Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
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Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?
But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something.
After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . .
. . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Caplan’s main argument is:
We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful.
But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or inscrutable random seeds plus noise.
So you can relax. Don’t run yourself ragged rushing your kids to gymnastics classes they don’t even like.
If you ask parents whether they’re happy, you get different answers depending on what exact framing you use; it’s kind of a tossup. But people who understand and internalize the points above will have a better time than average. So for them, kids are probably a great bet.
I buy the behavioral genetics. I buy the ambiguous happiness results. But how long do parents really spend on childcare, and how easily can those numbers be cut?
How Long Do Parents Really Spend On Childcare?
Caplan’s most striking statistic is that fathers now spend more time with their kids than mothers did in 1960 - not because gender roles have changed, but because both parents’ workload has been growing in tandem. Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.
I can’t reach Caplan’s specific source (Bianchi et al, Changing Rhythms Of American Family Life), but his claims broadly match the data in Dotti Sani & Treas (2016):
All these numbers are kind of low, aren’t they? Do both parents, combined, really only spend three hours a day with their children?! My wife and I combined spend approximately four thousand hours per day with our kids! Is that what we’re doing wrong - the dragon that we must slay before we enter Caplan’s easy-parenting paradise?
My wife eventually found Wilkie and Cullen (2023), an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.
But where DS&T seem too low, these seem too high. When a child is one year old, mothers spend 7.5 hours a day, and fathers 5 hours? Don’t some of these mothers and fathers have to work? Don’t some people put their kids in daycare? Even at age nine, W&C say both parents are spending a combined 9 hours per day, every day! Why are these two sources so different?
Zick & Bryant point out that a large portion of childcare time is “secondary childcare” while doing something else. This could be anything from “you’re sneaking a peek at your phone in the middle of babysitting” to “you’re napping, but your teenager is downstairs and can wake you if he needs you”.
Maybe C&W count secondary childcare, and DS&T don’t? Z&B’s own surveys find that this category only takes up an hour or so a day - not enough to close our gap. But this Bureau of Labor Statistics report is more promising:
Adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.3 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children … primary childcare is childcare that is done as a main activity, such as providing physical care or reading to children. (See table 9.)
Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare - that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 13 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (1.9 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).
This matches both sources pretty well, so we can consider the discrepancy solved. BLS goes on to separate its findings into ever-finer categories:
The weekend numbers add up to 19 hours of childcare a day, which is longer than most children are awake. Probably this is because both parents provide some secondary childcare together. I don’t know if these numbers count “childcare” “provided” when the children are sleeping, eg you’re watching a movie at 9 PM after putting your kid to bed.
I put more effort into finding these numbers than can be justified by curiosity alone. I wanted to know if my wife and I were doing something wrong or crazy - spending way more time with our kids than everyone else does. Now, with all the data in front of me, I find them impossible to interpret.
What does it mean to do secondary childcare for one-year-olds? They can’t exactly play quietly on their own while their parents are upstairs, can they? Or maybe everyone else’s one-year-olds can, and mine can’t? Or maybe I falsely think that mine aren’t, and that’s why I’m having so much trouble? Or maybe one-year-olds without twin siblings can do it, but twins have to - KAI! STOP PULLING LYRA’S HAIR RIGHT NOW! I’M TRYING TO WRITE A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ON HOW EASY TAKING CARE OF CHILDREN IS!
The Wisdom Of The Ancients
The first chart finds that 1960s mothers - including many stay-at-home-moms - spent only half as long on primary childcare as modern parents. How could this be?
Caplan treats this question in the genre of life advice - why not relax and spend less time parenting, like your grandparents did? But to me it feels more like ancient occult wisdom. If you heard that the people of 10,000 BC built vast crystal pyramids that channeled the music of the spheres into infinite free electricity, you wouldn’t think “Oh, nice, guess that gives me permission to relax and stop fretting so much about energy policy”. You would wonder how they accomplished this seemingly impossible feat!
