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

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We've needlessly turned parenting into an unpleasant chore. Parents invest more time and money in their kids than ever, but the shocking lesson of twin and adoption research is that upbringing is much less important than genetics in the long run. These revelations have surprising implications for how we parent and how we spend time with our kids. The big Mold your kids less and enjoy your life more. Your kids will still turn out fine.Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a book of practical big ideas. How can parents be happier? What can they change--and what do they need to just accept? Which of their worries can parents safely forget? Above all, what is the right number of kids for you to have? You'll never see kids or parenthood the same way again.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 18, 2011

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About the author

Bryan Caplan

23 books332 followers
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He received his B.S. in economics from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism and anarchism. (He is the author of the Anarchist Theory FAQ.) He has published in American Economic Review, Public Choice, and the Journal of Law and Economics, among others. He is a blogger at the EconLog blog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. He is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

Currently, his primary research interest is public economics. He has criticized the assumptions of rational voters that form the basis of public choice theory, but generally agrees with their conclusions based on his own model of "rational irrationality." Caplan has long disputed the efficacy of popular voter models, in a series of exchanges with Donald Wittman published by the Econ Journal Watch. Caplan outlined several major objections to popular political science and the economics sub-discipline public choice. Caplan later expanded upon this theme in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press 2007), in which he responded to the arguments put forward by Wittman in his The Myth of Democratic Failure.

He maintains a website that includes a "Museum of Communism" section, that "provides historical, economic, and philosophical analysis of the political movement known as Communism", to draw attention to human rights violations of which, despite often exceeding those of Nazi Germany, there is little public knowledge. Caplan has also written an online graphic novel called Amore Infernale.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 292 reviews
Profile Image for Lily.
98 reviews13 followers
August 5, 2014
This is a bad book. To summarize the author's point is this message - it doesn't matter what you do as a parent. The kids will grow up the way nature intended them to grow and nothing you do has any influence. So why bother? You, the parent, can just relax and stop investing all this time and energy in raising your kids. That way, you can have more kids. Its not a problem at all to put them in front of TV, feed them take-out food, and do whatever makes your life more convenient. Nothing you do matters.

Other dubious points he makes are that having more people is actually good for the Earth cause, you know, actually resources are getting cheaper (excuse me?). And the more people are there the more advances in technology we have, like iPhone and genetically modified crops. Genetically modified crops as a benefit?!? Well, he lost me there. I thought GMOs are the ultimate evil...

I am sorry, but doesn't matter how much research this fellow will show me, nothing would convince me that my efforts as a parent don't matter at all. I don't care what the research says. I don't. Research is all about who pays for it, who designs it, who picks the subjects, who interprets it, who lets it be published. Research is not the replacement of common sense. At least not for me. And I know what he says, based on these researches is just wrong. I am sure parents *do* have an impact. And not just a superficial one, the way he says.

Also, it kind of bothers me that he is a guy, a man, not a woman, making this point. Cause whether we like it or not, women are usually the ones that need to make the most sacrifices when raising children, starting from pregnancy and birth, to hormonal shifts, to sleepless nights, nursing, childcare, career sacrifices, housework and more. So it may be easy for this guy to preach to have more children as a theoretical intellectual exercise.

And this is what this book is for me - an intellectual exercise.

Cannot wait to get rid of this book.
Profile Image for Eduardo Santiago.
676 reviews39 followers
May 8, 2011
I'm a save-the-planet kind of guy: the way I show my children my love is by not bringing them into this world. So why in blazes would I read this book? Two reasons: 1) I respect Caplan based on his Myth of the Rational Voter, and 2) fuck confirmation bias. To my surprise, I enjoyed and learned from this book.

Caplan's main point, as others have mentioned, is “don't sweat it”. To a large extent, you don't have that much say in how your kids turn out: in the unsolvable nature/nurture debate, he presents evidence that nature accounts for more than we like to think. So if you're holding off at one child because you want to devote all your resources to him/her, Caplan's message is: quit being a superparent. It's your genes that will make the kid. The uncomfortable corollary here is that it's easy to read Caplan's message as “psssst, hey upper-class educated first-world people, the Others are outbreeding us. If you have good genes, do your part.” I can think of no believable way for Caplan to deny this, because he has to deny it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but still minus one star.

Minus one star for its obvious daddy perspective: does the mother of his children feel the same way? Her voice isn't even hinted at. Would she feel the same way if they were divorced, if she were struggling to work while raising them? In the long run there are many yeses to this question, but it's irresponsible not to address it.

Minus one star for the cutesy fake dialogs; I found them too annoying to read. Minus one for its length: I would have found it more effective at half or two-thirds the length. Minus one for its focus on the joys of grandparenthood: that's a perspective he can only theorize about.

Despite all the minus stars... four total. For making me think, and especially for getting me to rethink some assumptions. This is a worthwhile book, well written, worthy of conversation.
Profile Image for Justus.
636 reviews95 followers
April 25, 2011
Interesting but not quite interesting enough. Some good ideas with lots of horrible flaws. This book is a mishmash. It also feels like one of those Atlantic articles that gets blown up to book length and suffers for it.

The subtitle tells you exactly what Caplan is going to attempt to convince you of. Unfortunately he does a pretty poor job. His basic thesis is essentially "parents in modern, middle class American spend too much time on 'child rearing'." His primary argument to convince you of these are a slew of "twin studies" which show that, over the long haul, genetics trumps parenting in every category that parents care about.

I think you'd have to be silly to dismiss the findings of twin studies. There's no real basis to do so other than you don't like the conclusions that science has so far provided. I am deeply sympathetic to the argument he puts forward in the first 1/3 or so of the book: the world is safer than we think and children don't require constant helicopter parenting to turn out just fine.

But there's a huge leap from that to Caplan's real argument of "have more kids". And to get there he deploys a ridiculous amount of shoddy reasoning. I made notes along the way of objectionable things he said but I think his argument fails to convince me for two reasons:

- Okay, being a parent is less work than I think. How much less? Enough less than having more kids is worth it? He deploys the analogy of finding something on sale at the store and buying more of it. But if I see something is 20% off I don't immediately buy two of them. When Toyota has a summer special that knocks $5,000 off the price of a car I don't buy two of them. And how much less work is it? 5%? 10%? 60%?

- He doesn't even really try to convince you that being a parent is more fun than you think. His entire argument seems to be "being a grandparent is awesome and having lots of kids ensures that you will be a grandparent." That's it, as far I can tell.

Also, wtf was up with that chapter about IVF and cloning?

The final Socratic dialogues are just rehashing (sometimes nearly verbatim) earlier passages and arguments.
102 reviews6 followers
March 22, 2013
This book is great. Some reviewers disparage it saying that it claims that parenting efforts are meaningless and that kids will grow up according to the dictates of their genes. This is not the author's argument. He argues (with adequate support) that EXCESSIVE parenting efforts are meaningless. The advanced preschools, all the music lessons, all the sports teams, and all the extracurricular activities that require so much time and commitment detract from your ability to enjoy your children and their ability to enjoy their childhood. All the over the top lengths parents go to to give their children every possible advantage doesn't really give them any advantage at all.
Profile Image for Adrienne.
309 reviews23 followers
May 15, 2011
This book has changed my life. I think the title is unfortunate because it can give people the wrong idea, but I’m glad I saw past that misnomer. It came at just the right time, too. I have recently been thinking a lot about all the parenting books I’ve read and wondering just how effective their techniques really are. I mean, if “effective” means that they work to change the targeted behavior, then I would say most techniques that make it into a published book probably fit the bill. But I’ve found myself wondering about the long-term outcomes of these things. Do they even make a difference in the long run? My main concerns are about long-term behavior outcomes as well as the long-term effects of these things on my kids’ relationships with me. (You know, am I going to elicit compliance now, only to have my kids resent my later?)

