Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Original podcast
Think you know how much parents matter? Think again. Economists crunch the numbers to learn the ROI on child-rearing.
10,816 words · 15 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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So you're having a baby. Congratulations. It's great. Welcome to the wonderful world of parenthood. It's exhilarating, it's challenging, probably more than anything, it's perplexing. Why? One word. Experts. So many experts. So much advice.
All new, Dr. Oz report.
Do you ever wonder how to raise children who are confident? Researchers say.
Nature versus nurture. Strong parental leadership.
The first pediatrician whose book really turned into a very popular manual, absolutely forbid the eating of bananas. He said they were poisonous.
That's Anne Holbert. She wrote a book called Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children. It's fair to say that the advice has shifted a bit over time.
I think the example that is the most notorious is the behaviorist John Broaddus Watson, whose book, The Psychological Care of Infant and Child, was a big sensation in the late 20s. He said, you know, you should never kiss your child, you should never hug your child, you should never put your child on your knee, you're honeycombing the child with weakness, and he will not be able to face the harsh, cold, cruel world. That, I think, probably takes the cake.
Now, what do we know about the scientific underpinnings of that argument? Did he? Was it a scientific argument at all or no?
Well, that particular bit of wisdom, there was no scientific argument behind it at all. He surrounded it in his book with all kinds of supposed science about.
The absolute influence of parents and sort of behavioral conditioning on children. And he had a very famous experiment of teaching a child, a baby, to fear a rabbit. And it was not a good experiment, but it was cited in his book. And it was sort of his example of, you know, if you present a furry creature and a very loud noise that scares a child, and you do it often enough, you can inculcate a deep fear that will never go away. And that was kind of the sensational version of the science that underpinned his view that parents are themselves the absolute and total molders and shapers of their children.
Now, if you thought it was bad in the 20th century, you might want to just stay out of the 21st. In a lot of places, parenting has become a competitive sport. Experts are everywhere, each of them sounding more confident than the last, even if their advice contradicts one another or contradicts themselves. So how are we supposed to know what's really good for kids? How do we know what's worth worrying about and what's not? That's easy. Enter The Economist.
From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Today, The Economist's guide to parenting? Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, what the economists? What can economists possibly have to say about something as emotional, as nuanced, as humane as parenting? Well, let me say this. Because economists aren't necessarily emotional, or for that matter nuanced or humane, maybe they are exactly the people we need to sort this through. Maybe.
I'm Steve Levitt. I have four children. Amanda's 11, Olivia's 10, Nicholas is 8, and Sophie is 7. Two are adopted from China, two are biological.
Uh huh.
We almost have two sets of twins, although in each case, one of the twins is biological and the other is adopted from China.
Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. Over the past few years, he and I have written quite a bit about parenting. I've got two kids, Solomon, who's 10, and Anya's 9, but Levitt, he's got his own approach to parenting.
Well, I think I'm just lazy. You know, I could be investing in the kids, or I could be indulging my own hobbies and sleeping and things. And so, I'm sort of lazy. I mean, the other problem I have is I have four kids. If you have too many kids, you can't invest that heavily in any one of them because you go crazy. And so, you know, you leave some of the parenting to the older siblings, or you just hope that the schools will take care of it. But, you know, it's not like, if you have an only child, well, sure, you've got two parents, you've got one kid, you can lavish your attention on them. But if you've got four kids, and one wants to play soccer, and one wants to play baseball, the other one wants to play the clarinet, well...
Let's just watch TV instead.
Exactly.
Levitt may not strike you as the ideal parent, but don't worry, he's not the only economist we're talking to. In fact, we've put together a whole roundtable of them. Hey, guys, introduce yourselves.
I am Brian Kaplan. I'm a professor of economics at George Mason University, and I am the author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.
I am Melissa Carney. I'm in the economics department at the University of Maryland, and I study government expenditure programs and issues relevant mostly to low-income populations in the US.
You're also a mom?
I'm a mom of three. I feel the way I explain things to my kids. I hear an economist talking to them. I mean, I explain everything to my kids in terms of opportunity cost. And I say, well, you're making, you know, my daughter will be, when she's two, in the grocery store. And I'm like, listen, you're making choices. And if you pick that, you don't get that. And there's, right, there's a cost to your choices. And I'll hear my son tell my daughter, right, they're toddler speaking. He'll be like, look, you made a bad choice, you know? So I realize, I talk to them like economists.
So I'm Joshua Gans. I'm a professor of economics at Melbourne Business School, usually in Melbourne, Australia, but visiting at the moment, Microsoft Research. During my day job, I am an applied economist, more of a theoretical bent than a data-driven bent. And otherwise, I engage in the normal parts of life. And I like to leverage my career as much as possible. So when it came to parenting, I ended up writing a book called Parentenomics, An Economist Dad's Parenting Experiences.
I'm Bruce Sacerdo, and I'm a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and the National Bureau of Economic Research. And I teach finance here at Dartmouth, but I'm primarily a labor economist. And I study kids' education and kids' health, income, and well-being, that sort of thing.
Gotcha. And on your professional website, you list yourself as a professional parent as well, correct?
That's right, yep. And that probably is. I may even spend more hours on that than I do on research.