Here’s Caplan’s explanation:
When he was a boy, my dad rode his bike all over downtown Los Angeles.. My friends and I had more supervision, but our moms still got us out of their hair by ordering us to play outside until dinner. My mom kindly let me read in my room, but the philosophy was the same: Entertaining myself was my job, not hers. Today, I almost never see kids playing outside without a watchful parent.
This seems basically right. I lived just close enough to the tail end of this period to recognize the phrase “Remember to be home by dinner!”
G.K. Chesterton wrote about the phrase “you can’t turn back the clock”:
There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.
There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it, but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore.
So - could you, today, kick your child out the door at 9 AM on a Saturday and tell them to be back by dinner?
Bryan worries that most parents refuse to do this because they think the world is less safe than in their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. He says that’s wrong. Modern death rates for children are a quarter what they were in the golden age of outside kids. Most of the improvement comes from less disease, which is only slightly relevant to this question. But deaths from accidents (including car accidents) are down even more (5x!). Deaths from homicide are up slightly, but realistically it doesn’t matter given how rare homicides were to begin with (and most child homicide victims are unfortunately killed by family members).
You could think of this improvement in two ways - either as proof that coddling kids works really well, or that coddling kids is unnecessary. Caplan chooses the latter, at great length - although when I read the several pages he devoted to this question I cannot figure out his exact argument disproving the former.
One potential argument is that the child trends mostly mirror adult trends. Adult accident death rates have also gone way down (and adult murder rates stayed about the same) since the 1960s. The simplest explanation is that child trends simply mirror adults. And the adult trend certainly isn’t caused by coddling. So maybe the kids aren’t either.
What about kidnapping? Plenty of people are kidnapped, but it’s usually something like a relative stealing them away in defiance of a divorce custody agreement. The “traditional kidnapping” where a creep in a white van plucks a child off the streets is much rarer - only about 100 such incidents come to the attention of the authorities per year. Even if the true number is 10x higher (is this is a reasonable multiplier?) that’s still only 1/70,000 children per year. On the other hand, over ~ten years of relevant childhood (I’m assuming babies can’t get into white vans, and nobody wants to kidnap 17 year olds) that’s a 1/7,000 chance. And surely if you’re the only person still letting your kid play outside, your chances are worse than average. But if you’re an upper-class person in a good neighborhood, your chances get better than average again. Let’s estimate a 10x penalty for playing outside and a 2x bonus for not being a poor person in a ghetto. Now it seems like your total chance of child abduction per child-lifetime is 1/1,400.
But it seems like most abductions are navigated successfully:
Across the country, only 181 Amber Alerts were broadcast in 2022, including one in New York, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In those cases, 180 children were recovered and only one was still missing as of March. Four of the children were killed.
If 4/180 abducted children are killed (I don’t know if number of Amber Alerts is the right denominator), that’s a 1/63,000 chance of child death via abduction per child-lifetime. Seems not great but not like a deal-breaker.
So maybe the more relevant question is - if you decide you want to do this, is it even possible?
I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.
The police officer was legally in the wrong. This California child abuse lawyer says that there are no laws against letting your kid play (or walk) outside unsupervised. There is a generic law saying children generally need “adequate” supervision, but he doesn’t think the courts would interpret this as banning the sort of thing my friends did.
Still, being technically correct is cold comfort when the police disagree. Even if you can eventually win a court case, that takes a lot of resources - and who’s to say a different cop won’t nab you next time? To solve the problem, seven states (not including California) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which make it clear to policemen and everyone else that unsupervised play is okay. There is a whole “free range kids” movement (its founder, Lenore Skenazy, gets profiled in SRTHMK) trying to win this legal and cultural battle.
