Wellbeing and The Choice To Become A Parent
The feelings of parenthood cannot be understood until one becomes a parent. One philosopher connected this to the classic difference between knowing about something and knowing what it is to experience the thing,1 such as the colour-blind expert on all things colour (and this is a real life example—Neil Harbisson!). I think a closer analogy is the experience sex. When one is pre-pubescent, the idea of sex would, if presented with the details, seem entirely unappetising, or even gross. As one gets older, it begins to appeal more and one typically gains an understanding of what it entails. But one still can’t know the feeling of sex until it happens.
When people become a parent, they anecdotally report—by some point—experiencing completely new feelings. Self-reported sense of meaning also increases significantly when people become parents. And, when people become parents, their desired number of children increases.2 We also see unexpected changes in psychological outcomes. Those who have unwanted children see decreased risk of depression in some circumstances.
Of course, parenthood is not a uniformly good experience either. On average, parenthood looks pretty good, even for those who didn’t plan it but it ended up happening. But there are of course those who end up finding things very challenging, and I am sure that there are many who simply don’t want kids and feel worse off if they had them. But it is nonetheless striking that the average person seems to underestimate the benefits, and is therefore making ‘rational decisions’ which aren’t properly informed.
How, then, do we best create better informed decisions? And do it whilst avoiding making decisions on behalf of others, i.e., forcing them, which I think we can agree would result in some pretty bad outcomes!
I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here, but I think that people are today pretty ill-informed about family life because they don’t see it around, and pretty ill-informed about what it is like to care for children because they increasingly don’t do anything like it (even the reduction of the babysitter role or the volunteer referee is a part of this—it used to be far more common for teenage girls to look after younger children for a bit of extra cash or for teenage boys to volunteer watching over some sport with younger lads). When teenagers were tasked with looking after a doll with cries and needs (as part of a campaign to reduce teen pregnancy), their likelihood of falling pregnant increased.
As I’ve written before, we also live in an age of increasing intergenerational segregation. Students hang out with students, workers hang out with colleagues and peers, and pensioners go to their clubs. This is a tragedy in itself: the vast majority of us derive great pleasure from being mentored and from mentoring, from taking on the role of the child or the student at times and the role of the father/mother or the teacher at other times. But of immediate relevance for having kids, it means that many are disconnected from stories of what family life really is like from the perspective of previous generations of parents. The answer to this isn’t necessarily some radical decision to live in one great generational house—I’m personally a big fan of the nuclear family (for the family, for the individual, for society)—but it is to be better connected between the generations so we can gain more perspective.
At the end of the day, none of these experiences substitute that of you holding your child or seeing your child’s deranged smile as they do the silliest thing and yet derive thoroughly unadult and unadulterated levels of joy from it. But I think they do give more of a hint than nothing, just as a shadow tells you the shape of an object but does not show all that there is.
A Rule of Thumb in Decisions Under Epistemic Uncertainty
Before I dive into this next part, I think it’s worth pausing to think about what we’re doing here when we’re thinking about parenting decisions. Becoming a parent necessarily means creating another life, and it is also overwhelmingly likely that it means embarking on an adventure to create and raise that life with someone else. I don’t think we should forget that it is about more than ourselves. But, suppose that you were deciding whether to become a parent or have an additional child solely on the basis of the outcomes for yourself…
I also think there’s a good heuristic for many people in all manner of things in life, including in making decisions where you cannot fully know the outcomes (and therefore including parenthood): think honestly about what kind of person you are, and see what the outcomes are for them.
For most people, this means that parenting will be a pretty good thing on the whole: big changes in a sense of meaning and no big long run change in hedonic pleasure. This applies even if you haven’t ‘done’ all the things you think you might ‘need’ to do before becoming a parent—until just a couple of generations ago, people started families as the beginning and cornerstone of adult life, not as something to be delayed until some (being honest, pretty arbitrary) indicators of readiness are achieved.
But, look, I’m not in the business of forcing this down people’s throats. My point is that for reasonably ordinary people who feel from messaging they’ve been around that they should reconsider the urge to have kids or delay thinking about having kids at all until some undetermined point in the future… that kind of person will, according to the research, probably gain a lot of satisfaction from having kids and will raise kids who value their existence, so should take a moment to consider the positives!
In the linked paper, Paul maintains that my ‘Lucky Parent’ argument (i.e., that you should expect to be one of the parents for whom things turn out pretty swell) is wrong because her evaluation of the evidence paints a more sober account of the psychological outcomes of parenthood. But I think her analysis is systematically biased downwards!
This is because she relies on life satisfaction data, which find fluctuating results around the zero mark (some positive, some negative) when evaluating the effects of becoming a parent. But we would expect life satisfaction reports to hover around zero in the long run, because of hedonic adaptation. That’s what those metrics do, people return to their baseline score. And we don’t even really know how much people returning to their baseline score is them genuinely returning to their previous level of satisfaction and how much it’s from them recalibrating their changed life satisfaction around their baseline.
That’s why I think things like sense of meaning (which looks less vulnerable to adaptation) and changes in fertility ideals (the ‘let’s do it again!’ test) are better indicators… and at any rate they are at least not systematically biased towards null results.
(Interestingly, if I was to steelman the case for taking reported life satisfaction scores seriously, I would point to the fact that continued unemployment, continued disability, divorce and death of a spouse all seem to, unlike other things, have a permanent effect on self-reported life satisfaction and happiness scores. But I don’t think they tell us too much, as some people become less and less happy after experiencing these things, so might have a downward trend that shows up as a static permanent effect because of recalibrating. I’m hitting the counter with a just-so story, I happily concede, but I’m just pointing out that this rebuttal shouldn’t lower your credence in my thesis that life satisfaction scores are affected by recalibration of the same level of happiness… and my personal view is that hedonic adaptation is a mix of genuine recovery from events and then recalibration doing the rest of the work.)
In the paper linked, those who became parents saw their mean ideal number of children increase by about a quarter of a child, driven by an increase in the proportion wanting at least 3 children.