My wife and I are having a baby. He is due in a little over a month. So before we start this journey, I’d like to write down some of my thoughts, beliefs, and opinions about parenting. Since I’m not yet a parent, these thoughts are primarily influenced by books, intuition, and my observations of friends with small children. I plan on looking back on this post in a year or two to see how the actual experience of parenting changes my views.
There are three books that have had a large impact on my views on parenting, and I’d like to mention them upfront. The first is Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. In this book, Bryan uses evidence from twin and adoption studies to argue that parenting is less important to children’s adult outcomes than most people believe. His conclusion is that parents can give themselves permission to not stress out about raising a little future CEO. Instead, parents can focus on doing things that make life more enjoyable for themselves and their kids right now.
The second book that influenced me is Emily Oster’s Cribsheet. This is a data-driven look at many different aspects of parenting. Unlike Caplan, Oster isn’t pushing a specific point. Instead, she gives a broad overview of what the science says about many different areas of parenting, from breastfeeding, to sleep training, to daycare.
The third book I want to mention is not by an economist: Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman. This book presents an autobiographical narrative about the American author’s experience raising her kids in France. What’s so interesting about this book is that it illustrates a lot of cultural differences in parenting styles and outcomes. When every kid in your culture is raised in a certain way, it’s hard to distinguish what is and isn’t a human universal, so an intense case study of just one other culture is enough to dispel a lot of false assumptions.
I’ll share my thoughts about parenting, starting general and getting more specific.
1. Children are not blank slates
There’s a strange idea that many people implicitly hold that human beings start as blank slates and are moulded by their parents and their society into the adults that they eventually become. When you state the idea explicitly, it’s obviously not true. But it shows up as a background assumption informing many common misconceptions people hold.
What matters from a parenting perspective is how much your parenting choices affect the person your child becomes. Genes are one important thing beyond your control (at least once the baby is conceived), and they matter a lot. The conditions in the womb matter too. So once your baby is born, they’re already a unique person who will live a different life than a baby with different genes and womb conditions. Your baby might already have the IQ and conscientiousness to become a great innovator or a developmental disability that prevents them from doing any complex task.
In some ways, this can be scary. But as Caplan points out, it’s also quite liberating. If you believe that your parenting decisions early in life will be the difference between CEO and serial killer, you put yourself under a lot of stress to be the perfect parent. But if your little CEO is going to turn out fine either way, you can relax and focus on things that make you and your child happy right now.
2. Boys are different than girls
Since I’m talking about innate traits, I’ll just get it out of the way: boys and girls have different innate traits. What I mean by that is that each individual’s innate traits are drawn from a distribution, and boys’ and girls’ traits are drawn from different distributions. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional girl with male-typical traits or the occasional boy with female-typical traits. This is true of physical traits like height and grip strength as well as behavioural traits.
It’s trendy to blame all the differences between males and females on “society” or “patriarchy.” This is part of that blank slate assumption I mentioned earlier. While I do think societal factors can exacerbate the differences between boys and girls, there are definitely underlying differences to exacerbate.
My wife and I are having a son. Our friends all have daughters. We expect to have a different experience as parents of a boy rather than a girl.
3. Humans are good at learning but they’re not good at generalizing
OK, so if a lot of your child’s traits are outside your control, what should you be thinking about as a parent? The problem I see with the “tiger mom” parenting philosophy is that people try to teach their children big, general lessons, when most people most of the time are only good at learning specific lessons. Contrast the following statements:
“I am going to teach my child chess so that he learns strategic thinking skills that he can apply throughout his life.” VS “I am going to teach my child chess so that he can play chess.”
“I am going to have my child help with the dishes so that she learns responsibility and how to be a conscientious and contributing member of the household.” VS “I am going to have my child help with the dishes so that she does dishes.”
The former statements are pure fantasy, not supported by evidence, wishful thinking. The latter statements are totally reasonable and feasible. You teach your child very specific behaviours, sometimes without even intending to do so. Speaking of which…
4. Bad sleep is the result of a culture that actively teaches bad sleep
This is the biggest lesson I took from Bringing Up Bébé. I had always heard that having a baby meant never sleeping through the night for years. But French kids are apparently much better sleepers than most American kids are. The author of Bringing Up Bébé was tipped off to this when the French parents around her started asking whether her daughter was “doing her nights” (i.e. sleeping through the night) when she was just four months old.
