The Raise You’ll Need to Raise a Child; “Everything is Terrible But I’m Fine,” But for Teens and Social Media; Gaining Affluence Often Means Losing “the Village” + more.
I've always been extremely dubious about fertility gaps based desired number of children.
If we asked people how many times a week they wanted to exercise, and found the actual number was much lower, we would probably assume the desired number is a mostly made up aspirational signalling thing and that their revealed preferences are a better guide to what they actually want.
I saw one study that followed lottery winners to see if that sudden infusion of a lot of money resulted in people finally having the children they had previously claimed they couldn't afford. Nope, almost no effect. Just like we don't generally see billionaires running running around with even 3 or 4 children. (Other than Elon Musk.)
One problem with all the studies is they aren't longitudinal and fall prey to the end-of-history illusion. I saw one study that followed a group of women in Africa over a number of years, asking them how many children they desired. The number changed with each survey (trending down) but even more notable is they never realised they had changed their mind. They claimed that was the number they had ALWAYS desired, even though the researchers had previous survey data showing it wasn't true.
Yes, exactly about the desired number. Well yeah, we all desire XYZ things in life (I might desire to be more fit than I an, reading more books than I do) But if we want something as much as we say we do…. we do something about it. We make it happen despite the challenges. Otherwise it’s wishful thinking about the honesty of our own desires. This is one resounding theme from the book Hannah’s Children which will stay with me —that EVERYTHING, including children—is a trade off. Those who actually have the dang kids (barring lack of spouse or infertility of some kind) just…. wanted them more. Every story proved over and over that the impediments and hardships to these things we hear over and over from surveys just look kinda silly when you hear from an actual person who just did it: “it was hard, we sacrificed a LOT in every imaginable way, but the children were worth it.” For many people who say they want say XYZ kids... they often prove with their choices that deep down they actually wanted something else more. Not *always*—we don’t always get what we truly want, in the realm of fertility especially—but I think this is the case in more instances than we’d like to admit. People simply choose certain tradeoffs over others, but aren’t honest about it. lol
I think you are right about what drives people to have kids these days, but I would add that the fact that the people who have kids now are those who simply really really want kids and are willing to accept the extremely steep trade-offs is actually a reason to focus even more on reducing those trade-offs. Nancy Folbre basically predicts this in her paper Children as Public Goods: she says that as the costs/trade-offs to parenting rise, only "parents who derive sufficiently high nonpecuniary benefits from their children" will carry on having kids. But structuring society such that only the people who are basically willing to sacrifice everything to have kids actually have them is...not a great way to structure society haha. I don't think that is how things have ever worked historically. People in the past had all sorts of self-interested reasons to have kids--and more people had more kids...
To be fair, I also think people's desire for kids is way more malleable and culturally informed than people admit. I do not believe that people have some sort of fixed internal ideal number of children: I think evidence suggests that desire for kids is shaped by a whole bunch of factors, including the trade-offs people perceive but also your upbringing etc. So even if the diagnosis here is "well people just don't want kids enough and that's why they aren't having them" I would still be like "okay well what is wrong with our society that people are so uninterested in having children we should probs doing something about that."
Yeah, it can be both/and. I wrote a whole review of Carney’s “Family Unfriendly” after all! Haha but then reading Pakaluk’s book it just seemed to shed some different, more honest light about tradeoffs that I think gets missed.
Pakaluk’s book was a highly specific sub-group, and I don’t think it can be generalized to Americans as a whole. It was college-educated mothers of 4+ (or maybe 5+ ?) children. Unsurprisingly, she found that many were religious - most people don’t have 4+ children and most people don’t say they want 4+ children. While you can’t have a fractional child, the “undershooting” of fertility is <1 and the average ideal number is around 2.5.
College education is also linked to higher income (and marrying someone who is college educated with a higher income), so I also don’t think it’s surprising that her interviewed population might not mention finances as much as a representative survey
You're right it certainly can't be generalized, but her whole project of what makes people *have* kids, not just the evergreen question of why people *don't* was interesting. As for finances, part of what I found fascinating was that finances *were* a struggle for a decent number of the families (based on average expectations of what a "comfortable life" should look like). College education isn't always the silver bullet to a comfy life, as we're increasingly learning.
In employment, this is often referred to as underemployment - someone wants more work hours, but does not have them. Is underemployment fake?