My name is Valerie Ramey, and I'm a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. I'm married to another professor of economics at the same department. His name is Gary Ramey, and we write a number of papers together. We have two children, a college-age son, who's 21, who's studying engineering, although he was pretty good in economics in high school. He decided to do something a little bit more applied, which is engineering. And a daughter, who is a junior in high school, who at this point isn't quite sure what she wants to study in college, but she's thinking about taking some economics just to see if it's any different from what she hears at the dinner table at home.
So your son is the real rebel going into engineering?
That's right.
Rounding out the roundtable is another pair of mom and dad economists. Justin Wolfers is an Australian-born professor at Wharton. Betsy Stevenson, who's also at Wharton, is currently serving as chief economist for the Department of Labor in Washington, DC. That's where I visited them and their absolutely beguiling 19-month-old daughter, Matilda.
Yeah, you remember when we used to sit in the high chair? Oh, high chair.
Hi, Chair. Hello, Chair.
First of all, Justin and I met as graduate students in economics, and we started studying issues related to the family right away. Like, as soon as we started dating, we actually started doing research on divorce, which is a very puzzling way to start dating.
Very sexy, yeah.
And the first paper we ever wrote together was about the relationship between the ability to get divorced and avoiding violence in relationships.
And your finding was?
That divorce reforms that allowed one person to unilaterally walk out of a relationship saves lives. It reduced women committing suicide. It reduced women getting killed by their partners. It reduced domestic violence more broadly.
Now, are the two of you married?
No, we're not married.
So you're... I feel like I knew the answer. All right, so I did know that Stevenson and Wolfers aren't actually married. They refer to each other as partners rather than husband and wife.
I'm the person in the household who manages all of our money. So Justin and I actually do follow the old household specialization rules, but we do it much more narrowly. So Justin does IT, I do money. Justin does diapers, I do breastfeeding. And when it comes to money, I quickly realized that particularly as young people, the costs of being married outweighed any of the benefits when it comes to financial costs. Particularly as two people who have similar careers and therefore similar earnings, the tax costs...
So you didn't want to pay the marriage penalty?
Yeah, it would have been substantial.
So what do you save a year by not being married?
Over $20,000 a year.
Wow. You could have another kid sent to private school.
If you want to cause people to pause at a wedding, ask them how much they think what they're about to do is worth, and then tell them what the price tag is. The other thing is, marriage is an institution that people can get in and out of very easily. It doesn't actually serve the purpose most people want it to do.
Yeah.
So what couples are usually trying to do when they marry is trying to make it difficult to leave. We have a far stronger bond than a legal contract, which is we have a daughter. And you can't cut a daughter in two. And that daughter, right on cue, makes it incredibly difficult or expensive for us to have her part. That's much stronger than the marriage certificate.
Once they decided to have a child, Stevenson started "training," as she puts it. A lot of running, eating organic, reading up on ovulation, and all kinds of medical and behavioral literature.
You know, we approached getting pregnant like any other project we've done. I attempted, I spent four months getting fit. I went to the doctor for a checkup.
This was before you're pregnant?
Four months before I wanted my IUD out. I went and got a checkup, all the medical tests I needed. I started training for pregnancy.
What did training include, besides there was running?
Prenatal vitamins. Running, eating right. I was, you know, and then it involved charting, figuring out my cycle, ovulation.
And do all these data exist in a next cell spreadsheet somewhere in this very house right now?
Conception was just the beginning. Once the baby arrived, Stevenson and Wolfers put everything they knew as economists into being a mom and dad. Lesson number one: division of labor.
Well, the natural one was I breastfed and Justin did diapers.
Yeah, so to put that in economics language, Betsy does inputs, I do outputs.
And you did diapers because it's not the corollary somehow of breastfeeding.
That was actually Betsy's argument.
It was.
And I'm dumb enough to...
Somebody's doing inputs, somebody has to do outputs. It's basically the same. The same amount going in is basically what's coming out.
I will say, I actually now advise my male friends that they should put up their hand for this job.
I thought you were gonna say you advise your male friends that they should learn to be the one that breastfeeds.
That does look even more fun. But no, it's a nice time to spend with your kid, actually. When they're really young, it's one of the few times they'll make eye contact with you. You have a task, they like you having that role. So as much as I thought Betsy was taking advantage of me, her superior bargaining ability getting me to do that, I just told my brother-in-law that he should do the same thing, and I think he did.
Now, Wolfers and Stevenson are both busy professionals, which means that Matilda would be spending a fair amount of time with a babysitter. Could they have hired a perfectly nice, friendly, competent nanny for 15 bucks an hour? Yeah, they could have. So you guys hired a nanny.
Who was a public school teacher.
Who was extremely skilled as a nanny and beyond.
Right, right. And I think Matilda's getting the same kind of upbringing and intellectual stimulation as if we were at home raising her. And I think there's a certain level of comfort in that.
Can I ask what Ellen gets paid?
$50,000 a year.
Ellen does more than just watch after Matilda.
Dada. You wanna write "Dada"? Oh, dada. And dada? You can write that. Dada. Good job, Matilda, yay!
So Matilda's already learning her ABCs, but it doesn't stop there.
