Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

by Bryan Caplan

  This brings us to my last un-Beckerian explanation for smaller families: Changes in foresight. While impulsive, unprotected sex feels as good as ever, we are more likely to look ahead a few years and count the costs. Do you want to spend your twenties having fun and advancing your career—or changing diapers for crying kids? Do you want to spend your thirties with a kid or two, plus time for other pursuits—or so many kids that you don’t have a minute to yourself? In the past, we took the path of least resistance—ignoring future costs in favor of immediate sexual pleasure. As civilization has progressed, more of us have found the foresight to resist—or defuse—our biological urges.

  A LITTLE FORESIGHT IS A DANGEROUS THING

  If you’re reading this, you’re probably a person who plans ahead. Instead of acting on impulse, you’re reading a book about how many kids to have. Natalists often argue that foresighted folks like you are the reason so many cradles are empty. Why do you have to overthink everything? If everyone were like you, we would have gone extinct ages ago! Their story, crudely put, is that the human race can only continue with the help of bad judgment and strong liquor.

  Their story is not mine. Moderate increases in foresight are an important cause of lower fertility. But moderate foresight and high foresight lead to very different family plans.

  If human beings had zero foresight, we would have lots of unprotected sex, and plenty of kids. If we foresaw only the initial downside of kids—nothing but sleepless nights, temper tantrums, and dirty diapers—we’d be childless, if not celibate. Unfortunately, this is what usually passes for foresight today—weighing short-run pleasure against a few years’ worth of negative consequences. True foresight, however, is about calmly optimizing a lifetime’s worth of good and bad.

  The early years are often rough. Many moms agree with Angelina Jolie that pregnancy “makes you feel round and supple, and to have a little life inside you is amazing,” but others find pregnancy a mixed blessing—or necessary evil. After the delivery, both parents endure trying months. An infant is a lot of work even if you’re easy on yourself. I just gave my baby a 2:00 AM stroll to calm him down, and my bedtime is hours away.

  If you have more than one child, your troubles multiply. Caring for two youngsters often feels more than twice as stressful. As a veteran of the twins’ night shift, I speak from experience. When one baby wakes up while you’re feeding another, you’re in a no-win situation: One cries if you interrupt the feeding, the other cries if you don’t. Moderate foresight tells you to stop having kids. If one infant makes you tired and cranky, why have another?

  High foresight has a simple response: Infancy is a passing phase, but children last a lifetime. Costs fall: The older kids get, the easier they are to care for. Last week, we left our seven-year-olds home alone for the first time; before long, they’ll be babysitting their little brother. Benefits increase over time, too. Kids who walk and talk are more fun than newborns who sleep and cry.

  Now gaze further into the future. Once your kids are teenagers, you’ll rarely feel like you need a moment to yourself. You’ll have to pressure them to spend time with you. When they’re grown, all your children will likely be a plus. You’ll enjoy their company and take pride in their accomplishments but no longer bear the responsibility. As an added bonus, every child is another chance for grandchildren.

  In the winter, strangers are often shocked to see me wearing shorts. “Aren’t you cold?” they shout. If I’m outside and it’s forty degrees, I’m freezing, but I don’t base my whole decision on the outside temperature. My office runs warm. During January, I’m only outside five minutes a day. When I decide what to wear, I maximize my average comfort. I’d rather be thirty degrees too cold for five minutes than ten degrees too hot for eight hours, so I stick with shorts.

  Choosing the best number of kids is a lot like deciding what to wear on a winter day. You make one decision, then live with the consequences. The child-free often see this as an argument against kids, but it cuts both ways. People who want kids they can’t have are just as “trapped” as people who have kids they don’t want. In fact, irreversibility cuts in favor of kids. As we’ve seen, regret is abnormal for people who have kids, and normal for people who missed their chance.

  I admit that a perfectly foresighted person could choose a life of childlessness. If your sole dream is to wander the earth, kids will only slow you down. And perfect foresight almost certainly leads to fewer kids than zero foresight. The thought of eight kids scares me, too. The claim I stand by: Typical parental feelings paired with high foresight imply more kids than typical parental feelings paired with moderate foresight.

  Since the effect of kids on parental well-being changes over time, what precisely does enlightened self-interest advise? For starters, heavily discount the way you feel now. Your feelings are important, but from a purely selfish point of view, your feelings today are no more important than your feelings half a century from now. Instead of dwelling on the present, judiciously estimate the lifetime consequences of Plans A through Z, then pick the plan with the highest overall score. One good rule of thumb is to figure out the optimal number of kids to have during each of the major stages of your life—then set your target number of children equal to your average answer.

  Suppose you’re thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you’ll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness.

