Frazzled parents of young children, breathe easy. According to economist and parenting author Bryan Caplan, the benefits of having kids are greater than they seem. Take his advice, and resolve to stop working so hard at parenting the “right” way this year.

Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and father of three boys—a two-year-old and eight-year-old twins—wrote his first parenting book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (Basic Books, 2011), while pulling the night shift during the infancy of his youngest son. In the book, Caplan explains that parents today are making painful sacrifices for their children’s wellbeing in vain.

“The big problem,” he says, “is people focusing too much on changing their kids and not enough on enjoying them.” By examining a multitude of twin and adoption studies, Caplan found that the effects of child-rearing are mostly short-term; it’s really nature that dictates the lion’s share of how a person will turn out. Instead of seeing these statistics as disappointing, Caplan finds them encouraging. This news indicates that parental unhappiness is an unnecessary consequence of expending extra energy on raising kids and, better yet, may be avoidable.

Rather than try to change our children, “we should think about raising kids in a very similar way as we would look at a marriage or a friendship,” Caplan insists. Most people enter into such relationships because they appreciate future spouses and friends for who they already are, not because they hope to drastically reshape their personalities. It is understood that efforts to change one’s spouse will likely fail and lead to the dissatisfaction of both partners, but it is rarely acknowledged that this also occurs in parent-child relationships.

Instead, parents persist in trying to mold the perfect children, even though experimental evidence shows that they have little long-term ability to influence their kids’ personalities. By accepting their children with the same respect that they would show to a spouse or a friend, parents take a step toward creating more fulfilling family relationships.

The dominance of nature over nurture also means that parents can relax when it comes to pushing extracurricular activities that children are not good at or do not enjoy. Parents shouldn’t feel like they are putting their children at a disadvantage by not signing them up for every class or sport available across the city. Fewer activities may actually mean less stress.

“I was pushed to play sports and never really liked it, and I didn’t want to do that to my kids,” Caplan recalls. He does not dictate what his boys should do with their time, although he does impose a 90-minute limit on daily computer and TV usage. And while this boundary exists, the twins also enjoy reading or playing imagination games and perusing comic books with their father.

“What’s kind of funny is that some people say I’m a hippie; you know, let the kids do whatever they want. But my brother thinks of me as a disciplinarian, because when I tell my kids to do things, I do expect them to do them the first time,” Caplan says. His advice on discipline comes from his economics background: establish credibility by being clear and consistent.

“There’s some very good experimental evidence [that] clear, consistent, mild punishment is very effective,” he says. New parents can implement Caplan’s advice on discipline early on. Even at just six months, Caplan’s twins were old enough to respond to having their highchairs turned away from the table for a few minutes when they refused to eat. When they got a little older, he used the same tactic and put them in the “naughty corner.”

A child will respond to kindness and respect just like anyone else, Caplan says, and “often the child does end up becoming just like you; you just have to wait. So your child when he’s 40 is going to be a lot like you now, when you’re 40. When he’s ten he’s going to act like a kid—what do you expect?”

After determining that parental nurturing has little to no effect on most of the things we want for our children, such as happiness, success and character, Caplan found that the area in which parents have the most significant long-term effect on their kids is in their relationships—how kids perceive and remember their parents.

“What’s sad to me about someone like [“Tiger Mom”] Amy Chua is [that] she’s pushing her kids so hard to make them succeed when the science says parents really don’t have much effect there,” Caplan notes. “She’s…messing up the area where she really does make a difference.”

Readers of his book also learn that the world is safer than ever before, much more so than it was in the idyllic 1950s for example. This is more good news, and for Caplan, yet another reason to support hands-off parenting. It should not come as a surprise that his favorite parenting book is Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids, which suggests that parents give little ones a bit more freedom and, in doing so, spare themselves irrational worry.

Ultimately, Caplan encourages new parents to envision the long-run, a world in which the diapers and incessant crying is eventually not your every day. “Think ahead over your lifetime and how you’re going to feel 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And when you decide to stop [having kids], don’t just do it based upon how you feel today,” he says. “[Having] a lot of grandkids really does make a big difference in people’s lives later on.”

This of course does not mean that parents should maximize the number of kids they have until they reach their biological limits, but Caplan does recommend that they weigh his evidence before they decide to stop having children.

“Almost all the difference between living standards today and living standards 200 years ago is just from new ideas,” Caplan says. And new ideas come from people. From an economist’s point of view, a higher population can mean prosperity. So if parenting can be less work with a more fruitful payoff, why not have another child?