The thing is, there's no real obligation for the right thing to be achievable. That's how I felt in the worst of the parenting trenches when people would say I was doing fine when it was apparent that I was not. Just because it's impossible to do better doesn't mean I am doing enough!
Now I do think that slightly better parenting is better than bad parenting. There's parenting that increases crime rates, and then parenting that makes your kids turn out okay but resent you, all the way up to parenting that will make your kids go "I want to do things exactly how my parents did." (Not sure I've ever seen anybody say that.)
Then we get to the question of which corners it's okay to cut. Me, I think extracurriculars are kinda optional and I don't very much care about my kids' grades, but I am always there for them when they're upset. Is that the right approach or should I focus more on achievement and less on emotional health? For these kids who are very smart but not great on emotional regulation, this is probably the right course, but for different kids it might not be.
Then there's the question of, which advice, if given, will result in actual better parenting in the recipients? Which is why I think "don't hit" is good advice. Even if not precisely followed, it'll probably result in LESS hitting. Whereas "never use formula, breastfeed only" may result in babies not getting enough to eat, so it's not such good advice unless carefully tempered.
Anyway these are just some thoughts; I'm not sure I have a takeaway. Just that your post doesn't really take the pressure off. I still want to be the parent my kids need, whether or not that is possible to achieve.
This super aligns with my hypothesis about why many culturally middle class and above people, especially potential mothers, are reluctant to have children (on top of availability of attractive alternatives).
I do think widespread dissemination of "shared environment isn't really all that important" data could, maybe, help? And genuinely increasing social status of reproduction and having more childre. (I come from a culture where a "multi child family" is a social concept, and is associated with not just poverty but low status, stupidity and backwardness, and while it might have changed now, this used to be so strong that I did a double take every time I encountered someone normal/intelligent who has more than two siblings -- I can't help but think it's one of the reasons it now has a fertility rate of 1.26).
But I have another comment here, less side-bar like. Many of these ott standards are not straightforward moral standards but hinge on factual beliefs on what is (1) important (2) better. And most of them have zero to negative reliable, credible evidence. Maybe they could be knocked down via that route....
Caplan is also really keen on this idea and it's so funny to me. My genes (mental and physical illness history etc) SUCK. And now you're telling me very little I can do as a parent will matter, they'll turn out the same anyway? And this is supposed to be uplifting? Do all rationalists just have super genes??
I'm not a rationalist so idk about them. My genes seem ok-ish, genes my offspring received more mixed (much crazy but also much talent on the XY side). I find it uplifting because it removes some of the weight of responsibility and terror associated with it.
Also, peer environment matters and culture matters, so not just genes. It's just that WE as parents matter relatively much less than we've been led to believe.
Oh and I could do much Good Stuff with my children *because it made our life and their time when they were kids more enjoyable*!
Like, I think the best argument for not beating children is NOT that they'll be damaged adults if you do, but that it hurts and potentially harms them in the moment??
As a caveat I likely have (undiagnosed) quite an ADHD streak (which is obviously genetic and I'm not sure if it counts as a bonus or burden) so future has little visceral reality for me, and the idea of a child as a project I actively create rather than just kinda watch emerge in real time feels alien --- which likely influences my feelings on all this.
I obviously can't evaluate the factual basis of your claim that your genes suck, but my prior is that much of the suffering that leads you to feel this way originates in a mismatch between the environment in which your genes were selected and the current environment. That mismatch is not mandated by necessity. We currently already have the power to shape our environment to accommodate our genes, and in the future would have the ability to edit out any genes that are truly harmful. At any rate, casting categorical judgment at this point is premature, and you deserve better.
Cannot really think of any environment where epilepsy, OCD (horrifying intrusive thoughts that impairs functioning, not the stereotype) and (family history of) early onset Alzheimers is adaptive.
I'm not saying that every aspect of every mental operation was adaptive. Clearly, evolution works under severe design handicaps and would generally solve problems by selecting whatever mutations generated better overall outcomes, even when they came with severe costs. Still, it's very hard to eliminate environmental factors from consideration, as many of these problems may take the form of chemical and social sensitivities that would not flare without the presence of a necessary modern environmental causal factor.
I dunno, in what environments is apathetic depression adaptive? That stuff is just... useless lump disorder, and I say that as someone whose useless lump disorder is mmmostly medicated.
One such environment where depression is probably life-saving is when you are proximal to a dominant and violent male. Depression can be a way of committing to the dominant male that you will not rise against its rule.
Regarding the distribution of number of children, I think it's an interesting concept.
I once saw some official survey and wish I could find it again. As best I can remember, the results showed that: most adults with 0 kids were happy with that number, but the remainder often wanted 1-2 kids; parents with 1 kid were evenly split among wishing they had 0, 1, or 2 kids; most parents with 2 kids wished they had 3; most parents with 3 kids wished they had 4; most parents with 4 kids wished they had 5; most parents with 5 kids were satisfied with that number; and most parents with 6 kids wished they had 5.
It would be facile to conclude that most people should have 0 or 5 kids. More people currently have 2 kids than 4-6 kids, so more people want 3 kids than 5 kids. But still, it seems to paint a narrative where once you have a kid, if you find out that you like doing that, you typically want to keep going. I imagine most people usually stop before they're satisfied for age-related reasons, followed by health and financial reasons.
This supports the idea that we could actually make it work for a third of the population to have 0 kids and two thirds of the population to have a bell curve of kids averaging 3 kids (which would probably mean aiming for 4 kids on average, since most people get 1 fewer kid than they want).
So how can we create a society that normalizes *both* the childfree lifestyle *and* aiming for 4 kids? Our society doesn't do a great job of glamorizing mutually exclusive lifestyles where you can't have it all, TBH. But it would be good to celebrate being childfree as a responsible choice for those who would be bad or unwilling parents, and as a consolation prize for the increasing numbers of those who can't find a good partner to have kids with (the #1 reason people in the US don't have kids despite wanting to). And it would be good to celebrate having several children, including the lifestyles that have the most synergy with that: marriage, stay-at-home parenting, public schooling, etc. (The cost of schooling is the #1 reason people in China don't have a second kid).
I think diversity is the way to go here. As much as part of me thinks parenting is awesome and everyone should have the chance to do it, the reality is that lots of people know it's truly not for them, and lots of other people have insurmountable obstacles to achieving it. Better to use comparative advantage here than to try to get everyone to have 2 kids.
I keep having follow-up thoughts about how specializing like this would widen divisions among society, especially within women but also within men. Class division sucks, possibly even more than demographic collapse.
It brings me back to my thought about how our society doesn't do a great job of glamorizing mutually exclusive lifestyles where you can't have it all. For all our talk of diversity, do we know how to support diversity? Probably America actually does a better job than most places. But still not great.