It turns out that sleeping through the night is a learned behaviour for everyone. Even adults wake up between sleep cycles, we just don’t notice it because we’re so accustomed to falling right back into the next sleep cycle. In the first three or four months of life, babies need to be fed every couple hours, and their bodies don’t produce melatonin (the hormone responsible for sleep cycles) so sleeping though the night is out of the question. After three months, they need to learn the skill of linking sleep cycles. Parents often prevent their children from learning this skill by trying to comfort the baby every time they wake up and make a sound.
The point is not to never comfort a baby that makes sounds in the night. Sometimes babies cry because they genuinely need a parent. The point is that interrupting them when they don’t need you can harm their ability to sleep. When the baby cries, wait and observe until you’re fairly certain that they need your intervention.
This intuition lines up with a 2017 study Oster cites in her chapter on sleep. The researchers found that babies who were sleeping in the same room as parents at nine months slept less than babies in their own rooms. These children continued to sleep less when they were two and a half years old and sleeping alone. What I think explains this is that kids in the same room as their parents have their sleep interrupted more, and therefore have a harder time learning how to link sleep cycles. Consequently, they lack this skill when they get older.
5. Picky eating is (partly) the result of a culture that actively teaches picky eating
As for picky eating, this seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. White people in Canada and the United States seem to believe that children only like bland foods that are white or brown. Take a look at any kids’ menu to confirm this. And yet other cultures seem much better at getting their kids to eat a variety of foods (Bringing Up Bébé focuses on France, but it seems like almost everyone has this figured out).
It’s easy to imagine that what tastes good or bad to us is innate and immutable, and to some degree it is. For instance, there’s evidence that the presence of a specific gene can make cilantro taste like soap. But it seems to me that most tastes can be acquired and that most cultures get their kids to acquire all the local flavours by weaning them onto them slowly from the time they can first eat solid food.
If your kid takes a bite of carrot and says “yuck” you don’t force them to eat carrots (teaching them that carrot is a punishment). But you don’t indulge their dislike of carrots by keeping carrots out of their diet permanently. You bring them a different carrot a few days later, maybe prepared differently, and repeat this until they try the carrot and learn to like it. If you give kids what you’re eating, allow them to try everything, and just keep presenting them with foods, they will eventually learn to eat a wide variety of foods.
Children are very impressionable, so saying things like, “oh no he won’t like that, it’s too spicy” in front of them is a good way to train pickiness. I talked to one dad whose daughter happily ate green vegetables until she was in preschool, then refused to eat them because she saw the other children do so. The message I take from this is that what’s yucky and yummy can be learned, at least to some extent.
I believe that picky eaters are likely to have less healthy diets than less picky eaters. I also feel that they are missing out on a whole range of human experiences that could enrich their lives. So to the extent that I can steer my child away from picky eating, I will. To reiterate, forcing a child to eat food they don’t like will probably backfire, so I won’t be doing that.
6. School is kind of awful
I personally did not enjoy school as a child. Forcing a six-year-old to sit and watch a lecture for hours on end, five days a week, and then keep doing that for over a decade seems like something you need a really good reason to do. And given my belief that people are bad at generalizing learning (point 3) it’s hard to justify most of school.
People will sometimes justify our current education system by saying kids are “learning how to learn” or that school helps to “socialize” them. I do not believe either of these things. I believe that school teaches children how to learn in school, and how to negotiate social relationships in school, but I do not believe that these skills are generalizable outside the unique environment of a school. I’ll take that a step further and say that some of the habits learned in school are detrimental to success as an adult and that unlearning them is part of becoming successful.
The most generalizable skills learned in school are reading and math. Reading is easily learned at home (many children enter school with some reading skills). Math is probably the strongest case for classroom education, but there are other ways to learn it. It’s not a coincidence that when you read a story about some amazing teenager graduating from university at age 14, the kid was almost always homeschooled.
Schooling comes with a very high cost to the child. Ask any child whether they like school and many, if not most, will express negative feelings. This is borne out in research on children’s mental health, which shows a strong connection between school and depression and anxiety. Teenagers report much higher rates of stress during the school year than they do during the summer, which should surprise no one.
Before I had a child on the way, I thought, “why do parents put their children through traditional schooling if it’s so miserable?” Now it’s obvious to me that the practicality of having someone else paying for your childcare during the day is hard to ignore. I hope to be rich by the time my children reach school age, but if I’m not, there will be some hard choices to make.
Conclusion
These are some of my thoughts related to becoming a parent. I plan on returning to this essay in the future to see how or whether my views have changed. Maybe we’ll follow my philosophy about baby sleep and food to the letter and still have a picky insomniac for a child. Maybe we’ll get lucky and have a child who thrives in traditional schooling, despite its many faults. And while it’s hard to see how raising a child could change my views on blank slatism, I guess I’ll wait and see about that too.