Okay, so the one randomized trial that we actually did read had a huge impact on us, which was teaching babies sign language. And it turns out that this is a great way of increasing their vocab before their speaking skills kick in. And Matilda speaks terrific sign language and has been able to sort of communicate her needs, you know, whether she wants milk or Cheerios, you know, for about a year now. No, not a year, I miss six, seven months now. But, you know, pre-verbal, you know, we made that a priority. What kind of classes does she take?
She goes to music class.
How many days a week is that?
She, music class is one day a week. She goes to art class.
How many days a week?
That's one day a week. And she goes to preschool prep class.
Pre preschool. Preschool prep, uh-huh. Pre preschool. Matilda was leaving the house the other day at 17 months of age. I said, "Matilda, this is your first day of human capital accumulation. You can finish when you're 27."
So how much human capital will Matilda accumulate by the time she's 27? And here's the hard part. How much of that human capital will be because of what her parents did versus who her parents were? I mean, that's the central issue here, right? In the never-ending nature versus nurture debate, genes versus environment, what we really want to know is how much influence do parents have on their kids once the kids are out of the womb? Well, how confident are you? I mean, you guys are making a lot of choices from organic food and sign language and all kinds of behavioral things. How confident are you that your investments are, forget about optimal, even worthwhile?
Not at all confident.
Pardon me, Professor Wolfers?
Here's the thing. As much as Wolfers and Stevenson sound like your typical obsessive, sweat the small stuff, micromanaging parents, they actually agree with the rest of our Economist's Roundtable on one crucial and quite surprising fact: Parents.
Just don't matter as much as we think they do. Here's Joshua Gans again.
So my, you know, having now experienced it for 12 odd years, I don't think they matter a huge amount.
And Brian Kaplan.
In all honesty, I do sometimes think, you know, what if my kids don't turn out well and then everyone blames me? And, you know, I would still say, well, the data just say it was going to happen anyway.
And Steve Levitt.
One of the things that I think is true is that obsessive parenting has few rewards.
What are they talking about? What do these economists mean when they say that parents don't matter very much? Do they have evidence to back up this ridiculous claim? Yes, they do.
Coming up, from education to income to drinking and smoking, we'll hear what the data say about how much influence parents really have.
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Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-yolo type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.
From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
So if we're talking about parenting, why on earth do we want to listen to economists? Well, there are different species of economists. Here's Steve Levitt.
There are two kinds of economists. There are macroeconomists, and there are microeconomists. And macroeconomists, they study the big questions: inflation, financial crisis. Now, microeconomists, and those are people like me, we do something very different. We're focused on individual choices, on behavior, on how incentives affect what people do, and how you can use data to try to test hypotheses about whether our simple theories turn out to be right or not.
Like, does teaching a baby sign language really increase their chances of success? Or are the kind of parents who are likely to teach their baby sign language going to have successful kids anyway because they're high-IQ parents? Now, with something like parenting, establishing cause and effect is really hard. There are so many inputs in a kid's life: genes, environment, school, friends. It's hard to know how each of them affects the outputs. So economists think, mm, if only we could run experiments on kids the way we do with lab rats. But since they can't, not yet at least, the best they can
do is look for an accidental experiment. Bruce Sacerdo, the economist's dad from Dartmouth, went looking for such an experiment in adoption data.
I hunted and hunted and hunted and I talked to a wide variety of adoption agencies. And the thing that I really latched on to was my conversations with the Holt Adoption Agency. They are the biggest placer of adoptees into US families and they were among the first to place Korean adoptees with American families.
If you're trying to tease apart nature and nurture, adoption is an experiment. But the Holt adoptions were particularly good for this purpose. Harry and Bertha Holt were Oregon farmers who, after the Korean War, helped place Korean orphans with American families. Their policy? First come, first served, which meant that the orphans were adopted into all kinds of families, not just high-income families or high-education families.
They do it in a process that's, to all intents and purposes, random. And so that got economists excited. The big point being that we have a sample of adult adoptees for whom they were effectively, randomly assigned to their adoptive parents. And that was the big deal in that study.
As Sacerdote was digging into the adoption data, Brian Kaplan, he's the guy who wrote Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, he was reading every piece of twins research he could find. He'd end up having twin boys himself, but his fascination predated the birth.
The simplest way to explain it is, look, there's actually two kinds of twins. You've got identical twins who share all their genes. You've got fraternal twins who share half of their genes. So if identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, we could use that fact to measure how much genes actually matter. And once we've done that, we can actually see how much room, if any, is left for parents to be mattering.
And it all sounds very sensible so far. It sounds like you're trying to isolate cause and effect, which in a typical case is hard because you're not going to, even a guy like you, you had twins, even you, an economist who wants to know these answers, you're not going to ship off one of your twins to some stranger's family to see how that child comes up differently than your other identical twin. But you're using these kind of accidental experiments or shocks to the system to isolate what's going on.
Exactly. Now, as it turns out, over the last 40 years, basically, every trait that parents care about, or at least every trait that more than a handful of parents care about, has been studied by researchers in a lot of different fields using these methods.
