Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Case for Having More Kids (NYT)

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/the-case-for-having-more-kids/
April 7, 2011, 9:00 am
The Case for Having More Kids
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason, is the author of �Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids,� which will be released this week. Mr. Caplan doesn�t believe everyone should have a lot of children. But he does say many parents and future parents should consider having more children than they are currently planning.

...

Mr. Caplan: The central idea of twin and adoption research is that disentangling nature from nurture is hard. Our intuition isn�t very helpful. Yes, kids of college-educated parents know more words. But why? Maybe their upbringing is the reason, as you suggest. But babies from college-educated families might excel even if raised by high school dropouts, by learning a higher fraction of the words they hear, or spending more time reading.

So what does the twin and adoption data say? Language fits a standard pattern. Consistent with your skepticism, upbringing has a noticeable effect on the vocabulary of young children. But as children mature, this effect largely fades away. The Colorado Adoption Project found, for example, that 2-year-olds adopted by high-vocabulary parents had noticeably larger vocabularies. But as the kids grew up, their vocabulary scores looked more and more like their biological parents�. By age 12, the effect of enriched upbringing on vocabulary was barely visible.

Admittedly, there�s a sense in which upbringing is all-important: If a baby is raised by wolves, he won�t know any words. (There�s also a sense in which genes are all-important: If you had wolf DNA, you wouldn�t know any words either.) But twin and adoption research focuses on questions that are much more relevant for parents: how your child will turn out if you switch to another parenting style.

<rest of article at link>

Since, as Caplan explains, intelligence is highly heritable, it is especially important for smart people to have lots of children.

Forgive me if I decline to take anything seriously by someone who says that raising kids can and should be easy and that you should make it easier on yourself by Ferberising them and using timeouts! Sheesh.

Am I the only one here who doesn't think that highly intelligent people are more important than anyone else?

I certainly am not convinced that increasing the number of highly intelligent people at the cost of also increasing the number of people who think it's fine to prioritise an adult's wishes over the needs of a tiny baby is an improvement! (Do I think that *other things being equal* being more intelligent is a good thing, though? Yes.)

While I don't agree with the point of view of the writer (or the OP's statement about smart people having more kids for that matter), I do appreciate the opportunity to read articles I probably wouldn't otherwise have sought out on my own. I find it valuable to have the time to process what's in the article and settle on my own position and arguments for/against it. As a result, I am sometimes better-equipped to argue in real life when a similar topic comes up.

So, for my two cents worth, I say post away, Bostonian. Just don't mind us if we disagree with you.

One might think it would be the smart people who realize that putting more time and resources into a smaller number of children would guarantee better reproductive 'success'.

My knowledge about Mr. Caplan's ideas is limited to what I read in the linked article and a few other things he's written in his blog. Even so, from what I read, there seem to be a lot of misinterpretations in this thread. I'm not used to seeing this kind of thing here. For example, I didn't read anything in the linked article stating or implying that "smart people are more important than anyone else."


I didn't get the impression that he believes that raising kids should be easy. What I inferred was that there are healthy ways to make things go better for parents and kids:



This advice sounds perfectly reasonable to me. A break is a basic need.


You can berate me all you want for agreeing with him here, but I think he's spot-on. BTW, "fun" and "easy" are not the same things.

As for the concept of smart people should have more kids, which seems to have originated here and not in that article, I can't see what's wrong with this idea. What's so bad about having more smart people on the planet?

Val

I definitely agree with the included snippet in the article. My observations tell me that nurture can produce advanced skills early in life in almost any child, but nature limits just how advanced these skills will be in later life.

Growing up as the oldest in a large family is definitely fun and interesting, sometimes a little more interesting than you want it to be.

My values and feelings definitely don't like the idea of trying to purposely build a smarter population. However, I also have a practical view on this and am hoping we are heading towards being a smarter population.

Interestingly enough, the average brain volume in humans peaked 10,000 years ago and has been on a steady decline ever since. As John Hawks has said in this video, on his good days he likes to think the brain is becoming more efficient.



I personally feel our improved abilities to educate the next generation has removed the need for certain valuable abilities provided by the once larger average brain. At least on my bad days, but I go with John Hawks on my good days.

I wasn't advocating creating some kind of eugenics program aimed at raising IQs. I was only saying "What's so bad about smart people having more kids and increasing the number of smart people out there?"

That is what I wonder, as well. Most of the small-family parents that we know chose to do things that way because they calculated the costs of college, private school tuition, etc. etc. and found that it just didn't make sense to spread those resources more thinly among more siblings.

Of course, then there are those of us that consider ourselves fortunate to have had even the one child.

In general, I'm not sure that contributing to a rise in global population is necessarily a good thing no matter how intelligent those children might be. Maybe that's just me.