I also recall a survey of European women, middle aged and up. Only like 5% never wanted kids and never got them. Most childless were so unwillingly, and a lot of declining fertility seemed to be because so many people wanted more than one (especially) or two.
Seems pretty doable to have a society where 5% of women don't have kids. We've had societies with a decent amount of nuns before.
My parents generally did what by most standards is a Pretty Good Job, and I'm aware of how lucky that makes me. Maybe too aware; I'm still working on getting my head around the idea that acknowledging that there were things they did less than perfectly is a valid thing to do, and doesn't make me somehow ungrateful just because other people's parental relationship was more obviously fraught. Like... basically everything else, there's going to be tradeoffs and a balancing of priorities: sometimes parents can and will make sacrifices to do better by their kids, sometimes they can't or won't, and everyone's going to draw those lines in different places because everyone's situations are different. Probably nobody gets a perfect unproblematic relationship with their parents; people are people, and I appreciate the call to treat people with grace.
Another thing I greatly appreciate here is the gesture towards the social safety net that the "Society should make sure you can do this no matter how much of a dumbass you are" bullet point represents. I'm generally of the position that any time someone wants to impose a moral obligation, they should in the same breath be thinking about how that obligation could be made easier to fulfill. I do find myself wondering how many of the items on the superogatory standards list could also be brought into the domain of achievability for most people by making them easier and more supported on a societal level. Definitely not all, but probably some.
I would add things like "You should strive to treat your children with kindness, even when they are annoying or upset, avoid treating them as if they are fundamentally broken in some way if they struggle with some aspect of life, and allow them to have friends and a basic degree of independence." I think these are also reasonable things that average people can do, and I think this kind of standard doesn't belong in the same category as "never be angry" or "you must go to all the travel sports" or "your children's every desire and emotion must always be your first priority."
Oh, and "you should not allow your child to do nothing but play video games; you should not allow your child to eat nothing but junk food and become obese."
1 in 5 implies that this standard is achievable by most parents and is a reasonable thing to expect of average people. And yes, I am fine with fewer babies being born insofar as this is not the case, because I consider childhood obesity that is not the result of some medical condition to be a form of medical neglect. Your standards included the provision of basic medical care; I understand "basic medical care" to include, for example, the ability to promptly arrange a doctor's visit for an infected cut or broken bone, which likely excludes the 37% of Americans who cannot afford an unexpected expense over $400.
Any standards at all will result in fewer babies being born if people actually hold themselves to those standards, but I do not think that having more than zero moral standards for parents makes you an anti-natalist. I agree that standards like "each child should have their own bedroom/constant parental attention/money set aside for college tuition/etc" are higher than they should be, but this is because I do not think these things are necessary for a child to live a decent life, whereas I do think that about maintaining a basic level of health and fitness. I would argue that the standard should be based on what is necessary to give a child a decent (not extravagant or pampered) life and not severely handicap them in some way from day one, rather than on what the bottom 20% of parents can achieve.
I would also argue that most people who are scrupulous enough to not have children because of these types of standards are in a position to provide said decent life for children already, and so the primary effect of basic or medium standards for providing for children being socially expected is to pressure parents who otherwise might not meet those requirements to come closer to meeting them for the children they already have (as opposed to very high standards being popularly enforced, which is much more likely to meaningfully change the decisions of people who could have been competent parents.)
The current United States TFR is 1.66, well below replacement. If you would prefer that it instead be 1.3 (in line with Canada and Poland), that's a valid opinion, especially if you're honest about the future demographic crises.
Only about 5% of American children are uninsured, and Medicaid and CHIP typically cover everything I would consider basic medical care. I think that we should improve access to Medicaid and CHIP: many uninsured children actually qualify for these programs and their parents don't know or have trouble with the paperwork; I do think the programs should have a higher minimum. But these are problems that are fixable with government policy! If you have a government policy that would fix childhood obesity, you should really let people know.
Fair enough on the healthcare. But I do not have a government policy; I just believe this is a basic responsibility of parents and failing to fulfill it is neglectful. Also, the rate of children who have experienced corporal punishment between the ages of 0 and 9 in America appears to be 49%, based on a quick Google search- so are you saying that you want the TFR to be approximately 0.84? That would certainly have severe consequences.
I guess that you are not saying this, and that you do not think children who were spanked should not have been born. Instead I guess that you are saying that if you do have children, you should not hit them. And I am saying that if you do have children, you should not allow them to become obese.
1 in 5 is lower than the adult obesity rates (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data-and-statistics/adult-obesity-prevalence-maps.html). And we know that it's very hard for adults to lose significant amounts of weight in the long term, even if they try. If 1 in 5 children are obese, it seems to me that that's less likely to be because of medical neglect than because the children share whatever factors made their parents obese.
Weight is a factor of calories in, calories out; children don't have the impulse control to restrict their diets, so if adults fail to do so for them, given the health consequences I think of this as a failure akin to allowing your child to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes. The parents' choices made both the parents and the children obese. (And what was the obesity rate when food was not so abundant?)
Calories in, calories out isn't just about impulse control. Calories in is affected by the availability and affordability of healthy food. Calories out is affected by metabolism and by the amount of exercise a person gets. (And exercise isn't just about willpower, either. A manual laborer and a person who enjoys exercise will both exercise more regardless of how much willpower they have.) Both are affected by a person's hypothalamic set point, and by the culture in which a person lives.
When food wasn't so abundant, the obesity rate was lower but the malnourishment rate was much higher. I wouldn't blame a poor person 200 years ago for having underweight kids any more than I'd blame a poor person today for having fat ones.
My mother used to say "if your children survive to 18, you get a D grade. That's passing. Didn't get themselves/others pregnant as teenagers? That's a C. No drug addictions? B. Graduated high school? You are an A parent."
To be clear - she was a stellar parent, A++++ on her own scale. Ignoring arguments about natalism, if you don't grade society on a curve you'll spend a lot of time hating everyone, including yourself. The curve can change over time and let's aim for that, but don't lose sight of reality.
I am personally ok with the population shrinking over a generation or two, then plateauing.
If "bad parents" (regardless of how you define it, or what proportion of people meet this threshold) stop having kids, and if "good parents" (regardless of how you define it, or what proportion of people meet this threshold) continue to have ~2 kids per couple for each generation into the future, then there will be a population contraction followed by a plateau. The magnitude of this contraction depends on parenting standards (and the resulting ratio of "bad" versus "good" parents), but the overall shape stays the same: decrease, then leveling off.
That... doesn't actually sound all that bad? The next generation will be smaller, but happier and more well-adjusted.
