Most of the things Millennials fear about having children—loss of freedom and identity, loss of free time and personal time, not coming first—turn out to be very good for us.
This is what people don’t get until they have children. Focusing on yourself all the time, not having any urgent survival needs, and not having anyone depend on us, is actually brutal for mental health. We’re the most prosperous and comfortable people to ever live, and we spend our lives trying to understand why we’re so anxious and unhappy.
When you have a child, you don’t have time to sit around pondering, “who am I” or “what is my purpose” — and these questions have been answered, definitively, by the little being you love more than life, who needs you for everything.
I agree that this is directionally true (and good), but lots of parents still do have existential ennui, from what I can tell? Maybe I’m overweighting writers and artists, but if I look around me, there are plenty of parents who don’t seem to have had their questions answered definitively by their kids
As a mom of three, children don't completely answer the question of "what should I do? what am I for?" but (as someone working in public policy in DC) I think they make me saner about these questions.
Kids offer a sense of who you are/what you're doing that's *uncorrellated* from who you are at work. I can have a good day or a bad day pitching a family policy bill on the Hill, and my kids don't care and whether it's a good or bad day for them is uncorrelated alpha.
At work, I care a lot about what I *do,* but my kids more often care that I *am.* Last night, I lost a lot of sleep holding a feverish four year old, who was comforted only by being in my bed. And that's something I can do whether or not I'm successful by worldly metrics.
True, and some people blow up their families to chase personal fulfillment, or a more thrilling romance, and write memoirs about it. However I believe nearly all of those people would be happier if they stayed put. Someone who has a family, and still spends loads of time searching for identity and meaning, probably spends too much time online and/or is a victim of consumer culture. We’re not meant to have time for all this navel-gazing and existential angst.
As a voluntarily childless person, I’ve encountered this argument a lot but I’ve never found it convincing. I think people should only have children if they want the everyday experience of parenthood. You should want the first words, the first steps, the first day of school, the play dates, the family dinners, the teenage angst, the eventual empty nest, the whole shebang. Children deserve parents who want to be parents. If, like me, you feel no organic drive to raise children and watch them grow up, you probably shouldn’t have kids anyway just to feel more meaning in your life.
"I think people should only have children if they want the everyday experience of parenthood"
I didn't want the everyday experiences of parenthood. I could easily understand how much of a pain in the ass having kids was going to be. But my wife REALLY wanted them. Finally I gave in.
She was right, I was wrong.
Before kids I could understand all the drawbacks, but I couldn't understand how great they are. Not other people's kids, but YOUR kids.
How you think you understand what love is before you have kids, then realize you had know idea.
I’m not denying that experience, it’s quite common. But I’m skeptical of what you might call “The Parenthood Cure”: the belief, expressed by Carina and others, that parenthood is the solution to meaninglessness, alienation, boredom, ennui, and all the other existential maladies of modernity. Children as a new religion, if you will. There’s nothing wrong with having kids, but my opinion is you should do it because you want to do it, not to fill a hole.
Yes, I didn't suffer from any of those before I had kids. Overall I liked my life. But kids still made my life more in a way I couldn't understand before I had them.
Let me analogize to something less personal. Suppose we were talking about going on safari in Kenya. Group A are people for whom safari is a lifelong dream and when they do it they love it. Group B go on safari by circumstance and end up loving it anyway. Group C don’t particularly want to go on safari, but they believe that going on safari will cure existential despair, so they do it anyway. The existence of Groups A and B doesn’t mean Group C is making a sensible choice.
The problem is that it’s impossible to know how you’re going to feel about parenthood in advance. Many people who had kids accidentally, or for their partners, end up transformed by the experience. I wanted children, but I had no idea how amazing it would be. It’s different when they’re yours.
But some % of people who become parents end up unhappy, and that’s a bad outcome for everyone. So I would never say everyone should have kids. But it’s hard to predict in advance, and I think a lot of people who never get around to having kids would have been happier as parents.
It’s normal to not look forward to play dates, though. A lot of parenthood is a chore. The love and joy and purpose make it all worth it—but nobody thinks “I can’t wait to change diapers, and get up early every day for years….” However, most people are happier when we’re busy and focused on others. We think we’re happiest when we have more freedom and flexibility, but for many people the opposite is true.
