Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Ep 8: Should You Have Kids?

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

For most of human history, having kids wasn’t much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women presented a couple of options: Have children, or join a convent. But the 1960s ushered in a big change. With better options for birth control and expanded career opportunities for women, many people for the first time could choose how many children to have, and whether they should have any at all.  Fast-forward to today: More people are choosing not to have children for a wide range of reasons. Having children, of course, is a personal choice. But it’s a choice that has broader implications. Everywhere across the globe—the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa—fewer children are being born. And strangely enough, having kids has become part of the culture wars. There are pro-natalist public figures like Elon Musk on one side saying everyone needs to have more kids now in order to save humanity. And on the other side, people like climate activist Greta Thunberg say rising sea levels are so catastrophic that having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But there’s no debate that the fertility rate is plummeting in America and around the world. Presently, American women, on average, have 1.8 kids. In the 1950s, it was 3. The replacement rate in the United States, which is the fertility rate needed for a generation to replace itself without considering immigration, is approximately 2.1 births per woman. Around the world, the fertility rate fell by more than half between 1950 and 2021, as many countries became wealthier and women chose to have fewer children. For economists like Emily, the speed with which the fertility rate is falling is cause for alarm. Economic growth depends, at least in part, on population growth. Retired people rely on generations of younger workers for support, through contributions to Social Security and taxes. With fertility rates in free fall, the math doesn’t add up. That’s the big picture. Now back to our own families. Our series so far has focused on the state of our children. Today, we cap things off with a fundamental question: Should we even have kids in the first place, and what happens if we don’t? *** Resources from this episode: Bryan Caplan: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids (Bookshop) Gina Rushton The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty (Bookshop) Leah Libresco Sargeant Helena de Groot Ross Douthat

Hi, everyone. Emily here, and you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb.

I think I'm currently holding, like, six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode.

For now, onto the show. family trip later in the episode. For now, onto the show. I always wanted to have kids. There was never a question. So I got older. I know if I ever dated someone who didn't want to have kids, I just probably would have well, I know I would have ended it because there was no point.

It was just always there for me. I wanted to be there for someone and it's very rewarding. Husband and father, really two most important titles. The idea of kids was literally that I would recoil from the thought of that because it seemed so phenomenally on another planet that I was like, oh God, no. There's no chance of that. I'm just living my life.

I chose to have kids, I guess. I definitely thought the world would be a better place with more of me in it, no doubt. I was in the boat of two is ideal, and then I got pregnant with our third, and now I realize how people have many, many, many children. Because once you have your third, you're like, oh, yeah, we just like keep going. We got this down, we can do this. It comes to talking about child free versus childless. For some of us it goes more towards the side of oh yeah I am so child free I just never thought about having children. Put my fist in the air and declare with pride, yeah, man, I am not responsible for parenting anybody.

["Be My Baby"] For most of human history, having kids wasn't much of a choice. Social expectations, lack of birth control, and limited autonomy for women delivered a limited set of options. Say, have children or join the convent. But beginning in the 1960s, a combination of better birth control options and better opportunities for women gave many more people a choice about both how many children to have and whether they should have any at all.

Fast forward to today, many more people are making the decision not to have children at all. And for a wide range of reasons. People tell me they don't want kids because of financial strain or climate apocalypse. Others say they do want kids so that they can heal generational trauma or give their first kid a sibling. I once spoke to someone who told me that it was important for him to have children to pass on his spectacular genes. Maybe that's an underlying motivation, even if most people would not put it quite so directly.

Having children is a personal choice. However, it's a choice that has broader implications. And what's undisputable is this. Virtually everywhere across the globe, the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, fewer children are being born. Having kids has become a strange part of the culture wars. On one side you have pronatalist public figures like Elon Musk saying everyone needs to have more kids now in order to save humanity. I think he has 12 kids to date. And on the other side you have people like climate activist Greta Thunberg saying that the rising sea levels are so catastrophic

that having kids in this era is akin to genocide. But what everyone can agree on is that the fertility rate is plummeting in America but also around the world. And in my line of work, the speed with which this number is going down in the U.S. is causing concern for all of the economists in the room. Americans are not having babies anymore. The U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low, declining 2% from a year ago. This marks the lowest rate recorded since the government began tracking the data in

the 1930s. Our fertility rate is below the replacement threshold. It's been that way for several years since 2007, which is basically the level our generation needs to replace itself. And that falling birth rate, it has implications, obviously, for the economy, for demographics. One of the first effects we will see is when Social Security funds are expected to run low in the 2030s. The lower birth rate in 2022 will have long term effects. In a couple of decades, there could be a shortage of young adult workers.