This book has helped me answer those questions. Caplan uses twin and adoption research to make his argument that parents are “charging” themselves too much for the “commodity” that is children. If we stopped wasting energy trying to control our kids’ development in areas where we really don’t have much influence, we would have the energy to happily and effectively raise more children (which would actually feel like a good and enjoyable thing if we weren't overextending ourselves).

Basically, twin and adoption research shows that parenting has very little, if any, effect on what our children become. Adopted children resemble their adoptive families when they’re little, but the older they get, the more they become like their biological families, whom they’ve never met. Identical twins raised separately are far more similar to each other than they are to their adoptive siblings. Caplan sums it up best with this analogy: “Instead of thinking of children as lumps of clay for parents to mold, we should think of them as plastic that flexes in response to pressure—and pops back to its original shape once the pressure is released.”

With this knowledge in hand, I’ve been able to let go of some of the exhausting techniques intended to mold my kids into something and instill habits that apparently won’t stick anyway, and instead just ENJOY them. They’re going to be who they’re going to be (barring extremes like abuse or neglect, of course) so why bust my hump trying to make them something they’re not? Obviously, we have to teach our kids to be respectful and responsible but most of that is taught through example. I just love this book for lifting a foolish burden that I placed on my shoulders when my daughter was born four years ago. I'm so much happier as a parent, AND my daughter is better-behaved. Go figure. Perhaps it's because I'm not up in her business all day, trying to mold and shape her?

All that said, I didn’t care for the dialogues in the last section of the book. I ended up skipping them because they were kind of awkward to read and they just reiterated what was already said. So the book could have been significantly shorter.

Even so, best parenting book ever. I wish I had read this one first.

***To the reviewer who refuses to believe the research, I think it's important to realize that these studies focus on overall character traits. And the truth is that as parents, we aren't going to change our children's core character traits. But I don't think that means that parents don't make any difference at all. Lots of things are learned. Take racism or other forms of prejudice--those aren't attitudes that people are just born with. They're learned. Which means tolerance is learned as well. As parents, we can still do a lot of good, but most of the good we can do is pretty much done before our kids are even conceived. If you're a decent, tolerant, polite person, odds are good your kids will be, too.
Profile Image for Alison.
190 reviews
January 13, 2012
While I was looking to be persuaded that having more kids would be a great idea, I found Bryan Caplan's arguments and the scientific research he uses to back them up to be unconvincing. I am not schooled in statistical interpretation or in genetic research, but I looked at the numbers he presents as proof that nature completely overrides nurture and parenting has absolutely no effect, and I came up with somewhat different conclusions, from the exact same numbers. Although it also seemed to me that nurture has less of an effect than parents assume (so why worry so very much about all the education and classes and television-watching?), I didn't interpret the numbers as meaning that nurture has no effect at all. I also found his insistence that his interpretation was final and conclusive to be odd, unscientific, and damaging to his argument.

Twin research and the idea that parenting and parental stress are irrelevant seem to be the foundation of Caplan's argument, but he also repeatedly returns to the argument that if you want more grandchildren, you should have more children and he seems to think that everyone else wants lots of grandchildren. Frankly, I do hope to have grandchildren, but please let me survive (and learn to enjoy) giving birth to (something Caplan doesn't have to do, I'd like to point out) and parenting babies, toddlers and teens first; I'd prefer not to determine the whole course of my life based on how many grandchildren I'd like when I'm in my 60s or 70s (as an older parent, I expect to be an older grandparent).

The book is strangely organized, jumping from twin research, to how getting pregnant is more technologically possible than ever before so why are you stopping now, to the idea that, well, if you don't have more children, then you have less of a chance to giving birth to a genius, to a whole chapter for grandparents on persuading their own children to have more children, and finally, a transcript of a conversation between people who had the same problems I did with Mr. Caplan's arguments. While I was somewhat mollifed that my concerns were at least addressed, I felt that if the book had been well-written, there would have been no need for that strange addition to try to win people over.

I was also never quite sure why Mr. Caplan wants to convince people to have more kids - is it just altruistic desire for people to have "more fun" or does he have some other hidden reason for feeling the need to make this argument? I couldn't shake the feeling that it was the latter, but I never figured out what that reason might be. Maybe he just wanted to publish a book.

Ultimately, I did come to the conclusion that overall, yes, it's a good thing for parents to stop worrying so much and cut themselves some slack and even let the kids watch television while they take some time for themselves, and thus, if you are on the fence about having more kids, then maybe taking the pressure off yourself is just what you need to convince you that it would be a good thing, but I found this book to be mostly a half-organized muddle of flimsy ideas.
Profile Image for Skylar Burris.
Author 19 books247 followers
January 15, 2013
"Selfish Reasons to Have Children" more or less makes the following argument: (1) Modern day parents make parenting costlier than it has to be (in terms of time, energy, money, and worry). (2) They don't need to do this because, as the research shows, the way you parent doesn't really influence the way your kids turn out as adults. (3) If parents didn't do #1, more people would be willing to have more kids, and (4) More people should have more kids.

I agree with (1), though this concept was already fairly well covered in another book I've read, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.

I am increasingly becoming convinced of (2), though primarily because of the better substantiated argument made in another book I've read, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Still, my doubts linger. (More on that later.)

I agree with (3), as the costliness of children is a primary reason why people limit them.

As for (4), I, as most people, don't like to be told I should have more children than I think I want. (If you think you want none, he says, then have one; if you think you want two, have three.) That said, I do not buy into the Malthusian myth that overpopulation is a problem. I am aware of the immense value of human capital, and the economic problems modern advanced societies face due to an overall decline in population. I am aware that per capita income has risen with population, and that resources have not declined but evolved. And I don't think more people are necessarily bad for the environment, as that human capital typically results in new, more efficient technology as well as the discovery and development of new, more efficient resources. So I can agree human kind might benefit from more people having more children, I just don't want to be told what to do.

Caplan surveys the collected research data (particularly with regard to twin studies) and concludes that how parents raise their kids has very little measurable effect on how those kids turn out in the long-term (in terms of worldly success, health, and even ethical choices). Parents can influence the present-day behavior of their children within the home, but they have no influence over how the child will act outside of it when he is grown (that's determined by genetics, personality, and peer environment). The only *lasting* impact parents have is the impression they leave on their children – whether good or bad – of the kind of parents they were.

Ruling out extremes (such as saying, for instance, "You never have to go to school," or "You can eat nothing but sugar for the next month,"), there's no long-term benefit, Caplan argues, to pushing your kid to do things they don't want to do or forbidding them from doing things they do want to do. There's no need to spend great effort pushing them to excel academically or extracurricular and no need to spend large swathes of "quality time" with them. Have a cup of coffee and read a book while they entertain themselves. Let them cry it out as babies – it won't warp them, and you'll have better sleep in a few weeks. If it's easier and more pleasant for everyone involved, just let them watch Sponge Bob instead of going to Tae Kwon Do practice. Because in thirty years, it won't make one lick of difference that you forced them to go to some activity or that you didn't let them cry in their crib or that you refused to stop reading your book to play Candy Land with them. Don't do something, as a parent, because you think it will affect how your kids turn out or the type of person they will be at thirty. It likely won't. Do something for the purely selfish reason that it makes your life (the parent's life) better. Don't make them clean up after themselves assuming they will be cleanly and disciplined as adults. Make them clean up after themselves if it makes your eighteen years of living with them easier. Don't read to them assuming it will make them better students and more intelligent as adults. Read to them if it you enjoy reading to them. Otherwise…don't sweat it.

