I think there are a number of reasons that higher IQ individuals have less kids:
-they use birth control more effectively
-they chose to study/pursue a career first before having kids, thus, having a smaller number of fertile years
-they realistically thought about the cost of their child's education/travel/housing and decided to limit their family size because of it
-they chose not to have a large number of kids for environmental reasons
-there seems to be a strong correlation between giftedness and being an intense child. it's hard to have a lot of intense children around!
Nice list!
I might add that highest IQ parents are more perfectionistic, and vulnerable to trying 'birth-controling' styles of parenting - such as the family bed. ((wink))
I know that my natural gifted intensity kicked into overdrive with my DS, I wore him in a baby sling, nursed exclusively while working part time for 6 months - basically my perfectionism set me up to believe "There has to be a better way!" I was willing to try anything to blunt that very deep sence of lonliness I grew up with - even in the middle of a healthy loving family. When one is Intense, one doesn't need a tramatic upbringing to experience a lot of intense feelings.
And it's possible that my 'high-need' kid was successfully cue-ing me that he needed 'super-parenting' right from the begining (or that I created a monster with my liberal expectations - the world will never know)
Sometimes I dismiss my efforts as ignorant and misguided. Other times I get a sense of 'how things might have been much worse' if I hadn't gone 'over the top.'Either way, having a 2nd child just didn't seem in the cards for us.
It seems to me that a good number of very intelligent women would choose to not have children if they have a choice - it maybe an inborn desire for most women, but not all. Barbara Walters wrote in her book that Lauren Bacall said that a woman can have 2 out of following 3:
demanding job, good marriage, be a good enough mother.Grinity I could have written that, in particular the bold bits. I often wonder whether my first daughter drove my parenting style or whether I created a monster. My second DD made me think it was probably all my fault. My third has made me realise they come out how they are. I was quite affronted to have had a REALLY hard first baby, thought I had it all sorted after #2 and then find that #3 was the hardest yet. I love my girls to pieces but there is no way in hell DH and I would risk a fourth and we often wonder how crazy we must have been to think we could manage three. The answer to that might be that we probably could have managed a third that was like the second, and we had the delusion we had learned a thing or two about parenting and that would influence the outcome. And I guess to an extent it has, we are having a slightly less hard time with #3 as an individual than we did with #1 as an individual - but that is a nearly impossible task when combined with two other children already here and keeping life interesting.
Which dovetails nicely with the quote from Lauren Bacall. I was doing ok with 2 kids, but I just had a major melt down that I simply cannot adequately run my own business, parent three kids like we have and be married to to my DH. I love every one of my family members to pieces, and I love my job, I CANNOT do all three adequately. Not without some serious help.
I think the raise in general living standards, the democratisation of education, and the drop in childhood diseases probably also plays a role. Children who may have had the genetic traits for high IQ, but were malnorished or whatever are unlikely to have reached their potential. Plus the fact that for most people education was a rare privelege. If you were gifted but had never been even exposed to reading it would be unlikely that you would be identified.
I would certainly say that this describes at least one of my paternal grandparents, probably my grandfather who was a painter with "the gift of the gab", I would be surprised if he ever finished high school but he was a bright man. But following that trail - my dad was most certainly gifted, quite probably HG, one of his brothers probably is too, actually it would not surprise me to learn they were both PG or close to it. But his other was brother a mechanic, now a driver, his sisters are home makers. They all went to the same schools, had the same opportunities and same parenting. Well the gifted uncle chose to leave home for the seminary at 12 and never came home (he visited obviously and it was a choice, my gran did not want to let him go and all the other boys who went gave up but he did not, he had the inner calling and drive from early childhood). Interestingly I am my father's only child and his gifted brother is childless (priest!). My father's family are truly wonderful people, but I am certainly "different" from the rest of the family. Perhaps this unbalanced family tree is the result of more uneven IQ match between my grandparents? Where as my DH and I are very closely matched and I would place bets that all three of our children will fall within 10 points of each other, if they don't it would be 2E issues clouding things.