The Free Range Kids website has some tools and tips, but they don’t go about it the exact way that I would (yes, I’ve thought about this a lot). When Kai and Lyra are older, I fantasize about organizing the local rationalists - we have five families with kids on the same block. They’ll all wear bright orange t-shirts and hats with “FREE RANGE KIDS” on them, and they’ll all have a flyer - which they’re encouraged to show any adult or officer who complains - saying something like:
Thank you for your concern about our child. We are part of the free-range kids movement; you can read more about it at letgrow.org. We’ve given our children permission to roam between XXth street and YYth street. This decision is protected under California law based on the arguments we list at whyfreerangekidsarelegal.com. This has been endorsed by such-and-such a lawyer, and we also talked it over with our local city council member, so-and-so, who agreed. If you see our kid doing a specific dangerous thing, or inconveniencing anyone else, please call us at XXX-XXXX and we’ll come over immediately. Otherwise, please let them be!
Thank you,
Your Neighbors
PS: We are rich and extremely litigious.
Eventually the kids in the bright orange shirts will become a local fixture among neighbors and cops alike, and people will stop bothering us. I have no idea if this will work, but it works in my head.
Still, age one is too early to try this; my kids would still run into the street if we weren’t there to stop them. Did the mothers of the 1950s have some other trick for spending less time with their one-year-olds? I can’t find any data on this, and can’t imagine what the trick would be.
The “Wisdom” Of The Moderns
Let’s be real - if you dial back your parenting efforts while making no other changes, your kids won’t spend all day playing in the woods, Calvin-and-Hobbes-style. They’ll use screens.
Caplan seems to mostly accept this fate:
[These] suspicions are almost certainly correct. If you give mature adults extra free time, many relax in front of the TV or computer. It would be amazing if childish children didn’t do the same. But what’s wrong with that? Electronic babysitters are a vital component of cultural literacy. I hope my kids grow up to know both The Simpsons and Shakespeare. In any case, electronic babysitters are undeniably a lot of fun for kids, and - as a cheap, dependable substitute for a human babysitter - a blessing for parents, too. So why the hostility? It’s as if parents think that anything that feels good for every member of the family must be bad.
I’m not advising people to put their kids in front of the television and forget about them. My wife and I don’t let ours watch more than an hour or two a day, because we don’t want them to miss out on the other joys of childhood. I’m merely suggesting pragmatic adjustments in the way that families spend their time. If parents feel exhausted by their kids’ busy schedule, they should trim a few hours of activity from their week - even if their kids spend most of their extra hours on TV and video games. The parents will be happier, and the kids will probably be happier too.
Wise words - in 2011, when SRTHMK was written. What about the age of TikTok and Instagram?
We all know what argument comes next: “You think a newfangled thing is bad. But the ancients thought their newfangled thing was bad, and now that we’ve had time to get used to it, we realize it’s fine. Therefore, no new thing is ever bad.” People in 2000 were afraid video games were destroying society, people in 1960 were afraid TV was destroying society, people in 1600 thought the novel was destroying society, and people in 500 BC thought writing was destroying society.
Therefore, nothing can ever destroy society? Sorry, this is too Outside View, even for me (1, 2, 3). Every generation of Romans worried they were growing decadent and courting disaster. But eventually Rome did grow decadent and collapse. I’m not enough of a historian to know whether everyone was wrong until 476 AD and then they were right all at once - or whether each generation was right that they were slightly more decadent and less stable than the last, until finally the decline became unsustainable. But the guys in 475 saying “har har, we’ve read Livy, he thought his generation was decadent and about to collapse too” would have been in for a nasty surprise. So let’s at least consider taking this at face value.
There are two lines of evidence that phones are genuinely rotting people’s brains in a way past technologies haven’t. First, standardized test scores are down. Second, teachers are freaking out.
The Financial Times presents the argument from standardized testing: Have humans passed peak brain power? Student and adult test performance peaked in 2012, and has gone down ever since.
Cremieux thinks this might be fake. He says part of the effect is demographic shift. Blacks, Hispanics, and some Middle Eastern populations tend to underperform whites on most scholastic tests; if they are recent immigrants, they may not even speak the language fluently. As these groups increase in proportion of the test-taking population, test scores go down (there’s also a more arcane issue called measurement invariance; click the link for the explanation). Cremieux finds that when you adjust for these things, some of the problem goes away:
But these are American scores only. The pre-COVID decline in American scores was marginal at best. And the Financial Times’ cited scores across all OECD nations.