The basic problem is that economic growth relies at least in part on population growth. Plus, the older population relies on the younger population for support, through contributions to Social Security and taxes. But before we all panic, what does the data say? Presently, American women, on average, have 1.6 kids. In the 1950s, it was three. The replacement rate in the United States, which is the fertility rate needed for a generation to exactly replace itself without considering immigration, is

approximately 2.1 births per woman. The average age of first-time mothers has increased to about 27 years old, up from 21.4 years in 1970. The proportion of Americans aged 65 and older is projected to almost double, increasing from 16% in 2019 to 23% by 2060. This shift means that nearly 1 in 4 Americans will be in the senior age bracket. And this isn't just happening in the US. in the senior age bracket. And this isn't just happening in the US. From 1950 to 2021, the global total fertility rate more than halved, falling from 4.84 to 2.23, as many countries grew wealthier and women had fewer babies.

Notable highlights from the data include Sub-Saharan Africa, which has the highest fertility rate in the world, but has dropped from 6.3 in 1990 to 4.7 children per woman today. South Korea, with the world's lowest fertility rate, has only 0.78 children per woman. So today, birth rates, personal decisions, and their broader implications.

After a whole series focused on the state of our children, we cap things off with a fundamental question. Should you have kids? And what happens if we all don't? I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents. Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink?

You know, you shouldn't have like a lot. Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen.

What kind of reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist. You're not a doctor. I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really show women,

here is what the evidence is, and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself? Episode eight, should you have kids? I grew up in New Haven in the 1980s and 1990s. At a certain point in high school, I was assigned some kind of bulletin board project on the intersection between science and some kind

of major world issue or trend. And I ended up choosing population. This is Ross Duthat. He's a New York Times columnist and father of five children. And I went to the library, as one did, back in the day and went to the section of books that were about that subject. And most of them seem to be written by Paul Ehrlich, who was quite famous for a while as the prophet of overpopulation and doom.

And I checked out a number of those books, probably The Population Bomb, his original, and then his follow-up. I think it was called The Population Explosion. Those were sort of prophecies from the 1960s and 1970s about the demographic tide overwhelming the world. Net world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds. It's clear that world population growth remains completely out of control. Look at what the year 2000 will be.

Our cities are going to be choked with people. They're going to be choked with traffic. They're going to be choked with crime. They're going to be choked with pollution. And they will be impossible. As a good student, I compared those books' prophecies to what was actually happening in the world.

And this was about 25 or 30 years ago. And even then, it was quite clear that for various reasons, Ehrlich's prophecies of doom had not been fulfilled. His demographic projections no longer matched what was happening really anywhere around the world, but definitely didn't match what was happening in the developed world. Paul Ehrlich wrote his book, The Population Bomb, in 1968. He described the impacts of overpopulation in a very visceral way. It was easy to make it scary. He wrote about people dying from hunger because there literally wouldn't be enough food

to feed everyone sufficient calories. Major political upheavals. Every inch of the world would be looking like Bangladesh in terms of density. Poverty and disease everywhere. And back then, especially in Western Europe and to some extent East Asia, especially Japan, where you could see

that the trends were likely to go in the entirely opposite direction basically, that population was peaking and was going to pass a peak and start declining, that the richest parts of the world were going to get old very, very rapidly, and that in fact, most likely the big demographic challenge of the 21st century was going to be not population growth, but population decline. And it's sort of amazing. I mean, we're talking about the 1980s when this was already sort of somewhat visible, but the decline in fertility rates in this sort of period leading up to that and continuing is pretty astonishing because it isn't just the decline in more developed countries, which have

gone from replacement to under replacement, but it's an enormous decline in many of the places that were the highest fertility rates, even in the 1980s. So places that had seven, eight kid fertility rates are now down to three or four, even two. I mean, the magnitude of that change over a relatively short period has been pretty astounding. Yes, what you just described is the change that's happened from my bulletin board project to the present, right? So 25 years ago in the 1990s, whenever I was doing this, it wasn't quite as clear what

