I was reading some other columnist who said that the data favored a theory that birth rates drop when parents worry that investing in an additional child will reduce the investment in their existing children. As a theory, this is an "extreme K-selection strategy".
But taking the U.S. as an example... The U.S. has a notoriously underfunded social benefit system. However, the Cato Institute did a study that suggested that this is not as true as the official statistics say, in that there are a large number of situations where people who have less than perhaps 80th percentile income get reductions in what they have to pay for various things. And since these benefits are "in kind" rather than in cash, they don't show up in the usual statistics. The study provided a graph purporting to show the market value of a family's consumption vs. a family's income (in percentile rank). The major feature was that between 0th percentile and 80th percentile, consumption did not increase greatly, between 80th percentile and perhaps 97th percentile, consumption increased rapidly with percentile, and above 97th percentile it increased even faster. OK, the Cato Institute would be biased to discover facts like that.
But if they're right, the consequence is that people lower than the highly-educated professional class wouldn't have much reason to worry that having an additional child would endanger the outcome of existing children because moving down the percentile rankings (either for themselves or their children) wouldn't make much difference. And the reports I've seen are that poor and poor-ish women consider children to be an unalloyed good, they're not anxious about labor tradeoffs between employment and child care. This would encourage an "r-selection" strategy of producing many children.
Whereas once you're above the 80th percentile, relatively small changes in economic position result in relatively large changes in outcome, and the perceived tradeoffs become more critical. And in the well-educated professional class, women are very anxious about the tradeoff between career work and child-care. (Though the studies claim that women today spend more time on their children than in previous generations, even though they do more paid labor as well.)
This suggests that women's worry about children is relatively rational, and driven by situations where reducing investment in a child may have substantial consequences in the child's life trajectory. As a sanity test, I note that Tove has an unusually large number of children (for the social group of her relatives), and so my theory here predicts that Tove has a low level of worry that under-investing her time in a child will substantially harm that child's prospects for prosperity.
>>This suggests that women's worry about children is relatively rational, and driven by situations where reducing investment in a child may have substantial consequences in the child's life trajectory. As a sanity test, I note that Tove has an unusually large number of children (for the social group of her relatives), and so my theory here predicts that Tove has a low level of worry that under-investing her time in a child will substantially harm that child's prospects for prosperity.
I have to admit that I'm not very worried about failing to invest in my children exactly the way society prescribes: In a society where tens of percent of all teenagers are depressed, I think it's time for some risktaking.
Still, I have more time for my children than most parents because I don't have a job. Mothers in general need to find time when they don't work and don't commute to their jobs. Alternatively they need to quit their jobs in order to have more time for their children. Such a move would pull down them and their children to a lower social level. I never had a good job, so I simply found myself with more time than most parents in the first place. Which allows me to have more children before I run out of time.
I've been thinking about this much lately. I'm childless by choice and knew this since I was 6 yrs old, playing with my Betsy-Wetsy doll. It was simply, that given my interests, I couldn't conceive of anything more uninteresting than raising a child. Fortunately I found & married someone with the same preference. My mother confessed to me (before the dementia) that if it hadn't been for my father, she would never have wanted kids.
It's funny to watch you all discuss anxiety (which I agree may be a part of it) and ignore the fundamental inconvenience, risk & pain of pregnancy & childbirth itself as if it were trivial. Human mothers are at more personal risk of pain, damage & death than any other mammal (insert Genesis quote here), and it would be perfectly reasonable to avoid that unless one was strongly attracted to babies & children (as many women are, so I've been told, but I can't even imagine it).
I also had no interest in playing with baby dolls.
>>It's funny to watch you all discuss anxiety (which I agree may be a part of it) and ignore the fundamental inconvenience, risk & pain of pregnancy & childbirth itself as if it were trivial.
My guess is that it is because most people here are male and thereby a bit removed from that aspect of it.
