Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Radical Cultural Shift Behind America's Declining Birth Rate

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

We've done several podcasts on America's declining fertility rate, and why South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. But we've never done an episode on the subject quite like this one. Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children, and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world. The way we think about dating, marriage, kids, and family is changing radically in a very short period of time. And we are just beginning to reckon with the causes and consequences of that shift. In the new book, 'What Are Children For,' Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman say a new "parenthood ambivalence" is sweeping the world. In today's show, they persuade Derek that this issue is about more than the economic trends he tends to focus on when he discusses this issue. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings, it's Mal. Call your banners because it's time to head back to Westrose for House of the Dragon, season two. The ringers dragon riders will soar alongside you each week with a heron-hall-sized slate of conversations. The dragon has three heads, and on Sunday nights immediately after Hot D concludes, Chris Ryan, Joanna Robinson and I will be with you for Talk the Thrones. Then on Mondays, two more shows away. Dan Lath and Charles Holmes, Steve Allman, and Jomea Denneron, aka the Midnight Boys, Pugh!

Pee! We'll head to the tourney grounds to share their reactions. And of course, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald will sip the Arbor's finest vintage on the watch. Then on Tuesdays, Joanna and I will head to the bowels of a pleasure den for our House of our deep dives. Then on Thursdays, Joe, Neil Miller, and Dave Gonzalez will gather the Ravens for trial by content. In this season, full episodes of Talk to Thrones, House of Ar, and the Midnight Boys will also be available on video on Spotify and the new Ringervverse YouTube channel. Podcast episodes available on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, the cultural reasons why Americans are having fewer and fewer children.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Erlich published a massive bestseller called The Population Bomb. The world, he said, was standing on the precipice of disaster, with a global population set to explode and create a species-threatening disaster. Erlick's proposed fixes to this population bomb were radical. He said, quote, the FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television. That was in 1970. If that didn't work, he said the government ought to, quote, legislate the size of the family and, quote, throw you in jail if you have too many kids. This was no quiet, radical voice. Erlich appeared on the Johnny Carson show six times.

But now, 60 years later, the Western world faces an entirely separate problem, an opposite problem, not population explosion, but population decline. Marriage and fertility rates have fallen in practically every country on Earth in the last 50 years. In 2020, a study published in The Lancet Journal used fertility and migration trends to predict the year of peak population for, every region and country in the world. For Central Europe, in Russia, they said, that year was 2017. In other words, these countries are already declining, possibly permanently. They said in China, peak population would be 2024. In South Korea, 2031. In Germany, 2035. For the U.S., where we have slightly higher fertility, more migration, they said the year of peak population would be 2062. The world would peak in population by 2064.

Now, in some ways, these predictions were actually too rosy. Korea's population, for example, is already declining. China's birth rate has fallen by 50% in the past decade. The most important fact of this 21st century may well be the exact opposite of the thesis of the population bomb. This will be the century of the global population bust. Now, let's locate this conversation in the U.S. for a moment. The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades. In April this year, the CDC reported that the general birth rate in the U.S.

decreased by 3% from 2022, setting a new historic low. Now, there is clearly an economic story to tell here about money and finances and affordability. The long-range explanation that I find most persuasive for the global. global decline in birth rates is that if you look around the world, fertility declines as women get more education and are more likely to work. It really is practically a formula in every continent, the U.S., North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, as economic opportunities for women go up, the number of children per woman goes down. But what's more, as countries get richer, higher productivity raises the price of services that cannot be made more productive.

This is a function that's sometimes called Baumol's cost disease. So you take an industry like child care, for example, where we don't know how to get cost savings to the main levers of globalization and technology. To be specific, exporting child care doesn't make any sense, right? You can't ask somebody currently living in Nairobi to babysit my baby who lives in North Carolina. You also, in most cases, don't generally ask robots to change diapers. And so in an economy that is generally getting richer through globalization technology, it's non-globalized, low-tech fields like child care that get more expensive.

That is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that the rising cost of raising a child is partly a function of our affluence. At today's guest, Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg, the authors of a new book called What Are Children for, say that we can't just look to economic factors to explain the decline in fertility around the world, or even in the West, or even just in the U.S. specifically. For the millennial and Gen Z generations, for, let's say, all people under 40, 45 years old, there's been a massive cultural shift in our relationship to having children. People are getting married later.