was going to happen to population in China, South Asia, and Latin America. It was clear that they were not going to fulfill sort of Ehrlich's worst case scenarios from his perspective, right? Of just too many people, too many mouths to feed. But yeah, at that point, it was clear that rich countries were going to get old quite quickly. And what's become clear since then is that middle income and even poorer countries can

follow the same trajectory. You don't have to become Denmark or the Netherlands or Japan to enter into a shift, not just to replacement level fertility, but something below replacement, maybe even well below replacement. The replacement rate is the average birth per woman a country needs to maintain its population. Ehrlich was alarming, and he was following an alarming tradition. Thomas Malthus in the 1800s had a similar set of dire overpopulation predictions. Erlich was also wrong. The predictions he made haven't come to pass. But the tenor of this argument hasn't gone away. In a way,

it's transferred from overcrowding concerns to environmental arguments for lower population and to moral arguments about human suffering. Part of the legacy of this work is the sense that having more humans is just in some way bad. According to one new Pew survey of adults under 50, the primary argument against having children is, I just don't want to. All of this makes it harder for people to see the real risks of a declining fertility rate.

You know, I'm a conservative crank, right? So I've been talking about it that way for some time, though I would say the trends of the last five years have been sort of more alarming even than I expected. People are sort of still surprised when they're confronted with some of these demographic trends. There's still just an expectation that overpopulation is the main problem, which also then is entangled with anxiety about climate change, where people will either say, well, clearly the places where population is still increasing, Sub-Saharan Africa above all, are still going to create some kind of overpopulation problem and also

contribute to climate change. Or people will say, okay, well, maybe we're getting demographic decline, but because of the threat of climate change, we should welcome it, right? There's both a certain uncertainty shading into denial about whether this is really happening and a kind of desire to put an optimistic environmentalist interpretation on it. For most places, the more realistic vision is old people dying alone in large large numbers, places emptying. So many more ghost towns, rural areas emptying, but also potentially parts of cities emptying. It's just sort of a picture of not so much war and famine as depopulation decay and also kind of a clustering effect.

In an age of population decline, let's say you have a country with eight major cities. It's not that each of those cities declines in population. It's that three of them decline in population. Three of them have their population increase because everybody moves to them, right? Because nobody wants to be in the declining places, and two of them turn into Detroit at its emptiest. That's a weird future to get your mind around, I think. And what's at stake if we do that? Why is that bad?

You can frame it in sort of economist-friendly terms and say, OK, this is a world of declining population is a world that's going to have slower economic growth, it's going to have less dynamism and less innovation. Older populations are more change averse, they're less likely to come up with new inventions. When you have a smaller and smaller group of younger workers supporting the welfare states that rich countries have built up, that gets harder and harder to sustain. Those kind of societies are going to be more stagnant, less dynamic, less interesting and

creative places to live. And then also they're going to be on the evidence we have now, lonelier and unhappier places to live. Now, we only have sort of a generation's worth of data on what life and virtual reality looks like. It's possible that once Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook perfect virtual reality goggles, that the internet will become a different place than it's been so far. Right now, all of the data we have, I would say, suggests that young people growing up in virtual spaces, in a social media dominated social landscape, hanging out less in person, spending less time with

friends in reality and more time with friends in the virtual are unhappier in ways that in turn seem to be compounding the low fertility dilemma. They're unhappier, they're forming fewer relationships, they're less likely to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they're less likely to have sex, they're less likely to get married, they're less likely to have kids, and so the low fertility trap itself gets deeper.

Tell me your best theory for why people are not having children. I mean, there's like 17 theories, right? 17. 17 theories, right? 17. Give me the best one, Ross. So trying to really simplify it. One, you just expect fertility rates to fall naturally in the transition from an agricultural

society where kids are a net economic benefit in obvious ways, because you have farms and you need kids to work on farms, to a contemporary society where kids are something that in order for them to do well in life, you mostly have to invest in them and get less back and you don't need their support in the same way, at least until they're stopping no kids at all, as long as you have social security and Medicare and so on. Right? So there's sort of an economic basis for shrinking family size that you would expect. There's a health and wellness basis where people used to have larger families in part

because fewer kids survived to adulthood. Infant mortality was very high until quite recently in our history. So it's not the case that most people in 1730 were having 13 kids and all those kids were surviving to adulthood. Your family size of sort of kids who grew successfully to adulthood would always tend to be four, five, six kids, not 10, 11 or 12.

