Reddit Reddit reviews Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

We found 14 Reddit comments about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think
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14 Reddit comments about Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think:

u/Peetrius · 22 pointsr/Futurology

You'd be surprised

>In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, contrarian economist Bryan Caplan argues that we've needlessly turned parenting into an unpleasant chore, and don't know the real plusses and minuses of having kids. Parents today spend more time investing in their kids than ever, but twin and adoption research shows that upbringing is much less important than we imagine, especially in the long-run. Kids aren't like clay that parents mold for life; they're more like flexible plastic that pops back to its original shape once you relax your grip. These revelations are wonderful news for anyone with kids. Being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think—so instead of struggling to change your children, you can safely relax and enjoy your journey together. Raise your children in the way that feels right for you; they'll still probably turn out just fine. Indeed, as Caplan strikingly argues, modern parents should have more kids. Parents who endure needless toil and sacrifice are overcharging themselves for every child. Once you escape the drudgery and worry that other parents take for granted, bringing another child into the world becomes a much better deal. You might want to stock up

u/naraburns · 13 pointsr/slatestarcodex

I strongly suspect the argument that "having children increases your carbon footprint" is just totally specious. Bringing one less person into the world doesn't decrease your carbon footprint, it decreases the number of people. The carbon footprint in question isn't your carbon footprint, it's your child's carbon footprint.

Similar reasoning concludes that one way to decrease your carbon footprint is to just murder more people. In fact, if you murder more than one very young child, you've just offset yourself plus some number of your friends!

Of course there are other reasons to not murder people, and it would be silly to not take those into account! Likewise, there are many good reasons to have children, and so it would be silly to not take those into account also. If you want to think very seriously about those, I recommend Bryan Caplan's book on the subject.

u/nullshun · 11 pointsr/TheMotte

> I also dearly wish there were a way to encourage wealthy and educated people to fucking reproduce

Cutting education is a promising start. Not only does school directly delay family formation, but the whole premise of education is that successful people are made through an expensive, arduous training process, when all the evidence shows that genes are more important.

You can't pay a 30-year-old MA enough to settle down and have kids in the next few years, when she's just been through 25 years of school, and been brainwashed into thinking that she has to put her kids through the same, as well as act as their personal servant for decades in order to instill the "love of learning" responsible for her own success (because it definitely wasn't genetic!). You especially can't pay people with high earning potential enough to do this.

We should reassure people that their children will turn out similar to themselves, due to genetics, with no special effort on their part. See Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. And while you're agreeing with Bryan Caplan, you might also want to check out his case for open borders, especially the part focusing on IQ heritability.

u/SammyD1st · 6 pointsr/Parenting

I think you would enjoy the book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think"

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616

Focus on the later half of the title, not the first.

u/honeypuppy · 5 pointsr/EffectiveAltruism

Bryan Caplan would probably say so.
(He's also written a book called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, which (predictably) focuses on the selfish reasons as well.)

>Because much government spending is non-rival, estimates of the fiscal externality of a new baby are positive and large. The highest-quality study is probably Wolf et al (forthcoming).[22] For the United States, it calculates a positive externality of $217,000 $83,000 [figured modified by me to show correction] in 2009 dollars—roughly five times per-capita GDP.[23]

However, you might reasonably consider yourself likely to have above-average children, in which case the fiscal externalities would likely be larger. There are many other possible positive externalities too - your child may not become an effective altruist, but they might nonetheless still have a good chance of having a positive impact. There are negative externalities (such as an increased carbon footprint) too, but it's important to not give these considerations undue weight (as some people seem to).

u/cavedave · 3 pointsr/ireland

Selfish Reasons to have more kids is a good book on twin studies and what they tell us about raising kids.

