I have a nearly 11 year old son now, and I have Thoughts.
1. Bryan Caplan is right that the pain is front loaded, where the pain includes both the intrinsic disutility of child care and the indirect effects of social isolation, though he overestimates the feasibility of throwing money at the problem. The first five years can be very hard even if you are quite affluent. But once your kid is school age, besides being past the sleep deprivation, diaper changing, etc, you now have access to the parent community that any decent school will provide and cultivate. Most of my relatively-new friends from the past six years are parents of my son's classmates, and the shared mission and shared burden are great for cultivating meaningful bonds. The pandemic threw a wrench in this, not least because a couple of our favorite parent-friends moved away out of frustration with SF's shamefully overlong school closures, but it's still a pretty damn good source of connection.
2. This all goes double if you and your classmate-parent-friends mostly live in walking distance of the school and thus of each other. Then the kids can walk/bike to each others' houses, the parents can drop by for multifamily hangouts on minimal notice, etc. One of our sadly now moved-away, but still very dear, parent-friend couples lived *on the same block* and whenever we had a sunny weekend afternoon the kids would play together in one or the other backyard and the parents would sit and drink wine and shoot the shit and it was perfect.
3. At least in the US, the kinds of neighborhoods that make this meaningful, connected parental life easiest are mostly "streetcar suburbs," i.e. places built as residential neighborhoods for commuter families between say 1880-1940. I'm betting these are mostly not counted as suburbs because they're within city limits: most of western SF is like this, as are large swathes of Brooklyn and Queens. But they feel suburban-- quiet, leafy, clean, low-rise, devoid of offices or industry. They just have smaller lots, more sidewalks, narrower and better gridded streets, more small distributed retail and schools and the like, and better transit access compared to postwar suburbia.
And of course since we practically stopped building them 80 years ago, they cost the earth now. The standard YIMBY response to that is to get the ones that are SFR-only to allow apartments, which is good and right, but I can't help but wonder if there's more to be done around retrofitting other types of neighborhoods to be like this too. Because "what man has done, man may aspire to do" and I can testify that for those of us lucky enough to still be able to buy into those neighborhoods, they work very well at cultivating happy family life.
See also this extremely good post that was like 2-3 slots up from this in my Feedly today, on how and where and why we get, or don't get, more neighborhoods like this:
What you say about parenthood makes a ton of sense. I've never heard of "streetcar suburbs," but I know what you're talking about and I completely agree. Apartments are good but that sounds good too. TY for sharing, as always.
This was an extremely good analysis of the downsides of having kids, which I didn't really understand until I had them!
For me, the biggest pro and one of the reasons that I had mine is because it's an experience unlike any other, and I love my girls dearly. But I had to take an easier job and, between having kids and then the pandemic, I completely torched my social life . You can actually look at my online footprint and see that I officially became "too online" on my second maternity leave.
As a soft pro-natalist (kids are good, but nobody should be pressured to have them), I think we really need to address how isolating having kids can be, and how fucked up it is that caring for kids knocks you out of public life and kills your economic power. In addition to the inherit sexism, it creates a world and economy very hostile to children.
100% agreed. Thank you for weighing in with your personal experience. I hope you’re able to make up for the losses economically and socially as they get older. If anyone can, I think you can.
Thanks! I'll be fine. In stereotypical fashion, my husband's career has soared since we had kids, but I think the bias in power and voice created by this dynamic leads to some really harmful biases in society.
I'm not convinced that your analysis of kids versus happiness is adequate. You start with Kahneman 's question about happiness with childcare, which is a very different matter than one's happiness about having children. This reminds me a bit of two surveys I've seen, about which countries have the happiest people. The one that got the most press was one in which experts measured happiness on the basis of various societal services. In the less-publicised one, the researchers simply asked people if they were happy with their lives. Paraguay was first inthe latter survey, Scandanavian countries first in the former study. The first survey was about what experts thought SHOULD make people happy (i.e. chilcare?), while the second was about whether people said the were happy (i.e., having children). For another rather trite analogy, I don't like housecleaning, but I like having a clean house. It's important to pay attention to that kind of distinction,
I have a nearly 11 year old son now, and I have Thoughts.