While your actions don't affect how your children turn out, they do affect what your children think of you and what kind of relationship you have with them. And if you go about parenting in a sacrificial sort of manner, pushing your kids to achieve and presumably become better people even when it is unpleasant for you to do so, you're probably going to be more irritable than you would otherwise be, and your relationship with your family is going to be less pleasant than it would otherwise be. So just making parenting pleasant – do what feels good for your family, and not the tedious tasks you think you have to do to help your kids along in life. Don't read so many parenting books, and don't try so hard to get it right. It really doesn't matter that much. You don't have as much power as you think you do. Just enjoy your today with your child, because you have no control over his tomorrow.

How do I feel about this argument? Well, after reading much on the subject, I feel the sociological evidence is pretty strong that parents really do NOT have the kind of vast long-term influence they'd like to think they have. That said, I suspect they have more influence than mere charts and numbers imply, because charts and numbers can't measure what might have been. Research can only compare existing people to existing people; it cannot compare the person who is to the person who might have been. For example, if Twin A has adoptive parents who challenge him academically and Twin B doesn't, and Twin A still turns out to be as much of an academic failure as Twin B, I still don't know how much *more* of an academic failure Twin A *might have been* if he had instead had Twin B's parents.

In the end, belief in parental influence comes down to faith in the unknown. Modern day parenting is a kind of religion, with its own sects and varied prophets and diverse scriptures. This prophet says to relax. Take it easy. You're not really in control. Enjoy your kids. Don't knock yourself out trying to turn them into good, intelligent people. Because you can't. And when you realize how much easier it is to raise kids this way, go ahead and pop out another one. It won't be much trouble, and then you up your odds of having grandchildren, who you can trouble about even *less* than your own children.

Stylistically, the book is a light, easy, but rather repetitive read.

Profile Image for Rachel.
6 reviews
April 25, 2012
I was excited to read this book after hearing an interview of the author. The thesis of his book is that parenting style does not matter – at least not for a middle-class family in the developed world. Extensive twin and adoption studies show that parents have almost no effect on who their children become as adults. Genes have a small to moderate effect, while unknown variables (or “nonshared environment”) account for the rest. So instead of focusing on their children’s future success, the author argues that parents should instead focus on being happy, treating their kids with kindness, and creating fun memories to last a lifetime. This was the good part of the book. Unfortunately, like all parenting books, this one also gives its share of pointless and biased advice. The author’s love for the Chicago school of economics and his right-wing libertarian views come through loud and clear. In the book he recommends out-sourcing surrogate mothers from impoverished countries, defends genetic engineering, and at one point even tells the reader, “You’re not trying to raise a communist.” It was bad enough to make me question his summary of the research. While I found parts of the book thought-provoking, it was overall a disappointment.
Profile Image for Margaret Heller.
Author 2 books35 followers
July 15, 2014
I heard Bryan Caplan on the Freakonomics podcast and knew I had to read this book. He posits that, contrary to modern popular opinion, it is actually pretty fun to have kids, and it's more important in the long run to be nice to yourself and your kids (which includes making sure they behave themselves so they don't make you miserable) than to inflict a lot "for your own good" activities and rules. This is based on a body of twin adoption studies, and suggests that in the long run, nurture generally has less of an effect than nature--*assuming* that you are in a middle class family in a developed country with good health. Basically, if an adoption agency would likely consider you as a potential parent, and your kids are in good health, they will be fine even if you aren't Amy Chua or her ilk.

You likely have some questions about his conclusions and methods, and so he includes a panel discussion with critics that covers that ground and admits areas where reasonable people might disagree. But I still think it's worth a read--if nothing else, shows the data that "parents are less happy" and "women hate taking care of their kids" tropes are based on are not as dramatic as the media portrays them.
687 reviews60 followers
December 26, 2021
-This book is the man's version of the Three Martini Playdate. Three Martini Playdate is funnier though.

Here is the blog post I wrote about this book (roslynross.blogspot.com)--though it takes this book more seriously than it should be taken. The truth is, some books are too lame to deserve a review. And this is one of them! If the subject weren't interesting, I would not have thought twice about it at all.

I recently read: The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Both argue the nature/nurture question and side with nature. I thought both books were pretty bad (too long, extremely uncreative in the exploration of possible reasons for their findings, and not convincing) but they did provide some fun food for thought--hence this post.

First, a summary: In Surnames, Gregory Clark attempts to prove that if social mobility is studied by surnames, the rate of social mobility is always around .75. This means social mobility is much slower than was previously believed, and is much slower everywhere, even in places with massive government intervention like Sweden. Both rich and poor families always move, however slowly, toward the mean. (With or without government intervention, the poor get richer and the rich get poorer.) Therefore, says Clark, social stature is mostly nature, if not all nature. In Selfish Reasons Bryan Caplan concurs. Twin and adoption studies show that it is nature and not nurture that will most determine a person's income, educational achievement, health, happiness, character, and values (at least in middle and upper class America).

Second, the purpose: Both Clark and Caplan offer two kinds of advice (provided you accept the premise that nurture is largely irrelevant): advice to parents on how to maximize their breeding success and advice to public policy makers on how to make the world a better place.

For parents--if nurture is irrelevant:

Clark says, in order to maximize your chances of having The Best Children, invest a great deal of time and energy in the selection of your mate. The only way to have successful offspring is to mate successfully. I agree that mate-selection should be taken far more seriously. I also agree that DNA should be taken seriously. But I disagree that the proper mating goal should be to maximize education/income/occupation or social status of offspring. I have found little correlation between social status and happiness after basic needs are met. Moreover, psychologists generally agree that the number one determiner of happiness is physical health, then relationships, then income/occupation. So if I were mate-selecting, the most important thing would not actually be the social status DNA of my potential mate, but rather, his physical health (straight teeth without ever having had braces, no acne, no glasses, no allergies, etc). After that I would look for great communication skills and secure attachment. Only then would I start to look into his income/education/occupation. Selecting based on this order would ensure that I maximize my chances of having a happy spouse and happy children. They may not be doctors and lawyers, but who cares about that if they're not happy and healthy? Moreover, a far more convincing book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, shows that happiness and depression are highly contagious. Which means I maximize my own chances of happiness by selecting my mate first according to physical health, then relationships skills, then education/income/occupation. (And yes, the evidence shared in Connected directly contradicts both Surnames and Selfish Reasons on the nature/nurture question.)

It is this same value issue I have with Caplan's book in which I am instructed to spend less of my time and money on my kids (since nurture doesn't matter) and to have more kids since that will maximize my chances of having at least one total success of a child. But for me, success is based first on physical health. In order to maximize the physical health (DNA expression) of my offspring (and my own health) they should be spaced 4 to 5 years apart and ideally wouldn't be born after I am 35. After maximizing physical health I would focus on relationships. As a nanny I learned that when there are more than 2 kids, there wasn't enough of me to go around--someone always ended up starved for my attention. Perhaps in a different parenting world, one with more community in which there were more adults around with whom the children can bond, 2 kids wouldn't take all the attention I had to give, but in this parenting world, it's hard for me to imagine that attention-starved kids grow up to be securely attached individuals with high-quality relationship skills. If I had 2, one age 10 and one age 5, and thought that I had enough attention to give a 3rd, I would totally do it (and a 4th!) but in the mean time, I don't plan to have only 2 kids because I am a helicopter mom or because they need to attend private schools as Caplan seems to think, but rather because quality relationships with my children come before having trophy children.

And I guess that is the major problem I have with both of these books. Children are people, that's all they are, new people for us to have relationships with. Those relationships will be satisfying or unsatisfying depending upon how respectfully we relate to one another. Starting a relationship with the premise that a child ought to meet some expectation that I have about "what is successful" is a pretty controlling and disrespectful way to start a relationship. This is one of the main epiphanies I had while working as a nanny: parents destroy their children when they treat them as something other than people; children are not trophies, prizes, puppies, puppets, or toys.