It's impossible to truly know how you're going to feel about anything until you've done it. That goes for life with children and life without children. It goes for marriage and it goes for staying single. It goes for living in your hometown and it goes for moving to a new country. It goes for staying in your job and it goes for starting a new career. We all have to make life decisions based on our best guess for what will bring us happiness, with no guarantees. My philosophy is that we should approach parenthood the same way we approach everything else. I've never been convinced that it's categorically different. For what it's worth, academic happiness research usually finds that parents are slightly less happy than non-parents, but not by enough to matter much. I think people should just do what feels right to them :)
I actually do think parenthood is different, because giving birth (or becoming a father) changes our brains. The neurological and hormonal changes are especially intense for women, but occur for fathers too.
From an evolutionary perspective, the most successful humans were motivated to have a lot of sex—and then to care deeply about their children once they arrived.
When we consider kids as a separate question, we’re doing it with brains that haven’t been through those changes, and without being able to access what that bond feels like. That’s why so many parents say “I had NO idea….” Because we’ve been on both sides of it.
However, sure, at the end of the day we can only go with our best judgment.
“Children deserve” ehhh I mean this would be IDEAL, sure, but my dad didn’t want kids (and ended up absent) and my mom just did it bc it was the thing to do (she was loving and tried her best), neither of which would pass UMC ppl today’s standards for having kids, and yet I’m still glad that I was born.
Also practically you can’t sustain the birth rate if you require that every parent be 100% right reasons lol
Yes, it's nuanced. I'm coming at it from the perspective of individual flourishing, not moral/social obligation. "Society would be better off with more babies" and "your kids would be glad you had them" are logically compatible with "if you don't want the everyday experience of parenthood, having children is probably a bad idea for you personally".
Oh absolutely YOU might be better off without kids if you’re not sure! Just poking at the framing that this is for the good of the kids (“children deserve parents who want to be parents”). Similarly I feel like ppl feel need to frame divorce, self care etc as for your kids (“children should see a healthy relationship / happy mother”) as opposed to just biting the bullet that it’s ok to do stuff for yourself, even if it’s neutral/slightly worse for the kids
It is, yes, very anti-religious to say that parenthood is so fulfilling that it could remove the human spiritual yearning for God! Idolatrous, even. Though I will concede that such idolatry is not as uncommon as it ought to be, particularly within the genre of recommendations aimed at women.
^^^ I was going to write the exact same thing. As a parent I read this article and thought "if Jerusalem decides to have kids, she'll look back on this article and wonder how she thought like that."
I never doubted that I wanted kids, but the "when" was always a question. But now it's really hard to remember why I thought that was so important!
The variance of having a child can be really unforgiving. I have 2 kids. The older one has serious mental health issues that really surfaced after the younger one was born. It both has essentially ended my outside-of-family life and also affects both the older one's future in unpredictable ways and the younger one's experience of normality. It's really fucking hard and you don't get a day off ever.
That said I would still have taken the black box. I know people who delayed parenting until it was too late and are filled with regret. I think I would be too because I remember what I felt when waiting for their conception and births. But it's really fucking hard and you don't get a day off ever.
The rare column that should be a widely-read book. Nate Silver should be green with envy*. I agree with Carina on the median experience of having children (which was also mine) ... but she’s missing Jerusalem’s point, which is that having children can be the great unfixable tragedy of your life also. They still die sometimes. Or they can have crippling disabilities which turn you into an 80 hr/week caregiver and define your life, as happened to a classmate of mine. Jerusalem is right: parenthood is a one-way door into variance for a class that walks through few others.
Two immediate implications of this wonderful piece:
1. We need to keep beating the drum for road safety in general and driverless cars that demonstrate step-change decreases in harm in particular.
2. Our mortality is no longer immediate for us. We know very few people who die before old age, and it changes so much about our sense of life. Much to draw out here.
* (assuming he didn’t make the same point somewhere in his voluminous output)
Just to extend the point made in the comment by Carina above about parenting allowing you to focus less on yourself. I find that while it can introduce very high variance moments (like when my then 5 year old had appendicitis), I find that being a parent mostly _*reduces*_ variance in life "satisfaction."
