Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids explains how parents accidentally allowed modernity to suck all the pleasure out of family life, and why they should feel no guilt over choosing a low-stress way of parenting instead.

Parents largely assume that their day to day choices add up to create a huge, long-term impact on their children. This invites parents to do things like worry about all of these choices, read a ton of parenting advice, consult parenting experts, and more.

However, many reliable “twin studies” put these myths to rest. When researchers study twins who have been raised separately, they find that the twins come to resemble their genetic parents much more closely than the adoptive parents who raised them.

Not just “resemble” as in appearance—children turn out much like their genetic parents, despite adoptive upbringing, in terms of educational outcomes, political beliefs, health risks, and more.

What’s the significance of these twin findings? Basically, once you’ve conceived your children, you’ve already cast the genetic dice. If those kids turn out like you, it’s probably more due to their genetic similarity than due to what you said or did as a parent.

There’s some wiggle room for impacting children’s values and behaviors through parenting, but probably mostly in the short term. In the long run, they’re likely to revert to their genetic baseline. So you should choose a genetic co-parent whose qualities you like, and then try not to sweat the small stuff.

If you’ve fallen into the trap of watching or reading too much conventional news, you’ve probably developed the belief that modern life is dangerous for kids. They seem to face all sorts of health hazards, like from toxic plastics and processed food. Plus it seems like dangerous strangers lurk everywhere, from public playgrounds to right inside your home via the computers and smartphones even young children use.

Happily, this overall picture of safety doom and gloom just isn’t accurate.

Although there’s always room for improvement, children have never had it better in the history of humankind. Vaccinations have virtually eradicated many of the infectious diseases of childhood, and diseases like childhood cancers have become more and more treatable.

Last but not least, “stranger danger” was always overblown—kidnappings and murders get lots of attention because they’re rare, not because they’re common. In short, if you have a child today, he or she is very likely to go on to lead a good life, especially in a developed country.

Social scientists have had a hard time figuring out whether children make parents happier or less happy with their lives. The data isn’t really clear, and there are also lots of confounding variables. Over 90% of parents report not regretting…