I did think Caplan had a good point about grandchildren though. When people are in their 30's their ideal number of children is often zero or one, but by the time most people are in their 70's their ideal number of children is 5 (because that way they definitely have someone to hang out with and grandkids). My sister-in-law worked in an elderly home for many years and she made a similar conclusion: when you are 90 you will not care at all about whatever career you had, you will only care about your grandkids. This is confirmed whenever I read the Wesleyan University magazine that arrives in my mailbox periodically--the oldest alums stop talking about career achievements. Their paragraphs are always about their grandkids. (Note for Objectivists: this means that my real-life observations do not coincide with the fictional characters after whom Ayn Rand invited me to model my life--I would welcome any real-life evidence from readers supporting Rand's point of view.)

I also think this perspective is rather inconsiderate of the children. Yes, if you have five kids you may have maximized your chances of having at least one with whom you feel deeply connected. But what about the other four?!!! Shall we do like they did in the 1500's and throw the other four to the wolves?

I would rather have two kids and put a great deal of effort into creating relationships that will last a life time. Moreover, I would never "try to get" grandkids, but the following parenting choices that I would make either way, I believe, will contribute to me getting grandkids:
a) focusing on health--infertility is skyrocketing.
b) focusing on respectful relationships--people who love and enjoy their families are far more likely to want to have a family of their own.
c) proper child spacing combined with homeschooling--children who grow up knowing how to relate to people of many ages (a 10-year-old who plays often with his 5-year-old sibling, helps care for the baby, and spends a lot of time with young adults at his father's office) will likely find it easier to envision a life with children than the 30-year-olds who have only ever hung out with people their own age and know nothing about babies.
d) unschooling with a focus on the future--children who own their lives and who don't have to wait until they are 22 to pursue their dreams can get their 10,000 hours in a given field by the time they are 15 or 16. Which means they could have quite a bit of money put away and career success by the time they are 22. Which means they may be ready to have families of their own much younger than Standard American Children. And even if not--
e) parental help--books on evolutionary theory make it clear that we live as long as we do only because it is beneficial to offspring i.e. grandparents exist because they help care for the young. My son gets holiday gifts from his grandparents and that's it. Upper class friends of mine get insane amounts of free babysitting from their parents, some as much as 60 hours a week for 2 years. I hope to be able to offer insane amounts of free babysitting to my own grandkids--this should make it easier for me to get more grandkids and make parenting more fun for my kids.
f) including children in the world--the world for parents and children sucks right now (see my lecture 2). By creating a world that includes children, it would make having children a lot more fun.

I am not convinced nurture is irrelevant though.

-In Surnames, for example, the graphs of DNA winners and losers do not work for my family. I don't look at my genealogy chart and see a story of poor people moving ever so slowly toward the mean with some dips back into poverty, nor do I see a story of wealthy people moving ever so slowly toward the mean with some blips into extreme wealth. It doesn't matter what line you follow, my genealogy is more like: poor immigrant begets middle class man begets extremely wealthy man begets total financial failure begets middle class man. When I look at my genealogy chart and focus on education I see: farmer begets minister begets doctor who marries a fellow doctor and they beget a high school drop out. Am I just this anomaly with a combination of win/lose career-DNA or, more likely, are most of us DNA mutts? Don't most people have a poor relative and a rich one or is it really just me? Because I am inclined to argue that DNA purebreds don't make sense.

-Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives shows that social behaviors are contagious, from happiness to obesity. We will become the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. Couldn't this be the explanation for the wealthy dynasties falling inexorably toward the mean rather than their failure to properly screen potential mates? When I think of the extremely wealthy people for whom I worked during my 20's--who were the five people with whom their children spent most of their time? Never their parents. And never wealthy people. Even if you send your child to the most exclusive private school in the world, his teachers will still not be members of the social class which his parents hope he will one day join. Nor will his nannies. Nor will his piano instructor or personal trainers. Nor will his college professors. What I see is wealthy people failing to raise their own children.

Many wealthy people genuinely believe that middle class teachers or super nannies have more to offer their children than they do. I think the opposite is true. Wealthy people who want their children to be wealthy like them need to be the primary teachers of their children. Want your children to think the way you do, the way a successful, wealthy person does? Don't have them taught to think by middle class teachers.

In A Mother's Job: The History of Day Care 1890-1960 I read about the white, protestant, upper class women who started daycare and pushed for free, compulsory public education. The goal was to reshape the children of the poor. The goal was for the children of the poor to be raised by middle class people so that they would acquire middle class values. What ended up happening is that all children are raised by middle class people. Isn't this a more plausible explanation as to why both rich and poor families generally rise or fall to the mean?

-Caplan claims that political values are nature, not nurture. I mean--WHAT??? So in 1770's there was just a lot of Libertarian DNA expressed and today, randomly, nothing to do with the liberal takeover of education, it's Fascist DNA that happens to be expressed?

-Both Caplan and Clark mention that nurture is far more influential than nature until children are four years old and only then suddenly nurture becomes irrelevant. And yet it makes more sense to both of these scholars that our DNA suddenly turns on at four than that school has replaced nurture in American society? Or school plus seven hours of television a day? To me it is clear: it's not that nurture is actually irrelevant, it's that nurture is simply not part of the equation any more when it comes to American parenting. The Standard American parent has been replaced and is kidding himself/herself to think that his/her paltry few hours on the weekend stands a chance against the combined nurturing/indoctrination/brainwashing forces of school and television.

Which brings me to my conclusions from these books:

1. Raise your own children. Occasional babysitting, yes. But no nannies, no daycare, and definitely no school public or private. Especially if you are wealthy. The wealthier you are, the more important it is to not hire out the raising of your children. Which means not only that you need to learn how to raise children well, but that one of the focuses of your children's childhood should also be learning how to relate to children well so that they will be great parents too.

2. And consider this: occupations run in families. Hollywood poo-poo's taking over Daddy's company--and that is very unfortunate. What if one of the greatest keys to success in business is doing the same or similar occupation of your parents? It takes 10,000 hours to be world-class at something. What will your child get his hours in just because of his childhood with you? Today we do the best we can to keep kids out of the real world. It's as if we are trying to ensure that they have no real-world skills by the time they are 22. Yet, when look at my own life, even though I was so focused on school, I still managed to get a leg-up in my parent's occupations--farming and writing from my father and wine from my mother. Had a school counselor sat me down when I was eighteen and said: Look, if you are super passionate about something else, by all means go do it, but if you could be happy working in wine, you will have a much easier life and you will find career success at a much younger age. You can go to college, study something new, get a bunch of debt, and spend your 20's and 30's acquiring the social network and skills required to do a new line of work and you will be successful--just much later (your 50's rather than your late 20's) and with much more strife. Do you like this other career SO much more than wine that you are willing to make that trade?

I am not saying that kids should do what their parents do or that parents should push their kids to do so, just that if it works out that way, it would be very advantageous. Outliers points out that it is very rare for children who grew up in poverty to become very wealthy, but it is very common for them to make it to the middle class. Children who grow up in the middle class are more likely to become very wealthy--which is exactly what my family tree shows. Which is to say: a truely successful career may require three generations. I notice that in Hollywood. Failed actors have children who are working actors and they have children who are successful. I'm not arguing that this is The One Rule, there will always be anomalies, but this idea that building something amazing takes more than one generation was common knowlege for farmers in the time of Laura Ingles Wilder. The pioneers were going to have it rough and they knew that going in. But their children would have it easier and their grandchildren even easier. The farm would get better over time. Doing a career other than what your parents did is like being a pioneer. It may be unfortunate that we idealize, as a culture, "getting out" of our hometowns and not following in Daddy's footsteps.