So if twin births and adoptions are accidental experiments that yield useful data, what do those data have to say about the influence of parents? The most important question, which Sacerdote went after immediately, was about educational achievement. Let's say a low IQ kid is adopted into a high IQ family. You'd expect the parents to significantly boost the kid's IQ, right? But some earlier research Sacerdote read suggested that adoptive parents weren't that influential.
There's this voluminous literature saying things very much like that, which is that, yes, there's some influence of adoptive parents on adoptees' IQ scores, but it's small, and they also claim it goes to zero as the adoptees get older.
But with the good Korean adoption data, Sacerdote was pretty sure he'd poke holes in that research. If there's one thing that parents have to affect, I mean, just judging from how much effort we put into it, it's our kids' educational achievements, right? So he sliced and diced the Korean data, and he did find parental influence.
But it's not quite as big as I expected to find.
But how big is "not quite as big"? In the most advantaged families, where the parents were college-educated, the adoptees were 16 percentage points more likely to attend college than adoptees in the least privileged families, where the parents weren't college graduates. That sounds pretty good, right? 16 percentage points? Yeah! But the biological kids in the families with college-educated parents were 75 percentage points more likely to go to college than the biological kids in the low-education families, which suddenly makes the adoptive parents' 16 percentage point influence look kind of puny. Sacerdote's findings made a big impression on Brian Kaplan.
Basically, his average result was that if you were adopted by a mom with one more year of education, you, the adoptee, generally finished about five extra weeks of education. In other words, the mom would have to have about 10 extra years to boost you by a year. Everyone I talked to considered that a small effect. Right? So most people, when I said, "So what would you consider to be a large effect?", they said, "One year of maternal education would have to boost you six months, right? Not four weeks."
And it wasn't just education that parents didn't seem to affect so much.
Income too. Kaplan analyzed data from twin studies as well as Sacerdote's adoption research. Those results were even more surprising.
Korean War orphans were adopted in the 50s and 60s at a time when it was much easier for low-income families to adopt. But it's striking that it's the kind of thing that you would think of as being more about upbringing broadly defined than a lot of other traits. So, I mean, it could be that it's actual upbringing where your parents instill the value of a dollar in hard work in you, or it could be something more like nepotism, where because you get raised by the right kind of parents, you get good connections, or they actually make a phone call for you. And yet, actually, you know, the very best studies of the nature and nurture of income find that, you know, parents do have a moderate effect on your early income when you're in your 20s, but basically zero for the rest of your life.
Come on. No effect on income? A puny influence on education? Now, if you're a parent, especially the kind of hands-on parent who thinks hard about every input in your kid's life, every flash card, museum visit, every taekwondo lesson, and, God forbid, every video game, you've got to be thinking, "Oh, man, these economists, they're full of crap."
That's my co-author again, Steve Levitt. He and another economist, Roland Fryer, analyzed data from a survey by the US government that tracks kids from birth through grade school. How strong was the relationship between parental activity and school test scores?
It doesn't matter how many activities your kids do, whether they go to museums, that at least in terms of academic success, in the biggest nationally representative sample of data that the government has ever collected, Roland Fryer and I could find no evidence that those sort of parental choices, that what we've come to call the obsessive parents, of putting kids into ballet.
Kind of culture cramming in particular, right?
Exactly. That none of that can be correlated at all with academic success. And my guess is, and this is just a pure guess, is that when it comes to happiness of kids, that that kind of cramming has got to be negatively correlated with happiness. Like, being rushed from one event to the other is just not the way most kids want to live their lives, at least not my kids.
Levitt's argument is simple and sobering. What matters most is who parents are, not what they do. Following all the culture cramming advice in a parenting book won't have much effect. But the kind of parents who are likely to buy parenting books and do all that culture cramming, they're high-achieving parents to start with. And those are the qualities: high IQ, good health, determination, and so on, that the kids inherit. But try telling that to a modern parent, even an economist parent.
So, in the 1980s, the average young, college-educated mother spent 13 hours per week on childcare.
That's Valerie Ramey again. She and her husband Gary, also an economist, analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey.
Now, it's 22 hours a week. So, the amount of time has increased by nine hours a week.
Nine hours? So, that's about 70% increase. That's a huge increase.
It's a huge increase. Now, what's interesting is, over this same time period, the wages of college-educated women have really increased. So, the opportunity cost of time has increased, at the same time, they've decided to spend more time taking care of their children.
So, to an economist like you, that has to be a little bit baffling, yes?
Yes, it is a puzzle.
After declining for decades, the amount of time that parents spent on childcare started to rise in the 1990s, and then it skyrocketed in the 2000s, especially among college-educated moms. Why? The Rameys found a surprising answer: college, specifically, the increased competition for kids to get into good colleges. These high-end parents, they weren't simply babysitting, they were chauffeuring their kids to the kind of extracurricular activities that look good on a college application. The Rameys called it "the Rug Rat Race."
Want to know the strangest part? Valerie Ramey was a prime offender until her family put a stop to it.
I spent six hours a week at the stables with my daughter. And now she enjoyed the horseback riding, but it was also stressful to have, you know, somebody else determine our schedules for us, particularly since both my husband and I work full time. And there was the brownies and softball.