Right? So again, you expect birth rates to decline as infant mortality goes down. You expect birth rates to decline as you get more professional and economic opportunities for women. That's sort of an obvious expectation that has been fulfilled in every country we can see. So when you put all those things together, it's very easy to see why you would go from people having 10 kids to having five or from having six kids to having three. The harder question is, why does fertility go from two to three kids, which is what most people still say they want, not just men, but also

women. Both sexes in rich countries, if you ask, what is your desired fertility, it's still going to be around, let's say 2.4, 2.5, not 1.2 or something. That's the trillion dollar question, right? Because if fertility rates settled at 2.5, then populations would be stable or slightly increasing and you wouldn't have this depopulated wasteland future looming ahead. And there, I think you have to get into some mixture of essentially just the sheer scale of wealth and immediate pleasures available to people in modern life

that make having kids seem like a special kind of burden that you are more likely to postpone until you feel completely ready. One thing I wanted to add to Ross's analysis here is the question of social support. It's not lost on me or most of us that support for children in the US is pretty lousy. There's no national paid maternity leave, there's limited child care support. A lot of us look to places like Sweden with its seemingly unending support

for parents and say surely with that support there would be more children. But in fact, fertility rates have gone down as much, often more, in those places than in the U.S. And in general, policies which have tried to increase childbearing by offering incentives to do so have fallen flat. This leaves me back to Ross's final point. It must be something else which explains this. The main thing I notice is that most people make their decision about, do I want another kid based upon I feel exhausted right now? I mean, I just think that a lot of times people are making these decisions impulsively.

Meet Brian Kaplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, a New York Times bestselling author, and a father of four. In his book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, he argues that raising children is actually less demanding and stressful than many people think. He suggests that the current trend of having fewer children might be because parents overestimate how hard it is to raise a successful adult.

Brian tries to ease parents' worries so they can enjoy their kids in the short term and consider having more children for long-term happiness. Like you wouldn't say, I'm too tired to go and shop for a dishwasher because I'm doing too many dishes. And it's like, well, if you just put a little investment in and get the dishwasher, then your life is going to be easier every day. So like a lot of times, if your life is hard, you've got to do something that makes it worse for a little while in order to make it better after that. And I think there's definitely some part of having kids to that.

You know, like I'm not crazy or blind. I do know that the first couple of weeks of having kids is really hard. Why should people have kids? I mean, my honest answer is not everybody should. It depends. But I don't want to leave is not everybody should. It depends. But I don't want to leave it with that total cop out.

In particular, I start with, well, does this idea have any appeal to you whatsoever? And there's a few people who just know, I just don't like it at all. I'm like, all right, well, that's fine. But out of people that are interested, then a lot of it comes down to the question of cost, not just financial, but also in terms of time. And that's the main thing that I focused on in my research is whether the time that people are spending with their kids is actually either needlessly unpleasant

or just failing to deliver the benefits they think, in which case there's just a lot of the costs are actually artificial costs that are caused by people's own internalized theories about what they have to do, which might not be true. So people potentially overstate how expensive in the time sense in particular it would be to have kids. Right. That and on top of it, anyone who thinks that kid doesn't get private school is destined

to be a loser. Well, we've got data on that. The benefits are at least a lot smaller than people imagine. So it's not true that if you don't give your kids fancy private schools or they don't go to the very top colleges that they're doomed for disaster mediocrity in life. Would you say relative to the people who ask you,

would ask you this, more of them should have kids than think they should? Yeah, absolutely. So most people have an exaggerated notion of how much their children's future depends upon them being miserable during the kid's childhood. And once you set that aside, then step one, obviously, as well, if I don't have to be miserable, I'm not going to be miserable. But step two is, well, if kids are not automatically coming with this big package of suffering,

maybe I should rethink the number that I want to have. So what's my, if my job is not to suffer, what is the role of the parents? Well, of course, there's always a little bit of suffering. I'm not fool enough to deny that. I would say that you think about yourself as your child's companion. What is a child? A child is someone who was with you for a great many years of your life.

A child is your companion. A child is your friend. A child is the person that you are putting hopes and dreams into. And you can do this with a negative attitude, which it's up to you, but I strongly recommend to do it with a positive attitude like you would with any other person

that you have a good relationship with. Some of this feels like it's wrapped up in if I have a relationship that I like or that I find manageable, I'm able to have more kids. Is that, Link, how you see that? There's this wonderful evidence from adoption studies and twin studies on what is the parents matter for, what do they not matter for, and especially where's the dial. Normally, there'll be at least some slight effect, but the effects are bigger on some things than others.