This knowledge is equally valuable for the father who hates his job and hopes his son does not follow in his footsteps. Don't want your kid to do your job one day? Make sure he gets that leg-up from an uncle or one of your friends. Because if you don't plan otherwise, he will wake up at 25 and realize that doing what you do is the easiest route to take.

For Public Policy Makers--if nurture is irrelevant

Poor people who work hard get to switch social classes and always have been able to do so--our ideas about the repressive feudal times are inaccurate. Social mobility as always been .75! Woot woot! Ambitious people have always found a way and will always find a way! And unambitious people won't. All of Sweden's government interventions haven't changed their social mobility. DNA (or something in nature) is destiny. So don't bother with the nurture. Stop wasting your time trying to teach poor people and their children to fish. They never will.

This is great news, both Caplan and Clark insist. We don't need to worry anymore. Or try so hard. Leveling the playing field didn't work so we can stop trying.

Now, the authors obviously can't go Hitler, so they go Harrison Bergeron--leveling the playing field doesn't work so we are going to have to level the players. DNA is destiny, so even though the smart folk still have to do the work to acquire their income, it should be taken from them and given to those who lost the DNA lottery.

[Here is a link to the amazing 80's film based on Harrison Bergeron--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvqsv...]

As the awesome story Harrison Bergeron points out, the only reason anyone thinks this is okay is because they are only thinking in terms of money. But financial success isn't the only lottery we can win when it comes to DNA. Why are poor people the "less fortunate who should be compensated" and not the crappy athletes? What about lessening the blow for the ugly people? There are a lot of ways for life to be unfair. If I gotta share my IQ-related-wealth, then I think the pretty girls should have to wear masks and the good athletes should have their legs broken so their backs hurt as bad as mine. That sounds fair to me!

I am not joking. And if you think the above is insane, please reread the last paragraph and watch Harrison Bergeron.

From a public policy perspective, the only other option is the eugenics route--and if I read between the lines, I think this is how both Caplan and Clark really feel, they just can't say so. If nurture doesn't matter, if the poor cannot learn to fish, if DNA determines everything, as these writers claim with absolute surety, why should we, as parents, or as a society, invest anything in loser DNA? Especially considering that those with the loser DNA tend to have more children than the winners.

Goodreads won't give me any more space so the rest of this post is at:

http://roslynross.blogspot.com/2015/0...
Profile Image for Mary.
896 reviews48 followers
May 2, 2018
The basic premise of this book is "most of your kids' outcome is genetic, so don't sweat it." Caplan draws on twin and adoption studies to prove that most of the things we want for our kids (health, success, happiness) is determined from birth.

(Incidentally, I think he should alter this book for a dating book, too. He has one off-hand comment where he says that women who are attracted to "bad boys" are setting themselves up for another dimension of disappointment when their kids share characteristics of their deadbeat fathers. This is haunting and terrible. The costs of having kids with a guy that you aren't proud of are high for you and your children. It's better to divorce or, if he'll let you, get a sperm donor.)

This isn't to say that Caplan thinks only super-star genes should have kids--he says that if you'd be a good candidate for a typical adoption agency, you're a good candidate to raise kids. If you're proud of yourself and your reproductive partner, you'll probably be proud of your kids, especially as they enter adulthood. Everything we add on--guilt about bedtimes and discipline schemes and allowances and screen time--is just making our jobs harder, making it, in economic terms, more "expensive" to have kids. If you think you need give up all of your money, time and happiness in order to shuttle one kid to planned playdates and expensive extra-curriculars, then you are never going to want a second. Crikey, you might never want the one. But if kids are "cheaper," succeeding on feeding and watering, then you can have more than you think--maybe even as many as you want.

And that's the other economic insight Caplan gives to parenting: consumption smoothing. He never uses the phrase (although I have no idea why--heaven knows he gives us appendices with formulae and regressions), but consumption smoothing traditionally relates to how we balance out the highs and lows of our changing economic lives. Consider, for one classic example, the pro football player. He might make millions of dollars a year, but his career is probably only going to last the average of 6 years. If he spends like a millionaire all six years, he will go bankrupt by the end of his career --as many pros do. Instead, the pro player should live like a "thousandaire," investing some of those millions to live off of once his career is over, denying some pleasures to his current self in order to take care of his future self.

With having kids, Caplan argues, we are all like football players. When we're in our thirties, kids are expensive both in real (babies and schoolkids need our money to stay alive, as well as a lot of time and attention) and opportunity costs (our careers need a lot of attention right now, and parents of newborns famously lose a lot of sleep). But much like those pro football players, we can't see past the next six years...or eighteen or thirty. Because when we're in our sixties and seventies, our careers are on autopilot (if we're still in them), and, with few exceptions, our adult children don't make any demands on our time and money. It's all joy. (Even better if they have grandkids, which are the best kind of kids to have, everyone agrees.) So when you're in your thirties, you might be able to stomach one kid, but in your sixties, you'd want to have four or five so that they can light up your life by turns. Caplan says that, like the football player, we should smooth out our "consumption" of having kids by compromising between our present and future selves--maybe having three kids, so you're busy early, but more satisfied later.

As a good libertarian, Caplan isn't saying that everyone should have kids--if you really hate cartoons and amusement parks, you might not have fun with any kids--but that you can "afford" to have more kids than you think. They are, as the subtitle says, "less work and more fun than you think." And the fun is a big park of it. As much as I liked All Joy and No Fun , Caplan does a better job selling the low-key fun of being around kids. You get to enter into kid worlds, from park swingsets to funny questions. Parenting, he argues, is enjoyable in its own, and much more so if you aren't stressing about parenting as something instrumental, because it teaches some kind of skill that will set your kid up for success. Because, as long as you're doing an okay job, the kids are going to turn out okay.

Profile Image for Steve Carroll.
182 reviews10 followers
June 16, 2013
Brilliant. Best parenting book I've read to date. Even if you don't plan to have kids this book presents a simple compelling argument that you are probably sucking all the fun out of parenting for no reason. To summarize, twin research suggests that on most of the dimensions that parents actually care about and for any reasonable parenting style that wouldn't be interpreted as abuse, nature completely destroys nurture in the long run. Parenting does matter in the short term so modify your style to produce strong bonds with your children and stop beating yourself up in status competitions with other parents that don't really effect the children.

Parenting having less effect in the long term than most realize is a hard pill for many to swallow because it injures our self-images (just read some of the goodreads reviews) but even if you don't accept the strong form of the advice here and stop worrying altogether and enjoy the ride, I advise most parents to move at least somewhat in this direction. There is some simple advice here that can make a big difference. Think about whatever the activity you signed up your kid for is. Do they really enjoy it? REALLY? Great. Now cancel it and spend that time doing something you both enjoy. They are never going to learn whatever skill you were trying to teach them unless they want to anyways!

If people ever asked me for a curriculum for parenting (and they don't :)) I think I would pair this book up with "The Power of Positive Parenting" by Latham. That book is by a hardcore behaviorist who believes that NURTURE > NATURE. It turns out that the two books can be quite compatible because as Caplan acknowledges parenting does matter quite a bit in the short term and in your ability to enjoy your life with your kids.
97 reviews
December 5, 2021
"Great book, important subject and directionally correct. Argues that empirical research suggests most parental interventions (nurture) have little or no long-lasted effect, whereas pre-birth factors (nature) determine most long-term outcomes. Some important caveats, that nurture determines how much your kids like you, and political and religious affiliation (although not intensity of political and religious affiliation). Conclusion is that parents over-invest in costly and unpleasant parenting, so they should decrease effort. Corollary is that as costs lower you should buy more, thus the payoff, be selfish and have more kids. Great, well-reasoned, and consistent with the empirical literature (which is not always true with BC, see e.g. his newer book on education as signalling, which is more controversial, especially among some elite economists, like Harvard folks).