Put another way, I have an old minivan. I want a newer minivan. I do not want an SUV. I have neither. Do I not want a newer minivan in the same way I do not want an SUV, given that I have neither? I also want my house to be cleaner, but it is not, because I have small children, a limited budget, and only so much time in the day. Cleaning, like exercise, is largely a time use question, and we’re limited by 168 hours a week. I think it only works to claim it’s aspirational signaling if we assume the respondents are untethered from work, sleep, budgets, etc.
Total fertility is also linked more to prior choices/life circumstances than exercise time. I may have wanted 3 children, but if I didn’t meet my spouse until later or didn’t reach a certain income level until later, I might run out of time to have 3 children or have them young enough to feel physically up to a third pregnancy. But I’m not in the same category as someone who only wanted 2 kids.
Another great round-up. On the primal world beliefs paper, an interesting subtlety is that it's only *child reports of* parental warmth that significantly predict Good, Safe and Enticing. Parental reports of parental warmth don't significantly correlate with anything. (The two measures correlate at r = 0.54.)
This adds to a growing body of evidence that parental reports of subjective characteristics are too biased to be reliable (due to social desirability bias, etc.) and some eminent psychologists have recently called for a moratorium on their use. [ https://uclpress.co.uk/book/matters-of-significance/ ]
That’s very interesting! It seems like another explanation (besides parents being biased), is that people who generally take a rosier view of things will agree with both “the world is good” and “my parents were warm”. Is this simply measuring a positive outlook, and not saying anything about causality?
I think people who gain affluence also don’t WANT to rely on grandparents. And some people can’t even be enticed by a free break (although many can). My friend doesn’t let her mother in law do any discipline. If she can’t have childcare she can command she’d either have no childcare at all.
Yeah you might be on to something there... I find it sort of hard to empathize with that perspective ALTHOUGH I do have my various things. Like I am very happy for my mom to discipline my kids (not that she's harsh or anything) but if she was just going to hand them a tablet all day I'd be like...hm...how badly do I need this break haha.
I’m at great risk of confirmation bias here, but the “parental warmth” finding seems like a common attachment theory win. It reminds me of how one of the strongest determinants of therapy outcomes is not the type of therapy but the strength of the therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6493237/).
I very much liked the 'Village' article. I hadn't realised you'd moved US -> UK. I'm curious: do you feel the intensive parenting culture is less intense in the UK?
I really enjoy reading this newsletter :). I completely agree with what you say re: ignoring the cost of unpaid domestic labor, and wanted to add that we have numbers for this: for the U.S., we find that the costs of unpaid time to parents (when valued at a conservative replacement wage) are more than twice the monetary costs, esp. when children are young (e.g., Figure 4 in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/roiw.12672).
My parents raised children far from their parents, and so did my grandparents. Great grandparents too, on one side at least. We replicated this as well: my in-laws were Germans, and never visited the US. We saw them less than a dozen times in the lives of our kids (my in-laws are gone now). When our kids were little, we lived in DC, while my parents lived in Florida in the winter and BC in the summer. We visited them every year, for a week in Florida and 2 in BC.
We were all set to do this again, kids living states away.
Then capitalism intruded. We live in Montana. When our daughter was pregnant (originally in Denver), she and her fellow came to live with us for birth and the first year for economic reasons. Then, reverting to type for both our family and his, they moved to his hometown of San Diego. After a few years there he lapsed into DV, so daughter and granddaughter have lived with us for just over 2 years now.
There's no way my daughter dreamed of living in her old mom and dad's basement coming on 39 years old. And yet, it's glorious for us oldsters. We were empty nesters, and now I drive my second-grader granddaughter to school every morning, and we talk about everything.
With the evening out and (potential/future) switching of employment fertility linkage, I wonder if we’d start to see more fertility boost-age from work-specific policies. If employment pushes fertility lower, I wouldn’t expect paid, job protected maternity leave or child care to do much to the birth rate (might help with child poverty and general egalitarianism). But if employment starts to raise fertility, women may respond specifically to policies that help them keep their specific job/attachment to the labor force throughout early childhood
I've always been extremely dubious about fertility gaps based desired number of children.
If we asked people how many times a week they wanted to exercise, and found the actual number was much lower, we would probably assume the desired number is a mostly made up aspirational signalling thing and that their revealed preferences are a better guide to what they actually want.