What it says when you go through all of this evidence, the most meaningful effect of parenting is just on appreciation, how your child feels about you, the kind of person they see you as. To me, this is really the heart of being a parent is the main thing that's in my power is this relationship, which makes a lot of sense if you think about a kid as being a person, as you should, they are people. If you think about, well, so I should marry this person in order to mold them into some other person.

It's not a good idea generally. You need to roughly accept them as they are, maybe try to send off some rough edges, but mostly focus on enjoying your time together. Same with friends, same with almost any good relationship. Try to focus on leading a fulfilling life together rather than molding them. So that's what I think of as the real heart of parenting. It's like great many other kinds of positive relationships where you enjoy spending time

together without sitting around saying, yeah, but what's the long run payoff? The payoff's now, mostly. There's one piece I think we definitely agree on, which is that a lot of the things that parents sort of sit around and obsess about, or at least the kinds of parents that I think we probably talk to a lot sit around and obsess about, don't matter as much as they think they do or at all. And that it would be, you know, investing a lot of time in trying to get your kid to the junior Olympics,

like they're not going to the junior Olympics anyway. Oh yeah, yeah. And also, of course, it's not very fun for your kid, for the parent to be miserable. I mean, one to me, very meaningful study that I came across when I was doing my kids book is something called the Ask the Children Survey. We just asked a lot of kids to give reviews of their parents.

And one of the most revealing things to me anyway was very few kids complain their parents don't have time for them. Instead, what kids complain is that their parents are too angry, tired, and stressed. And I was reading that, it's like, yeah, that's a lot like your parents go and they're driving you around to a bunch of functions that they don't really feel like taking you to, and then they flip out at you because you tried to change the radio station.

And it's like, well, wouldn't it be better to have just had a nice night together and not taking the kid to a sport he doesn't even enjoy very much, and then you would have been happy? ["The Last Supper"] doesn't even enjoy very much and then you would have been happy. I think part of it is that we've shifted to a model of parenting, especially in those upper economic trenches, that just sets the bar for parenthood too high and it causes people to miss out on a lot of joy that they would otherwise have earlier in their life.

This is Leah Labresco Sargent, writer at OtherFeminisms.com and author of several books, including the upcoming The Dignity of Dependence, which explores how to create a world that welcomes women and children. She has three children under five and is also the mother of six others, whom she lost through miscarriage. You tweeted about going to Yale to convince students to have more kids at younger ages. What's your first argument to the kids for why they should have kids sooner? GIGI BELLAMI I think the most basic reason is because

kids are good and that you should be suspicious by default of a culture that's telling you that these are goods you have to wait to enjoy for a long time. And because there's a tendency to overstate our own control over our lives and our children, and then we lose out on those goods. Ultimately, saying yes to children and openness to children is a yes to a certain amount of chaos. And whether you succeed in having children or not, acknowledging that reality, that life is not totally authored by you or under your control, opens you up to the richness of what your life can be. How do the students respond to that?

You know, it was interesting. We have varying speeches, the two major themes, one of which I respect and one of which I don't. One of the rebuttals was more of an environmental one of just kids are bad, humans are mostly bad. We should have fewer of all of these. You know, the student giving the speech was tiptoeing pretty close to kind of suicidal civilizational logic. Each individual person avoided each life cut shorter, fewer person lives on earth is a net improvement for the planet. It's an extremely college attitude, I would say, of just this, what if everyone is bad, but you want more people

to grow out of it than I think are currently making it through that brief freshman nihilism. Now the argument I respected a lot more came from a young woman who would, I think, position herself also on the left, but was making a different critique. And she just said, look, whenever women opt into having children, their lives are more strongly differentiated for men. And in a sexist society, encouraging women to have children is encouraging them essentially to make their womanhood more salient and that's bad for them. And I think she's descriptively right, right? Like, you know, in a world that's hostile to children, children are dangerous to women. But the kind of the alternative she's putting forward,

which I think is a strain in mainstream feminism is, women are essentially received by society as deficient men and the feminist project is helping us better pass for men or remedying those deficiencies, not making a world where women are welcome as women. So let's talk about moms and whether they can have it all. Can they have a career? What is your feeling? Can we have it all? No one can have it all. So you're making choices about trade-offs and everyone has to make those choices. I think the, our society asks

unjust things of both men and women and the valence of that unjust demand is a little different. Women face more pressure to have it all, a high powered career and kids, and you love your kids, but you can't see your kids, and you should feel guilty about all these things. Men face the opposite pressure of there's less room for men's grief about their lack of fatherhood, whether it's because they don't have kids or because they are succeeding in a non-parental career track and they come home as their kids are going to bed and they miss that, but there's not as much conversation about that being a real loss for them. We just don't put caregiving at the center of our society and everyone, men and women, pay a price for that.