This is not because parenting makes life smoother or more predictable. It is because it adds many more significant ups and downs to each day or week, so by law of large numbers, variance is reduced.
Simple example. A couple of Saturdays ago I was up at 530 am to take my 12 year old to his basketball tournament 2 hrs away. For some stupid reason, I happened to open my work email while I was waiting for my coffee to brew. Overnight I had received a message from a journal I had submitted a paper to. It was a desk rejection. I've had trouble finding a place for this paper (about failures in peer review, ironically) and this was very disheartening. Nonetheless, I was about to drive 2 hrs with my son and there was no time to stew about this nor would he want to discuss this. I cursed myself for opening the email.
It was dark and foggy so I had to drive carefully. My son is also, like me, prone to worry, so I had to pretend like I was not nervous on the road even though I was.
We got to the tournament. He won both games! So now that's a good thing balancing my rejection! But also, we had told him that he had to go to Hebrew school the next morning, so would miss the Sunday morning games, and now we learned that there was no Sunday afternoon part of the tournament. So on the ride home he was mad at me, and I felt bad _*about that*_. I forgot about my rejection. I didn't remember until that night as I was going to bed.
I'm still mad about the rejection. But I can only allocate so much emotional space to that.
Like so many articles about the choice to have kids, the perspective of someone who had them would add A LOT. But Jerusalem is right that having kids is a high variance activity. One thing I've learned about parenting is that there will be at least one life and death crisis for each kid. Start asking around and it doesn't take long to realize that every family had a kid born early who spent 6 weeks in the NICU, or a kid whose type 1 diabetes could kill them with a midnight blood sugar crash, or a kid who was in a bad crash and has a lifelong TBI, or a kid with post-viral syndrome who has spent the last two years ill, or a kid who goes through a dangerous teenager phase with drugs, petty crime, etc. I know families with all of these situations, and more, including families who lost children and those with severely disabled kids. Despite the inevitability of crises, most of the outcomes are eventually happy ones, and the parents I know who lost kids would never want to go back and do it over without them.
I think this post is very thoughtful (as are the initial comments). I think an additional difference that affects decisions about having children in contemporary America, compared to earlier eras and to countries with weak safety nets, is that the imperative to produce guaranteed caregivers for one's old age has been greatly reduced. Not only has the state taken on a much larger role in providing for the elderly, reducing (though not eliminating) elder poverty, but our mobile society has reduced the likelihood that a child will be geographically near enough to provide personal care (or living in such proximity that social pressure will demand they provide it).
Unfortunately, I think the extended life expectancies of those who do reach old age (an added ~5 years compared to 1950) may now leave many more older people to live marginal lives, having spent down their savings, which is a critical problem for those with age-related disabilities. But I doubt many people of child-bearing years now are likely to view the "eldercare insurance" element of children as meaningful in their planning, whereas it used to be taken for granted.
"I could catch scurvy or whatever else it is people died of in Florida."
Scurvy would be unlikely in Florida, given the early introduction of citrus fruits. You should probably rely on dying of malaria. Florida wasn't malaria-free until 1951.
I think modern life gives us the illusion that we have more control than we actually do. You mention how having a kid is irreversible in a way that moving to a new city or entering into a new relationship is not. But actually, those decisions aren't really reversible either. Yes you can break up with someone or move back to your old city, but you'll never be able to live the alternative life you would have lived had you chosen differently. All the experiences you had because you made that choice will continue to influence you for the rest of your life, and due to path dependency will restrict your future options. I actually don't see having a kid as being different in kind from those other choices.
I think narrowing the curve is the goal of communism, liberalism would seek to widen it. The asymmetric mix is the ideal where society takes care of the unfortunate without excessively impeding the successful.
Great article. I think for some people, having children is not something to be debated even if the importance of the decision is an order of magnitude more significant. Also, the lifetime mortality from a car crash seemed very high.
This is really interesting! I was at first thinking this was going to be about Laurie Paul’s work on “transformative experience” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience) but I think in many ways it ties more into a very different set of discussions around “safetyism” and the like.