"In the 1950s, the Holt family set up a charity to help American families adopt disadvantaged Koreans. The adopting families were unusually diverse: Applicants had to be married for at least three years, 25-45 years old, have no more than four children, and have earnings 25% or more above the poverty line. Decades later, economist Bruce Sacerdote tracked down over 1600 of the Korean adoptees to see how much their adopting families influenced their success. The effects were tiny. If a mother had an extra year of education, her Korean adoptee finished five extra weeks of school; if a family had one extra child, its adoptee finished six fewer weeks of school. Richer families and richer neighborhoods made no difference at all. Another study of over two thousand Swedish adoptees found that moms mattered even less, and dads mattered a little more."

Basically, once a family is into kids enough to want to adopt one, genetics plays a much more important role than parents education or income levels.

u/Nashvillain2 · 3 pointsr/California

I recommend you lead the charge in solving that supposed problem.

u/Keeping_itreal · 3 pointsr/MGTOW

Guys here have given you excellent advice, but there is another option, for those of us who are still young in the Western World, or ridiculously wealthy in the rest.

>There is no need to despair.

>Look up surrogacy in Nepal and Cambodia. I was exited about India because it is cheaper, among other reasons, but I've been told that single men are not allowed to, by law. Mexico and Ukraine are shit when it comes to surrogacy, so don't go there.

>My research so far indicates that it will cost you about $40,000-$50,000 dollars. I haven't done that much so there may be a way for you to go a little lower.

>This may seem like a lot of money but you are young, and you are MGTOW. This means that you have basically zero expenses for the foreseeable future, in comparison to your non-mgtow buddies. Put $220 in a savings account each month for the next twenty years and affording the surrogacy will be a piece of cake. Here is a good place to start.

>Work hard, get a great job and you will get the family you wanted, without the threat of divorce rape/alimony/child support. But don't kill yourself over it. Even if you fail, kids are not all that great. You won't be missing much.

>On the other hand, should you succeed, here is something to make raising it a whole lot easier and more compatible with MGTOW.

u/mcclungRVA · 3 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

If you enjoyed "The Nurture Assumption," you should check out Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."

u/Minarchist77 · 2 pointsr/Libertarian

Here's a great book that you can use to convince your husband. It is written by libertarian economist, Bryan Caplan.

u/DaMilan · 2 pointsr/de

GANZ WICHTIG:
Pädagogen/Erziehungsratgeber und ähnliches sind NICHT dein Freund und schon gar nicht der deines Kindes. Sie verfolgen oft ganz eigene Ziele. Auch wenn man hin und wieder faktisch richtige und nützliche Informationen bzgl. Kindererziehung erfährt, wird dies durch die Menge an Falschinformationen ganz schnell wieder aufgewogen.

Lies das hier, wenn du englisch kannst:
https://www.amazon.de/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501526273&sr=8-1&keywords=selfish+reasons+to+have+kids

Eines der wenigen Bücher zu dem Thema mit "harter", wissenschaftlicher herangehensweise und auch eines, welches dir wirklichen Nutzen bringt.

Falls du kein (gutes) Englisch kannst:
1: Dein Erziehungsstil bewirkt langfristig bei deinem Kind weniger als du denkst.
2: Du selbst auch nicht.
3: Relaxe und hab Spaß bei der Erziehung, Stress ist außer in Einzelfällen unnötig.

u/LivelyLinden · 2 pointsr/January2020bumpers

I'm reading Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids. I find the message incredibly heartening and uplifting. He smashes a lot of the myths underlying the modern intensive parenting style, and offers practical, fact-based ways to make child-rearing a LOT less stressful and high-stakes, while offering the refreshing-these-days view that kids are actually fun and worthwhile to have around even from a selfish perspective.

It reinforces a lot of my preconceived ideas (I've always been a fan of free-range, anti-tiger-mom type parenting) but it's nice to have the data to back me up.

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NPR overview of the book here

u/failed2quitreddit · -14 pointsr/financialindependence

Economist Bryan Caplan disagrees. If you're on the fence, then just have one. Basically, he says you should have one more than the number you think you want. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids