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

Ahh! Great point. I'm going to start a new philosophical ramblings thread called "What is talent?" on this subject.

While it may be nice for the blogger to say just have more kids and don't sweat the small stuff, I have to say that for us having a third kid was a major decision with significant economic and life-style consequences. It is what pushed us over the edge re having one of us stay home. We knew daycare costs for three kids would be too absurd. The only way we could afford for both of us to be working would have been for me to go back to being an attorney in private practice -- something I didn't want to do. With my non-profit job, the numbers just didn't make sense. Pretty much every penny that I made would have gone to childcare.

So now, I am an over-educated (Ivy undergrad plus a law degree). I don't regret being home with my kids but it was not a no-brainer

I was staying out of this, but Dandy, I have to pick you up on this. If you expect (based on the experience of previous generations) many of your children to die before they reach adulthood, some of the rest to die in childbirth before you reach old age, and you live in a country where your only hope of being cared for in old age is to be looked after by your surviving healthy well-enough-off children, then having as many children as you can is a perfectly rational strategy; you or I would do the same. Not to mention that if reliable safe contraception and sex education isn't available to you, it may be difficult for you to act on a choice to have fewer anyway.

If you want to change the situation, you need to act to decrease infant, child and maternal mortality and provide contraception, not go round exhorting.

CM -- You left out the sentence immediately preceding those you quoted:

"Since I'm not a fan of gov't control over much of anything -- let alone population control -- I think we've got to have a little more faith in the individual."

I have faith in the individual, don't you?

And, yes, I understand the rationale behind large families where the harsh reality of their existence essentially dictates that strategy -- but that doesn't make it the *best* strategy (certainly not in the eyes of those most concerned about over-population). But I sure as Hades don't think it's my responsibility to reduce my family size while *they* figure out how to reduce theirs.

Maybe if we did get busy -- literally and figuratively -- and produced more smart people, we'd have more smart people available to work out solutions to the population issue. Or to better educate folks on family planning. Or whatever.

Consider this: How many times have we been told that we are gonna run out of food in X number years due to over-population? And then danged if some smarty pants don't come along and figure out ways to increase production, etc., to resolve the supply issue.

The phrase electronic babysitter does not suggest a moderate amount of TV. In fact, in this piece, he celebrates his baby learning to watch television as a "valuable life skill." http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/why_tv_is_great.html
He's encouraging parents to plop their babies in front of the TV because it makes it "easier for you to treat your kids well." This ignores the well documented detrimental effects television has on infants and toddlers which led the American Academy of Pediatrics to say:
http://www.aap.org/sections/media/toddlerstv.htm

My thoughts exactly. I've never bought into the idea that we should limit family size due to the resources on the planet. Instead we should be working to conserve those resources and find other solutions. Dealing with limited resources is just another problem for mankind to solve. I guess I'm rather idealistic but I do think that's possible. Plus I love watching Star Trek so I guess my head's up in the clouds sometimes.

Now, I don't necessarily think smart individuals HAVE to reproduce to save the planet or something. That's the choice of each family. Plus gifted children are not easy to raise (especially once you get into the 2E/lots of OE range). Many times you can't just send them to your local public school and have everything work out perfectly (granted, this happens sometimes but usually there needs to be at least some advocacy on the parent's part). Raising a gifted child can take up more financial resources (if you need to send them to private schools, try and keep up with their latest interests etc).

Add to this that many parents of gifted children are gifted adults and may choose more demanding professions because of it. Professions that many times are NOT understanding of parenthood, ones that provide little to no maternity/paternity leave, and may ask you to travel quite a bit. Some gifted parents might both want to work so having one parent stay home with the kids isn't realistic. Now, the government could change a number of practices to force employers to be more family friendly, and I'd definitely encourage that, but that still might not make it easy for gifted individuals to have large families. Additionally, many gifted, working moms chose to have children later in life due to their careers and that also tends to limit family size.