Some qualms. I do worry that readers will take insufficient notice of one point BC makes—that twin studies only describe correlations on within-population variance, and the population is (generally middle-class or upper-middle class) child adopters. That is, if there's some behavior that is reasonably common among adoptive parents, you can safely situate yourself at the lazier end of that behavior. But a behavior is uncommon among adoptive parents, the empirical literature doesn't say anything about whether it'll be OK for you. In this sense BC's book is a little self-defeating, because he claims that parents widely believe that effort is important, while suggesting that twin studies indicate that these parents are wrong. But if there's something that almost all parents do that BC believes is overrated—say, limiting screen time—a sample that focuses on existing parents won't be at all informative about whether we should or should not limit screen time, because the subsample of parents who DO limit screen time is too small.

A second problem is that BC only discusses very high-level summary statistics, i.e. correlations between nature/nurture and outcomes. But it's possible that the shape of the curve is heterogenous, rather than uniformly zero. Perhaps both very low and very high effort lead to worse outcomes. Or perhaps low effort usually doesn't matter, but it matters a lot in some cases. Some caution is required in reading these results—but again, they seem directionally correct and a forthright treatment of an important subject."
Profile Image for Rachel.
782 reviews30 followers
August 18, 2018
I was intrigued by the title of this book and my friend Mary's review. One of the main takeaways is that as long as you provide adequate parenting (good enough that an adoption agency would approve), there's not a large benefit to going above and beyond in terms of extracurriculars and stressing about TV time. And if you can lower your standard of parenting (for average middle-class American homes), you might enjoy parenting enough to have more children.

I liked how the book was reassuring, but at the same time the author's tone seemed overly confident (maybe even condescending). I love the idea that there are selfish reasons to have children, just because I consider it such a selfless act. But if I change my perspective, maybe I could enjoy parenting more?
Profile Image for Blake.
289 reviews3 followers
November 10, 2022
This book can be life-changing if you take it seriously and don't write off Bryan Caplan's arguments without really thinking about them. I agree with many of his points, although the nature/nurture argument -- that nature dwarfs nurture in long-term effects for pretty much every outcome that matters -- comes across stronger than he intends while reading Chapter 2 (he helps clarify later on).

Summary of the main points, which are backed by scientific studies and/or logical arguments:
1. Parents are only slightly less happy than childless people
2. This is likely because parents hold themselves to a higher standard than a few decades ago
3. Parents should spend a little more time doing things they enjoy and a little less time parenting because
4. Parenting effects are mostly short-term rather than long-term, as proven out by twin adoption studies, and parenting is a less effective than most people think because the nature effect is so much stronger than the nurture effect
5. The "cost" of children is therefore less than most people think; also, most of us undervalue the long-term benefits (productive adult children and grandchildren)

The nature/nurture topic is pretty mind-blowing when reading through the studies. For example, most studies show that if your genetic child is 80th percentile in x, then an adopted child could be expected to be 55th-60th percentile, meaning that your "nurture" effect from parenting is only a few percentile strong. This applies to pretty much every characteristic you'd care about for your children when they become an adult. I think that this can still be a decent impact. I mean, personally I'd prefer to be 55-60th percentile rather than 50th. Also, as Caplan points out, there are near-term effects that are pretty strong. So if I'm a decent parent I won't have to deal with as many behavioral issues. If I force my kids to practice piano that's a talent they'll carry for the rest of their lives.

But I agree that most parents try to do too much and sacrifice too much for marginal (probably negligible) gains for their children. I see parents throwing elaborate birthday parties rather than keeping it simple, or running around every Saturday all year taking their children to games and practices that the kids may not even really want to be at. In the meantime, these parents have no hobbies that they are passionate about.

I feel like my wife and I have struck a decent balance despite having multiple children. Sometimes things are out of balance, and this book has made me think about how I can improve. For example, are there more things that I love doing that I can include my kids in so that we're both having fun (especially as they're getting older)? Are there any activities that I'm forcing on them that really won't help them long term and just creates headaches for everyone?

Overall this book was thought-provoking and brings good ideas to an important, underrated topic of our day: the gigantic decline in the fertility rate.
Profile Image for Colleen.
600 reviews2 followers
January 2, 2020
One of the big maxims of parenting that I (we) took into this whole adventure came from a couple whose rationality and values we really respect—plus I just like the way they summed up a key idea: “the goal of parenting is to produce a successful adult.”

Heavily drawing on a fascinating review of genetics versus nurture studies, The author convincingly argues that while you can hyper-invest in parenting in the short term to affect your child, in the long term, genetics have an inordinate say in the success (or challenges/pitfalls) of the adult that you are raising. Anything that provides a sanity check on modern American approaches to parenting is valuable, particularly something as difficult to push back on as science :-)

What I also found unexpected and interesting was the perspective that, at the end of the day, it’s not just that you’re producing an adult, but that, if the actuarial statistics smile on you, your relationship with that adult ultimately is going to long out-distance the span of time you spend raising them. I think anyone who has a second kid has instinctively sussed out the short term version of this: the insane nursing, diapering, no sleep period doesn’t actually last all that long relatively speaking, and they get more fun and interesting by the year. Hence the attraction of another one. But I found it very interesting to hear this reframed on a much longer time scale, with him focusing on the rewards of grandparenthood as contrasted with parenthood.

Ultimately, ironically, this book had zero effect on my thinking regarding family size. That said, it made me very happy that it exists, even if it is a little on the long/repetitive side towards the end, because the anti-natalist narrative in some fora these days weirds makes me out to no end, and I think this provides a wide range of pushback on that narrative.

Plus, the twin studies are just such fascinating science.

Profile Image for Betsy.
131 reviews27 followers
January 27, 2022
3.5 I usually read books focused on the individual, so it was fun to do a “big picture,” economics focused read. A few takeaways - much of how your kids turn out long-term is nature, not nurture. If you’re a middle class American, you’re probably over parenting your kids, and could lighten up a bit. And, think of how many children you’ll be glad you had when you’re sixty, not just today. Plenty to quibble with in the book, but I enjoyed the tone, and thinking about such a personal decision from a economic view.
Profile Image for Libby.
441 reviews
October 1, 2011
I really liked this book. I think it's interesting to think about deciding the number of kids, from an economic perspective. The title makes it sound like something it's not, which is a book that's trying to get you to have as many kids as physically possible. Rather, it's just trying to get you to think about your parenting differently- it doesn't have to be as painful as we sometimes make it. For example:

If your kid doesn't like to practice or play their instrument, you have to constantly nag them to practice it, you are paying for lessons and driving them to the lessons and you have to drag your kid out the door... why are you doing this? If they hate it, they'll never keep up with it anyway. You're just straining your relationship and wasting money. STOP.

I really wanted to write this review with the book in hand, but my husband had to return it to the library, so I even stayed up late finishing it. Basically, Caplan studies and discusses adopted twin studies to determine if all the things we want our kids to have- success, money, happiness, good job, education, smarts etc is affected more by nature, or nurture.

The findings are astounding.

Parenting doesn't have as much affect as you might think. They do affect the kids a lot, while living at home, as far as behavior is concerned and in the areas they tested (Some I can remember are: income, amount of education, religion, political affiliation, religious activity, political activity, health, longevity, IQ, alcohol and drug use, when virginity is lost, maybe more... ) but once they leave home, the kid will go through what Caplan calls "fade-out" in which the nurtured traits that aren't there genetically will slowly fade out and by their 30s, they will just be the kind of adult they are genetically, despite what you've taught them growing up.

The only things the children DO keep with them, is the religion they feel affiliated with (though activity is unaffected) and the political party they feel closest to (and again, activity is unaffected) and finally, how fondly they look back at their childhood.

I guess the moral of the story is, it's worth it to try to get them to be polite and behave well, since you want to live with people like that, but that doesn't mean they will stay well-behaved and polite into adulthood. (However, if you are polite and well-behaved, the chances are they will get your "well-behaved" and "considerate" genes.) It's also worth it to try and give them a pleasant childhood (that doesn't mean they must be spoiled...) if you want to be involved in their grandchildren's lives.

So, lay off all the "IQ-building activities" unless everyone actually enjoys them- you're probably wasting your time and money.

One final point I will bring up, is he tries to get people to think about the future. Raising kids is really only a 20-year ordeal, and most people live for 4 times that! More of your life will be spent with grandkids than kids, and if you want lots of grandkids (which most people do- they're much more fun and less work, right?) you should think about the other half of your life and maximize your grandchild potential by having more kids.
Profile Image for AnnaMay.
287 reviews
August 4, 2012
Ahhh...I can breathe easier as a parent now and my kids will, too. This book has done more to cut down on the second-hand stress my kids and husband receive than anything else I've read or done lately. By cutting down on the second-hand stress, I'm not only making my life happier, but the trickle-down effect takes hold and their lives are happier as well.

Parenting doesn't need to be as painful or difficult as we make it. This book is about striking a balance and feeling good about it. Somehow, reading the twin research studies and having him explain them really contributed to my understanding that taking 'me' time is important. His approach of teaching had way more 'take hold' effect on me than any book or talk touting the importance of 'filling my jar so I can fill others.' His book's message, and is more true I think, is 'fill my jar and so others aren't inhibited by filling their own.' It helped me see myself and my children as individuals and my job is to feed, clother, and love them...and enjoy the journey. They're already who they are and my influence is best directed in having positive interactions with them and the rest falls into place (within my good reason...I'm not saying it's okay to neglect their care.)

I love the scientific evidence mixed with humorous quotes and witty debates. Caplan's writing is very readable and organized in a fashion that worked well with my way of thinking.

Profile Image for Heather.
241 reviews5 followers
September 21, 2011
I heard the author interviewed and was intrigued with his ideas, but I didn't think they would change the way I saw the world. I checked it out as a fun read and for parenting inspiration, and because I basically agree with the title. I was surprised when I read it how disturbed I was by the twin studies that he used to assert that much of what we do as parents has little lasting effect. Most of how our children turn out as adults is due to genetics and their own free will. The best things we can do for our kids are to choose wisely who you decide to parent with and to give them happy memories of their childhoods with security and kindness. That really does put a different spin on parenting--and it made me appreciate my own parents.. It was also interesting to see him take an economists' argument that therefore, children are a relative bargain and you should stock up on them. You should decide how many children you would like when you are 60, not how many you would like right now. I did like that perspective of taking the very long view. After all, children are a long term investment in anyone's book.
131 reviews3 followers
January 29, 2018
Caplan presents a bundle of data suggesting that in most ways that parents try to improve their children's lives, they have surprisingly little lasting impact by the time the children become adults (at least normal first-world parents). Basically "LOL nothing matters," so, he argues, today's parents should make their jobs much, much easier.

The data he presents is eye opening, though I think he slightly overstates his case (some of the effect sizes which he considers small, bordering on negligible, I would consider significant enough to discuss further). I find his overall argument fairly persuasive, though by temperament I definitely started out a lot closer to his camp than average.
Profile Image for danelle.
41 reviews4 followers
May 27, 2012
I love the title and the synopsis of this book. Kids can me fun, don't stress about being a bad parent and just enjoy your children before they grow up in to the people they were going to be anyway. Great advice. But he alienated me the whole way through his argument. Example; one of his reasons to have more kids was essentially that your wife would be doing all the work anyway. I didn't trust his research and he sounds like a jerkstore.
Profile Image for Respectable.
49 reviews12 followers
September 9, 2019
I started writing the review and it got quite long and I noticed it had nothing to with the book but simply my own ideas of parenting. So I've split the "review" in two. The first part is the actual review. The second half outlines my idea of parenting.

This is a terrific book. I would suggest all expecting parents to read it. Even if you disagree with the thesis of the book (which I summarize in the bullet points below) the logical structure of the book makes it possible for you to determine at what point you disagree with it, and also help you advance your own thinking about the "why" in such a case.

1. Parenting in the 21st century is widely thought of as a nightmare. The root cause is that we have so many expectations about ourselves as parents and from our kids are obedient pupils willing to collaborate (without throwing tantrums) in the project of turning their lives into a success (with the hidden assumption that this success is defined by us as parents) or still worse attempting to mould them into "better version of ourselves". Such notions are not outlandish.

2. This begs the question - does parenting really make a difference? Are life outcomes significantly affected by more involved parents?

3. This is a classic nature versus nurture problem. How can we correctly attribute life outcomes of people to the correct causes? Is it because of their genes (nature), is it because of their environment and parenting (nurture), or is it because of random chance (everything else)? As kids are raised almost always by the biological parents who gave birth to them it seems impossible to tease this causes apart.

4. Surprisingly, science can shed light on this question by way of adoption and twin studies. The reason is quite simple. If an adopted child grows up to be more like their adopted parents then we have one piece of evidence for nurture. Similarly, if identical twins (who share 100% of their genetic material) grow up to be two times more like each other than fraternal twins (who share only 50% of their genetic material) then we have one piece of evidence for nature. The mind-blowing thing is that for a wide variety of measurable traits (say longevity, intelligence, character, income, etc.) there are hundreds of twin and adoption studies since about 50 years ago.

5. The research bears out the truth quite clearly - nurture doesn't really matter, while nature does, and significantly so. This statement has only one caveat, which is that we assume "nurture" includes a provision of the basics - food, security, love, etc. - all of which are of course to be found in any family considering adoption, who are likely to be well-off financially as well. In other words, parents have the capacity to ruin their kids lives (by bringing them into a world of poverty and having limited means to protect against disease, illness, and starvation; or by being abusive alcoholics; etc.), but they are much less capable of affecting their life outcomes in the long run significantly let alone turning them into superstars despite their arrogant belief in doing so. In other words, nurture is necessary but not sufficient. Once there is enough of it (and it is much less than we think these days, especially because how affluent we are today) nature takes over and there is little you can do.

6. So, as a parent, if this is news to you then you should have more kids than you previously thought you would (assuming you wanted any at all) because they are less costly to you now because of lesser involvement (in a good way).

* One major point is that helicopter parenting (or too much involvement, bossing around, sermonising, etc.) is extremely tempting for parents because they do indeed have strong effects - but crucially, it is only in the short term. If you berate and shame your kid for getting poor grades at school, chances are that they take greater interest in their studies in the near future, but as soon as the pressure goes away (they leave home, say) they are unlikely to keep up the pretense, for it is hard work to be at odds with our nature!

One of my favorite bits of the book is a calculation which we can personally make to arrive at the right number of kids we should have. The book overall is really well-written. It is often funny as well. And as the points above show - it is enlightening and backed by solid research. So what are you waiting for! Go read it.

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Somehow we have stumbled into a time where parenting has become complex, unpleasant, and seemingly impossible to get right. Our conception of a good parent or what it means to raise kids right seems to have absorbed the expectations and wishes in an age where the idea that anything is possible is constantly being hammered into us. The latter--worthy of its own separate analysis--is of course a symptom of who we look at and unconsciously compare ourselves against in the new and (without exaggeration) highly connected world wrought by, of course, the internet. I think it would (or at least should) surprise no one that parenting was not always collectively thought about in such ways. Today the first thing a prospective parent would hear (either from friends or as a voice in their own head) is likely the countless hours of lost sleep in the first years and more varied, elaborate, and sustained sacrifices until the child becomes a "grown-up". Sure enough, no eyebrows would be raised in framing the conversation in such a manner as we really think of expecting parents as soldiers leaving for war - one that will never end soon enough.