The best way I could think of to test this was to look at PISA scores filtered by the question “Does one of your parents have an immigrant background”? I hoped that this would filter out most of the ethnically diverse test-takers in non-US countries, allowing an apples-to-apples comparison:
Here ALL is all test-takers, and NAT is those with two native-born parents. 5/6 of the 2012-2018 score decline remains in the latter group. I’m not showing the 2018 - 2022 score decline, because most of that is COVID learning loss, but I analyzed it separately and found similar results.
This doesn’t really look demographic shift related. I can’t prove it, because it could be demographic shift among third-generation-plus immigrants. But most PISA countries don’t have enough third-generation-plus immigrants to shift trendlines on their own. These findings don’t 100% prove that something bad is going on, but they’re consistent with it.
I am more convinced by the widespread negative reports from teachers. People dismiss these by claiming there is some generic bias to think “the youth” used to be better in “the good old days”. But I hear stories like these from teachers who have been in the field for 30, 40 years, never said anything like this between 1980 and 2010, but now suddenly think there’s a crisis (one of them is my mother, who taught high school until her retirement in the late 2010s). This recent essay by blogger “Hilarius Bookbinder” is representative of the (voluminous) genre:
I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know […]
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either […]
Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection […[ it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.
If I’d known I was going to write this post, I would have saved the dozens of similar claims I’ve come across recently - as it is, I’ll just have to hope that you’ve seen them too.
Hilarius lists seven causes, which separate into three groups.
The first root cause group is COVID. Faculty lowered standards when things were genuinely tough. Then students pushed back when they tried to raise standards again, so the new low standards got locked in.
The second is general technology. Teachers started giving lectures on PowerPoint; they sent out the slides afterwards to help people study; students figured they could skip the lectures and read the slides instead. There are plenty of ways to use technology to get learning experiences which are easier than the real thing and 80% as good. But when you get too reliant on them, you learn 20% less.
But the third is screens. Bookbinder writes:
[Students are] pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.
Maybe this is a subspecies of the previous category: bringing a laptop to class makes lectures far more tolerable at the cost of learning 20% less material. But also:
It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.
Suppose that screens genuinely harm many students. Does that mean that parents should keep screens away from toddlers? It depends on the mechanism of harm. If phones harm kids by gradually damaging their brains somehow (chronic dopamine poisoning? I’m pretty sure this isn’t a real thing, but I’m sure some self-help guru has an infomercial that disagrees), and this damage is worst during childhood, then sure, keep your kids away. But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?
Or does giving kids phones at age three (when they have no hope of resisting) deny them the right to exercise their free will at age eighteen (when they might have some slight hope)? Do Caplan’s exhortations to remember the behavioral genetics literature apply here? Will those with phone addiction genes get addicted no matter how we raise them? Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?
I feel about 75% sure there’s a trend towards recent intellectual decline which needs to be explained, I think phones are about 60% of the explanation, and I think it’s about 25% likely that early childhood phone use causes some damage beyond what would happen if you kept your kid away from phones until age 18 but then let him use them normally afterwards. When I multiply those all out, that’s an 11% chance that letting my kid use a phone will rot his brain. I can already hear Bryan Caplan saying that’s not so high - that living with a stressed-out parent who constantly resents the demandingness of childcare has a much more than 11% chance of being bad.