It would be one thing to come to everyone and say look if you want to have children it's going to require these trade-offs and that's something we're all going to grapple with. I think the sort of current setup for many people feels like men aren't going to have that at all and women are going to have it a lot. Let me be that person a little bit, the student. Basically who would say, and I think I would have said this at that time, like I did want kids and I also wanted a career and I wanted wanted a career and I wanted fairness. And it feels like we should be able to get farther than we are. And that that has to be part of the societal bargain that no one can have it all. But like, why am I having none of it? This is where I see a lot of the most fruitful collaboration between the feminist community and the disability community.

They're both basically making the claim, we build our society around too narrow a range of bodies and experiences. And the question isn't just, will we help women fit a male mold better? Will we help someone who's in a wheelchair fit a walking mold better? But do we build our buildings, our expectations, our careers to accommodate a wider range of lived experience? And that's where you get something that isn't so much just, okay, well, you do want to have a baby, I guess.

So I guess we'll make this closet for you to pump in if we have to. But water is pretty clean, so formula would be better for us. I've got nothing against breast pumps, but I think a lot of our expectations around them are built around how they serve your boss, not around how they serve you. And so the question is more, all right, well, we start with the assumption, you're a mom, what will it look like to accommodate a mother in this job or in this workplace? And I think COVID has helped a little bit, because it just was

a hard reset on a lot of expectations we have around work and let people explore a broader range of models. Not all of which are compensated at the same level, but just having a broader range of accommodations is good for women, is good for people with physical disabilities, because it means we're not all fitting one narrow mold. After the break, we'll tackle more tough questions about deciding whether to have children. How do you make such a significant decision when the future feels so uncertain?

And how can you be sure you won't regret it? Stay with us. Raising Parents is proudly supported by Airbnb, a company that has made trips with my family time and time again so exciting and memorable. In Japan, I found an Airbnb in the middle of a small town called Goathouse. We were the only tourists for many miles, and in addition to goats, the house also had a samurai sword. It was amazing to feel, even briefly, like we were living a normal life in a totally different place.

What's amazing about Airbnb hosts is you're getting all the local experience instantly. At an Airbnb in Maine, our host recommended a particular swimming pond where you could walk on a hidden path and jump off cliffs. Needless to say, we were alone there, and we couldn't have felt more like locals. And here's the really cool thing. While you're away, your home could also be an Airbnb.

And yes, that means you can actually make cash while you're on vacation. It's really a no-brainer. Or maybe your in-laws made you build that back house when the baby was born, but now that your cute little newborn is an angsty, stinky teen, they only visit three times a year? Definitely consider hosting on Airbnb. Your home may be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. And now back to the show. My husband was a only child, and I, growing up, had a sibling.

And I do feel like part of everyone is we're always all trying to just recreate our childhoods. So I kind of always assumed that if I had any kids at all, I would have two. And I think he always assumed that if he had any kids at all, I would have two. And I think he always assumed that if he had any kids at all, it would be one. But we did start later by some doctor's tenders. I was geriatric by the time I was birthing my son at 35. And I kind of came to this realization recently that I wish that we had had a second earlier.

But for me, I am no longer open to going through all that again now. Having children was never really like a question for me. My mom was the type of mom that took parenting really seriously, and she always told me and my sister that raising us was her most important job, and that was always

something that just really stuck with me and became something that I also wanted to take on. I didn't have kids because I never felt the urge. My husband didn't either and I've seen how much work they are. Most of my closest friends are parents and the amount of drudgery involved in raising children really requires you to want them because otherwise I think you'd feel resentful. In fact, one of my friends has told me she regrets having kids, and she did it out of societal pressure.