I saw one study that followed lottery winners to see if that sudden infusion of a lot of money resulted in people finally having the children they had previously claimed they couldn't afford. Nope, almost no effect. Just like we don't generally see billionaires running running around with even 3 or 4 children. (Other than Elon Musk.)
One problem with all the studies is they aren't longitudinal and fall prey to the end-of-history illusion. I saw one study that followed a group of women in Africa over a number of years, asking them how many children they desired. The number changed with each survey (trending down) but even more notable is they never realised they had changed their mind. They claimed that was the number they had ALWAYS desired, even though the researchers had previous survey data showing it wasn't true.
Yes, exactly about the desired number. Well yeah, we all desire XYZ things in life (I might desire to be more fit than I an, reading more books than I do) But if we want something as much as we say we do…. we do something about it. We make it happen despite the challenges. Otherwise it’s wishful thinking about the honesty of our own desires. This is one resounding theme from the book Hannah’s Children which will stay with me —that EVERYTHING, including children—is a trade off. Those who actually have the dang kids (barring lack of spouse or infertility of some kind) just…. wanted them more. Every story proved over and over that the impediments and hardships to these things we hear over and over from surveys just look kinda silly when you hear from an actual person who just did it: “it was hard, we sacrificed a LOT in every imaginable way, but the children were worth it.” For many people who say they want say XYZ kids... they often prove with their choices that deep down they actually wanted something else more. Not *always*—we don’t always get what we truly want, in the realm of fertility especially—but I think this is the case in more instances than we’d like to admit. People simply choose certain tradeoffs over others, but aren’t honest about it. lol
I think you are right about what drives people to have kids these days, but I would add that the fact that the people who have kids now are those who simply really really want kids and are willing to accept the extremely steep trade-offs is actually a reason to focus even more on reducing those trade-offs. Nancy Folbre basically predicts this in her paper Children as Public Goods: she says that as the costs/trade-offs to parenting rise, only "parents who derive sufficiently high nonpecuniary benefits from their children" will carry on having kids. But structuring society such that only the people who are basically willing to sacrifice everything to have kids actually have them is...not a great way to structure society haha. I don't think that is how things have ever worked historically. People in the past had all sorts of self-interested reasons to have kids--and more people had more kids...
To be fair, I also think people's desire for kids is way more malleable and culturally informed than people admit. I do not believe that people have some sort of fixed internal ideal number of children: I think evidence suggests that desire for kids is shaped by a whole bunch of factors, including the trade-offs people perceive but also your upbringing etc. So even if the diagnosis here is "well people just don't want kids enough and that's why they aren't having them" I would still be like "okay well what is wrong with our society that people are so uninterested in having children we should probs doing something about that."
Yeah, it can be both/and. I wrote a whole review of Carney’s “Family Unfriendly” after all! Haha but then reading Pakaluk’s book it just seemed to shed some different, more honest light about tradeoffs that I think gets missed.
Pakaluk’s book was a highly specific sub-group, and I don’t think it can be generalized to Americans as a whole. It was college-educated mothers of 4+ (or maybe 5+ ?) children. Unsurprisingly, she found that many were religious - most people don’t have 4+ children and most people don’t say they want 4+ children. While you can’t have a fractional child, the “undershooting” of fertility is <1 and the average ideal number is around 2.5.
College education is also linked to higher income (and marrying someone who is college educated with a higher income), so I also don’t think it’s surprising that her interviewed population might not mention finances as much as a representative survey
You're right it certainly can't be generalized, but her whole project of what makes people *have* kids, not just the evergreen question of why people *don't* was interesting. As for finances, part of what I found fascinating was that finances *were* a struggle for a decent number of the families (based on average expectations of what a "comfortable life" should look like). College education isn't always the silver bullet to a comfy life, as we're increasingly learning.
In employment, this is often referred to as underemployment - someone wants more work hours, but does not have them. Is underemployment fake?
Put another way, I have an old minivan. I want a newer minivan. I do not want an SUV. I have neither. Do I not want a newer minivan in the same way I do not want an SUV, given that I have neither? I also want my house to be cleaner, but it is not, because I have small children, a limited budget, and only so much time in the day. Cleaning, like exercise, is largely a time use question, and we’re limited by 168 hours a week. I think it only works to claim it’s aspirational signaling if we assume the respondents are untethered from work, sleep, budgets, etc.