My only concern would be if the drop-off is too steep. Or if "acceptable" parenting standards continue to escalate for generation after generation, causing further contractions instead of plateauing. I do think today's standards of "acceptable" parenting are too high, and we should help would-be "good parents" have more kids. But I don't think a smaller-but-happier population is a problem in and of itself.
No matter who raises it, the next generation will be a mix of good and bad parents; you can't assume that the children of good parents will be good parents themselves.
> you can't assume that the children of good parents will be good parents themselves.
It's not a perfect guarantee, but the odds are much better.
There will always be "bad parents" in every generation, but the proportion would shrink over time. Perhaps the "good parents" would need to have ~2.2 or 2.3 kids per couple to maintain a plateau instead of ~2, but that's much more realistic than the numbers that the post assumes would be needed indefinitely.
Only letting good parents have kids would probably reduce the number of emotionally immature parents in the next generation, but I'm not sure it necessarily does anything to the rate of parents who are poor, disabled, immigrants, etc.
How much do you think we can shrink each generation before the resulting demographic problems (in particular, economically unproductive old people outnumbering economically productive young people) are bad enough to make it not worth it?
I think more of the people of this school of thought are realizing they're being "anti-natalist" than you give them credit for.
Many people think population decline would be good. People who would not be the best parents not having children would be good, as they would not pass that behavior/illness/whatever, on.
I don't think there's anything people haven't realised or any/much hypocrisy going on here.
There definitely are some pro-natalist writers out there who want more births for the sake of more births, regardless of the amount of "bad parenting" that would result. Mostly evangelicals like Lyman Stone who want to a) raise the birth rate at all costs, and b) ban abortion for religious reasons (but also to raise the birthrate).
If someone is committed to both preventing "bad parents" from having kids, and also helping "good parents" have 4+ to keep the population constant, then that wouldn't make them a hypocrite. Ozy was just pointing out how difficult that would be in practice.
I'm personally more concerned with future generations flourishing than I am about maintaining our current headcount.
If "bad parents" have zero kids, and "good parents" have ~2 kids per couple, then the next generation would only be made up of those children of "good parents"*, who will themselves probably be "good parents", who will in turn have ~2 kids per couple. This would be a one-time population decline followed by a plateau, not a continuous decline. (Assuming "good parent" standards remain relatively constant into the future. That's a big if.)
If a one-time decline will lead to happier, more well-adjusted future generations, then so be it. (But if the "good parents" have tons of kids, enough to keep the population constant after all, then that would be great, too!)
*(Edit: obviously there will be some "bad parents" born to "good parents", but the ratios will be much lower compared to if the "bad parents" had kids. I will admit that the "~" in "~2" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The TFR to maintain a plateau would be closer to ~2-3 than the TFR of 4+ that the post is claiming would be needed indefinitely.)
I think it's perfectly healthy to prefer a future where the population does not exceed available resources. But when that mutates into preferring a decline in human population, ultimately, this involves withholding existence from human beings who are currently voiceless. In my mind, it's a situation where moral imagination has failed.
Re: "withholding existence from human beings who are currently voiceless" -- are we supposed to morally care about people who don't and will never exist?? This seems like it's from the school of positive utilitarianism, and afaict antinatalists are *much* more sympathetic to negative utilitarianism
To the degree any person's existence is the outcome of your actions, they have their life in your hands. How can any predictable result of your actions escape moral responsibility?
Because there exists no person to be harmed if you don't have a child?
After a child is born, in my moral view it matters a *lot* whether their life is good or bad, because they are a moral patient.
But all the quadrillions (minimum) of humans that could have theoretically existed if something were very slightly different than it actually is -- I don't care about "hypothetical" people literally at all, so whether they would have lived an excellent life or a terrible one is pretty much entirely irrelevant.
I feel approximately the same level of moral concern for a child you never choose to have as I do for a rock. Even if it were absolutely guaranteed that the child, if you choose to have them, would be the happiest person to ever exist, if they have not actually started to exist yet they are still worth zero in all my moral calculations (and if you choose not to have them I don't care).
If this position was logically coherent, you could inflict irreparable harm on future humans, say by genetic engineering, and if it can't be undone then you would never have to take responsibility for it, because at the time they did not exist yet, and later when they do exist you can no longer do anything about it.
No. At that point you have intentionally created suffering, and since I lean way more negative utilitarian, that's extraordinarily bad from my perspective.
You get no points for having a child with a great life *compared to* the alternative of not having them at all; i.e. intentionally giving birth cannot make you a better person (at least for the specific reason of having brought someone into existence).
You do, however, lose a LOT of points for intentionally having a child with a terrible life compared to the alternative of not having them at all; i.e. intentionally giving birth if you have good reason to believe that the resulting child would prefer to have never been born is a morally heinous act
To quote Jan Naverson:
"If we cause a miserable child to come into existence, there will exist a child who will have a justified complaint, while if we refrain from causing a happy child to come into existence, this child will not exist and so can have no complaint."
Future kids are not human beings who are currently voiceless. They are, at best, statistical likelihoods about their future parents' genetics and behavior.
When the existence of someone is decided, they are a choice variable, not a statistical likelihood. The language of probability can describe what you do not control, but it is inappropriate when you hold all the power.
This feels like an obvious no to me. I'm pretty convinced of 1) a person's consciousness stops existing when they die, and 2) generally what it means to wrong someone is to make their existence worse.
I'm not getting the feeling that you're genuinely trying to have a conversation in good faith here.
But if this is a genuine question, I would still consider someone to have a continuous consciousness if they were colloquially "unconscious" as in asleep or under anaesthesia. When someone is asleep, many of the continuous physical processes that allow for thought/awareness/etc. are ongoing and the ones that are disrupted are only disrupted temporarily. This is a common use of the word "consciousness" in philosophy/ethics.
I think a very important bare-minimum standard not mentioned here is "you shouldn't prevent your kids from leaving you or your social sphere for any reason short of it being illegal for you to let them leave". Exit rights make up for a whole lot of other wrongs, while being relatively undemanding on the people being potentially exited-from. And I think I *am* willing to bite the bullet that anyone unwilling to have kids except conditional on those kids remaining closely-connected to them forever should just not have kids and drive overall birth-rates down thereby. (...a lot more than I'd be willing to bite the proposed bullet that people shouldn't have kids unless willing to never use heroin in front of them, really!)
I disagree pretty strongly with this being a "bare minimum standard". I'd agree with a much weaker version, something like "once your kids are adults, you need to be willing to negotiate an acceptable compromise with them regarding your behavior and level of presence in their lives, even if it's much lower than you prefer."
I think there's a lot of potential harm in setting the bar for acceptable reasons for children to walk away from their parents entirely low, and not nearly as much (some, certainly, but not as much) in setting it high.