>>Human mothers are at more personal risk of pain, damage & death than any other mammal (insert Genesis quote here), and it would be perfectly reasonable to avoid that unless one was strongly attracted to babies & children (as many women are, so I've been told, but I can't even imagine it).
I have to admit that I like to have a baby. But it is also a kind of stupid sport. I get pregnant, I get sick and extremely exhausted for weeks, then I get in such bad shape that I can barely walk, I get different kinds and degrees of pain...and then, finally, I have a baby and I bounce back into shape again. In that situation, I guess a more normal reaction would be to say "never again". But my reaction is like "Hah! I survived! I will do it again!". Like someone who climbs the same mountain again and again for the thrill of surviving it.
That's an admirable & courageous attitude, and one that I hope will prevail in future generations, even though I have dealt myself out of the gene pool. For millions of years, our ancestresses had next to no choice in the matter, so there's not been much evolutionary pressure to welcome children when there is a choice.
It wasn't just the baby dolls (insert cold open from Barbie here, which was funny in a bleak way that illustrates why many women don't want to have babies), because I got a younger sister a year later to practice on. I love her dearly & we are still close, but the whole thing seemed like a hobby I had no interest in pursuing.
"But isn't that because women have used their power in society to form standards of childcare to fit their own feelings of anxiety?"
This explains pretty much all of family law (which is - rightly - a huge concern for young men considering marriage and especially children); the daycare moral panic of the 80s and 90s with the continued unavailability and unaffordability of daycare today; the "soccer mom" and eventual "helicopter mom" phenomena; the outlawing of free-range-children that persists to this day and undermines their emotional development; and the child care standards that make (more) children unaffordable for so many people.
I always enjoy your posts. Interestingly my demographic (Mormon) has seen fertility declines, but it still is higher than norms. Interestingly, the religion does not teach that it's wrong to use birth control, but instead teaches that we must "multiply and replenish the earth." The worry factor is combatted by the fundamental Mormon teaching that God will provide a way for us to do want he commands. We are taught to put our anxieties on God's shoulders from a very young age. Not sure if that or an extrapolation of that is one way to combat declining fertility. I don't know, but when I got married at a relatively young age my wife wanted kids more than me. I was worried about my abilities to provide for them while still in school and not having money. It was I who struggled to put my anxieties elsewhere.
I purchased the book “Warriors and Worriers” you recommended and am loving it. Thank you for your article on it. I think you’re completely right about the anxiety level of hesitant mothers. When I think about family friends or colleagues with only a single child, they are inevitably some of the most anxious women I have met. Moreover, once they have only a single child, they then paradoxically become even more nervous as they only have “one shot” and no other children in case something goes bad. So they vaxx up, mask up, and do all sorts of neurotic things to keep their one child “safe.” In a funny way, those moms with three or four kids are often very relaxed and nonchalant.
Naive young women want more children but after having their first they get really worried and want less; or anxious women just don't want that many at all from the get go and now that they are free to choose they limit the amount; or women being worried about not providing enough and postpone getting children and maybe never having them?
>>Naive young women want more children but after having their first they get really worried and want less; or anxious women just don't want that many at all from the get go and now that they are free to choose they limit the amount; or women being worried about not providing enough and postpone getting children and maybe never having them?
All the three of them! There are women for everything. Except the first, maybe. Naivety in front of relationships and family life is not really fashionable these days.
In general, I think that people replace children with dogs and cats. Young people who form couples are not suppose to cement their alliance through having a child. Instead, they buy a dog or a cat. That way, they can get an outlet for their caring instincts, without having to take on the astronomical load of responsibility and worrying that is expected from parents. After having cared together for an animal for x years, people then feel ready to have a real human child.
I've begun to think it's not the cause, but often a consequence - like porn use. It mitigates the unhappiness that results from not being able to have the real experience.