As for the job situation, people being unsatisfied with their jobs. There's no 1-1 correlation with the number of gifted adults and the number of people unhappy with their jobs. This could certainly be a problem where schools can be blamed. Schools that aren't teaching children to their level and allowing children to follow their passions so they end up in jobs that don't suit their abilities. It can also be that some parents are forcing their kids into jobs that earn money instead of ones that allow their child to best pursue their passions. Additionally, there are some people that simply enjoy being in jobs that are below their abilities because then they can follow their own interests in their spare time.

It's too simplistic to say "go out and have more kids" or "stop having kids to save the world". Instead it's wiser to fix the problems surrounding giftedness and also to fix the problems surrounding overpopulation. Even in China where they try to limit population there are families having more than one child out there or at least would like to, limiting the number of kids isn't the solution.

Caplan discusses the ideas of his book in today's Wall Street Journal:
Twin Lessons: Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them..
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/11/twin-lessons-have-more-kids-pay-less-attention-to-them/

He outlined his ideas at http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/fee.htm .

Yeesh, not another one of these flawed conclusions drawn from likely flawed research. The main conclusion one can draw from the study cited, if that article is accurate, is that increasing one's own vocabulary can have a negligible long-term effect on your child's vocabulary, not that switching to another "parenting style" will have negligible effects-- and certainly not that switching to different educational strategies will have negligible effects. These types of studies are often used to "support" a wide range of questionable assertions, such as that the environment has a negligible lasting effect no matter what, that training/education has only a negligible effect on IQ, that only people with a certain IQ should go to college , etc.

Intelligence certainly is highly heritable, and more intelligence is more better.

I agree with you that more intelligent people should have more children than they do now; there may actually be a tendency for the opposite to be true. I don't have any cites ready to hand, but again IIRC lower economic status -> more children, and lower education -> more children as well, likely a secondary phenomenon due to the link between economic status and education. This phenomenon makes sense to me, as it increases the likelihood a family / bloodline will survive, especially in very impoverished regions with abysmal health care, and may increase the financial stability of a family as well.

If there is anything to the notion that highly intelligent people are more likely to be successful and achieve higher education levels, then it may well be true that highly intelligent people have fewer children on average than less intelligent people. And I don't see how that's a good thing, though it is understandable: higher education can take so much time and money that one's personal life is given secondary status for a while, at least enough to impact child-rearing plans.

Laura Vanderkam of the Gifted Exchange blog has just reviewed the book:

http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/2011/07/selfish-reasons-to-have-more-kids.html
July 18, 2011
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids

I spent the last few days reading through economist Bryan Caplan's new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. The title is a bit of a stretch but the argument is a fascinating one when viewed through the lens of the whole parenting advice industrial-complex.

Caplan's main argument is that within the norms for First World, middle-class homes, nurture doesn't make a whole lot of difference to children's long-term outcomes. Parents can have an effect in the short run, but mounting evidence from identical vs. fraternal twin studies, and adoption studies, shows that over time, these effects become less and less pronounced. Parents have their biggest effect in the moment of conception. After that, there are very few effects that last. The only ones that really seem to are religious identification and political affiliation, but even there it's a shallow affinity. Devout Presbyterians who go to church twice a week might raise a child who identifies as Presbyterian, but he's not much more likely to attend services regularly than other people. The biggest effect may just be whether the child remembers the home as being happy or not.

As for what this means for one's fertility, Caplan suggests that people overestimate how much effort modern parenting requires. If you are a normal, productive adult, odds are your children will be too, and if you raise them within American middle-class norms, any odd outliers are probably not to your credit or blame. The flash cards don't matter. The activities don't matter. The focus on strict TV limits doesn't matter. Discipline matters more for making your life more pleasant in the moment than for anything it will do down the road. So he suggests that people relax and try to enjoy their time with their children, possibly more children than they were otherwise planning to have. After all, bigger families are good for nurturing social ties -- one of the key components of human happiness -- and if items are cheaper than you thought, economists will tell you to stock up.

...

Interesting. So I wonder what the author recommends to people who are not in First-World, middle-class homes?

Personally, I do feel that nature made my kiddo the way he is a bit more than nurture, but both played a role.