And what was your state of mind generally during this period where you were doing a lot of chauffeuring and kind of activist moming? Did it make you happy? Did it make you tense?
It did not make me happy. It did make me tense. Fortunately, my family rebelled against me because I felt we needed to do this because this sort of everybody else was doing it.
Now, before you go off and decide that good parenting is a complete waste of time, consider a couple of areas where economists have found parents to be very influential. Smoking and drinking.
Kids who grow up around parents who smoke and drink are much more likely to do so themselves. I asked Bruce Sacerdote about this. So if I'm a smoker, if I'm a parent who smokes, and I think that smoking is bad, which would probably describe a lot of smokers, and I don't want my kids to smoke, and I've got, let's say, 10 hours of time or $100 or whatnot, and I've got to decide how to spend that 10 hours or $100, you're telling me based on what you've seen in the research that it would probably be better for me to spend those hours and dollars trying to quit smoking than it would be trying to cram in some extra reading time at the library or whatnot?
No, that's absolutely right. If you were sitting there reading to them while smoking four cigarettes, I think you'd be doing damage on all kinds of levels. So no, that's absolutely right. Another thing that's undoubtedly contagious is the behavior of how you interact with, how you treat other people, how you treat employees at a restaurant or a retail store. I think those things are probably highly contagious as well, and things that you really want to model carefully. And just like in the smoking example, you can make yourself better off as well as setting a good example for your kids.
Oh, great. So we finally find something that parents do influence, and it's smoking, drinking, and talking to the waitress. Okay, well, at least parents are really good at protecting their kids, right? Keeping them safe from all the dangerous stuff out there, right? Like kidnappers?
That it's worth thinking about more than you should think about being struck by lightning or something like that.
Here's Brian Kaplan again.
The FBI has statistics on what are called stereotypical kidnappings, which is basically like some stranger going and taking your kid from some distant distance and holding the child overnight. And in that case, often something very bad will happen. But that's really in the range of like 100 to 200 per year. So I mean, it literally is like a one in a million annual event. So it's just something that is not sensible to worry about. And if you find you're worrying about it, even though you know that it's not sensible, this is something where I recommend going and reading about how you can cure yourself of anxiety problems rather than trying to take action to reduce this illusory risk.
And then there are guns, of course. Here's Steve Levitt.
If there's one thing that terrifies parents, it's guns. The thought of their child going to have a playdate at a house where there'd be a gun, many parents would say, no way. But there's one object that parents should fear 100 times more than the gun, although they don't. And that's the swimming pool. Because statistics say that if your child spends a day at a house that has both a gun and a swimming pool, the likelihood your child dies is 100 times greater from the swimming pool than it is from the gun.
And skiing is scary, right?
So I don't know if it's one of these evolutionary biology things, but we take our kids skiing, for example. And I know skiing is inherently risky. And, but I never used to be worried about sitting on the chair, though.
That's Melissa Carney from the University of Maryland. She never used to be a scaredy cat. Then she became a parent, she got swept up in the fear parade.
But when I'm sitting on the chairlift with my kids, I mean, I could barely breathe. I'm so scared of them falling off.
And then she takes a deep breath and reminds herself that human beings are terrible risk assessors in general, and no one worse than a parent.
But I fight it because I tell myself, you know, I'm not going to not teach my kids to ski, which I think is a really fun activity, to protect them from this small risk, right? If something terrible happens, you know, it would be hard to forgive myself. But try and remember that everything has trade-offs. And the chances are, nothing's going to happen. People don't really fall off chairlifts. And hopefully, they'll have a lifetime love of skiing.
The fact is, parenting is an exercise in risk assessment. Here's Betsy Stevenson again.
I think the hardest thing as a parent is to admit that you're going to take risks with your child's life. To actually admit out loud, I take risks with my child's life. I mean, if you said that at a cocktail party, people would look at you like you were a monster. But of course, we take risks with our lives every day. I take Matilda out on to the sidewalk, and we cross streets. Every time we cross a street, we're taking a risk. It's not risk-free to cross the street, or to ride the subway, or to go in a car. Almost everything we do has risks. And as economists, I think Justin and I are really comfortable with thinking about risks and making decisions with them. And that means we have to face the really painful thing, which is we take risks with our child's life.
Joshua Gans, our Australian friend who wrote Parentonomics, he's proud to admit that he's taken risks with his kid's life, but not how you might think.
We would go to the park, and our child, who was probably around four, would invariably not want to leave. So we would have this big song and dance about, you know, we have to go now. You can't keep on playing. She'd run off. You know, it would be costly. Let's put it that way. So what we did one day is we were sitting there, and she was doing it yet again. And we said, you know, we keep threatening that we'll just leave. Why don't we get in the car and just leave? And so we said, you know, you come, or we're going to go. We're going to get in the car and drive off. And that is actually what we did.
In front of a full park, full of other parents as well. We had a screaming child running after us going, you know, no, don't leave me. Uh, exactly to get that message across. Now, to be short, you know, while that might or not be obvious to the other parents standing there, and I'll tell you, it was a tough thing for us to do. There was another family at the park who was going to at least watch out that she didn't do something silly as a result of this, like run onto a road or something like that. So we weren't totally crazy, but then again, we did drive off, leaving our child thinking she'd been left behind.