I was skeptical when I read your first sentence, that millennials mostly make low stakes decisions - after all, look at how many millennials are now mayors or senators or heads of state or run businesses or labs or non-profits, or other things where their decisions affect hundreds to millions of other people. But I realized eventually that, although our decisions might be high stakes for the world, what you’re talking about is how we’ve set up our lives such that for ourself, they are often usually lower stakes.
I don't think she's just talking about millennials, it's the fact that the vast majority of people living in the modern day world don't have to make high stakes decisions. Which is true, and seems more true than at most points in history. And while there are people who end up in positions where they need to make high stakes, impactful decisions, Ms. Demsas points out that she is in one of the most insulated populations within that modern society.
I think you are actually talking about skewness, not variance. The examples you cite are virtually all about the left tail of the distribution getting cut: dying of cholera, getting murdered, marrying a violent spouse. These are not outcomes with a symmetrically good right tail.
Nor has the right tail necessarily compressed in modernity: it’s much more likely for someone to be a billionaire now than at previous points in history!
A true story of modernity seems to be left-skewed distributions becoming more symmetrical, and symmetrical distributions becoming more right-skewed.
I do agree with the thrust of the argument, though: kids, because we don’t know who they will be, are among the choices we make that have retained left-tail risk. Genetic screening of course is a possible mitigant. What’s your take on that?
The headline reminds me of a big story from when I was living in China. A British diplomat and his wife had adopted a baby from China then a few years later changed their minds. They sent the kid alone on a flight to Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the British government fired him when it became a scandal.
Most of the things Millennials fear about having children—loss of freedom and identity, loss of free time and personal time, not coming first—turn out to be very good for us.
This is what people don’t get until they have children. Focusing on yourself all the time, not having any urgent survival needs, and not having anyone depend on us, is actually brutal for mental health. We’re the most prosperous and comfortable people to ever live, and we spend our lives trying to understand why we’re so anxious and unhappy.
When you have a child, you don’t have time to sit around pondering, “who am I” or “what is my purpose” — and these questions have been answered, definitively, by the little being you love more than life, who needs you for everything.
I agree that this is directionally true (and good), but lots of parents still do have existential ennui, from what I can tell? Maybe I’m overweighting writers and artists, but if I look around me, there are plenty of parents who don’t seem to have had their questions answered definitively by their kids
As a mom of three, children don't completely answer the question of "what should I do? what am I for?" but (as someone working in public policy in DC) I think they make me saner about these questions.
Kids offer a sense of who you are/what you're doing that's *uncorrellated* from who you are at work. I can have a good day or a bad day pitching a family policy bill on the Hill, and my kids don't care and whether it's a good or bad day for them is uncorrelated alpha.
At work, I care a lot about what I *do,* but my kids more often care that I *am.* Last night, I lost a lot of sleep holding a feverish four year old, who was comforted only by being in my bed. And that's something I can do whether or not I'm successful by worldly metrics.
True, and some people blow up their families to chase personal fulfillment, or a more thrilling romance, and write memoirs about it. However I believe nearly all of those people would be happier if they stayed put. Someone who has a family, and still spends loads of time searching for identity and meaning, probably spends too much time online and/or is a victim of consumer culture. We’re not meant to have time for all this navel-gazing and existential angst.
I think my most red-coded personal belief is that having kids would dissolve the spiritual/psychological problems of almost everyone in my cohort.
10000%. It's so true.
As a voluntarily childless person, I’ve encountered this argument a lot but I’ve never found it convincing. I think people should only have children if they want the everyday experience of parenthood. You should want the first words, the first steps, the first day of school, the play dates, the family dinners, the teenage angst, the eventual empty nest, the whole shebang. Children deserve parents who want to be parents. If, like me, you feel no organic drive to raise children and watch them grow up, you probably shouldn’t have kids anyway just to feel more meaning in your life.
"I think people should only have children if they want the everyday experience of parenthood"
I didn't want the everyday experiences of parenthood. I could easily understand how much of a pain in the ass having kids was going to be. But my wife REALLY wanted them. Finally I gave in.