What's odd is that the threats children faced in pre-modern societies generally seem like a mother's worry couldn't have alleviated them much. Infectious disease and starvation were the overwhelming reasons why roughly half of children died before adulthood across pre-modern cultures. But it seems like the main way a mother could keep her children from starving was by not having too many of them in the first place (hence the prevalence of infanticide), and before the germ theory of disease there was pretty much nothing a mother could do to protect them from infection.
Is it that Malthusian agricultural societies represented a divergence from the hunter-gatherer norm, which is what actually shaped human instincts? It does seem like violence from males and accidents (both of which seem easier for maternal vigilance to ward off) were bigger threats to hunter-gatherer children, while malnutrition and infectious disease were less common than they later became.
Befire the 20th century children died at such rates that also rather small diffences in survival had an impact. Starvation is seldom absolute. As long as there is something to eat at all, worried and attentive parents are more likely to get it to the child who needscitvthe most (or the child they most want to save).
David Good, son of Anthropologist Kenneth Good and Yanomamö teenage girl Yarima, tells about one thing that actually could be done against infection. In his book The Way Around he writes about an accident when he learned to clear land with a machete in his mother's village. He got a twig or something in his eye and it was badly hurt. He was in extreme pain and couldn't see. A few times a day his "wife" (complicated history) appeared and poured some liquid into his eye, which relieved his pain. After a few rounds of that treatment he realized what is was: breast milk. With only that treatment David's eye got better and he got his vision back.
By the way, I read your bio and saw that you like cetaceans. A year ago I tried to learn everything about cetaceans, especially about their social lives. But I didn't learn much because I found few books for grown-ups on the subject. Do you have any tips on how to learn as much as possible about the social lives of dolphins and whales?
I challenge your premise. The idea that each child would add X amount of anxiety to the mother’s life, therefore she limits the number of children, seems completely backwards to me.
Instead, I’d imagine the model would be something like : Each child has some chance to have a terrible thing happen to it, therefore I’ll have as many kids as possible so at the end of the day I am guaranteed at least a few healthy survivors into adulthood.
If the second model is true, then number of children should rise alongside perceived childhood danger. This has historically been the case and still continues to be the case in the much of the world. Since we don’t see this pattern here in the states, I’d say the fertility situation may have little to do with perceptions of risk and danger.
I almost agree. I only disagree with what I see as a confusion of "anxiety" and "risk". Analyzing risks is a typically male pursuit. Feeling anxious is typically female. Although the feeling of anxiety evolved to handle risks, it works very differently from risk analysis. A rational risk analyzer would follow your model. But anxious mothers are mostly not rational risk analyzers. They are just feeling afraid, more or less like animals feel afraid.
I do think that the number of children people have is positively correlated to perceived risk. The other day Anders and I talked about that Israeli fertility might be unusually high because Israelis have the sense of living a bit dangerously. A missile can come and strike them any time. Probably that makes them less anxious to always use the very latest model of car seat.
Having a child means taking a number of risks. That will be easier in societies where risks are an accepted part of life.
The difference between a risk analyzer and an anxiety “emotion feeler” is a good one. Maybe women in the west have a poorly calibrated anxiety trigger relative to the risks that such an emotion evolved to respond to in the first place.
That said, what’s to explain why women in actually riskier environments seem to experience less anxiety and/or have a more rational response to it relative to women in the west. Why would women in the west be paralyzed by anxiety relative to those in much riskier environments? Sounds like a John Haidt explanation would help here.
Being a worrier myself, I know that anxiety is triggered by what one CAN do. For example, I can be so anxious over the idea of forgetting to turn on the breathing alarm on my baby's bed that I can't sleep without going up and double-checking. If breathing alarms didn't exist, worrying about that would have been meaningless.
That way, worrying is very adaptive. People who worry worry about not doing what they can. From that follows that the more there is to do to fight bad outcomes, the more people worry. It is fully logical for Western women to be paralyzed by anxiety than women in much riskier environments. Because Western women can do so much more for their children. Women in risky environments can't do very much anyway (if they could, they probably wouldn't have been in a risky environment).