What went wrong? When did we cook up all these ideas about parenting?

This timely book addresses the main problem with how we think about parenting in the 21st century: our ridiculous and impossibly narcissistic idea that our kids are in effect a science project which we must carefully monitor, manipulate, and push around in order that they simultaneously avoid a life of destitution and achieve life successes which parents think their kids have a real shot at.

There are at least two things wrong with that. First kids are people - so treat them with respect, which means to trust them to think for themselves and make the right decisions and not abuse them by giving them unsolicited advice or impose your life wishes on them. Second it is perfectly arrogant to think that parents' interference in their children's lives will affect the attainment of positive life outcomes in the expected manner. So just leave the kids alone.

Parenting is very simple. Ensure that your kids get all the basics - food, shelter, security, affection, warmth, and humongous boatloads of love. Build beautiful relationships with them, enjoy their childhood years, go on vacations, and really just have fun with your kids. It's not hard because they want the same things too. Duh!

It's possible to misinterpret what I'm saying as some kind of lax, laissez-faire parenting where kids are not taught boundaries or given everything they ask for. No. If you kid sticks his finger in a power outlet or wants to eat cheetos for breakfast you tell them why they can't do it. Hello! That is what parenting is about. All the rest - driving your kids to taekwondo classes twice a week in some misguided attempt to build character or enrolling them in piano lessons because you think it improves their attention while they are kicking and screaming the whole way is not fun for anyone and is also (as the book's research shows) useless in the long run. I mean look at yourself. Are you doing anything today that your parents pushed you to when you were a child? So really, just leave the kids alone.

Basically, parenting is supporting the child's development (I'm speaking of the years past the toddler years - when they're toddlers yes, you need to take care of them so that they don't do stupid things and die). Children already know deep inside where they're headed. Your job as a parent is just to enable them. If you notice they take an interest in reading or find them singing all the time, don't deny them books or signing lessons because they are expensive. And always - don't take more interest in shoving them any which way more than they do themselves. If they really care about something, trust them that they have the good sense to come to you with it.

As a practicing Buddhist I feel compelled to condense this advise into a nugget that you can remember it by: You can only (and have the responsibility to) water the plant. The plant will decide how it grows.

These ideas sit well with me for my own experience as a child corroborates the thesis presented in this book. My parents were about as far away from being helicopter parents as one can imagine. They never forced any extra-curricular activities upon me, never pushed me to read books, or even ever cared about what grades I got at school. I mean they did have expectations that I would do well and they did tell me how important a career was but for the most part their parenting would appear to any well-meaning, upwardly mobile, middle-class Indian parents as bordering on outright neglect. Much of my childhood was spent pottering around the house playing with legos and pokemons, reading books, creating board games, playing tons of video games or outside playing cricket and badminton. And none of these things was executed with any focused attention or intention - I wasn't training to get anywhere or become anyone in any of these activities. I was just having fun!

I'm turning thirty soon and I can say without a doubt my parents that are proud of me - or even more accurately, they are yet more proud of themselves for having raised me to turn out the way I did. And it's not just delusional, objectively they have reason to be. And almost none of the specific life advice they gave me at any point in their life was of much use either in the moment or soon after. To conclude, just leave the kids alone!
Profile Image for Neil Pasricha.
Author 30 books857 followers
May 4, 2022
What happens when you ask an economist to look at declining global birthrates? You get this intriguing, imperfect look at why having more kids is a great thing. (He’s not trying to convert the child-free crowd, but get those who already want kids to just want more.) He starts by showing how modern parents are martyrs and most of the overinvestments made in parenting make zero difference on how kids end up, based on twin and adoption studies. You don’t matter much! And then he whips through all kinds of reasons to have larger families while cautioning against making rash decisions in the particularly painful early parenting years. Like any parenting book, there are lots of things to disagree with. I found his tone preachy (he skims past sleep challenges with a couple sentences about the Ferber Method, for instance) but overall there is a lot to like. A key question underpinning the book is: “How many kids do you want when you’re 60?” and he points out that 60 isn’t much past current middle age. We’ll be in the enjoying kids, rather than the raising kids, stage of life much longer than any generation ever has… never mind enjoying grandkids or beyond. The real gem of the book is the final chapter which shows off an amazing trick: He stages roleplay style roundtable chats with a roomful of extremely harsh critics of his arguments. He says he based these chats on his own discussions with friends as he shared the book and, basically, got his ideas bashed in. He knows his arguments are lightning rods but I’ve never seen such a powerful finishing move outside of Mortal Kombat. It’s incredibly convincing. If you’re a skimmer, his detailed introduction, detailed conclusion, and that final roleplay chapter are enough to get most of the argument.
Profile Image for Abigail.
83 reviews7 followers
March 7, 2024
This was a fun read. I completely disagreed with his chapter on artificial reproduction technologies on a moral basis and have some serious quibbles with a few other points. But! For an economists' look at family size, it was fun and refreshing. Most of what I hear on this topic is steeped in religious or moral foundations and this was just on the premise that parenting is a joyful experience for otherwise healthy people (yes), your children will be happy whether or not you spend lots of money on them (yes), you and your children will be happier if you are more chill as a parent (yes), and therefore being a more chill parent now will allow you to enjoy parenting more, to have more children, and therefore experience maximal enjoyment from parenting over the long haul.
Profile Image for Jaime.
128 reviews3 followers
August 7, 2022
Caplan makes four main claims about why it may be worth having more kids that you otherwise planned:
1. Twin studies show that nature (genetics) determine adult characteristics much more than nurture - therefore parents should worry less and expend less effort on “perfect” parenting
2. Kids are safer now than ever - therefore parents can worry less
3. The cost/benefit ratio of children improves as you get older, e.g. future grandchildren. Even though the first few years are hard, it may still be selfish on behalf of your future self to have more kids now
4. Self-interest and altruism agree. More kids are better for society, and don’t have a definitively negative impact on the environment

Of these points, I found the first three fairly convincing and well-supported by evidence, enough so that they will likely affect my parenting style and perhaps even my choice of how many kids to have. The fourth point seemed more hand-wavy, especially around the impact of increased population on greenhouse gas emissions.
Profile Image for Suhrob.
432 reviews54 followers
May 8, 2018
I wish there were more books like this - picking a relevant, interesting topic, bringing together research from multiple disciplines (genetics, education, psychology and economics) in a non-dogmatic, well-written way.

I was familiar with the thesis and most of the results from twin studies, so this was more like a nice summary / refreshers.

I think there is still some room for parental effect studies on dimensions not captured here - but I also believe that on the metrics discussed here, the research is currently already very solid. Caplan than draws important parental policy recommendations.

Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Alexander.
4 reviews1 follower
July 23, 2017
The truly interesting part of this book is the one about behavioral genetics, which allows future parents to feel relaxed about the outcome of their parenting (if they're not complete morons to their children). Definitely, it gives you a different perspective about being a parent, and truly encourages us to bring more kids to the world.
Profile Image for Paige.
351 reviews3 followers
July 15, 2019
Different than I was expecting. I wouldn’t recommend it. I found the central argument compelling - twin and adoption research shows that moderate variations in parenting don’t have much influence on outcomes in adulthood. When the book reached beyond that central premise, though, I found the arguments a little thin, and many weren’t based on evidence. Another book that probably should have been an article.
Profile Image for Amir Salar Pourhasan.
93 reviews12 followers
February 26, 2022
awful book and full of biases to convince people having more children anyway. Writer really wrote this book by and order of government I guess. Awful statistics and reasoning. Be careful

I've read it's Blikist summarized version.
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