She was right, I was wrong.
Before kids I could understand all the drawbacks, but I couldn't understand how great they are. Not other people's kids, but YOUR kids.
How you think you understand what love is before you have kids, then realize you had know idea.
I’m not denying that experience, it’s quite common. But I’m skeptical of what you might call “The Parenthood Cure”: the belief, expressed by Carina and others, that parenthood is the solution to meaninglessness, alienation, boredom, ennui, and all the other existential maladies of modernity. Children as a new religion, if you will. There’s nothing wrong with having kids, but my opinion is you should do it because you want to do it, not to fill a hole.
Yes, I didn't suffer from any of those before I had kids. Overall I liked my life. But kids still made my life more in a way I couldn't understand before I had them.
Let me analogize to something less personal. Suppose we were talking about going on safari in Kenya. Group A are people for whom safari is a lifelong dream and when they do it they love it. Group B go on safari by circumstance and end up loving it anyway. Group C don’t particularly want to go on safari, but they believe that going on safari will cure existential despair, so they do it anyway. The existence of Groups A and B doesn’t mean Group C is making a sensible choice.
The problem is that it’s impossible to know how you’re going to feel about parenthood in advance. Many people who had kids accidentally, or for their partners, end up transformed by the experience. I wanted children, but I had no idea how amazing it would be. It’s different when they’re yours.
But some % of people who become parents end up unhappy, and that’s a bad outcome for everyone. So I would never say everyone should have kids. But it’s hard to predict in advance, and I think a lot of people who never get around to having kids would have been happier as parents.
It’s normal to not look forward to play dates, though. A lot of parenthood is a chore. The love and joy and purpose make it all worth it—but nobody thinks “I can’t wait to change diapers, and get up early every day for years….” However, most people are happier when we’re busy and focused on others. We think we’re happiest when we have more freedom and flexibility, but for many people the opposite is true.
It's impossible to truly know how you're going to feel about anything until you've done it. That goes for life with children and life without children. It goes for marriage and it goes for staying single. It goes for living in your hometown and it goes for moving to a new country. It goes for staying in your job and it goes for starting a new career. We all have to make life decisions based on our best guess for what will bring us happiness, with no guarantees. My philosophy is that we should approach parenthood the same way we approach everything else. I've never been convinced that it's categorically different. For what it's worth, academic happiness research usually finds that parents are slightly less happy than non-parents, but not by enough to matter much. I think people should just do what feels right to them :)
I actually do think parenthood is different, because giving birth (or becoming a father) changes our brains. The neurological and hormonal changes are especially intense for women, but occur for fathers too.
From an evolutionary perspective, the most successful humans were motivated to have a lot of sex—and then to care deeply about their children once they arrived.
When we consider kids as a separate question, we’re doing it with brains that haven’t been through those changes, and without being able to access what that bond feels like. That’s why so many parents say “I had NO idea….” Because we’ve been on both sides of it.
However, sure, at the end of the day we can only go with our best judgment.
“Children deserve” ehhh I mean this would be IDEAL, sure, but my dad didn’t want kids (and ended up absent) and my mom just did it bc it was the thing to do (she was loving and tried her best), neither of which would pass UMC ppl today’s standards for having kids, and yet I’m still glad that I was born.
Also practically you can’t sustain the birth rate if you require that every parent be 100% right reasons lol
Yes, it's nuanced. I'm coming at it from the perspective of individual flourishing, not moral/social obligation. "Society would be better off with more babies" and "your kids would be glad you had them" are logically compatible with "if you don't want the everyday experience of parenthood, having children is probably a bad idea for you personally".
Oh absolutely YOU might be better off without kids if you’re not sure! Just poking at the framing that this is for the good of the kids (“children deserve parents who want to be parents”). Similarly I feel like ppl feel need to frame divorce, self care etc as for your kids (“children should see a healthy relationship / happy mother”) as opposed to just biting the bullet that it’s ok to do stuff for yourself, even if it’s neutral/slightly worse for the kids
That’s a decidedly anti-religious red-coded personal belief you have, there.
Is it? Seems in line with most of the religious takes I’m familiar with.