It's a hard decision to stick to, so much so that I felt myself wavering in my late 30s and early 40s, but I'm glad I stuck to my guns and didn't bow to the pressure. It was definitely the right decision for me. I decided to have kids because, unlike my friends who think that the world is ending and therefore how could we bring kids into it, I think that fundamentally how can we possibly have a future

without bringing more humans into this world. And I believe that we have a moral and religious and spiritual imperative to do the thing that is most essential to who we are, which is procreation. And as a woman, I believe that my biology is my destiny and I can't imagine an unfolding of life without being one with my biology. I have been thinking, like, I don't have a desire to move to a commune or something, but I have thought so often, like, if society was a little bit more communal and we didn't

have to raise our children sort of within the tiny, tiny confines of the nuclear family, I might want to have a child. This is Helena de Groot, a podcast producer who lives in New York and has been working on a series about not having kids. If I could share the burden of child rearing with a village, right, as the saying goes, maybe. Part of what's so interesting for me about this conversation is this thinking. I didn't feel it.

And I think that I find really resonant, because I sort of, from the other side, if you had asked me, you know, did you feel like you wanted to have kids, I would have said, from the beginning. Like, I always knew that was something that I wanted. And in some ways, I did think about some practical parts of it, but not very much, because it was like,

we're gonna do this, and it's just about sort of structuring around exactly how. It seems like your decision started at this, like I don't have this feeling, but then has many practical, there's like a lot of, oh, not overthinking is probably not quite the word I'm looking for. Like, you can say overthinking. I've done a fair amount about this.

Do you think that's new to the world? What I hear when you ask that question is, do you think there were people in, you know, before we had reproductive choice, which, okay, we don't, you know, it's sort of debatable. Let's put aside whether we have that. Exactly. Some of it. Yes. A modicum.

But before we had any, I probably think there were people who were just like me, who just never had that feeling, who never had that desire. And it terrifies me to know that they had no choice. I mean, maybe they couldn't even imagine it because there just wasn't really that scenario for them as an option. But I can so imagine that there were people who felt trapped their entire life as parents

in a life that didn't fit them. I don't think everyone is made to be a parent. Ah, I'm so relieved to be born when I am. There was a combination of a total social expectation that unless you were going to become a monk or a nun, and sometimes even then, right? This was sort of what you were going to do, join to an absence of reliable contraceptives that meant that even if you didn't intend to do it,

you probably would, you know, you were likely to have kids. Ross, do that again. But it's a relatively novel situation where there's this sort of sense of this as like this very conscious choice That you have to make and you have to choose what point in your life cycle You're doing it which you know in your 20s or your 30s How soon after you get married whether you're getting married at all all of these things?

Yeah, we just never had to confront that before because of course you were gonna have kids because that's just what people do After sex right and I mean there is a there is a sense in which as someone who had who now has by Contemporary standards a lot of kids like there are times when I sort of find it Unfathomable that people don't want this or sort of setting up their lives in such a way that this is deprioritized because I literally cannot imagine what kind of meaning my life as a mid-40s professional would carry if it was not organized around my kids. But again, from an outsider's perspective, that can look like Stockholm syndrome, right? It's like, well, yeah, you have all these tiny, you know, these tiny humans, and they're holding you hostage,

and you've learned to love them, right? But you love your captor. The central question is, you know, should I have a kid, yes or no? But I think the actual question is, how do you make a decision about a future that feels precarious? This is Gina Rushden.

She's a reproductive rights and women's health reporter from Sydney, Australia. Most recently, she wrote The Parenthood Dilemma, a book about procreation in an age of uncertainty. Do you think there's a rational argument to have kids? Yeah, of course. You know, you very rarely speak to people who say that they regret having their children, because I think that few people do. You talk about this idea of the impoverished, epistemic position, which is that, you know, the thing, and I will say I'm a person who has kids,

and sometimes when people ask me to describe the experience of that, it's that it's both much harder and harder for my job and harder for my marriage and harder for like everything about my life than I anticipated it would be. And it's also the joy and the sort of connection to my kids is something I wouldn't really be able to describe. Like it's just so much different than any other life experience. And so that's the piece I think you mean by that, which is just until you have that experience, maybe it's hard to, hard to visualize both sides of it, actually, which makes it such a hard choice. It's like, I'm going to go into this world where I know there's really big

pluses and really big minuses and I have no ability to evaluate either of them. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those decisions where you cannot make a pros and cons list because you don't know how having or not having kids will change you as a person. Therefore, like you can't make a series of judgments about that because like having kids transform you and not having kids transforms you and you just haven't met those two people that you could be or those two lives that you could lead. It is new in the sense that particularly for women, with all the constraints around

