The argument is in the name. You should have more kids. But unlike other pro-natalists, Caplan argues you should have kids, not because it’s good for the world, but because it’s good for you.
His core arguments are:
- Having kids is rewarding, especially after you get through the tough early years.
- It’s not that difficult to be a parent, today’s typical parent makes it needlessly hard on themselves. Twin studies show us that nature matters much more than nurture, so parents should relax and let nature play out.
- There are simple ways to make parenting easier, like spending money to help where needed and cutting activities that neither the kid nor parent wants to do.
Overall I found the arguments pretty convincing, but I came into the book already agreeing with most of them. In general, I notice people make things needlessly hard on themselves and parenting seems to be an attractor for emotions of shame and guilt.
His argument is backed by a few pieces of evidence. The largest one is an array of twin studies from around the world which repeatedly show that genetics plays a stronger role on child outcomes than upbringing. A twin study usually works by looking at twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families. Twins have nearly identical genetics — so we can look at the outcomes of these twins to measure nature vs nurture.
Let’s take an example. In a Swedish Twin Study of over 2,000 twins, they found that genetics was a much better predictor than upbringing for most major personality traits. This suggests that if you, within a reasonable amount, encourage your kid to be conscientious and organized, you probably won’t have an effect.
But that brings us to a limit of twin studies. The researchers try to measure the difference between similar-ish upbringings in the same country. Of course, an impoverished child from Burundi would have much better health outcomes if they instead grew up in Atherton. When your upbringing and support are significantly different, you will have better health and economic outcomes.
So twin studies apply to Swedish families which are relatively homogenous — it doesn’t matter which Swedes are your parents. But they don’t apply to immigrating from Burundi to Atherton. Where’s the boundary? We don’t really know, and that’s a bit disappointing.
In raising a kid, I’m curious to know about the effect of parents who do weird things (let’s say 2+ standard deviations outside normal) and twin studies can’t tell us much here. And without twin studies, much of Caplan’s argument falls apart.
But that only applies if you want to do something outside the norm. If you are staying within bounds, you should expect that genetics has a much larger effect on your kids outcomes then if they go to private school or if you force them to play clarinet for another couple years.
A lot of parents are worried about their kids safety. And it seems that today’s parents are much more worried than parents in the past. We long for the nostalgic 50s and 60s where kids could safely bike around in the suburbs.
Caplan argues that kids are much safer today — safer than ever in fact. And the data supports him. Today’s kids are much less likely to die in any given year than kids in the 50s. Most of this gain comes from a reduction in disease and accidents — but it’s significant improvement.
So again Caplan tells parents to worry less. The data shows that kids are safer so you don’t need to worry about your kids safety. But I wonder — are kids safer today in part because parents are so worried and prevent their kids from doing dangerous things? How do we tease those two apart?
Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was interesting to learn about some of the twin studies and some different perspectives on raising kids.
On the negative side, I don’t think my opinion changed too much after reading this book. I updated in favor of thinking that nature matters even more. But I find that Caplan’s books tend to suffer a bit from motivated reasoning — he really wants to find evidence for his point and at times the evidence feels a bit strained in service of his point.
Either way, I hope if you are reading this, you can worry less! That is, almost always, good advice.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan - Amazon