Since 1970, the median age of first marriage for women has increased from 22 years old to almost 29 years old. The average age at first birth for women has increased from 21 to 27. And this does not merely reflect delay. It reflects a new kind of ambivalence. toward marriage and children that is strikingly common in America. And we must admit, especially common on the left. In a Pew Research Survey asking Americans, what is most important for a meaningful life,

kids, marriage, friends, or career, the most popular answers went in the opposite direction. 71% of Americans said that having a job or career they enjoy was critical for fulfilling life. Less than 30% said kids or marriage. Asked whether society is better off. If we prioritize marriage and kids, just 16% of democratic women said yes.

Now, that's a lot of numbers to throw at you, so I'll sum it up this way. Family life used to be the American default. Family life used to be synonymous with the American dream. But today, for many young people, and especially, it seems, for many young progressives, marriage and kids seemed like one option among many plausible options.

A world where children are more optional is a world with fewer children. And this, I think, may very well be the story of the century. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Anastasia Berg, welcome to the show. Hi, Derek. It's good to be here.

Rachel Wiseman, welcome to the show. Really happy to be here. Thanks for having us. I am so happy you're here. I'm so interested in this topic of declining childbirths around the world and especially in the West and the U.S. I'm interested in its effect in economics, its effect on migration, on geopolitics and the future even of warfare. This is such a huge and rich subject. The title of your book comes up. at this huge, rich subject from a very interesting direction. The title is, what are children for? And of all the questions that we might ask about this age of declining childbirth, why did you choose this one? What are children for? Rachel, why don't you start? Right. That's a great question.

So the title was chosen for two main reasons, I would say. First is that it points to a basic difficulty that many people have today when it comes to even answering the question of why they might want to have kids. So it's self-evident to most people, especially in progressive secular society, why someone might want to go to college or pursue a fulfilling career or fall in love. But it's much less obvious to them why someone should have kids, especially if you take into account all of the sacrifices and the resources and the time that they demand. And the second thing about what are children for kind of goes to the philosophical character of the book where we feel that you can't really know why some big trend is happening, like declining birth rates,

without first stepping back and asking what that thing is for. So like, why should we have children? What role do they play? How could they fit into a well-lidling? modern life. And then just as a matter of fact, the book emerged out of an editorial that Anastasia and I both wrote for The Point magazine that was dedicated to this very question of what children are for. And in that editorial and the real seed of the book was our expression of dissatisfaction with these big historical narratives about why millennials aren't having kids today and if it's even okay to, especially in relation to climate change. Anastasia, at the highest level, why do people who don't have children say they don't have children?

When people are asked, people who are childless are asked, why did you not have children? The second most common reason they give. This is true in both the U.S. and the U.K. After, I didn't want any, is I failed to find a willing and suitable partner. This is actually true of men and women at almost the same rates. And we have sociologists and pundits respond to this by saying, oh, there is a shortage of Mr. Rights. There is a problem of finding eligible men. they point to statistics about how men are not

graduating the same rates from college. They're not getting as, their jobs aren't as good. So we cannot find good men anymore. Now, that is an interesting supposition, but Rachel and I, in the book, explore how the actual dating scripts that we abide by that include very long explorations on the dating market. They include dedicating your entire,

20s and early 30s to more or less casual dating, certainly not dating with a view to family. They involve a endless vetting of that potential partner through long, non-exclusive dating, then long-exclusive dating, then cohabitation, then trial parenting a pet, before one even is willing to consider having children. In this case, we're inviting people to ask whether or not this self-evident love. logic of postponement within professional life, within romantic life, within personal life is in fact a good one. One thing that I love about the way this book comes at the question of why people are having fewer children is that it's so different than the way I would typically write about the

issue of declining fertility in the West. Because what I would do is I think I would start with a paper that looked at the huge broadsuit of history and said, well, the number one correlation for declining fertility is rising women's education rates and rising labor force participation. So overall, let's just say this is mostly about women moving from working inside the home, working in child care, preparing the house, to women working side by side with men. And you're saying, no, we have to connect these grand historical narratives with personal stories, with the psychology of parenthood. We have to consider culture. Why are you so sure that this is largely a cultural story.