1. Bryan Caplan is right that the pain is front loaded, where the pain includes both the intrinsic disutility of child care and the indirect effects of social isolation, though he overestimates the feasibility of throwing money at the problem. The first five years can be very hard even if you are quite affluent. But once your kid is school age, besides being past the sleep deprivation, diaper changing, etc, you now have access to the parent community that any decent school will provide and cultivate. Most of my relatively-new friends from the past six years are parents of my son's classmates, and the shared mission and shared burden are great for cultivating meaningful bonds. The pandemic threw a wrench in this, not least because a couple of our favorite parent-friends moved away out of frustration with SF's shamefully overlong school closures, but it's still a pretty damn good source of connection.
2. This all goes double if you and your classmate-parent-friends mostly live in walking distance of the school and thus of each other. Then the kids can walk/bike to each others' houses, the parents can drop by for multifamily hangouts on minimal notice, etc. One of our sadly now moved-away, but still very dear, parent-friend couples lived *on the same block* and whenever we had a sunny weekend afternoon the kids would play together in one or the other backyard and the parents would sit and drink wine and shoot the shit and it was perfect.
3. At least in the US, the kinds of neighborhoods that make this meaningful, connected parental life easiest are mostly "streetcar suburbs," i.e. places built as residential neighborhoods for commuter families between say 1880-1940. I'm betting these are mostly not counted as suburbs because they're within city limits: most of western SF is like this, as are large swathes of Brooklyn and Queens. But they feel suburban-- quiet, leafy, clean, low-rise, devoid of offices or industry. They just have smaller lots, more sidewalks, narrower and better gridded streets, more small distributed retail and schools and the like, and better transit access compared to postwar suburbia.
And of course since we practically stopped building them 80 years ago, they cost the earth now. The standard YIMBY response to that is to get the ones that are SFR-only to allow apartments, which is good and right, but I can't help but wonder if there's more to be done around retrofitting other types of neighborhoods to be like this too. Because "what man has done, man may aspire to do" and I can testify that for those of us lucky enough to still be able to buy into those neighborhoods, they work very well at cultivating happy family life.
See also this extremely good post that was like 2-3 slots up from this in my Feedly today, on how and where and why we get, or don't get, more neighborhoods like this:
https://devonzuegel.com/post/america-s-hidden-urban-laboratory-the-south
What you say about parenthood makes a ton of sense. I've never heard of "streetcar suburbs," but I know what you're talking about and I completely agree. Apartments are good but that sounds good too. TY for sharing, as always.
This was an extremely good analysis of the downsides of having kids, which I didn't really understand until I had them!
For me, the biggest pro and one of the reasons that I had mine is because it's an experience unlike any other, and I love my girls dearly. But I had to take an easier job and, between having kids and then the pandemic, I completely torched my social life . You can actually look at my online footprint and see that I officially became "too online" on my second maternity leave.
As a soft pro-natalist (kids are good, but nobody should be pressured to have them), I think we really need to address how isolating having kids can be, and how fucked up it is that caring for kids knocks you out of public life and kills your economic power. In addition to the inherit sexism, it creates a world and economy very hostile to children.
100% agreed. Thank you for weighing in with your personal experience. I hope you’re able to make up for the losses economically and socially as they get older. If anyone can, I think you can.
Thanks! I'll be fine. In stereotypical fashion, my husband's career has soared since we had kids, but I think the bias in power and voice created by this dynamic leads to some really harmful biases in society.
Join the CNL slack and you too can chat with Cathy about her reproductive choices!
(joking, joking)
Everyone joins to encourage me to remain childfree
I'm not convinced that your analysis of kids versus happiness is adequate. You start with Kahneman 's question about happiness with childcare, which is a very different matter than one's happiness about having children. This reminds me a bit of two surveys I've seen, about which countries have the happiest people. The one that got the most press was one in which experts measured happiness on the basis of various societal services. In the less-publicised one, the researchers simply asked people if they were happy with their lives. Paraguay was first inthe latter survey, Scandanavian countries first in the former study. The first survey was about what experts thought SHOULD make people happy (i.e. chilcare?), while the second was about whether people said the were happy (i.e., having children). For another rather trite analogy, I don't like housecleaning, but I like having a clean house. It's important to pay attention to that kind of distinction,