Fascinating! MHO is that there are two factors which de-optimize (relative to evolution) women's behavior in contemporary society:
Historically there wasn't much in the way of contraception, and women had frequent sex with their husbands (in order to keep them around), and hence, serial pregnancies. Where "family planning" was done was the selective infanticide of newborns. There's a bunch of interesting psychology around that; the factors that seem relevant to me are: (1) post-partum depression, eliminating the default human over-optimism, allowing the mother to accurately judge the cost/benefit value of *this* child relative to the circumstances, (2) the presence of the baby activating the mother's desire to protect it, (3) the correlation of cuteness in babies with survival chances (chubby cheeks vs. an animal-like face indicating high vs. low birth weight, aversion to physical abnormalities, many genetic abnormalities causing unusual facial appearance). (That last point has surfaced in hospital slang, "FLK" in notes meaning "funny-looking kid", indicating that the baby should be screened for genetic problems.)
The other factor is that the baseline, unavoidable death rate of children in contemporary society is very low. A couple of generations ago (for me) (circa 1890 or 1930), couples in the US would have maybe 4 children and expect 3 to survive to a successful adulthood. Given that reality, mothers' actions based on their worries would be limited by awareness that lots of actions would have insignificant safety consequences relative to the unavoidable risks. Indeed, to the point that the perceived benefits of fretting more about existing children would be less than the perceived benefits of producing more children. Compared to my parents' generation, where the assumption was that one could have 2 children and expect both to survive to adulthood with only "reasonable" amounts of worrying, and the contemporary drive to produce "one perfect child".
That is an interesting theory of post-partum depression. I have always assumed that it is a modern phenomenon arising from the isolated conditions for parents in high-tech society. But when you say it, it makes sense to see it as an adaptive phenomenon.
First: All people need to learn about cowardice, how to identify it in themselves, and have a strategy for overcoming it when they catch themselves behaving like cowards, or excusing cowardice in others. Only some women are getting lessons in this. Many are completely unaware of why cowardice -- their own cowardice or their children's cowardice in particular -- is a problem.
Second: Some worries paradoxically both oppress and empower people at the same time. They give you a permanent _get out of responsibility free_ card whose backside says _because of my feelings_ -- but the price of being able to use the card is to be at the mercy of those feelings. They also make it much easier for a certain type of selfish bully to behave aggressively, and get away with it. When they get called out on their selfishness, they assert that <whatever it was> cannot be selfish, because they didn't do it for themselves, but for *the children*, or whoever is a proxy for the children at the present time. Some of them, misunderstanding cowardice, even think that this aggression is brave.
This essay makes many good points. But I think that its main hypothesis, that women have come to fear having children, is not the explanation of the fertility drop. I think instead that postponing the decision to marry is at the heart of the fertility drop. Instead, look for the causes of women marrying later or not at all.
I think there are several reasons behind the fertility crisis. Worried mothers pressing for perpetually increasing standards for childrearing is not the most important of them. Still, I think it is one of several reasons. When standards for childrearing increases, that imposes higher costs on parents for every child. Everything else being equal, that should have some kind of effect.
I don't have any statistics on this, but anecdotally I have understood that also women in steady relationships tend to postpone childbearing until around 30. At least in many social groups, there is a norm for doing so. So in addition to inspiring people to marry early and marry at all, the norm against having children before one's late 20s has to be reversed too.
After talking to many women "in the wild" (and being one myself), my impression is that the reason for late marriage is the lack of men who are good enough. Why were there more "good enough" men in the past? Because a man was highly necessary, so that even low-quality ones were better than nothing. My grandma's sister had a small inborn foot problem; to get her married, her parents bought off a poor man in the village - they had to give him so much money and stuff from their farm that not much was left for the younger siblings of the "happy bride". The guy was a drunk with a bad temper; fortunately for the family he was later imprisoned for assault. So the man was of low quality, but at least she got to be a married woman able to have legal children, which was better than nothing. Nowadays, in welfare countries, a low quality man is worse than nothing, even a good-but-not-perfect man is worse than nothing for many. Therefore, like you say, women keep looking and postpone marriage.