It is, yes, very anti-religious to say that parenthood is so fulfilling that it could remove the human spiritual yearning for God! Idolatrous, even. Though I will concede that such idolatry is not as uncommon as it ought to be, particularly within the genre of recommendations aimed at women.
^^^ I was going to write the exact same thing. As a parent I read this article and thought "if Jerusalem decides to have kids, she'll look back on this article and wonder how she thought like that."
I never doubted that I wanted kids, but the "when" was always a question. But now it's really hard to remember why I thought that was so important!
The variance of having a child can be really unforgiving. I have 2 kids. The older one has serious mental health issues that really surfaced after the younger one was born. It both has essentially ended my outside-of-family life and also affects both the older one's future in unpredictable ways and the younger one's experience of normality. It's really fucking hard and you don't get a day off ever.
That said I would still have taken the black box. I know people who delayed parenting until it was too late and are filled with regret. I think I would be too because I remember what I felt when waiting for their conception and births. But it's really fucking hard and you don't get a day off ever.
The rare column that should be a widely-read book. Nate Silver should be green with envy*. I agree with Carina on the median experience of having children (which was also mine) ... but she’s missing Jerusalem’s point, which is that having children can be the great unfixable tragedy of your life also. They still die sometimes. Or they can have crippling disabilities which turn you into an 80 hr/week caregiver and define your life, as happened to a classmate of mine. Jerusalem is right: parenthood is a one-way door into variance for a class that walks through few others.
Two immediate implications of this wonderful piece:
1. We need to keep beating the drum for road safety in general and driverless cars that demonstrate step-change decreases in harm in particular.
2. Our mortality is no longer immediate for us. We know very few people who die before old age, and it changes so much about our sense of life. Much to draw out here.
* (assuming he didn’t make the same point somewhere in his voluminous output)
Just to extend the point made in the comment by Carina above about parenting allowing you to focus less on yourself. I find that while it can introduce very high variance moments (like when my then 5 year old had appendicitis), I find that being a parent mostly _*reduces*_ variance in life "satisfaction."
This is not because parenting makes life smoother or more predictable. It is because it adds many more significant ups and downs to each day or week, so by law of large numbers, variance is reduced.
Simple example. A couple of Saturdays ago I was up at 530 am to take my 12 year old to his basketball tournament 2 hrs away. For some stupid reason, I happened to open my work email while I was waiting for my coffee to brew. Overnight I had received a message from a journal I had submitted a paper to. It was a desk rejection. I've had trouble finding a place for this paper (about failures in peer review, ironically) and this was very disheartening. Nonetheless, I was about to drive 2 hrs with my son and there was no time to stew about this nor would he want to discuss this. I cursed myself for opening the email.
It was dark and foggy so I had to drive carefully. My son is also, like me, prone to worry, so I had to pretend like I was not nervous on the road even though I was.
We got to the tournament. He won both games! So now that's a good thing balancing my rejection! But also, we had told him that he had to go to Hebrew school the next morning, so would miss the Sunday morning games, and now we learned that there was no Sunday afternoon part of the tournament. So on the ride home he was mad at me, and I felt bad _*about that*_. I forgot about my rejection. I didn't remember until that night as I was going to bed.
I'm still mad about the rejection. But I can only allocate so much emotional space to that.
The rise of cohabitation as a prelude/alternative to marriage is also an example of trying to sidestep the irrevocable choice, imo.
In our society marriage is not really irrevocable. I suspect it has more to do with declining religiosity.
Like so many articles about the choice to have kids, the perspective of someone who had them would add A LOT. But Jerusalem is right that having kids is a high variance activity. One thing I've learned about parenting is that there will be at least one life and death crisis for each kid. Start asking around and it doesn't take long to realize that every family had a kid born early who spent 6 weeks in the NICU, or a kid whose type 1 diabetes could kill them with a midnight blood sugar crash, or a kid who was in a bad crash and has a lifelong TBI, or a kid with post-viral syndrome who has spent the last two years ill, or a kid who goes through a dangerous teenager phase with drugs, petty crime, etc. I know families with all of these situations, and more, including families who lost children and those with severely disabled kids. Despite the inevitability of crises, most of the outcomes are eventually happy ones, and the parents I know who lost kids would never want to go back and do it over without them.
