Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
I've never created a reading list, so this was a fun exercise. Programming: * Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ - Gunther * The Mythical Man Month - Brooks Philosophy: * A Journey Around my Room - de Maistre * Anger, Mercy, and Revenge - Seneca * Schrödinger - What is Life? * Man's Search for Meaning - Frankl * Essays - Montaigne * Ethical Intuitionism - Huemer * The Consolations of Philosophy - de Botton * A Manual for Living - Epictetus * Meditations - Aurelius Psychology / Meaning / Purpose / Science: * Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace - Dik, Byrne &…
What has helped me was a combination of trying to really simplify life, and accepting and embracing that things will be hard, and that this will require a lot of energy and strength. I see my pre-parent self as really weak, and am genuinely grateful for how hard this has been, because it has helped forge me into someone with real strength, that I didn't have before and never would have had. I'm not going to lie, I was a mess the first few years as a parent and was massively stressed, couldn't sleep, and couldn't figure out how to find time just to do basic care for my body not alone enjoy…
It's also possible that the woman you know is, for predominantly genetic or personality reasons, highly sexed and sociosexually unrestricted, and her parents' efforts at best delayed some matters. There's a line of thinking, articulated in Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and elsewhere, that a large component of personality is innate and parents spend way too much time trying to micro-shape their kids. There is an interesting writer and tweeter named Aella: https://knowingless.com/ who has described at length how she was born into a fundamentalist Christian family, found…
I certainly didn't mean it as a "thinly veiled attack on minorities," and it does seem more likely linked to the economic history of various communities. Children of college graduates are more likely to go to college themselves; parents with PhDs are more likely to have children who receive them as well. That could be due to genetics or shared environment or other factors, and there's a whole realm of twin and adoption studies on how much life outcomes are due to shared environment versus inheritance. Bryan Caplan has a good summary of this in the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (p.…
> Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids Not aware of any grand genetic behavioral traits to things like theft, murder, violence, rape discussed in this book. Nor does it particularly concern itself with the effect of socioeconomic status or the environment(low-income, illiterate parents, lack of books/newspapers in the home etc, stigma of members of certain minorities etc). It really only concerns itself with parenting style ('tiger mom' vs 'sure you can watch TV and eat pizza') and even here he suggests that there are indeed effects of parenting on intelligence up to a certain age. And within…
I'd really like to see a study specific to female happiness with children All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood discusses this (https://www.amazon.com/All-Joy-No-Fun-Parenthood/dp/00620722...), among many other interesting topics. I'd also observe that there are probably time-sensitive issues; much of the day-to-day stuff with small children is dreary, but the long-term prospects are quite good. I've heard lots of older people say that having adult children is great, because they're self-sustaining and yet emotionally close / connected. Many long-term projects (probably…
> Good school, healthcare and do actually matter, you know. If you’re familiar with the behavior genetics literature, not really. Judith Rich Harris covers it in No Two Alike and Bryan Caplan does the same in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Who one’s biological parents are matters enormously and after that as long as children aren’t abused they basically turn out like they’re going to turn out. Children who are adopted turn out about as similar to their adoptive siblings as to strangers and as similar to biological siblings as normal whether raised together or apart. > So that the child…
I recommend a book called "Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids" by Bryan Caplan. It's a short read, and very interesting. The basic argument is that we've turned modern parenting into a stressful chore, much as you describe. But by looking at separated twin studies, he argues that what we do as parents has much less impact on how our kids turn out than we would probably like to believe. Essentially, if your parenting is within decent normal parameters (i.e. there isn't an abusive situation or anything like that) your kids will probably turn out ok, and if they don't, it will probably not be…
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is worth a read for anyone who is taking parenting too seriously. Developmental psychologists have brainwashed the public into thinking children can be ruined by insufficiency dedicated parenting. But for generations developmental psychologists were Lysenkoist hacks who didn’t realize their studies were confounded by basically all mental traits being extremely heritable. The most important influence parents have on their children is at conception. If you want a smart kid, choosing a very smart mate is far more effective than any amount of…
> as long as you meet a pretty low bar for decent parenting ... the impact of your parenting on your kids' lives is minimal at best That's assuming an upbringing in regular society, though, yes? I'm curious whether there'd be much larger effect-sizes on these interventions for children who are brought up in isolation, knowing only their families (e.g. this girl: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/invisible-girl/). If that's true—if there is a larger effect-size—then it suggests that "the real problem" isn't so much that nothing works, as that your society has a much larger effect in shaping…