However, even though late marriage is part of the fertility crisis, the preference for smaller numbers of kids is the other half of it. We know how many children young women dream of having (if they imagine their perfect future) in Europe and US, there are poll results. If I remember correctly, it's somewhere around two on average, with slight regional differences. Much less than five. If all women realized their perfect number of offspring we still would have no crisis. But the unfortunate lack of perfect men reduces the number of actual kids to a crisis level.
Theodore Dalrymple (rightly) complained a lot of the bad taste for male partners among English lower class women. Did well-meaning people like him cause the fertility crisis through criticizing women for having children with substandard men?
Well, a crisis for fertility (and thereby for our civilization) doesn't need to be a crisis for women. It can be the reverse. Many flourishing societies have treated women abysmally. We have yet to see a gender equal society that doesn't get outnumbered by patriarchal societies.
I was reading some other columnist who said that the data favored a theory that birth rates drop when parents worry that investing in an additional child will reduce the investment in their existing children. As a theory, this is an "extreme K-selection strategy".
But taking the U.S. as an example... The U.S. has a notoriously underfunded social benefit system. However, the Cato Institute did a study that suggested that this is not as true as the official statistics say, in that there are a large number of situations where people who have less than perhaps 80th percentile income get reductions in what they have to pay for various things. And since these benefits are "in kind" rather than in cash, they don't show up in the usual statistics. The study provided a graph purporting to show the market value of a family's consumption vs. a family's income (in percentile rank). The major feature was that between 0th percentile and 80th percentile, consumption did not increase greatly, between 80th percentile and perhaps 97th percentile, consumption increased rapidly with percentile, and above 97th percentile it increased even faster. OK, the Cato Institute would be biased to discover facts like that.
But if they're right, the consequence is that people lower than the highly-educated professional class wouldn't have much reason to worry that having an additional child would endanger the outcome of existing children because moving down the percentile rankings (either for themselves or their children) wouldn't make much difference. And the reports I've seen are that poor and poor-ish women consider children to be an unalloyed good, they're not anxious about labor tradeoffs between employment and child care. This would encourage an "r-selection" strategy of producing many children.
Whereas once you're above the 80th percentile, relatively small changes in economic position result in relatively large changes in outcome, and the perceived tradeoffs become more critical. And in the well-educated professional class, women are very anxious about the tradeoff between career work and child-care. (Though the studies claim that women today spend more time on their children than in previous generations, even though they do more paid labor as well.)
This suggests that women's worry about children is relatively rational, and driven by situations where reducing investment in a child may have substantial consequences in the child's life trajectory. As a sanity test, I note that Tove has an unusually large number of children (for the social group of her relatives), and so my theory here predicts that Tove has a low level of worry that under-investing her time in a child will substantially harm that child's prospects for prosperity.
I located the "other columnist": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2024 "What beliefs correlate with low fertility rates? You might expect to find socially liberal beliefs (like that women need to focus on their careers), but Aria Babu says the data don’t support this [https://www.ariababu.co.uk/p/actually-social-conservatism-probably]. Instead, the biggest driver of low fertility [https://substack.com/home/post/p-139013458] seems to be a belief that taking care of kids is a lot of work and you’ll screw them up if you cut any corners."
I think she is into something! People make decisions based on what they believe more than what they experience.
>>This suggests that women's worry about children is relatively rational, and driven by situations where reducing investment in a child may have substantial consequences in the child's life trajectory. As a sanity test, I note that Tove has an unusually large number of children (for the social group of her relatives), and so my theory here predicts that Tove has a low level of worry that under-investing her time in a child will substantially harm that child's prospects for prosperity.
I have to admit that I'm not very worried about failing to invest in my children exactly the way society prescribes: In a society where tens of percent of all teenagers are depressed, I think it's time for some risktaking.