So within the U.S. framework and in talking to people in the U.S., one would be led to believe that economics plays a outsized role in people's decision whether or not to have children and how many. But first of all, the understanding of millennials as a radically precarious generation has been vastly challenged if we're looking at countless measures from their wages to their savings, to their home ownership, not to mention how much they are about to inherit and they know it. The story of them as being a generation that's been completely economically forsaken is one that is inaccurate. But much more importantly, in looking at countries,

where having children is easy, affordable, in fact, somewhat financially advantageous because they're subsidizing having children, we see that their birth rates are as low. And so when the material explanation doesn't provide, the material explanation doesn't hold, when material factors can't explain the changes we're seeing, we have to turn to what people are thinking,

experiencing in order to understand what's driving their decision making. And in this case, we apply our, so at this kind of moment, we turn to cultural artifacts, not just as reflections of what people are thinking, but also because these are the kind of object that people turn to for guidance and for an interpretation of their own experience. So, for instance, if you're looking at TV shows after decades upon decades of the success of the family sitcom, when you look today, you are unable to find a single portrayal of a woman who is both excelling at whatever it is that she's doing, if she's a spy or a businesswoman or a lawyer. And at the same, being a anything but a failed mother, then you're not. you're having a social script that's suggesting that motherhood is incompatible with the pursuit of excellence. If you're looking at the rise of an entire literary genre that explores the ambivalence of women around having children, then something is happening.

If you're looking at a philosophical question that was raised for two millennia, but it was raised in the abstract, it was raised, by philosophers. It was raised by a lonely poet. And you see that same question being raised every month in the New York Times Op Ed section, which is, is human life so full of suffering and so harmful that perhaps you shouldn't be perpetuating it, then I think we are liberated to ask the question

in a cultural register. One way that I might try to tell this story in a way that connected economics and culture is to say that as a country gets richer, several things happen at once. education attainment goes up, labor force participation among women goes up, income rises. But what happens at the individual level is that richer countries have more leisure time. They have more entertainment options.

That means the opportunity cost of having a baby goes up. And that seems like a very clinical, you know, cold-sounding term, the opportunity cost of having a baby. But I guess you could put it in a more casual term by saying it's just, it can be really fun or at least maybe very, very, overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of options available to you to be a 20-something in this 21st century modern affluent world. And adding a baby to this mix feels like an impossible sacrifice when you're figuring your life out. How much of the decline of fertility is just that, seeing children as a bad bargain and opportunity cost? When people evaluate the declining birth rates they oftentimes say exactly what you just said.

The opportunity cost or some version of it, the opportunity cost of having kids has risen. What we think is that it's not that the opportunity cost of having kids has risen. The shift is so radical that what is new is that we're thinking about kids in terms of opportunity costs at all. When you ask a member of a previous generation,

and I'm not talking about hundreds of years ago, I'm just talking about our parents. Why did you decide to have kids? How did you know to raise this question, and let alone answer it? They say, I don't know what you're talking about. This was never in question. And so the question is, well, how did you weigh the advantages and disadvantage? That just wasn't salient.

And that is because children, until recently, were a part of the very framework of human life. That's fascinating. Rachel, how widespread is this phenomenon that Anastasia is describing, this radical shift towards thinking of having children primarily as a cost that one chooses to accept rather than a kind of life script default? We interviewed and surveyed hundreds of millennials, and it wasn't uncommon to hear from them that when they were contemplating the idea of having kids, all that they could think about was the prohibitive cost.

So, for example, some would say that they were open to the idea of having kids, but only on the condition that it didn't jeopardize anything else that they cared about. So the thought of organizing one's life in advance to make room for family, which was something that for our parents' generation was just taken for granted, now strikes many young people as unacceptable. One thing I think it's important to stress here is that it isn't just, a matter of priorities shifting, right? That kids aren't as advantageous as they used to be, and, you know, people have better things to do now than change diapers. What is notable is that people treat kids as a choice in the first place as something that is, that you can weigh against a sea of other equally good options. And so aside from the question of opportunity cost, we think that this reveals something really interesting, starting a family

of one's own is no longer understood as a necessary part of adult life. And actually, there was a report that came out last year from Pew Research Center that validated this. It found that only 26% of Americans today see having children as a necessary part of a fulfilling life. That's compared with 71% who said that having a career that you enjoy is important to a fulfilling life, or 61% to having close friends. And so this demotion of family from a constitutive part of adulthood to just one possible project among lots of other ones is a really remarkable change. One thing I'm very interested in, Rachel, is this idea that especially in the last 20 to 30 years, there's this new concept of delayed adulthood. The idea that once 20s are almost a new recognized

stage in our becoming full-fledged adults, which is not necessarily children or young adults and not necessarily full-fledged adults, but sort of this like larval adult who is still in an existential way trying to understand who am I? What is the self? What am I all about? And it's interesting because that conviction that your 20s are for self-discovery and for self-fulfillment means that they're not for necessarily diving fully into starting a family. what is this new stage that we're seeing? And do you agree that it's a new, relatively new phenomenon? So when we asked young people, what would it take for you to feel comfortable starting a family and taking that step?