And what happened? And what happened the next time that she wanted to stay at the park longer?
Never ever happened again. Never ever had another problem. Perfectly well behaved.
Sadism works.
You know, you got, you know, at some type point, you've got to raise the price enough. You've got to be credible. I mean, you know, that's the dispassionate economist says you do what it takes. I guess I've become some hardline hawk in that regard. Uh, you know, so occasionally we break from social mores, but we only had to do it once.
What a bunch of misanthropes, unloving, uncaring, ungrateful parents these economists are, aren't they? Well, not quite.
Coming up, the importance of being kind.
Even when you're in your seventies, whether or not your parents were kind to you stays with you. And the identical twins, fraternal twins have similar and quite high levels of agreement on these questions, which is the smoking gun for nurture really mattering.
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So you've got to be thinking about all those hours, all those years that parents spend trying to improve their kids. Years that just don't add up to much. But it all depends on your attitude. Why'd you become a parent in the first place? To make yourself happy? To give someone else the gift of life? To get a solid return on your parental investment? Bruce Sacerdote, before he wound up in academia, ran a hedge fund. So I asked him what kind of a return parents should expect.
Expect low. Yeah, think modern treasury bills here. Low. Aim low, and you won't be disappointed. I think the return is going to be in happiness as opposed to necessarily cash flow remittances back. The first thing is, don't be afraid to invest up until the marginal return is zero. So you don't want to be investing to the point where there's a negative marginal return, where you're not only chewing up a lot of your time, but you're turning your kids off to what would otherwise be a great and intellectual and fun thing. You overinvest to the point where you've made you and yourselves miserable. So obviously, you don't want to go negative. You don't want to have a negative return on these things.
All right. So how well do these economists follow their own advice? We already know Valerie Ramey got sucked into the very Rugrats race she was studying. What about Joshua Gans, the Parentonomics author? Well, let me ask you this, Joshua, if I'm not prying. What forms of insurance do you buy?
I have life insurance. I have disability insurance. We, of course, have, here in the US, so we're paying out of pocket for health insurance. That isn't fun.
You have some homeowner's insurance?
Yes, homeowner's insurance, car insurance.
Yeah. So what you're describing now, which is engaging in a bunch of parental behaviors that the data say are not worthwhile, is really you're just buying another form of insurance, aren't you?
Well, I'm buying hypothetical insurance. You know, I mean, I know with health insurance what I'm getting for that. Someone gets sick, the bill gets paid for. You know, if we're going to be doing piano lessons, I'm not 100% sure what's coming out of that.
Joshua, how many children do you and your wife have?
So we have three. They're 12, 10, and 6. Two girls and a boy.
How many of them have taken piano lessons?
All three.
It's so depressing, I have to say. Because we rely on people like you to represent the disinterested view, to make an unimpassioned assessment of the way things are and the way we think things are. And you often show in your research that the way things are is quite different than the way we think things are. And we want you, as economists, to behave as your data preaches, just as we want a man of the cloth to behave as the liturgy and the sacred texts preach. What does it say about the human mind that even you, who's written a book on this, is unable to break the ties that society presents to you as this is the way it must be done?
Well, you know, this is the difference between the positive and the normative. You're right, as a normative actor, doing for the good of showing society the way to go, of course I should do all those things. But as a normal selfish economic rationalist person, yeah, it's too costly for me. I really don't want to, I really want to have to deal with that. Not even to do what objectively might actually help the happiness and perhaps even well-being of my child. Apparently, I'm willing to stick with the social mores on that. So even economists, you know, we can say these things publicly, but doing them is very, very hard. The social pressures are there.
Let's go back to our Washington DC couple, the marriage tax dodging Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. I asked them, if there were an obsessive parenting index from 0 to 10, how they'd rate themselves?
Aspirationally, we're a 3. Reality, we're a 9 and 3/4. So I want to be sort of the cool dad.
You have great self-awareness. I like that. Well, talk about that gap. What lives in that gap?
We're pretty sure that some large chunk of that gap isn't that productive. Like, as a parent, you can wander around fretting about every friggin' thing that could happen to your kid.
Just on a kind of safety level or also like an achievement and happiness level and so on?
Yeah, also an achievement and happiness level. For us, the trade-off's not so bad in that, um, so, you know, what do we do on the weekend? We go to the Smithsonian. Well, that sounds like the most type A parent you could be. The truth is, I love spending time with Matilda and it wouldn't matter if I was at a baseball game in the Smithsonian or sitting at home. It's just every instance a joy and the Smithsonian's sort of a bit of a distraction for all of us and it doesn't actually matter.
It's free.
And it's free. No, you're absolutely right. So we get, we do all the stuff that you would do as a type A parent, but I, I know you were going to talk to Brian Kaplan, right? And he talks a lot about, you know, doing all these expensive things. It's not expensive to us.
Well, but we do do expensive things, although I think we don't think that they're necessary. We understand that they're nice. So Matilda goes to a lot of classes. She likes her classes.
You know, buying her organic food.
Yeah, so let's talk about the food.
She's gonna be fine eating anything.
Well, let's talk about the food. So tell me the foods that she does not eat.
Meat, uh, any kind of sugar.
Any kind of sugar.
She eats fruit.
I mean, so she's allowed fruit.
No, and she doesn't drink pure juice.
So, um, has she ever eaten a donut?
No.
She's, she's like a total Berkeley hippie.
Never eaten a piece of cake?
Piece of candy?
Doesn't even know what they are.
Now, what do you think is gonna happen? Her first, like, Snickers bar?
Uh, we're in trouble.
Pretend for a minute that we wanted to distill everything the economists have taught us and start a reality-based parenting movement. Who should be its president? Unfortunately, I don't think Wolfers and Stevenson are up for the job, or Joshua Gans, or Valerie Ramey. I'd say it's a toss-up between Steve Levitt, who says he's lazy by nature, so that works in his favor, and Brian Kaplan. I mean, listen again to the title of Kaplan's book, "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think." I mean, just listen to the man's defense of television.
People call them electronic babysitters as if it's a bad thing, right? But babysitters are good, and nothing wrong with being electronic. So, meaning the idea that there's some awful harm done when your children watch TV or play video games, and no evidence of that, that if they enjoy it, and it gives you a chance to relax, and get a little peace and quiet, and do your own thing, or get some work done, no reason to feel guilty about it. And I'd actually go further and say, especially now, there really is a lot of fantastic culture on television and in video games. I would be sad if my kids didn't like The Simpsons, even more sad than if they didn't like opera.
Part of what motivated Kaplan to write his book was a new pile of research suggesting that, on average, becoming a parent robs you of happiness.
It is true that people who have kids are a little bit less happy than otherwise identical people who don't have kids.
As Kaplan sees it, parents make themselves unhappy by stressing out over any and everything. So what does a Brian Kaplan parenting makeover look like?
The easiest step is just getting rid of the stuff that nobody likes, that you're doing based upon some illusory long-run benefit. Like, you go to karate, and that'll teach you discipline, and then you'll do better in school, and then you'll get into a good school, and then you'll become an investment banker, something like that, all you owe it all to karate.
All right, so, Ian, but I'd also go further and say, look, even if your kid does like the activity, if you don't like it, it's okay to say, look, we're not going to do as much of it. I'll take you to soccer, but we're just doing the easy league where people don't take it that seriously. And, you know, I mean, if this prevents you from becoming the next Pele, you know, it's too bad, but, you know, it's really unlikely, so I'm just not that worried about it.
Brian, if you had to pick one activity, I realize you probably don't have any actual date on this, but if you had to pick one activity that you suspect has the biggest overlap of lack of enjoyment of parent and child, what do you think that activity would be?
Music lessons.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Because, again, the hourly commitment is so large, and yet, and the fights that kids have with their parents over doing it seem to be so interminable. And I also know that my dad was forced to do piano lessons until he was 16 and hates music as a result. At least that's his story. Whereas, I'm actually so grateful my parents never had me, never took me to a single music lesson, and I love music. And I think that if they had forced me to, that actually might, I might have actually rebelled and disliked it, which is a kind of parenting effect, although a perverse one. To me, the idea that, like, because you love music, you want to push your kid to become a musician, makes about as much sense as saying, I love action movies, so I'm going to push my kid to become a stunt man.
I can understand if by now, you think Brian Kaplan is just a kook, some kind of an unfeeling, unnurturing monster, an economics textbook made incarnate. But the fact is, that he has his eyes on a different kind of parenting prize. It's not achievement he's after. It's, I think I'm going to cry here, it's warmth.
So there's this great Swedish twin study, where the people, the twins were in their 50s and 60s and 70s, and even when you're in your 70s, whether or not your parents were kind to you stays with you. And the identical twins, fraternal twins, have similar and quite high levels of agreement on these questions, which is the smoking gun for nurture really mattering. So the way that your kids feel about and remember you. And so, you know, like the quality of the relationship, this is where you really have an effect, and where it is very long lasting. It really does last a lifetime. And that to look at your child like a science project is just going to make you unhappy. Or you know, just the same way, if you marry someone saying, look, step one is I'm going to totally change the person after I marry him, or her. That is a recipe for disaster. It's probably not going to work and it's going to really sour the relationship because
people don't like being treated like that. And you know, it makes people, it makes people on, you know, feel bad about themselves and feel bad about you if your concern is to turn them into something different from what they are. So this is the kind of thing where if you really can just adopt, you know, like, accept a little humility, realize, look, you know, this child is a separate person than me, the child is going to want different things than I want, and that's okay, right? That's the, that is part of the beauty of being a human being.
You've got to admit, Brian Kaplan might seem crusty on the outside, but man, once you get beneath the surface, what a softie. And listen to Steve Levitt, self-proclaimed lazy dad, who says obsessive parenting is way, way overrated.
There's a lot of research on unwantedness and tremendous historical data sets from social science over the last 50 years. It's just that if your mother doesn't love you, nothing good will happen to you alive. And so, the lowest common denominator for having a kid who turns out well, is the kid being loved. And if I were president for a day, maybe dictator for a day, one of the first things that I might do would be to make it harder to be a parent, to make the standards for being a parent more difficult. I mean, you should have to demonstrate some proficiency at parenting, perhaps, to be a parent.