Still, I have more time for my children than most parents because I don't have a job. Mothers in general need to find time when they don't work and don't commute to their jobs. Alternatively they need to quit their jobs in order to have more time for their children. Such a move would pull down them and their children to a lower social level. I never had a good job, so I simply found myself with more time than most parents in the first place. Which allows me to have more children before I run out of time.
I've been thinking about this much lately. I'm childless by choice and knew this since I was 6 yrs old, playing with my Betsy-Wetsy doll. It was simply, that given my interests, I couldn't conceive of anything more uninteresting than raising a child. Fortunately I found & married someone with the same preference. My mother confessed to me (before the dementia) that if it hadn't been for my father, she would never have wanted kids.
It's funny to watch you all discuss anxiety (which I agree may be a part of it) and ignore the fundamental inconvenience, risk & pain of pregnancy & childbirth itself as if it were trivial. Human mothers are at more personal risk of pain, damage & death than any other mammal (insert Genesis quote here), and it would be perfectly reasonable to avoid that unless one was strongly attracted to babies & children (as many women are, so I've been told, but I can't even imagine it).
I also had no interest in playing with baby dolls.
>>It's funny to watch you all discuss anxiety (which I agree may be a part of it) and ignore the fundamental inconvenience, risk & pain of pregnancy & childbirth itself as if it were trivial.
My guess is that it is because most people here are male and thereby a bit removed from that aspect of it.
>>Human mothers are at more personal risk of pain, damage & death than any other mammal (insert Genesis quote here), and it would be perfectly reasonable to avoid that unless one was strongly attracted to babies & children (as many women are, so I've been told, but I can't even imagine it).
I have to admit that I like to have a baby. But it is also a kind of stupid sport. I get pregnant, I get sick and extremely exhausted for weeks, then I get in such bad shape that I can barely walk, I get different kinds and degrees of pain...and then, finally, I have a baby and I bounce back into shape again. In that situation, I guess a more normal reaction would be to say "never again". But my reaction is like "Hah! I survived! I will do it again!". Like someone who climbs the same mountain again and again for the thrill of surviving it.
That's an admirable & courageous attitude, and one that I hope will prevail in future generations, even though I have dealt myself out of the gene pool. For millions of years, our ancestresses had next to no choice in the matter, so there's not been much evolutionary pressure to welcome children when there is a choice.
It wasn't just the baby dolls (insert cold open from Barbie here, which was funny in a bleak way that illustrates why many women don't want to have babies), because I got a younger sister a year later to practice on. I love her dearly & we are still close, but the whole thing seemed like a hobby I had no interest in pursuing.
"But isn't that because women have used their power in society to form standards of childcare to fit their own feelings of anxiety?"
This explains pretty much all of family law (which is - rightly - a huge concern for young men considering marriage and especially children); the daycare moral panic of the 80s and 90s with the continued unavailability and unaffordability of daycare today; the "soccer mom" and eventual "helicopter mom" phenomena; the outlawing of free-range-children that persists to this day and undermines their emotional development; and the child care standards that make (more) children unaffordable for so many people.
I always enjoy your posts. Interestingly my demographic (Mormon) has seen fertility declines, but it still is higher than norms. Interestingly, the religion does not teach that it's wrong to use birth control, but instead teaches that we must "multiply and replenish the earth." The worry factor is combatted by the fundamental Mormon teaching that God will provide a way for us to do want he commands. We are taught to put our anxieties on God's shoulders from a very young age. Not sure if that or an extrapolation of that is one way to combat declining fertility. I don't know, but when I got married at a relatively young age my wife wanted kids more than me. I was worried about my abilities to provide for them while still in school and not having money. It was I who struggled to put my anxieties elsewhere.
Again, great post. Always gets me thinking.