I think this post is very thoughtful (as are the initial comments). I think an additional difference that affects decisions about having children in contemporary America, compared to earlier eras and to countries with weak safety nets, is that the imperative to produce guaranteed caregivers for one's old age has been greatly reduced. Not only has the state taken on a much larger role in providing for the elderly, reducing (though not eliminating) elder poverty, but our mobile society has reduced the likelihood that a child will be geographically near enough to provide personal care (or living in such proximity that social pressure will demand they provide it).
Unfortunately, I think the extended life expectancies of those who do reach old age (an added ~5 years compared to 1950) may now leave many more older people to live marginal lives, having spent down their savings, which is a critical problem for those with age-related disabilities. But I doubt many people of child-bearing years now are likely to view the "eldercare insurance" element of children as meaningful in their planning, whereas it used to be taken for granted.
"I could catch scurvy or whatever else it is people died of in Florida."
Scurvy would be unlikely in Florida, given the early introduction of citrus fruits. You should probably rely on dying of malaria. Florida wasn't malaria-free until 1951.
Not important for your point, but it does matter in other contexts. At least in 1841 England, life expectancy at 20 was 60: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09
I think modern life gives us the illusion that we have more control than we actually do. You mention how having a kid is irreversible in a way that moving to a new city or entering into a new relationship is not. But actually, those decisions aren't really reversible either. Yes you can break up with someone or move back to your old city, but you'll never be able to live the alternative life you would have lived had you chosen differently. All the experiences you had because you made that choice will continue to influence you for the rest of your life, and due to path dependency will restrict your future options. I actually don't see having a kid as being different in kind from those other choices.
I think high variance outcomes are fine as long as you add a reasonable floor. There’s no reason to assume positive-negative-symmetric curves.
Right, and you could make a plot based on actual data—the level of satisfaction reported by parents serves as the probability distribution.
I think narrowing the curve is the goal of communism, liberalism would seek to widen it. The asymmetric mix is the ideal where society takes care of the unfortunate without excessively impeding the successful.
I think deciding who to marry/have kids with is a higher stakes decision than having the kids! If you screw that up it’s going to be very, very rough.
Great article. I think for some people, having children is not something to be debated even if the importance of the decision is an order of magnitude more significant. Also, the lifetime mortality from a car crash seemed very high.
This is really interesting! I was at first thinking this was going to be about Laurie Paul’s work on “transformative experience” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_Experience) but I think in many ways it ties more into a very different set of discussions around “safetyism” and the like.
I was skeptical when I read your first sentence, that millennials mostly make low stakes decisions - after all, look at how many millennials are now mayors or senators or heads of state or run businesses or labs or non-profits, or other things where their decisions affect hundreds to millions of other people. But I realized eventually that, although our decisions might be high stakes for the world, what you’re talking about is how we’ve set up our lives such that for ourself, they are often usually lower stakes.
I don't think she's just talking about millennials, it's the fact that the vast majority of people living in the modern day world don't have to make high stakes decisions. Which is true, and seems more true than at most points in history. And while there are people who end up in positions where they need to make high stakes, impactful decisions, Ms. Demsas points out that she is in one of the most insulated populations within that modern society.
I think you are actually talking about skewness, not variance. The examples you cite are virtually all about the left tail of the distribution getting cut: dying of cholera, getting murdered, marrying a violent spouse. These are not outcomes with a symmetrically good right tail.
Nor has the right tail necessarily compressed in modernity: it’s much more likely for someone to be a billionaire now than at previous points in history!
A true story of modernity seems to be left-skewed distributions becoming more symmetrical, and symmetrical distributions becoming more right-skewed.
I do agree with the thrust of the argument, though: kids, because we don’t know who they will be, are among the choices we make that have retained left-tail risk. Genetic screening of course is a possible mitigant. What’s your take on that?
The headline reminds me of a big story from when I was living in China. A British diplomat and his wife had adopted a baby from China then a few years later changed their minds. They sent the kid alone on a flight to Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the British government fired him when it became a scandal.