They would tell us things like, well, I would need to feel really established in my career. Or I would want complete flexibility to travel or massive amounts of safety. So there was no one real number or goal to reach. And that tells us something, which is that it isn't so much about the material concerns as such, but a deeper anxiety that's at play about losing whatever little stability they've managed to score for themselves. And then at the same time, yes, there are these cultural scripts. that tell young people that they should spend their 20s discovering themselves and not to rush to settle down.

But, of course, people will get to their 30s and realize that maybe they haven't, you know, figured out as much as they thought they would by then. So there was like this New York Times article that was about millennials entering middle age, which I thought was a really striking illustration of this, many of the people that they interviewed said that they hadn't attained remotely as many of the markers of adulthood as they had expected to by 40.

They felt that their lives were only just getting started. So what this shows us is that, you know, because their identity and sense of self feels so very tenuous, people end up putting off thinking about kids until very late in the game. They feel like they don't just have to have the material conditions all locked in, but that they have to have really figured out who they are first before they can even begin to think about whether or not they want to have children.

I'm just going to ask one more time, and I apologize for repeating myself. Are we sure this isn't mostly an economic story? because I feel like maybe an economist listening to this interview might think, we are talking about the rising salience of children as costs. Child care costs really are rising. There's a housing shortage in this country. What's wrong with the argument that declining fertility, which is something that's happening around the world,

is mostly about the perceived rising costs of life in one's 20s, which is, of course, a story about economics. So, yeah, it is true. that financial concerns loom really large in the minds of millennials when they're deliberating about having kids. But we also don't think that economic explanations can be the complete answer for why they're not having them. And there are two reasons for this. One is that when you look at the international comparisons, like the countries with very robust social welfare systems like the Nordic states, Norway and Sweden, or countries like South Korea, which have very low birth rates,

but have in recent years been trying mightily to raise them through cash incentives and other social programs, people still aren't having kids at the rates of earlier generations. And birth rates are not rising at the level you would expect, given the amount of investment in these social programs that they're doing. That said, we do think that these sorts of programs are good things to do and that they would help improve the quality of life for a lot of American families. But it's important to be clear-eyed about the fact that they're not some kind of silver bullet that will get the U.S. back to replacement. Universal child care and child tax credits are great things, but they don't get to the deepest sources of people's ambivalence. For one thing,

people aren't just having fewer kids than they would like to. This is something the demographic researchers like to call the fertility gap, but lots more people than before are choosing to have no children at all. And then the other thing is that, while it is true that millennials graduated into a really rough recession and it took a while for them to establish themselves in the workforce, they are now doing better financially than a lot of economists predicted they would be at this point. And so the narratives about millennial precarity that one tends to read in the news are now a little bit outdated. It seems to me that another piece of this is that the modern dating script has changed significantly in the last 20 years. I mean, many people have probably seen that graph showing that the share of people who meet in the physical world has collapsed over the last 20 years.

and the share of people who meet online, meet their partners online, has basically gone exponential. This interests me a lot. I met my wife on Bumble, but I've also read a lot of articles now indicating that young people are souring on dating apps. Tell me a little bit how you see modern dating scripts

playing a role here. I think the most interesting thing that we've discovered researching the book, something that was truly a surprise for Rachel and me, about modern scripts, was that in addition to the things that we know, which is that people date for a long time, people delay exclusivity, people delay moving in together, people are really trying to be very confident about securing a long-lasting relationship, is that today people see the goal

of a relationship as romance and romantic compatibility, and they conceive that as separate from the goal of starting a family. This means that people are reluctant, men and women both are reluctant to bring up the question of family in the dating context. A study, a sociological recent study of women who have either frozen their eggs or thought about freezing their eggs, asked why is it that women are turning to these reproductive technologies, expecting that it would be a familiar answer. They want to be able to extend their career. They wanted to have more options. The answer was, for the most of them, is that they wanted to be able to protect their

romantic timelines and separate them from the family once. They were saying that to date with a view to starting a family would instrumentalize the relationship. It would make them less likely to find a suitable partner because they're more likely to compromise. They wanted to maximize compatibility. A lot of them will talk in the language of the dating apps. So I want maximal compatibility.