I purchased the book “Warriors and Worriers” you recommended and am loving it. Thank you for your article on it. I think you’re completely right about the anxiety level of hesitant mothers. When I think about family friends or colleagues with only a single child, they are inevitably some of the most anxious women I have met. Moreover, once they have only a single child, they then paradoxically become even more nervous as they only have “one shot” and no other children in case something goes bad. So they vaxx up, mask up, and do all sorts of neurotic things to keep their one child “safe.” In a funny way, those moms with three or four kids are often very relaxed and nonchalant.
Insightful article!
What do you think is the causal story here?
Naive young women want more children but after having their first they get really worried and want less; or anxious women just don't want that many at all from the get go and now that they are free to choose they limit the amount; or women being worried about not providing enough and postpone getting children and maybe never having them?
Maybe something else entirely?
>>Naive young women want more children but after having their first they get really worried and want less; or anxious women just don't want that many at all from the get go and now that they are free to choose they limit the amount; or women being worried about not providing enough and postpone getting children and maybe never having them?
All the three of them! There are women for everything. Except the first, maybe. Naivety in front of relationships and family life is not really fashionable these days.
In general, I think that people replace children with dogs and cats. Young people who form couples are not suppose to cement their alliance through having a child. Instead, they buy a dog or a cat. That way, they can get an outlet for their caring instincts, without having to take on the astronomical load of responsibility and worrying that is expected from parents. After having cared together for an animal for x years, people then feel ready to have a real human child.
It would be quite funny if the main cause of the global fertility decline of the past 50 years is cute dogs!
I've begun to think it's not the cause, but often a consequence - like porn use. It mitigates the unhappiness that results from not being able to have the real experience.
Well, cute hedgehogs probably deserve some of the blame too:
https://putanumonit.com/2017/03/12/goddess-spreadsheet/
What's odd is that the threats children faced in pre-modern societies generally seem like a mother's worry couldn't have alleviated them much. Infectious disease and starvation were the overwhelming reasons why roughly half of children died before adulthood across pre-modern cultures. But it seems like the main way a mother could keep her children from starving was by not having too many of them in the first place (hence the prevalence of infanticide), and before the germ theory of disease there was pretty much nothing a mother could do to protect them from infection.
Is it that Malthusian agricultural societies represented a divergence from the hunter-gatherer norm, which is what actually shaped human instincts? It does seem like violence from males and accidents (both of which seem easier for maternal vigilance to ward off) were bigger threats to hunter-gatherer children, while malnutrition and infectious disease were less common than they later became.
Befire the 20th century children died at such rates that also rather small diffences in survival had an impact. Starvation is seldom absolute. As long as there is something to eat at all, worried and attentive parents are more likely to get it to the child who needscitvthe most (or the child they most want to save).
David Good, son of Anthropologist Kenneth Good and Yanomamö teenage girl Yarima, tells about one thing that actually could be done against infection. In his book The Way Around he writes about an accident when he learned to clear land with a machete in his mother's village. He got a twig or something in his eye and it was badly hurt. He was in extreme pain and couldn't see. A few times a day his "wife" (complicated history) appeared and poured some liquid into his eye, which relieved his pain. After a few rounds of that treatment he realized what is was: breast milk. With only that treatment David's eye got better and he got his vision back.
By the way, I read your bio and saw that you like cetaceans. A year ago I tried to learn everything about cetaceans, especially about their social lives. But I didn't learn much because I found few books for grown-ups on the subject. Do you have any tips on how to learn as much as possible about the social lives of dolphins and whales?
I challenge your premise. The idea that each child would add X amount of anxiety to the mother’s life, therefore she limits the number of children, seems completely backwards to me.
Instead, I’d imagine the model would be something like : Each child has some chance to have a terrible thing happen to it, therefore I’ll have as many kids as possible so at the end of the day I am guaranteed at least a few healthy survivors into adulthood.
If the second model is true, then number of children should rise alongside perceived childhood danger. This has historically been the case and still continues to be the case in the much of the world. Since we don’t see this pattern here in the states, I’d say the fertility situation may have little to do with perceptions of risk and danger.
