Relax baby!

Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids:  Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think
By Bryan Caplan
(Basic Books, 2011, 228 pages)

This book is targeted at a very specific demographic.  It is not aimed at someone like me who already has children.  Neither is it aimed at those who do not want children at all -- the author, Bryan Caplan, is a father of three, and happily accepts that there are some people who have no desire to be parents.  No, he is specifically targeting the types most of us have encountered -- middle class parents with one or two children who say that, in theory, they would love to have another one but, in practice, they cannot, because they cannot afford it financially, or time-wise.  Which begs the question, how on earth did previous generations raise much larger families in far less auspicious circumstances?

Of course, what modern parents really mean is not actually that they cannot afford it, but they do not wish to jeopardise the lifestyle of the existing members of the family, particularly the existing children.  They do not wish to move to a cheaper suburb to reduce the size of the mortgage, pass on a private school education, or give up holidays in premium locations.  While there may be good reasons why parents want to live in a particular suburb, mix with fellow private school parents and enjoy holidays in expensive locations, what Caplan says is, do not kid yourself that you are doing these things for the long-term benefit of your one or two existing children.  His key claim is that ''parenting barely affects a child's prospects''.

The evidence for this is adoption and twin research, which Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has studied extensively.  With the important caveat that we are talking about what might be considered broadly normal first world families, Caplan presents the work of numerous behavioural geneticists from many countries, which shows that, while nurture might have some effects during childhood, once children reach adulthood they will revert to the path their nature (genes) pre-ordained for them in matters such as financial success, health, happiness and values.  Twins, who are separated at birth and are adopted out, end up closer to each other on a range of criteria than either one does to his or her adoptive family.

The only outcome where separately adopted twins are closer to the children of their adopting families than to their biological twin is in appreciation of their parents.  So the moral of all the research is don't force your child into ballet lessons, or private tutoring, but do be nice to them.

There is some evidence that early born children suffer a minor diminution in outcomes through the birth of subsequent siblings, but children three and four are such big winners, purely by virtue of being born, that this dwarfs any minor loss to one and two in terms of outcomes, before one factors in any pleasure one and two might get from having the younger siblings.

Perhaps even more striking than the behavioural genetics is the sociological data.  The evidence shows that since the 1960s, not only have fathers more than doubled the time they spend looking after children, but mothers have increased time spent on this activity by thirty per cent.  While stay-at-home mothers still spend more time with their children than contemporary working mothers, the current working mother actually spends more time directly supervising children than her mother or grandmother spent looking after her.

''Ah ha,'' I hear the sceptic say, but while it was safe for me as a child to happily roam the neighbourhood in the sixties or seventies, we now live in far more dangerous times.  Caplan does an excellent demolition job on this nonsense.  Children have never been safer, with the annual mortality rate of 1-4 year olds in the US in 1950 having declined from 139 per 100,000 to 29 per 100,000 in 2005.  While most of that reduction is from better medicine and fewer accidents, he also points out that the rate of violent crime in the United States has halved since 1973.  Most irrational of all is the fear of child kidnapping.  Truly random child kidnappings make global news stories, precisely because they are so rare.

Spotting irrationality is a key feature of Caplan's work.  Caplan is best known for The Myth of the Rational Voter:  Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007), a book named the best political book of the year by The New York Times.  When it comes to children, the main irrationality comes from over-emphasising the short-term pain, such as lots of sleepless nights, but not giving enough account to the long-term benefits, such as the increased likelihood of being a grandparent.  As he writes, ''today's typical parents artificially inflate the price of kids, needlessly worry, and neglect the long-run benefits of larger families''.

The media have presented a contrast between Caplan's work and that of Amy Chua, who earlier this year created something of a sensation with her book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which described how through a draconian parenting regime she turned her daughter into a Harvard student and concert pianist.  As a recent feature in The Australian commented, ''everybody argued about the sanity of her methods, but no-one argued that her methods did not work''.  Caplan did.  He argued that with a pair of Yale law professors as parents, Chua's daughters would have succeeded on genetics alone, without the extra priming.

However, while that may hold true for success in careers as an adult, one area which Caplan does gloss over is that in many fields of endeavour you do have to start young.  Your child is not going to become a concert pianist, or tennis professional, if they take it up at 18.  It might be your genetic make-up which determines whether you stick with it, and deliver on that other well-known modern theory about success -- Malcolm Gladwell's observation that 10,000 hours of practice is the key to success -- but children need parental encouragement to begin the process.

The other thing which Caplan touches on, but perhaps does not consider enough, is sibling difference.  Same parents, same nurture, but very different outcomes.  Others who have written in the field have ascribed some differences to birth order, an idea which Caplan does not discuss.

While Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids can be read as not much more than a parenting self-help book, urging frazzled parents to just lighten up, the book does at times have some serious things to say about public policy.  As well as the selfish reasons to have more kids, Caplan demonstrates quite clearly that there are also strong altruistic reasons for doing so.  Caplan is quite explicit that your extra kids, provided they are not homicidal maniacs or inveterate bludgers, will be net contributors to society.

Caplan also does not believe that governments should be stopping the use of new technologies to enable reproduction.  He finds particularly illogical the argument that one of the threats of the technology is authoritarian governments using if for nefarious purposes.  As he writes, ''If government abuse is the real danger, the smart line to draw in the sand isn't government prohibition.  It's reproductive freedom.  Insist that parents, not governments, decide if, when and how to make babies''.  And if technology still cannot deliver children, he suggests prospective parents consider adoption from the third world, because while adopting a first world baby will not alter its life outcomes all that much, adopting one irom the third world should deliver a massively improved life outcome to that individual.

In Australia in the past year, we have seen journalist Jacinta Tynan get pilloried for saying having an infant was not too hard, while the likes of businessman Dick Smith and Labor MP Kelvin Thomson continue to want a third of us to disappear.  Hopefully, plenty of people will read Caplan and realise that there are plenty of good reasons, both selfish and altruistic, to ignore the naysayers.