I want a 99 percentile, not a 93 percentile. And of course, it's possible to hit a target without trying. So it's possible that in dating, not with a view to starting a family, you might end up with somebody who happens to be suitable for the task and eventually willing. But this is no guarantee. And so in private, when we're looking, at couples, we have a dynamic by which it's understood whether or not the couple will have children is something that the woman has to figure out. Ayesha needs to know if she wants it.

And then she needs to raise it because men, and I'm talking about, you know, people who understand themselves as enlightened, progressive, supportive men take themselves to not have the right to raise the question themselves. So we've talked to men and they would say, I would feel creepy. I would feel oppressive. I would feel controlling to raise the question. And this dynamic, this sort of gender inequality in the burden of figuring out what it is that people want and then getting the couple to consider it as a couple

contributes to this postponement. I want to bring in ideology here. I think one really interesting fact that emerges in some of my research and certainly in this book is the fact that having children appears to be at odds with several ideological pillars of modern progressive thought in the West.

Number one being women's liberation, modern feminism, and number two being the salience of climate change. You go into both of these in-depth in your book. On the other hand, it seems like conservative women are more likely to get married, more likely to have kids, certainly in America. Tell me, where did this relationship

come from, this idea that progressives are now less inclined to have children. Rachel, why don't you start? Well, you know, the old feminist truism that the personalist political is perhaps nowhere more true than in the discourse about having kids on the left today, where for many progressives, it can really feel like having kids brushes up against their core political values in an uncomfortable way, especially their commitments to feminism and environmentalism. And in the case of feminism,

there's a really interesting history here that I think is worth touching on, where insofar as second wave feminism in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, aimed to liberate and empower women to enter the public sphere and aspire to higher goals. It seemed obvious to feminists that women had to be freed from motherhood, which was an institution that chained women to the home and kept them out of public life. So just to be clear, do you think there are parts of modern feminism that are essentially anti-motherhood?

I guess if I can just reframe it a little bit. The way I would put it is this. Within second wave feminism, there were definitely strains of thought that took as their goal liberating women from the confines of their physiological destiny. This didn't just mean giving them access to birth control so that they would have more agency over their reproductive choices and bodies. But also in the case of someone like Shulameth Firestone, a real suspicion that motherhood was at the core of inequality between the sexes. So famously, Firestone believed that it was only when women were completely freed of having to kill. carry a child and give birth, that they would be able to be on equal footing with men. And she, you know, along those lines, proposed things like mechanical wounds, which, you know, are sort of like a sci-fi solution to the problem of sexual difference. And the important thing to note, however, is that while there were these other more pro-motherhood

sides of the conversation, and they would duke it out and debate about the role of parenthood and motherhood in a woman's life. Ultimately, that discourse exhausted itself so that by the 1980s, there was basically one default answer. And it was that whether or not to have kids is essentially a private choice. So if you want kids, have them. If you don't want them, don't have them. But no one else should have much to say about it. And that's left a real void in the conversation such that a lot of women don't necessarily know where to turn when they're trying to look for conceptual resources to answer whether or not they want kids and whether it's a good thing to do in the first place. And we think that there's room to return this question of

parenthood, children, family into the feminist conversation once more. Anastasia, I find it striking how common it is to find examples of people on the left saying that they are anti-natalist, they're against having children, because of climate change. What do you make of this? I think quite radical idea. Either I'm not having kids

because I want to preserve the planet or I'm so afraid of climate change that I don't want the people I love to even be alive in the future. Although, it is the case. that anti-natalism in the culture is often or even mostly couch in terms of climate change concerns. That is the context in which we're raising the anti-natalist worry that human life is not worth living, whether or not because it's so harmful or because it's so full of suffering.

When people are surveyed both in the U.S. and globally about the reasons for them hesitating about having children, climate change to date does not feature almost anywhere. So we have a discrepancy and one that we think is really interesting between phenomena in the public discourse on the one hand and people's private deliberations. Now, what can explain this discrepancy? One thing that we see is that when it comes to parenthood ambivalence, The truth is, P, it's not even salient to people themselves oftentimes.