So you need to get licensed, let's say?
Yeah, I mean, we make people prove they can parallel park before they can get a driver's license. Maybe we should make people prove that they can interact in a productive way in teaching their kid. Now, there's nothing more un-American than intervening in the family. People just hate the idea of big government looking over their shoulder and telling them how to be parent.
And you're not a big government guy by any means?
No, I hate big government. But on the other hand, I could imagine there being a sensible set of things that you would want to do to make sure that people were ready to be parents.
I think we'd all agree that parental licensing isn't bound to happen anytime soon, nor should it. But you can see where Levitt's going with this, can't you? We probably could all agree on a sensible set of things you'd want to do to be a parent. Heavy drinking and smoking and hitting your kids? Not sensible. But on the other end of the spectrum, fueling the rug rat race and turning into obsessive parents? Probably also not sensible. The evidence suggests that obsessive parenting tends to make parents less happy. And at the end of the day, the best parent is probably the happiest parent.
That's what Stevenson and Wolfers figured out.
In fact, we were trying to get pregnant and we were writing a paper on women's happiness. And I kept cutting the data to try to find myself in the data to say, I won't get less happy. Let me find a mid-30s woman with a PhD with, you know, high household income. You know, I want to show that people like me don't get less happy. And I couldn't find that. I found that the happiness hit was much smaller than it would be for, you know, a 20-year-old high school dropout who was having, becoming a single mom, for sure. Oh, what? What?
But, but we made, I mean, I think we made the leap fully informed, knowing that...
And you made the leap thinking what? Thinking that there's a, there's a happiness penalty to pay and we're willing to pay it for the, for the, for the experience of seeing if it's not so bad?
You make us sound terribly non-rational. Um, yeah, I guess. Like, you don't get too many, I'm 38. I don't get too much longer to figure it out.
I mean, the bottom line is that the data still suggests that people with...
Kids are less happy than people without, even even though among people like us, that happiness hit is smaller, it does suggest they're less happy. So then, why would I do something that I said, well, look?
I mean, you guys are the ultimate rationalists theoretically economists. I mean, you were trained, well, at least you you assume rationality in most people. And one would assume that one who assumes rationality in most people practices rationality, him or herself.
Justin and I joke about the type A things we do, but we don't actually have a type A attitude towards raising Matilda. If, you know, if we feel like going out to dinner and it's not organic, she'll eat off our plate, that's fine. We know that these things don't matter that much. We try not, we've we've traveled with her extensively. We figure she's pretty robust. And and I think that we've tried not to let ourselves have a lot of anxiety over parenting. And I figured that that was part of what was behind this lack of happiness, was the stress and the anxiety and the guilt that people felt. And if we could parent without that, then perhaps we wouldn't be less happy.
I guess it all comes down to expectations. And to me, one basic question, why have kids in the first place? I asked our roundtable why they decided to become parents. Here's Bruce Sacerdote.
What I could certainly tell you, while we had children number two and three, which is that I realized, or we, you know, I think my wife already knew this, but I realized, oh, my goodness, this is the greatest adventure ever. You know, this is so much fun. It's so interesting. You learn so much from them. And you get to do all those things that you wanted to do, that you haven't gotten to do since you were 10. And you get to do it with someone who actually looks up to you and thinks that and wants to take advice from you and things. So it's just a tremendous adventure.
And Brian Kaplan. I would say, like me, before I actually started having kids, that I started feeling something that is unusual for men to feel. So I actually started getting what psychologists call baby fever, where I just had these paternal feelings, like I need to go and have a little child and teach him stuff and raise him and do things with him. And so, I mean, I actually felt this kind of hole in my heart, right? I started wanting to have kids when I was, you know, around 30. But you know, the other thing is, you know, I'll admit, I have a childish personality. I just like doing things that kids like doing. I like cartoons. I like comic books. I like games. I mean, I relate very well to kids. In any ways, I feel like I relate better to kids than to adults, where adults, you know, it's so boring. I'm bored. Let's do something fun. And with kids, you don't have that, you don't have that conflict usually. It's like, okay, yeah, let's do something fun.
Look, just because I'm an economist doesn't mean I can't be deceived by evolution just as strongly as someone else. I mean, I think if you buzzed me when I was with my kids, I'd be just as unhappy as the next guy. But still, in my head, I float around thinking it's great to have four kids. Self-deception, it's a wonderful, powerful force.
Yeah, a wonderful, powerful force. For me, that pretty much sums up parenting, too. So, before we go, let me just say one thing to little Matilda, and to Levitt's kids, Olivia, Amanda, Nicholas, and Sophie, and to the kids of the other economists we heard from today, Sam and Leo, and two Sofias, Aiden and Tristan, and Simon, Sean and Michelle, William and Adelaide, your parents are strange people.
Like it's sick without a faucet.
They have strong feelings about what's best for you, which is, for the most part, leave you alone. So, do us all a favor, would you? Ten years from now, and then, again in 20 years, and again in 30 and 40, give us a call. Tell us how things worked out, would you? Let us know if the sign language paid off, and the piano lessons, and, and what that first Snickers bar tasted like.
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