But it’s not just addiction. What if they wander into the wrong part of the Internet and become incels, or SJWs with seven genders, or sedevacantists? Lots of people get one or another mind virus; why should my kids be immune? Because I’ll give them a happy childhood? I checked this on the ACX survey, and although alt-rightists did have significantly less happy childhoods than normal liberals (5.93 vs. 6.70 on a ten-point scale), the effect was too weak to rely on on an individual level (46% of alt-rightists had happier childhoods than the average liberal). Also, I married the only centrist-classical-liberal woman left in the San Francisco Bay Area - what kind of off-the-chart-outlier genes did she need in order to pull that off? If my son inherits those genes in a male body and moves to Chicago or something, will he become the next Costin Alamariu? And what about our daughter? What percent of women from intellectually-inclined non-practicing-Jewish families avoid becoming insane woke people? 20%? 10%? Sure, we’ll try to inculcate her into our reasonable liberal culture. But what do you think all those woke teenagers are rebelling against?
Can a 2011 book say anything about these dangers? Caplan still blogs; some of his more recent output addresses them more directly. But maybe his greater contribution is the way SRTHMK teaches us to challenge our fears. Are the dangers of today really worse than those of yesterday? Is some real-but-small chance of harm from insufficient caution really worse than the certainty of making ourselves and our kids miserable through excessive discipline? Can we really win a fight against the spirit of the age and our children’s genetic proclivities?
When I try to apply SRTHMK’s lessons, I can’t deny that I’m being exactly the kind of hypocrite who says that my generation was okay but the next generation is destroying society. I chafed against all of my parents’ stupid computer use restrictions as a teenager - why couldn’t they understand that I was only playing classy games, like Civilization, and hanging out on decent sites, like LiveJournal? Now it’s twenty years later and…
…actually, I guess I became an anti-woke influencer (surely every good liberal mother’s worst nightmare). And I did sort of join a doomsday cult (comparatively tame but still unfortunate). Is that bad enough that my parents were right? If my kids end up as weird compared to me as I am compared to my parents, will I tolerate them as graciously as my parents still somehow tolerate me?
At this age, none of this affects me as much as my visceral reaction when I see a phone-addicted toddler. I shudder to see a three-year-old in the grocery store screaming “PHONE? PHONE?” until her parents relent and let her watch algorithmically-recommended YouTube videos of dancing monsters. And I know my kids would fall for it. I got them a toy keyboard-like-object once, the kind where you press a button and it plays terrible nursery rhymes. Sometimes I would not want to hear terrible nursery rhymes and would turn it off. Big mistake. My son would scream at me until I changed my mind; eventually I stopped even trying. The moment he gets a phone, his life is over.
And this is part of a more general argument against superstimuli. I used to let my kids stand on top of the table, under supervision. They loved it. Every time they saw me, they would grab me and point to the table. But sometimes I didn’t want to supervise them that closely, or there were breakable objects on the table, and then they (okay, mostly my son) would throw tantrums. Eventually my wife made a no-tables rule so they would lose the expectation that pestering us might work. This has expanded into a broader principle: don’t let toddlers know a superstimulus exists if you’re not prepared to fight them about whether they get to have it all the time.
So I’m not giving in yet. If nothing else, I want to be able to spend quality time with my kids without it turning into an argument over whether they get the phone or not.
Selfish Reasons To Do Less Childcare
None of this addresses my primary interest in this book: am I wrong to feel overwhelmed by childcare?
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
(Daycare would also work, except that my wife and nanny both have terrible immune systems and get knocked out of commission if they catch anything from the kids. Any solution which exposes them to more germs probably saves me negative childcare hours.)
I’d been resisting this. Partly it was out of stinginess - something something tariffs, something something impending recession. But partly it was pride. We’re a two parent family with a stay-at-home mom, a work-from-home dad, and a part-time nanny. Millions have it far worse.
I read SRTHMK hoping it would have some loophole, One Weird Trick that would let me stop feeling overwhelmed and join the ranks of those pronatalist influencers who blog about how childcare is great and you should go ahead and have kids right now, even if you’re only twenty-five, even if you don’t have your career totally figured out, even if you lost all your limbs in a tragic boating accident and are incapable of independent movement. It doesn’t, at least not for one-year-olds.
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!
This whole time I was reading Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, when I should have been waiting for Pro-Market And Pro-Business (released last month, now available on Amazon). There really is a Bryan Caplan book for everything!
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