  If you apply my “take the average” rule of thumb to this example, the best number of kids is three. Five kids would be foolish; you’d sacrifice the rest of your life for a great retirement. It would be similarly foolish to have one child in your thirties, declare your life perfect, and schedule a vasectomy. Foresight implores you to strike a balance between too many kids in your early years and too few later on.

  A time-worn tactic to discourage teen pregnancy is to give students a fake baby (a doll, an egg, whatever) and make them take care of it for a week. The more temperamental the faux infant, the better: Advanced models cry and scream unless their guardians meet expectations. The point is to give a little extra foresight to those who need it most—to show teens what they can expect next year if they have unprotected sex today. If you take this educational exercise literally, however, its lesson is that babies are more trouble than they’re worth. The experiment isn’t an argument against teens having kids; it’s an argument against kids, period. And it’s a deeply misleading argument, because infancy doesn’t last long.

  Maybe the only way to reach teens is with a noble lie, but I prefer an honest approach. Like: Having a child is a serious decision. But if you take the decision seriously enough, you won’t just avoid pregnancy until you’re ready for kids. You’ll also start having kids before it’s too late to have as many as you want. Or: Plan ahead before you have a child. But don’t just plan on dirty diapers and lost sleep. Remember to look forward to your kids’ hilarious questions, trips to Disneyland, and Christmas with your grandchildren.

  You’ve probably heard the maxim “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” When it comes to kids, a little foresight is a dangerous thing, too. Looking a few years ahead, it’s tempting to conclude that the best number of children is one, or none. But from a bird’s-eye view of your whole life, a zero-to-one child policy usually looks like a big mistake.

  FORESIGHT AND FERTILITY: FRIENDS NOT FOES

  Natalist attacks on the excessive foresight of civilized man bother me in two ways. First, I take them personally. I happen to be a person of foresight. I started pondering retirement long before I got my first re
al job. (My current plan is to work till I drop.) Second, and more important, the critique of foresight buys into the view that kids are a bad deal.

  Exhausted parents of young children who vow “never again” normally have selfish motives. But are they good at being selfish? Maybe in the midst of their temporary misery, they calmly computed the lifetime consequences of another child and found that it’s not worth it. If they really have such stoic detachment, great. But real human beings are more likely to be myopic—to let the negatives right before their eyes unduly tilt their decision. When your toddler is driving you crazy, you have to struggle to remember that he’ll only be two once.

  How myopic are parents? Judging by their body language, they focus almost wholly on the here and now. When they imagine the short-term consequences of another kid, they often visibly recoil; but if you mention the consequences twenty or thirty years hence, they apathetically roll their eyes. Maybe they’ve thought through their middle age and retirement so carefully that the topic bores them. Maybe they’re keeping their deliberations secret to spite me. More plausibly, however, they’re too short-sighted to put “How many kids will I want when I’m sixty?” on their List of Things to Wonder About.

  If I had telepathy, I could check my suspicions. Since I don’t, I’ll never conclusively prove that parents are myopic to my own satisfaction, much less anyone else’s. From a social scientist’s point of view, this is a frustrating limitation. From your point of view, however, it’s not relevant, because you can measure your myopia by looking inside yourself. You know whether you’ve gazed all the way to the horizon. You know whether you’ve calmly weighed the lifetime consequences of another child.

  If you’ve been there and done that, wonderful. If you haven’t, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m appealing to your prudence. If you were good at being self-interested, “How many kids will I want when I’m sixty?” would interest you as much as “How many kids do I want right now?” If your answers to these two questions are not the same, balancing your present and future interests is no sacrifice. It’s common sense. Splitting the difference is as selfish as waking up a little early to pack yourself a lunch.

  6

  YOUR KIDS ARE GOOD FOR YOU—BUT ARE THEY GOOD OR THE WORLD?

  There came to me the memory of reading a eulogy delivered by a Jewish chaplain over the dead on the battlefield at Iwo Jima, saying something like, “How many who would have been a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein have we buried here?” And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein—or simply a joy to his or her family and community, and a person who will enjoy life?

  —Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2

  WE USUALLY LIMIT OUR NUMBERS OUT OF SELF-INTEREST—OR TO be more precise, perceived self-interest. When a couple has an unwanted pregnancy, they feel sorry for themselves, not for the world. Still, self-interest isn’t the whole story. Some of us have fewer kids than we’d like to avoid being selfish. Another baby might make you happier, but it’s wrong to think only of yourself. Shouldn’t I be pushing altruism, instead of refining selfishness?

  My answer is a definite maybe. If having more kids were bad for the world, the book in your hands would be awfully irresponsible. I’d be a cheerleader for evil. Even if all my earlier arguments held water, my book would be encouraging bad behavior because it happens to feel good. If more kids were good for the world, however, I’d have no cause for shame. When self-interest and the general interest coincide, preaching prudence is a public service.