It was recently pointed out to me that what it means to "walk away from your parents" is a very different thing than it was, say, a hundred years ago. You used to be able to move to a new continent and, like, *maybe* send letters back and forth - very few people were crossing oceans to come home for Christmas.
IMO setting standards for contact that are much higher than that is basically unreasonable. Like, "you should probably keep your parents on the holiday card list unless they did something egregious" feels fine as a moral standard, but I don't think someone should get to demand much more of their adult child's time and attention.
I also have an anec data point: the only true explicit anti natalist I have ever encountered irl (antinatalist on consent grounds) was also the person with the most elevated AND MORALISED parenting standards I've ever seen (less on the material/practical/normie side and more on the emotionalist attachment side but still).
So it's possible that there's not just unwitting correlation but genuine causality here....
A lot of anti-natalists I know are pretty explicit about this. If you consider childhood a moral horror, it is completely rational to advocate against creating new kids.
Yep, this post reads to me a lot like a discussion of moral standards for slaveowners or torturers. And yeah sure, if we're in an ancient society where everyone would starve without slave labour, or an edgy thought experiment where the torture dungeon powers the universe, then that's a useful discussion to have, but can I say "missing mood"?
Moral horror the sense of "it's literally impossible to be an even vaguely acceptable parent"? Or in the sense "being born is such a huge violation than NOTHING makes up for it but you should try for perfection"?
I've seen both, but the one I see more often is "impossible to be an acceptable parent". One common argument goes something like 1) respecting a person's autonomy is the most important thing, 2) it's impossible to raise a child without large violations to their autonomy, therefore 3) raising a child is either incredibly ethically fraught or entirely unethical.
Obviously the premises of the argument are pretty contentious (I don't fully agree with them myself), but I think the conclusion is rational given the premises.
Yes I agree these conclusions are entirely valid (while also believing that they're not at all sound -- but that brings up a very interesting and somewhat disturbing question of "to what extent children are non-people")
I think this post hears people saying "parents should [...]" as (necessarily) setting a minimum standard, a condition which if you cannot fulfill you should not have children. I don't think this is a natural interpretation: I hear all your "parents should" sentences as saying "I think it's morally better for parents to do this thing", and even in the cases where they're saying "this is extremely morally important", they're still not obviously (to me) saying "without this condition, it is better not to have children at all".
Of course, even if you don't *intend* your standards to push people not to have children, you might reasonably anticipate that they might do so. But if this isn't what you intended, I don't think it's accurate to call you an antinatalist (and, for example, I don't think it would be particularly surprising to meet someone who had a lot of high standards for parenthood and also supported a bunch of policy proposals with the goal of increasing fertility rates).
Even to the extent that this *is* about minimum standards of parenthood, I think it's weird to interpret minimum standards as only having effect via changing whether people have children or not. Let's say I meet someone who dispositionally yells at kids and is considering having a kid, and I say to them "parents shouldn't yell at their kids". Isn't it more natural to interpret me as saying "you should change your yelling disposition, and then feel free to have a kid", rather than "you shouldn't have a kid"? Granted, *some* minimum parenthood conditions aren't changeable and those really are best understood as recommending to some people that they don't have children, but a lot of these don't feel like that at all.
It's been really weird for me to see "having their own bedrooms" talked about in the last few years as a bare minimum human right that all children are entitled to. I shared a room with my sister until I was thirteen and it honestly wasn't a big deal either way. I can see why it would be an issue if one child bullies or steals, but for most families I really don't think it matters whether the kids have their own rooms or not.
Agreed, this is ridiculous. I shared a room with my sister for most of my childhood as well, and think the small pros and small cons about canceled each other out as well, from our perspectives anyway.
I have very fond memories of sharing a room with my brother! Not...y'know, all the time, but very often. Communal living is natural, at least to the extent that "sharing a room with another human being" is definitely not abusive.
I do think having some space that is at least sometimes your own is important, but it's important enough that kids will just naturally negotiate it when required to share space.
When I was about 6 my parents bought a fixer-upper house and literally combined two rooms so that my sister and I would have to share. We all agree in retrospect that this was the *incorrect* decision (it probably lowered the property value of the house, among other things), but I wouldn't list it in their top 50 bad parenting decisions.
I do think it's probably good for kids to get some privacy when they want it and to make some accommodation for them to have their own personal belongings, but that doesn't require individual rooms.
I don't know if this includes spanking, but if it does - around 50% of Americans think it's morally acceptable, so this point would exclude a lot of people just on its own.
There's a more general pattern where people use moral standards to beat up on each other, and that leads to constant inflation in moral demands. The inflation of standards for parenting is just one example of how we make each other miserable while trying to do good in the world. The human condition is really tragic in this way, not because of how much suffering we must endure, but by how much avoidable suffering we inflict on each other.
I was right with you up until the bit about unconditionally loving and accepting your child. I don't think I would put that on the list for bare minimum acceptable parenting. I think it's ok to have some conditions. If your child becomes a serial killer, I think it is permissible to stop loving them. If your child gets Cs when they could get As, I think it is permissible not to accept that.
actually "this kid is getting Cs when they [to an external observer seem like they] could be getting As" is exactly the situation where kids really need to be accepted while parents often fuck this up. "accept the kid" != "accept this" - it's important for the kid not to believe that they as a person are unlovable/unacceptable if they fail to meet a high bar of achievement, having that belief causes all sorts of problems
I suppose it comes down to what we mean by "accept". Ozy used two separate words "love" and "accept", which I assumed must have two separate meanings, and this is the best second meaning I could think of. You seem to be treating them as synonyms, in which case Ozy could have just used one.
Matrescence, especially in the case of well-supported natural birth which releases peak oxytocin and breastfeeding which releases oxytocin and prolactin, rebuilds people for giving unconditional love. Then an infancy of receiving that unconditional love builds people for emotional resilience and healthy attachment. Greer Kirschenbaum has a recent book about the neuroscience of it, The Nurture Revolution.
The thing is, there's no real obligation for the right thing to be achievable. That's how I felt in the worst of the parenting trenches when people would say I was doing fine when it was apparent that I was not. Just because it's impossible to do better doesn't mean I am doing enough!
Now I do think that slightly better parenting is better than bad parenting. There's parenting that increases crime rates, and then parenting that makes your kids turn out okay but resent you, all the way up to parenting that will make your kids go "I want to do things exactly how my parents did." (Not sure I've ever seen anybody say that.)
Then we get to the question of which corners it's okay to cut. Me, I think extracurriculars are kinda optional and I don't very much care about my kids' grades, but I am always there for them when they're upset. Is that the right approach or should I focus more on achievement and less on emotional health? For these kids who are very smart but not great on emotional regulation, this is probably the right course, but for different kids it might not be.
Then there's the question of, which advice, if given, will result in actual better parenting in the recipients? Which is why I think "don't hit" is good advice. Even if not precisely followed, it'll probably result in LESS hitting. Whereas "never use formula, breastfeed only" may result in babies not getting enough to eat, so it's not such good advice unless carefully tempered.
Anyway these are just some thoughts; I'm not sure I have a takeaway. Just that your post doesn't really take the pressure off. I still want to be the parent my kids need, whether or not that is possible to achieve.
This super aligns with my hypothesis about why many culturally middle class and above people, especially potential mothers, are reluctant to have children (on top of availability of attractive alternatives).
I do think widespread dissemination of "shared environment isn't really all that important" data could, maybe, help? And genuinely increasing social status of reproduction and having more childre. (I come from a culture where a "multi child family" is a social concept, and is associated with not just poverty but low status, stupidity and backwardness, and while it might have changed now, this used to be so strong that I did a double take every time I encountered someone normal/intelligent who has more than two siblings -- I can't help but think it's one of the reasons it now has a fertility rate of 1.26).
But I have another comment here, less side-bar like. Many of these ott standards are not straightforward moral standards but hinge on factual beliefs on what is (1) important (2) better. And most of them have zero to negative reliable, credible evidence. Maybe they could be knocked down via that route....
Caplan is also really keen on this idea and it's so funny to me. My genes (mental and physical illness history etc) SUCK. And now you're telling me very little I can do as a parent will matter, they'll turn out the same anyway? And this is supposed to be uplifting? Do all rationalists just have super genes??
I'm not a rationalist so idk about them. My genes seem ok-ish, genes my offspring received more mixed (much crazy but also much talent on the XY side). I find it uplifting because it removes some of the weight of responsibility and terror associated with it.
Also, peer environment matters and culture matters, so not just genes. It's just that WE as parents matter relatively much less than we've been led to believe.
Oh and I could do much Good Stuff with my children *because it made our life and their time when they were kids more enjoyable*!
Like, I think the best argument for not beating children is NOT that they'll be damaged adults if you do, but that it hurts and potentially harms them in the moment??
As a caveat I likely have (undiagnosed) quite an ADHD streak (which is obviously genetic and I'm not sure if it counts as a bonus or burden) so future has little visceral reality for me, and the idea of a child as a project I actively create rather than just kinda watch emerge in real time feels alien --- which likely influences my feelings on all this.
I obviously can't evaluate the factual basis of your claim that your genes suck, but my prior is that much of the suffering that leads you to feel this way originates in a mismatch between the environment in which your genes were selected and the current environment. That mismatch is not mandated by necessity. We currently already have the power to shape our environment to accommodate our genes, and in the future would have the ability to edit out any genes that are truly harmful. At any rate, casting categorical judgment at this point is premature, and you deserve better.
Cannot really think of any environment where epilepsy, OCD (horrifying intrusive thoughts that impairs functioning, not the stereotype) and (family history of) early onset Alzheimers is adaptive.
I'm not saying that every aspect of every mental operation was adaptive. Clearly, evolution works under severe design handicaps and would generally solve problems by selecting whatever mutations generated better overall outcomes, even when they came with severe costs. Still, it's very hard to eliminate environmental factors from consideration, as many of these problems may take the form of chemical and social sensitivities that would not flare without the presence of a necessary modern environmental causal factor.
I dunno, in what environments is apathetic depression adaptive? That stuff is just... useless lump disorder, and I say that as someone whose useless lump disorder is mmmostly medicated.
One such environment where depression is probably life-saving is when you are proximal to a dominant and violent male. Depression can be a way of committing to the dominant male that you will not rise against its rule.
Do we have particular evidence that ancestral humans actually had that come up much?
Given the rate of violence in some hunter gatherer societies, probably.
https://www.britannica.com/story/are-chimpanzees-cannibals
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/564321/
Regarding the distribution of number of children, I think it's an interesting concept.
I once saw some official survey and wish I could find it again. As best I can remember, the results showed that: most adults with 0 kids were happy with that number, but the remainder often wanted 1-2 kids; parents with 1 kid were evenly split among wishing they had 0, 1, or 2 kids; most parents with 2 kids wished they had 3; most parents with 3 kids wished they had 4; most parents with 4 kids wished they had 5; most parents with 5 kids were satisfied with that number; and most parents with 6 kids wished they had 5.
It would be facile to conclude that most people should have 0 or 5 kids. More people currently have 2 kids than 4-6 kids, so more people want 3 kids than 5 kids. But still, it seems to paint a narrative where once you have a kid, if you find out that you like doing that, you typically want to keep going. I imagine most people usually stop before they're satisfied for age-related reasons, followed by health and financial reasons.
This supports the idea that we could actually make it work for a third of the population to have 0 kids and two thirds of the population to have a bell curve of kids averaging 3 kids (which would probably mean aiming for 4 kids on average, since most people get 1 fewer kid than they want).
So how can we create a society that normalizes *both* the childfree lifestyle *and* aiming for 4 kids? Our society doesn't do a great job of glamorizing mutually exclusive lifestyles where you can't have it all, TBH. But it would be good to celebrate being childfree as a responsible choice for those who would be bad or unwilling parents, and as a consolation prize for the increasing numbers of those who can't find a good partner to have kids with (the #1 reason people in the US don't have kids despite wanting to). And it would be good to celebrate having several children, including the lifestyles that have the most synergy with that: marriage, stay-at-home parenting, public schooling, etc. (The cost of schooling is the #1 reason people in China don't have a second kid).
I think diversity is the way to go here. As much as part of me thinks parenting is awesome and everyone should have the chance to do it, the reality is that lots of people know it's truly not for them, and lots of other people have insurmountable obstacles to achieving it. Better to use comparative advantage here than to try to get everyone to have 2 kids.
I keep having follow-up thoughts about how specializing like this would widen divisions among society, especially within women but also within men. Class division sucks, possibly even more than demographic collapse.
It brings me back to my thought about how our society doesn't do a great job of glamorizing mutually exclusive lifestyles where you can't have it all. For all our talk of diversity, do we know how to support diversity? Probably America actually does a better job than most places. But still not great.
I also recall a survey of European women, middle aged and up. Only like 5% never wanted kids and never got them. Most childless were so unwillingly, and a lot of declining fertility seemed to be because so many people wanted more than one (especially) or two.
Seems pretty doable to have a society where 5% of women don't have kids. We've had societies with a decent amount of nuns before.
This reminds me of this tongue-in-cheek short poem about how it's impossible to be a parent without fucking up your offspring at least a little: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
My parents generally did what by most standards is a Pretty Good Job, and I'm aware of how lucky that makes me. Maybe too aware; I'm still working on getting my head around the idea that acknowledging that there were things they did less than perfectly is a valid thing to do, and doesn't make me somehow ungrateful just because other people's parental relationship was more obviously fraught. Like... basically everything else, there's going to be tradeoffs and a balancing of priorities: sometimes parents can and will make sacrifices to do better by their kids, sometimes they can't or won't, and everyone's going to draw those lines in different places because everyone's situations are different. Probably nobody gets a perfect unproblematic relationship with their parents; people are people, and I appreciate the call to treat people with grace.
Another thing I greatly appreciate here is the gesture towards the social safety net that the "Society should make sure you can do this no matter how much of a dumbass you are" bullet point represents. I'm generally of the position that any time someone wants to impose a moral obligation, they should in the same breath be thinking about how that obligation could be made easier to fulfill. I do find myself wondering how many of the items on the superogatory standards list could also be brought into the domain of achievability for most people by making them easier and more supported on a societal level. Definitely not all, but probably some.
I would add things like "You should strive to treat your children with kindness, even when they are annoying or upset, avoid treating them as if they are fundamentally broken in some way if they struggle with some aspect of life, and allow them to have friends and a basic degree of independence." I think these are also reasonable things that average people can do, and I think this kind of standard doesn't belong in the same category as "never be angry" or "you must go to all the travel sports" or "your children's every desire and emotion must always be your first priority."
Oh, and "you should not allow your child to do nothing but play video games; you should not allow your child to eat nothing but junk food and become obese."
"Don't let your child become obese" alone rules out the parents of about 1 in 5 children in the U.S. (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood-obesity-facts/childhood-obesity-facts.html). It is fine to be an anti-natalist but you should recognize what you're doing!
1 in 5 implies that this standard is achievable by most parents and is a reasonable thing to expect of average people. And yes, I am fine with fewer babies being born insofar as this is not the case, because I consider childhood obesity that is not the result of some medical condition to be a form of medical neglect. Your standards included the provision of basic medical care; I understand "basic medical care" to include, for example, the ability to promptly arrange a doctor's visit for an infected cut or broken bone, which likely excludes the 37% of Americans who cannot afford an unexpected expense over $400.
Any standards at all will result in fewer babies being born if people actually hold themselves to those standards, but I do not think that having more than zero moral standards for parents makes you an anti-natalist. I agree that standards like "each child should have their own bedroom/constant parental attention/money set aside for college tuition/etc" are higher than they should be, but this is because I do not think these things are necessary for a child to live a decent life, whereas I do think that about maintaining a basic level of health and fitness. I would argue that the standard should be based on what is necessary to give a child a decent (not extravagant or pampered) life and not severely handicap them in some way from day one, rather than on what the bottom 20% of parents can achieve.
I would also argue that most people who are scrupulous enough to not have children because of these types of standards are in a position to provide said decent life for children already, and so the primary effect of basic or medium standards for providing for children being socially expected is to pressure parents who otherwise might not meet those requirements to come closer to meeting them for the children they already have (as opposed to very high standards being popularly enforced, which is much more likely to meaningfully change the decisions of people who could have been competent parents.)
The current United States TFR is 1.66, well below replacement. If you would prefer that it instead be 1.3 (in line with Canada and Poland), that's a valid opinion, especially if you're honest about the future demographic crises.
Only about 5% of American children are uninsured, and Medicaid and CHIP typically cover everything I would consider basic medical care. I think that we should improve access to Medicaid and CHIP: many uninsured children actually qualify for these programs and their parents don't know or have trouble with the paperwork; I do think the programs should have a higher minimum. But these are problems that are fixable with government policy! If you have a government policy that would fix childhood obesity, you should really let people know.
Fair enough on the healthcare. But I do not have a government policy; I just believe this is a basic responsibility of parents and failing to fulfill it is neglectful. Also, the rate of children who have experienced corporal punishment between the ages of 0 and 9 in America appears to be 49%, based on a quick Google search- so are you saying that you want the TFR to be approximately 0.84? That would certainly have severe consequences.
I guess that you are not saying this, and that you do not think children who were spanked should not have been born. Instead I guess that you are saying that if you do have children, you should not hit them. And I am saying that if you do have children, you should not allow them to become obese.
1 in 5 is lower than the adult obesity rates (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data-and-statistics/adult-obesity-prevalence-maps.html). And we know that it's very hard for adults to lose significant amounts of weight in the long term, even if they try. If 1 in 5 children are obese, it seems to me that that's less likely to be because of medical neglect than because the children share whatever factors made their parents obese.
Weight is a factor of calories in, calories out; children don't have the impulse control to restrict their diets, so if adults fail to do so for them, given the health consequences I think of this as a failure akin to allowing your child to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes. The parents' choices made both the parents and the children obese. (And what was the obesity rate when food was not so abundant?)
Calories in, calories out isn't just about impulse control. Calories in is affected by the availability and affordability of healthy food. Calories out is affected by metabolism and by the amount of exercise a person gets. (And exercise isn't just about willpower, either. A manual laborer and a person who enjoys exercise will both exercise more regardless of how much willpower they have.) Both are affected by a person's hypothalamic set point, and by the culture in which a person lives.
When food wasn't so abundant, the obesity rate was lower but the malnourishment rate was much higher. I wouldn't blame a poor person 200 years ago for having underweight kids any more than I'd blame a poor person today for having fat ones.
My mother used to say "if your children survive to 18, you get a D grade. That's passing. Didn't get themselves/others pregnant as teenagers? That's a C. No drug addictions? B. Graduated high school? You are an A parent."
To be clear - she was a stellar parent, A++++ on her own scale. Ignoring arguments about natalism, if you don't grade society on a curve you'll spend a lot of time hating everyone, including yourself. The curve can change over time and let's aim for that, but don't lose sight of reality.
I am personally ok with the population shrinking over a generation or two, then plateauing.
If "bad parents" (regardless of how you define it, or what proportion of people meet this threshold) stop having kids, and if "good parents" (regardless of how you define it, or what proportion of people meet this threshold) continue to have ~2 kids per couple for each generation into the future, then there will be a population contraction followed by a plateau. The magnitude of this contraction depends on parenting standards (and the resulting ratio of "bad" versus "good" parents), but the overall shape stays the same: decrease, then leveling off.
That... doesn't actually sound all that bad? The next generation will be smaller, but happier and more well-adjusted.
My only concern would be if the drop-off is too steep. Or if "acceptable" parenting standards continue to escalate for generation after generation, causing further contractions instead of plateauing. I do think today's standards of "acceptable" parenting are too high, and we should help would-be "good parents" have more kids. But I don't think a smaller-but-happier population is a problem in and of itself.
No matter who raises it, the next generation will be a mix of good and bad parents; you can't assume that the children of good parents will be good parents themselves.
> you can't assume that the children of good parents will be good parents themselves.
It's not a perfect guarantee, but the odds are much better.
There will always be "bad parents" in every generation, but the proportion would shrink over time. Perhaps the "good parents" would need to have ~2.2 or 2.3 kids per couple to maintain a plateau instead of ~2, but that's much more realistic than the numbers that the post assumes would be needed indefinitely.
Only letting good parents have kids would probably reduce the number of emotionally immature parents in the next generation, but I'm not sure it necessarily does anything to the rate of parents who are poor, disabled, immigrants, etc.
Also, maybe over time we can decrease conditions of scarcity such that more people will have the slack to be good parents.
How much do you think we can shrink each generation before the resulting demographic problems (in particular, economically unproductive old people outnumbering economically productive young people) are bad enough to make it not worth it?
I think more of the people of this school of thought are realizing they're being "anti-natalist" than you give them credit for.
Many people think population decline would be good. People who would not be the best parents not having children would be good, as they would not pass that behavior/illness/whatever, on.
I don't think there's anything people haven't realised or any/much hypocrisy going on here.
There definitely are some pro-natalist writers out there who want more births for the sake of more births, regardless of the amount of "bad parenting" that would result. Mostly evangelicals like Lyman Stone who want to a) raise the birth rate at all costs, and b) ban abortion for religious reasons (but also to raise the birthrate).
If someone is committed to both preventing "bad parents" from having kids, and also helping "good parents" have 4+ to keep the population constant, then that wouldn't make them a hypocrite. Ozy was just pointing out how difficult that would be in practice.
I'm personally more concerned with future generations flourishing than I am about maintaining our current headcount.
If "bad parents" have zero kids, and "good parents" have ~2 kids per couple, then the next generation would only be made up of those children of "good parents"*, who will themselves probably be "good parents", who will in turn have ~2 kids per couple. This would be a one-time population decline followed by a plateau, not a continuous decline. (Assuming "good parent" standards remain relatively constant into the future. That's a big if.)
If a one-time decline will lead to happier, more well-adjusted future generations, then so be it. (But if the "good parents" have tons of kids, enough to keep the population constant after all, then that would be great, too!)
*(Edit: obviously there will be some "bad parents" born to "good parents", but the ratios will be much lower compared to if the "bad parents" had kids. I will admit that the "~" in "~2" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The TFR to maintain a plateau would be closer to ~2-3 than the TFR of 4+ that the post is claiming would be needed indefinitely.)
I think it's perfectly healthy to prefer a future where the population does not exceed available resources. But when that mutates into preferring a decline in human population, ultimately, this involves withholding existence from human beings who are currently voiceless. In my mind, it's a situation where moral imagination has failed.
Re: "withholding existence from human beings who are currently voiceless" -- are we supposed to morally care about people who don't and will never exist?? This seems like it's from the school of positive utilitarianism, and afaict antinatalists are *much* more sympathetic to negative utilitarianism
To the degree any person's existence is the outcome of your actions, they have their life in your hands. How can any predictable result of your actions escape moral responsibility?
Because there exists no person to be harmed if you don't have a child?
After a child is born, in my moral view it matters a *lot* whether their life is good or bad, because they are a moral patient.
But all the quadrillions (minimum) of humans that could have theoretically existed if something were very slightly different than it actually is -- I don't care about "hypothetical" people literally at all, so whether they would have lived an excellent life or a terrible one is pretty much entirely irrelevant.
I feel approximately the same level of moral concern for a child you never choose to have as I do for a rock. Even if it were absolutely guaranteed that the child, if you choose to have them, would be the happiest person to ever exist, if they have not actually started to exist yet they are still worth zero in all my moral calculations (and if you choose not to have them I don't care).
If this position was logically coherent, you could inflict irreparable harm on future humans, say by genetic engineering, and if it can't be undone then you would never have to take responsibility for it, because at the time they did not exist yet, and later when they do exist you can no longer do anything about it.
No. At that point you have intentionally created suffering, and since I lean way more negative utilitarian, that's extraordinarily bad from my perspective.
You get no points for having a child with a great life *compared to* the alternative of not having them at all; i.e. intentionally giving birth cannot make you a better person (at least for the specific reason of having brought someone into existence).
You do, however, lose a LOT of points for intentionally having a child with a terrible life compared to the alternative of not having them at all; i.e. intentionally giving birth if you have good reason to believe that the resulting child would prefer to have never been born is a morally heinous act
To quote Jan Naverson:
"If we cause a miserable child to come into existence, there will exist a child who will have a justified complaint, while if we refrain from causing a happy child to come into existence, this child will not exist and so can have no complaint."
Future kids are not human beings who are currently voiceless. They are, at best, statistical likelihoods about their future parents' genetics and behavior.
When the existence of someone is decided, they are a choice variable, not a statistical likelihood. The language of probability can describe what you do not control, but it is inappropriate when you hold all the power.
Can you do right or wrong by someone who has passed away? Are people moral agents after their corporal existence has terminated?
This feels like an obvious no to me. I'm pretty convinced of 1) a person's consciousness stops existing when they die, and 2) generally what it means to wrong someone is to make their existence worse.
So, if you kill someone while they are unconscious, there is no harm?
I'm not getting the feeling that you're genuinely trying to have a conversation in good faith here.
But if this is a genuine question, I would still consider someone to have a continuous consciousness if they were colloquially "unconscious" as in asleep or under anaesthesia. When someone is asleep, many of the continuous physical processes that allow for thought/awareness/etc. are ongoing and the ones that are disrupted are only disrupted temporarily. This is a common use of the word "consciousness" in philosophy/ethics.
I think a very important bare-minimum standard not mentioned here is "you shouldn't prevent your kids from leaving you or your social sphere for any reason short of it being illegal for you to let them leave". Exit rights make up for a whole lot of other wrongs, while being relatively undemanding on the people being potentially exited-from. And I think I *am* willing to bite the bullet that anyone unwilling to have kids except conditional on those kids remaining closely-connected to them forever should just not have kids and drive overall birth-rates down thereby. (...a lot more than I'd be willing to bite the proposed bullet that people shouldn't have kids unless willing to never use heroin in front of them, really!)
I disagree pretty strongly with this being a "bare minimum standard". I'd agree with a much weaker version, something like "once your kids are adults, you need to be willing to negotiate an acceptable compromise with them regarding your behavior and level of presence in their lives, even if it's much lower than you prefer."
I think there's a lot of potential harm in setting the bar for acceptable reasons for children to walk away from their parents entirely low, and not nearly as much (some, certainly, but not as much) in setting it high.