Why is it that it is so hard for them to make a decision for or against? Climate change is an intelligible and moreover ethically virtuous way of expressing one's ambivalence. This could be noble in itself, but it's very important to notice that it means that people are not in their personal deliberations, taking climate change as salient practically as we think. Just to jump in there, one thing that seems possible to me is that while there are some people who don't want to have children and are judgmental of other people having children because of their fears about the future of the planet,

there might be other people who are, to reference one of the first points you made in this interview, not having children because of intensely personal and non-political decisions. They simply see an opportunity to cost where previous generations didn't, But they don't feel comfortable telling themselves or telling their friends that they don't want children because they simply enjoy their life without children or are worried about the way that children will disrupt their life. And so in order to whitewash a personal choice with this sense of noble political thought, they say, well, where's the, what word can I use? What phrase or cause can I reference that will make my individual decision feel like an important political decision? I'll mention climate change. I'm not accusing any individual of doing this, but it just seems to me like a plausible move that you might personally just not want kids, but find it really convenient to tell other people that you're doing this for an intensely political reason. Is that plausible? Does that connect at all with any of the interviews, the reporting that you did? So I think that definitely tells part of the story, but only a part of it. We quote a interview that Seth Rogen did with Howard Sturd in which he talks about climate change,

being a reason for him and his wife not having kids, but in the same interview, he talks about how he loves spending his Saturdays naked in bed smoking weed, and it would be really hard to do that with kids. And so perhaps about a subject like that, we can characterize them exactly in the ways that you did, Derek. But I think there is something deeper going on. because the question of climate change and the way it should be affecting a reproductive choices is not unique to our historical moment, although it seems very much so. And in fact, has a very long philosophical, ethical, and theological history. So this is a question that people have been asking for millennia.

And the way we're seeing that question raised today is just an iteration of that question. And I think that when people raise it, I don't think that. they're just whitewashing their selfish confusion or increased opportunity cost. I think they're also trying to give voice to a kind of crisis. I think that means that people are looking around us. They're looking at the harms of climate change. They're looking at political systems that are in the eyes of many being corrupt. We see democracy being threatened.

We see rise of things we are at least debating whether or not we should call fascism. They're looking around themselves and they're worried and they are not confident about the way in which human beings are conducting their lives. And I think one way of expressing that is to say, I don't know if I could be bringing children into a world. like that. So in addition to the opportunity cost that they may be perceiving, I think that they're also, I'll put it this way. Derek, I know that you in particular are very interested in mental health crises, especially among the young. We see despondency. We see a lack of confidence in our political system, in our social fabric, in our economic systems. And I think these kind of anxieties find their expression through talk of,

or through raising the question, can we bring more people into a world that looks like this? It's interesting, Rachel, I want to hear from you on this. But one thing that I've talked a little bit about with Richard Reeves, another guest in the show when we've had conversations about masculinity in the left is I think progressives are very, very good at talking about toxic masculinity, but there's not an obvious vision of positive masculinity on the left.

And I remember one of our conversations, I talked about how on the right, they're very good at advocating for what you can think of as like caveman masculinity, where it's like, here's how you can get really ripped and here's how you can have a really,

really good diet, and here's how you can be like an incredible stoic. And those are all fine things, you know, working out, having good diet, having good mental health. There are also things you can do

in a cave without anyone around you. And there's a vision of masculinity that's a little bit absent, I think, on the right, about like, a transactional masculinity, a relational masculinity. I'll use shorter words. dad masculinity, right?

Like being a father is not a selfish act. It's an exhaustingly loving act. And that's a lane that I think is a little bit untaken, potentially, on the left. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how that might tie into the potential politicization of children. Anastasia and I work at a literary magazine called The Point. and we just published an issue this past spring on masculinity and manhood. And we surveyed about 300 people about their thoughts on this very question about, you know, whether there's a model of masculinity today that could be embraced.

And I really got the sense in reading over their answers that many of them shared your concern, that there isn't an obvious or even an aspirational ideal for what it would mean to be a good man or a good father. But maybe one place to start, I guess, is for men to be more conscientious about joining their partners in asking the big questions about family and the shape of their lives together much earlier on. I would sort of propose if we want to see more, dad masculinity, we should be more open to the idea of pre-dad masculinity. So as a progressive

femininity-oriented person today, we're very comfortable with men wanting to be active dads doing as much, if not more, around the house, but we're still very much not comfortable and certainly not inviting them to be active in the pre-dadhood, which is to say in figuring out what they want and being open about it and in initiating, conversations about it and being supportive in the process of deciding for a couple whether or not they want kids. So we need to have pre-dad masculinity as well. There's a tension here that I find very, very interesting. For many adults, having a child has never felt more optional, but also if they do have a child or for those who do have children, parenting seems more intensive

than ever. Parents, especially high-income parents, spend more and more time. with their children. Maybe this is just the basic math of modern parenting. More resources plus fewer kids equals more resources per kid. And so mechanically, children become more precious at the same time. They become more optional. But isn't this strange? Yes, I do think that's right, Derek.