Total fertility is also linked more to prior choices/life circumstances than exercise time. I may have wanted 3 children, but if I didn’t meet my spouse until later or didn’t reach a certain income level until later, I might run out of time to have 3 children or have them young enough to feel physically up to a third pregnancy. But I’m not in the same category as someone who only wanted 2 kids.
Another great round-up. On the primal world beliefs paper, an interesting subtlety is that it's only *child reports of* parental warmth that significantly predict Good, Safe and Enticing. Parental reports of parental warmth don't significantly correlate with anything. (The two measures correlate at r = 0.54.)
This adds to a growing body of evidence that parental reports of subjective characteristics are too biased to be reliable (due to social desirability bias, etc.) and some eminent psychologists have recently called for a moratorium on their use. [ https://uclpress.co.uk/book/matters-of-significance/ ]
That’s very interesting! It seems like another explanation (besides parents being biased), is that people who generally take a rosier view of things will agree with both “the world is good” and “my parents were warm”. Is this simply measuring a positive outlook, and not saying anything about causality?
Also definitely possible. But if that were the main factor I would have expected child-rated psychological control to anticorrelate with something.
Oh dang that's really really interesting! I'll have to keep that in mind going forward haha.
I think people who gain affluence also don’t WANT to rely on grandparents. And some people can’t even be enticed by a free break (although many can). My friend doesn’t let her mother in law do any discipline. If she can’t have childcare she can command she’d either have no childcare at all.
Yeah you might be on to something there... I find it sort of hard to empathize with that perspective ALTHOUGH I do have my various things. Like I am very happy for my mom to discipline my kids (not that she's harsh or anything) but if she was just going to hand them a tablet all day I'd be like...hm...how badly do I need this break haha.
I’m at great risk of confirmation bias here, but the “parental warmth” finding seems like a common attachment theory win. It reminds me of how one of the strongest determinants of therapy outcomes is not the type of therapy but the strength of the therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6493237/).
If nothing else, make sure your kids feel loved!
Hi Stephanie,
I very much liked the 'Village' article. I hadn't realised you'd moved US -> UK. I'm curious: do you feel the intensive parenting culture is less intense in the UK?
Thank you! And in some ways/to a certain extent, yes. I definitely think the safetyism isn't quite as extreme here as in the U.S.
I really enjoy reading this newsletter :). I completely agree with what you say re: ignoring the cost of unpaid domestic labor, and wanted to add that we have numbers for this: for the U.S., we find that the costs of unpaid time to parents (when valued at a conservative replacement wage) are more than twice the monetary costs, esp. when children are young (e.g., Figure 4 in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/roiw.12672).
Thank you! And thank you for the link!
Some US anecdata.
My parents raised children far from their parents, and so did my grandparents. Great grandparents too, on one side at least. We replicated this as well: my in-laws were Germans, and never visited the US. We saw them less than a dozen times in the lives of our kids (my in-laws are gone now). When our kids were little, we lived in DC, while my parents lived in Florida in the winter and BC in the summer. We visited them every year, for a week in Florida and 2 in BC.
We were all set to do this again, kids living states away.
Then capitalism intruded. We live in Montana. When our daughter was pregnant (originally in Denver), she and her fellow came to live with us for birth and the first year for economic reasons. Then, reverting to type for both our family and his, they moved to his hometown of San Diego. After a few years there he lapsed into DV, so daughter and granddaughter have lived with us for just over 2 years now.
There's no way my daughter dreamed of living in her old mom and dad's basement coming on 39 years old. And yet, it's glorious for us oldsters. We were empty nesters, and now I drive my second-grader granddaughter to school every morning, and we talk about everything.
On my wife's side, her ancestors have lived in the same county since the Thirty Years War.
With the evening out and (potential/future) switching of employment fertility linkage, I wonder if we’d start to see more fertility boost-age from work-specific policies. If employment pushes fertility lower, I wouldn’t expect paid, job protected maternity leave or child care to do much to the birth rate (might help with child poverty and general egalitarianism). But if employment starts to raise fertility, women may respond specifically to policies that help them keep their specific job/attachment to the labor force throughout early childhood
ooh now that’s interesting…