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?