It was recently pointed out to me that what it means to "walk away from your parents" is a very different thing than it was, say, a hundred years ago. You used to be able to move to a new continent and, like, *maybe* send letters back and forth - very few people were crossing oceans to come home for Christmas.
IMO setting standards for contact that are much higher than that is basically unreasonable. Like, "you should probably keep your parents on the holiday card list unless they did something egregious" feels fine as a moral standard, but I don't think someone should get to demand much more of their adult child's time and attention.
I also have an anec data point: the only true explicit anti natalist I have ever encountered irl (antinatalist on consent grounds) was also the person with the most elevated AND MORALISED parenting standards I've ever seen (less on the material/practical/normie side and more on the emotionalist attachment side but still).
So it's possible that there's not just unwitting correlation but genuine causality here....
A lot of anti-natalists I know are pretty explicit about this. If you consider childhood a moral horror, it is completely rational to advocate against creating new kids.
Yep, this post reads to me a lot like a discussion of moral standards for slaveowners or torturers. And yeah sure, if we're in an ancient society where everyone would starve without slave labour, or an edgy thought experiment where the torture dungeon powers the universe, then that's a useful discussion to have, but can I say "missing mood"?
Counterpoint: I'm a pretty hardcore antinatalist in theory, and I don't consider childhood a moral horror comparable to slavery.
Moral horror the sense of "it's literally impossible to be an even vaguely acceptable parent"? Or in the sense "being born is such a huge violation than NOTHING makes up for it but you should try for perfection"?
Either way makes sense.
I've seen both, but the one I see more often is "impossible to be an acceptable parent". One common argument goes something like 1) respecting a person's autonomy is the most important thing, 2) it's impossible to raise a child without large violations to their autonomy, therefore 3) raising a child is either incredibly ethically fraught or entirely unethical.
Obviously the premises of the argument are pretty contentious (I don't fully agree with them myself), but I think the conclusion is rational given the premises.
Yes I agree these conclusions are entirely valid (while also believing that they're not at all sound -- but that brings up a very interesting and somewhat disturbing question of "to what extent children are non-people")
I think this post hears people saying "parents should [...]" as (necessarily) setting a minimum standard, a condition which if you cannot fulfill you should not have children. I don't think this is a natural interpretation: I hear all your "parents should" sentences as saying "I think it's morally better for parents to do this thing", and even in the cases where they're saying "this is extremely morally important", they're still not obviously (to me) saying "without this condition, it is better not to have children at all".
Of course, even if you don't *intend* your standards to push people not to have children, you might reasonably anticipate that they might do so. But if this isn't what you intended, I don't think it's accurate to call you an antinatalist (and, for example, I don't think it would be particularly surprising to meet someone who had a lot of high standards for parenthood and also supported a bunch of policy proposals with the goal of increasing fertility rates).
Even to the extent that this *is* about minimum standards of parenthood, I think it's weird to interpret minimum standards as only having effect via changing whether people have children or not. Let's say I meet someone who dispositionally yells at kids and is considering having a kid, and I say to them "parents shouldn't yell at their kids". Isn't it more natural to interpret me as saying "you should change your yelling disposition, and then feel free to have a kid", rather than "you shouldn't have a kid"? Granted, *some* minimum parenthood conditions aren't changeable and those really are best understood as recommending to some people that they don't have children, but a lot of these don't feel like that at all.
It's been really weird for me to see "having their own bedrooms" talked about in the last few years as a bare minimum human right that all children are entitled to. I shared a room with my sister until I was thirteen and it honestly wasn't a big deal either way. I can see why it would be an issue if one child bullies or steals, but for most families I really don't think it matters whether the kids have their own rooms or not.
Agreed, this is ridiculous. I shared a room with my sister for most of my childhood as well, and think the small pros and small cons about canceled each other out as well, from our perspectives anyway.
I have very fond memories of sharing a room with my brother! Not...y'know, all the time, but very often. Communal living is natural, at least to the extent that "sharing a room with another human being" is definitely not abusive.
I do think having some space that is at least sometimes your own is important, but it's important enough that kids will just naturally negotiate it when required to share space.
When I was about 6 my parents bought a fixer-upper house and literally combined two rooms so that my sister and I would have to share. We all agree in retrospect that this was the *incorrect* decision (it probably lowered the property value of the house, among other things), but I wouldn't list it in their top 50 bad parenting decisions.
I do think it's probably good for kids to get some privacy when they want it and to make some accommodation for them to have their own personal belongings, but that doesn't require individual rooms.
I am short tempered and lack emotional intelligence and shouldn't have had the two kids I did have.
[mod voice] Don't ask people invasive, personal questions.
> You shouldn't hit your kids.
I don't know if this includes spanking, but if it does - around 50% of Americans think it's morally acceptable, so this point would exclude a lot of people just on its own.
Not necessarily, most who think it’s acceptable don’t actually do it.
There's a more general pattern where people use moral standards to beat up on each other, and that leads to constant inflation in moral demands. The inflation of standards for parenting is just one example of how we make each other miserable while trying to do good in the world. The human condition is really tragic in this way, not because of how much suffering we must endure, but by how much avoidable suffering we inflict on each other.
I was right with you up until the bit about unconditionally loving and accepting your child. I don't think I would put that on the list for bare minimum acceptable parenting. I think it's ok to have some conditions. If your child becomes a serial killer, I think it is permissible to stop loving them. If your child gets Cs when they could get As, I think it is permissible not to accept that.
> If your child gets Cs when they could get As, I think it is permissible not to accept that.
Being upset with their children for academic underperformance does not mean you stop loving them. People get angry at their loved ones all the time.
I think River is using that as an example of permissibly not *accepting* your child, not as an example of permissibly not loving them.
It does bring into relief the question of what exactly "not accepting someone" means, vs. "not accepting a certain behavior"
actually "this kid is getting Cs when they [to an external observer seem like they] could be getting As" is exactly the situation where kids really need to be accepted while parents often fuck this up. "accept the kid" != "accept this" - it's important for the kid not to believe that they as a person are unlovable/unacceptable if they fail to meet a high bar of achievement, having that belief causes all sorts of problems
I suppose it comes down to what we mean by "accept". Ozy used two separate words "love" and "accept", which I assumed must have two separate meanings, and this is the best second meaning I could think of. You seem to be treating them as synonyms, in which case Ozy could have just used one.
I'd argue that we're absolutely not built for unconditional love, and that demanding it from people is asking them to overcome their nature.
Matrescence, especially in the case of well-supported natural birth which releases peak oxytocin and breastfeeding which releases oxytocin and prolactin, rebuilds people for giving unconditional love. Then an infancy of receiving that unconditional love builds people for emotional resilience and healthy attachment. Greer Kirschenbaum has a recent book about the neuroscience of it, The Nurture Revolution.