fertility, all the constraints around reproductive rights, of course, this is the most choice we've ever had. And it's the most access many people have had to the technologies that will let them put off this decision as well. And that's exciting and really something to celebrate that that like, it is more of a choice than it's ever been in some senses. I think the other thing that people, there's a bit of debate about like, well, you know, people had kids through all sorts of wars

and all sorts of crises and like, why is this time particularly unstable and isn't this just like millennial navel gazing? And I think that that is true in a sense, like of course, people were deciding to have or not have kids in really precarious situations. But I do think that there are a few factors, particularly around the climate, of something that it's not a war with a beginning and an end. It's something that we'll get as far as we can tell progressively worse over time in a way that I don't know. We've had a particular, you know, political or financial crisis that's been the same. I'm curious if you think there's a way that this generation, this sort of millennial generation, was raised that makes them approach the topic differently, like almost think about it more,

like this question of like, what am I passing on? And am I going to repeat the problems of my parents? I don't feel like my parents thought about that. Maybe they had many complicated questions, but it was not that question. This actually goes on to raising kids in general, but in this, it's almost like there's so much thinking. And I just wonder how that plays into this. There is. And it's funny because, you know, some of the feedback, particularly from older people has been like, you're just thinking too much, like, just stop thinking and just make the decision. So if I told you people are morally obligated to have children, yes or no? Oh, that's a high one.

Um, my instinct is to say no, but I do like entertaining it because I do think that in a world where we're entertaining it, we could perhaps be entertaining policies that actually make motherhood or parenthood more tenable for people. No, people are morally obligated to be hospitable to children, and that might look like having them yourselves, but you just can't be part of actively or complicity in making the world hostile to children because it's wrong, because it's breaking a compact that you were part of as someone who was once a child. And whether or not you should have children is partly a personal discernment and partly

the factor of things outside your control. I don't think everyone has a moral obligation. What I would say to most people is if you think you have something in your future that is as important for society as future generations of human beings and is as good for your own moral development as having kids, then by all means do that instead of having kids. But the odds that you're going to find those things are maybe a little bit lower than you would think. So where does this leave us? I can't tell you whether or not to have kids.

It's not my style. It's a personal decision, but also a financial one, a religious one, and for some a political one. I feel lucky to be born in a time, as Helena says, in which we have a choice. And I also agree with Leah that we need to make it easier on parents, especially moms, and with Brian that kids can be more fun than we sometimes admit. I also really resonate with Ross's point that it's both harder and more joyful than anything else I've ever experienced. Earlier in this episode I said to a guest that I couldn't even explain the feeling

of being a parent, but let me try. The fundamental thing, for me at least, is to feel someone else's joy and sadness so much more than your own. When things are going well with my children, other setbacks matter much less. And when things are not going well, it's all consuming and impossible to find joy outside of it. As I'm recording this, both of my children are at sleepaway camp, and I am spending my time refreshing the camp website to see if they had added pictures. They are simply everything. As a parent, you want nothing more than to do the right thing for your children and make the best choices for them.

And at the same time, it can be impossible to know what those best choices are. Things crop up that you never thought about, even with a second kid, probably even with a fifth kid. The world and your child surprise you all the time, and it's hard not to second-guess yourself, even on the small things. But here's the thing, you have way less control than you think you do. You might ask why, if I know that to be true, have I spent the last decades writing books about parenting? The answer is that even if you don't have control, you have choices. And those choices are important. The problem is that the atmosphere about parenting

rarely frames these choices in a way that gives parents autonomy. We are not often given the opportunity to think critically about the decisions we make. Instead, we're expected to follow an arbitrary script, often without question. And often, one or two weak studies rapidly become conventional wisdom, even if they're wrong. Parenting is among the most important and meaningful experiences most of us will ever have. Probably the most important. I hope this series has taken some of the stress out of parenting by arming you with good information

and perspectives that you don't often hear from mainstream media or even from your parents or a pediatrician. Because we can do better. And data and information, I hope I've proven to you, can help. Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with The Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen. Thanks as well to producer Tamar Abishei.

The executive producer is Candice Khan. Barry Weiss is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Free Press. And last, thanks to my guests today, Ross Duthat, Brian Kaplan, Leah Libresco Sargent, Helena DeGroot, and Gina Rushden. I'm Emily Oster. This has been Raising Parents.