  The crucial question, therefore, is: Does the birth of another baby make the world better—or worse? If creating one more life has bad overall consequences, then the unselfish should ignore my selfish reasons to have more kids—and everyone should hope I stay silent. Overpopulation burdens the selfish and unselfish alike. But if creating one more life has good overall consequences, everyone should be glad to see me promoting enlightened self-interest—and consistency seems to require even altruists to follow my advice.

  GIVING BIRTH: AT LEAST YOU’RE DOING THE KID A FAVOR

  You and your intellect would not be here,

  If Mother’s traits had all been fine, my dear.

  And it’s most fortunate for you that she,

  Was not wed solely to philosophy.

  Relent, and tolerate in me, I pray,

  That urge through which you saw the light of day.

  And do not bid me be like you, and scorn,

  The hopes of some small scholar to be born.

  —Jean-Baptiste Molière, The Learned Ladies

  Considering how cute babies are, it’s amazing how much we blame them for. Whether we’re worrying about poverty or the environment, we’re quick to point fingers at people who still haven’t learned to talk. Yet the accusations don’t stop there. When people weigh whether to have a baby, many openly doubt whether the baby benefits. One of the most common questions about reproducing is: Would it be fair to the child?

  Sometimes prospective parents worry that their motives are suspect: Do I want a child for the right reasons? Am I having a child out of loneliness? To hold my marriage together? To please my parents? Other times, they wonder whether their qualifications are substandard: Do I have the money to support a child? Am I too old? Too young? Will my job leave enough time for my child? Am I nurturing enough? Once we doubt our motives or qualifications, many of us can’t help but wonder if we would be wronging a child by bringing him into the world.

  What’s funny about these doubts is that virtually no one feels that it was unfair for their parents to have them. While we waste a lot of time blaming our parents for our problems, almost no one tells himself: “My parents were wrong to have me. They should be ashamed of themselves!”

  The more specific the doubts, the weirder they sound. Many prospective parents fret, “It’s not fair to have a child when we’re having trouble making ends meet,” or “It’s not fair to have a child out of loneliness.” Can you imagine someone saying, “My whole life has been a mistake because I grew up poor,” or “My parents had me out of loneliness; it would be better never to have been born”? These are flimsy reasons to regret your own existence. If they wouldn’t come close to convincing you that your life was a mistake, aren’t they equally flimsy reasons against passing the gift of life along to someone else?

  Almost everyone—children of flawed parents included—is glad to be alive. The upshot is that, contrary to popular worries, almost anyone who decides to reproduce is doing the child a favor. Fretting about “fairness” is looking a gift horse in the mouth. No one asks to be born, but almost everyone would if they could.

  We like to think that every child deserves the best, but almost no real human being lives up to this standard. We’re the imperfect children of imperfect parents. If it’s unfair to have a child without giving him the best, the only way to avoid treating your children unfairly is to remain childless. Be glad your parents held themselves to a looser standard; otherwise you wouldn’t be here to read this.

  If you’re still unsure, consider: How bad would your life have to be before you’d wish you’d never been born? You’ll probably need ultra-grim scenarios to answer the question. If a medical condition condemned me to a lifetime of horrible pain, if my parents were too poor to save me from immediate starvation, or if it were customary to savagely beat me just for fun, I’d regret having seen the light of day. Perhaps you have a longer list of nightmares. Still, wouldn’t your life have to be vastly below average before you’d wish to erase your whole existence?

  In the graphic novel It’s a Bird, a writer named Steve shows how Huntington’s disease, a dreadful hereditary condition, has haunted his family. He finally realizes that his father “doesn’t want to admit to himself that he might have doomed his own children . . . simply by having them.” Steve finally tells his dad to forget his regrets: “I�
��d rather have known my family, and fallen in love with Lisa, and written my stories, and then come down with Huntington’s . . . if that turns out to be my fate . . . than not to have lived, and missed all that.”

  There’s no need to dwell on nightmares come true; they’re happily as rare as they are disturbing. Yet asking yourself, “How bad would my life have to be before I’d wish I’d never been born?” teaches a profound lesson: At least one person benefits tremendously from virtually every birth—the new baby. The baby benefits if the parents have him out of loneliness, or to hold their marriage together. The baby benefits if the parents are poor, or workaholics, or carry Huntington’s disease in their genes. Turning the gift of life into a curse is quite a challenge.

  Prospective parents ought to do right by their children. But unless you foresee that your child’s life will be a full-blown tragedy, stop worrying about the fairness of creating life. How can it be unfair to give your child a gift that’s way better than nothing? When you wonder whether a new life will make the world a better place, don’t forget that being born means the world to someone.

  KIDS AND POVERTY: WHY PROSPERITY AND POPULATION GO TOGETHER

  Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered . . . Possibilities do merely not add up; they multiply.