imagine an economist would analyze kids vs adults via revealed preference. When people have the option to interact with either, who do they choose to interact with?
Most people would chose the kids than having to interact with an economist, so there's that
Besides, he's going to be extremely viased to his own kids.
Having kids & spending time with them was the biggest highlight of my husband’s & my lives. We both separately said we should’ve had another one after our youngest of four went off to college.
You sound like you’re in the 20% of adults that aren’t duds :)
An adult gets an automatic status boost among children. We can lose it quickly and permanently, but it’s not difficult to keep.
Notice a more basic problem with Tyler's comment. As Charley Hooper and I explain in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, you can't explain a change by pointing to something that's constant.
One thing that has changed, I think, are the expectations for parental time investments in children. If you look at the parenting strategies that many parents adopt (myself included), they simply cannot scale up to a large family. Thus, people seem completely baffled by how parents could possibly raise a family with six children, or more. There's an unstated assumption that some degree of neglect must be occurring. They don't realize that large families employ a different parenting technology. My grandfather was the third of fifteen children (all 15 from the same two parents). He did not spend hours of one-on-one time with his mom or dad doing "enrichment activities." He did spend a lot of time playing with his (many) siblings. And his parents did spend time with the children, though typically in a group setting of some sort (mom reading to all the children together, for instance).
I have seven, and beneath the surface level "are you insane?" and "are you super-religious?" (we're not religious at all) questions, there's always a stigma associated with big families, the idea that they can't control their children as well as people with two. Luckily, there are several other families who have five or six young kids in our town, and we look out for each other. But I always feel judged.
I'm always fascinated by people without a religious community who have a lot of kids. How do you do it without social support?
With a massive chip on my shoulder and an acknowledgment that most days I'm pretty happy with the trade-offs I've made.
When a parent with 1-2 kids sees such a big family, it's an unsolicited reminder of their own decision against having more kids. And (for many people) that is one of those decisions they prefer to keep walled off from reconsideration, which is easier to do around other small families, and harder to do when your pack of howl-at-the-moon kids is running all over town withholding external validation, lol. Fwiw I think your happiness with those trade-offs will increase over time, cheers.
Funny thing is, I don't remotely care if you have 0 kids or 10, and neither does anyone in my big family friends. You do you--I'm too busy cleaning up spit up from the youngers and cheering on the olders to worry about someone else's choices.
I don't helicopter parent, but extra kids are extra expense. Especially once we got past two, it becomes hard for both parents to work. Daycare is crazy expensive. After 2020 we simply won't do public school, so that tuition bill keeps going even when they are five. You don't need to be a helicopter parent to want them to play some sports and do other activities growing up. You need an bigger hotel room, a bigger car, a bigger house.
A lot of these problems could be solved by just returning some of my taxes in acknowledgment of all these future social security revenue generators I'm paying to raise.
Good point.
Bryan seemed to be alluding to that when he asked why it took so long.
I agree. I just like seeing the point made explicitly as well as obliquely.
> Kids are much less boring than adults.
That depends on what you consider boring. What I want to do with my time mostly involves low-pressure, escapist-themed, tactical and strategic thinking. I.e. board games and computer games. My two year old son is not capable of this. What he wants to do is explore the laws of physics and pretend to engage in mundane activities like driving a car or washing dishes. Neither set of preferences is objectively "boring", but young children's preferred activites are likely to bore most adults.
> Kids are much more honest than adults.
Arrant nonsense. Kids lie routinely and constantly. They have no social censor, true. But they are definitely not honest.
> Kids are much less conformist than adults.
Again, this is nonsense. Kids are vastly more conformist by instinct than adults. Young children don't understand the rules they are expected to conform to. But that's not the same as being non-conformist.
> Kids have better imaginations than adults.
OK, this one is true.
> Kids have much better hobbies than adults. A large share of grown-up recreation revolves around alcohol consumption.
Plausibly true, but I suspect this is mostly because they have more free time.
> Kids hold far fewer grudges than adults.
I grant you this one as well.
> Kids express far more joy and love than adults.
I.e. they are more emotional. Definitely true, but I do not regard this as a virtue.
> Kids have more time for you than adults.
See more free time.
> Kids are more likely to teach you new things than adults.
Definitely not my experience, but my children are pretty young (under 5). Could see this being true of older kids.
> Kids are much less jaded than adults.
Yes.
Kids are better than adults for sure, but I don’t know a single mom who isn’t completely overwhelmed. I think that’s the disconnect. As much as I love being around my nieces all the time and helping out as much as I can, I don’t want to be a parent. There’s not enough support.
Just think of all the time saved by washing machines, dishwashers, and premade food!
When I was a child, I had little time for other children. Adults were more interesting, knew more, could offer useful insights when offered a crazy scenario. Most kids (boys) I knew wanted to talk about sports or, as they got older, rock bands (video games were a thing of the future). And then there were the bullies.
When I became an adult, I noticed that children were mostly fine - and appeared to think I was fine. But I seemed not to interest them, nor they me.
Then, through traumatic events affecting a young friend who had just finished college, I learned about "family law" and "child support".
Society's message was loud and clear: unless having a child is the most important priority in your life, do not risk fatherhood (in or out of wedlock) - because if you do and the mother so chooses, we will treat you like a felon on 20-year parole. For one child we will take a quarter (or so) of your pretax income potential. This will not be an additional income tax: it will be an assessment and you will owe it even if you earn less than we expect or are temporarily out of work. It will not actually go to the child, nor need any of it be spent on the child. It may greatly exceed the cost to raise the child yourself, and we will not limit it. We will subject you to regular intrusive monitoring of your income potential. If you fail to pay, you will go to jail. You will be accorded the rights of an income-generating human property (and there's a name for that). And, if you get married, or have more than one child, all that's just the beginning!
Like many young adults, I dreamed of finding "the one" and although I wasn't enthusiastic about children I knew that "the one" was likely to want some, which was a tradeoff I could make peace with. Kids, while uninteresting, seemed generally okay. I might even like them, who knew? It might be fun.
But at that price?
Before I was 30 - decades ago, now - I had very reluctantly arrived at my answer. I abandoned the search for "the one". I do not have children. Yes, I might well have been happier on the traditional path, had it worked out well. But society made its preferences very clear, and the penalties very compelling. I did what society wanted - so don't come to me now and ask why.
Good piece; there is a lot to think about here.
I worry that for many people, one overriding desire is to be left alone. Obviously there is a balance to be struck here - few or no people want to be really alone permanently. But people guard their alone time. And kids are a serious tax on that -- young kids in particular do not leave their parents be.
I think Bryan is right that there's more joy to be found in relating to other people than most realize. Modern society has swung too far towards atomization and a lack of close personal relationships. But those relationships can indeed be hard.
> I worry that for many people, one overriding desire is to be left alone.
To rot and die doomscrolling and consuming BS social media content
Oh, and on a different topic -- the fact that we can now have a meaningful option to have sex without having kids is historically anomalous.* Healthy young people generally want sex (the desire manifests differently in men versus women, but both are so feel sexual desire). For most of history, this would naturally lead to kids. Broad access to mostly-effective birth control puts us in uncharted territory.
*I am aware that birth control methods existed historically, but aside from straight abstinence, they were significantly less reliable than modern methods.
The idea that they were less reliable in practice is false. It was spread by sex educators trying to scare kids away from sex.
Observe the TFR in France starting in the late 1800s
Pre-moderns knew how to not conceive
Docendo discimus
I’ve finally learned how to play chess properly in the process of teaching my son. Now we have a chess club with his buds. Kids are the best. Wish I had more and sooner.