Children are getting treated as both more optional and more precious at the very same time. And these two things are linked. The standards of readiness for having children are high because people feel a duty to give those children not just a decent quality of life, but one that's just as high and maybe even better than the ones that they had when they were growing up. And so there's an anxiety of not being able to provide for your children the way that your parents provided for you. There's also a social component where liberal middle class parents look at what other parents in their social milieus are doing and they don't want to feel like they're not measuring up.

Jay Caspian King wrote about this recently in The New Yorker. It was a piece about liberal parenting panics about summer camp. And he argued that liberal parents have less faith in the prospect of progress and social mobility. So they end up feeling like all they can offer their kids is a wide array of enrichments to choose from, like summer camp or private school. And this is connected to another parenting paradigm that I think is really interesting and is inseparable from this like intensive parenting mentality. It's called acceptance parenting. And it turns the work of raising children into a really intensive enterprise, with also very high, indeterminate bars of success.

So for older generations, it was understood that the job of a parent was to transmit a certain set of values to their children that they also shared and a vision of what a good, flourishing life ought to look like. But now it's kids who are the ones who are supposed to determine what those standards of happiness are, and this has two main effects. One, it makes the work of parenting very stressful because parents feel like they have to offer a very wide menu of different activities and opportunities for their children in the hope that they'll take to one of them and find success. And the other thing is that people who are raised in

acceptance parenting, like many of the American millennials and Gen Z years today, myself among them, it can make it hard to identify what exactly you're signing up for when you start a family. Because you don't have a crystal clear vision of what family life ought to be instilling in the next generation. I think I would summarize so much of what you've told me in this interview about the evolution of modern parenting as expectation hyperinflation. But rather than normal economic hyperinflation, where prices are going up and up and out of control, in the absence of a sufficient supply of goods, this is expectations going up and up and out of control in an environment of perceived precarity.

The vision of parenthood that you're describing young people having really is one of profound fear and worry and status anxiety and anxiety about perfectionism. And if this is the vision of parenthood that we're putting out there, that the modern Western culture is putting out there, that American culture is putting out there,

then of course I can see how at the margins having a child is incredibly unattractive. But I want to close with this. Statement in question. I'm a young dad. My child is 10, 11 months old. Being a parent is exhausting. It is truly, truly exhausting.

It's also a blast. And it opens up a a secret room in the house of yourself that you never knew existed. And get a walk into that room and discover a part of yourself that never existed before. And it's so beautiful to be able to do that. I don't want to be shy about how much I love being a father. And I especially don't want to be shy about how much I love being a father in the context of a conversation about how I think maybe there's too much shyness about the incredible joys of parenthood. Anastasia, at the biggest level here, what is the positive case for having children?

I think the positive argument for having kids we lay out is to say that we think most people are already committed to the goodness of a human future. And that is because if we consider the kind of goals and commitments and projects that people are already committed to for most, people, they presuppose the possibility of a human future. So if you're thinking of a political activist on the left, when being asked about children, they might express a lot of ambivalence. But in the very commitment to a political project that extends into the far future and their attempts to build a better and more just society, they are committed to a robust human future. If we talk to a climate activist, they are committed to the possibility of a kind of human future in which human beings would like to live in. If you're talking about gender equality,

we're not talking about having equality just for the people who live now and who knows what it's going to be. It's about establishing a way for people to live together justly and equally. And so the invitation for the reader is to recognize the way in which they are already committed to a human future. What's left to determine is whether or not you personally are going to take part of it. And there, I think on the one hand, we're not in a position to tell you what to do. There are other ways of, as we say, affirming a human life. Somebody could dedicate their entire life to politics or to the pursuit of knowledge or to art. We do think that the most basic way of committing oneself to that project is by, the way I put it, is taking one for

team humanity, doing one's share, one little tiny share. of bringing forth new life, raising it, nurturing it, educating it, and helping the next generation build the kind of moral and political character that we want to see perpetuated into the future. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Beraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays.

We'll see you next week.