I almost agree. I only disagree with what I see as a confusion of "anxiety" and "risk". Analyzing risks is a typically male pursuit. Feeling anxious is typically female. Although the feeling of anxiety evolved to handle risks, it works very differently from risk analysis. A rational risk analyzer would follow your model. But anxious mothers are mostly not rational risk analyzers. They are just feeling afraid, more or less like animals feel afraid.
I do think that the number of children people have is positively correlated to perceived risk. The other day Anders and I talked about that Israeli fertility might be unusually high because Israelis have the sense of living a bit dangerously. A missile can come and strike them any time. Probably that makes them less anxious to always use the very latest model of car seat.
Having a child means taking a number of risks. That will be easier in societies where risks are an accepted part of life.
The difference between a risk analyzer and an anxiety “emotion feeler” is a good one. Maybe women in the west have a poorly calibrated anxiety trigger relative to the risks that such an emotion evolved to respond to in the first place.
That said, what’s to explain why women in actually riskier environments seem to experience less anxiety and/or have a more rational response to it relative to women in the west. Why would women in the west be paralyzed by anxiety relative to those in much riskier environments? Sounds like a John Haidt explanation would help here.
Being a worrier myself, I know that anxiety is triggered by what one CAN do. For example, I can be so anxious over the idea of forgetting to turn on the breathing alarm on my baby's bed that I can't sleep without going up and double-checking. If breathing alarms didn't exist, worrying about that would have been meaningless.
That way, worrying is very adaptive. People who worry worry about not doing what they can. From that follows that the more there is to do to fight bad outcomes, the more people worry. It is fully logical for Western women to be paralyzed by anxiety than women in much riskier environments. Because Western women can do so much more for their children. Women in risky environments can't do very much anyway (if they could, they probably wouldn't have been in a risky environment).
in many European countries the start of WW2 was accompanied by a substantial fertility increase. European baby boom started in 1940. Humans are weird.
Fascinating! MHO is that there are two factors which de-optimize (relative to evolution) women's behavior in contemporary society:
Historically there wasn't much in the way of contraception, and women had frequent sex with their husbands (in order to keep them around), and hence, serial pregnancies. Where "family planning" was done was the selective infanticide of newborns. There's a bunch of interesting psychology around that; the factors that seem relevant to me are: (1) post-partum depression, eliminating the default human over-optimism, allowing the mother to accurately judge the cost/benefit value of *this* child relative to the circumstances, (2) the presence of the baby activating the mother's desire to protect it, (3) the correlation of cuteness in babies with survival chances (chubby cheeks vs. an animal-like face indicating high vs. low birth weight, aversion to physical abnormalities, many genetic abnormalities causing unusual facial appearance). (That last point has surfaced in hospital slang, "FLK" in notes meaning "funny-looking kid", indicating that the baby should be screened for genetic problems.)
The other factor is that the baseline, unavoidable death rate of children in contemporary society is very low. A couple of generations ago (for me) (circa 1890 or 1930), couples in the US would have maybe 4 children and expect 3 to survive to a successful adulthood. Given that reality, mothers' actions based on their worries would be limited by awareness that lots of actions would have insignificant safety consequences relative to the unavoidable risks. Indeed, to the point that the perceived benefits of fretting more about existing children would be less than the perceived benefits of producing more children. Compared to my parents' generation, where the assumption was that one could have 2 children and expect both to survive to adulthood with only "reasonable" amounts of worrying, and the contemporary drive to produce "one perfect child".
That is an interesting theory of post-partum depression. I have always assumed that it is a modern phenomenon arising from the isolated conditions for parents in high-tech society. But when you say it, it makes sense to see it as an adaptive phenomenon.
First: All people need to learn about cowardice, how to identify it in themselves, and have a strategy for overcoming it when they catch themselves behaving like cowards, or excusing cowardice in others. Only some women are getting lessons in this. Many are completely unaware of why cowardice -- their own cowardice or their children's cowardice in particular -- is a problem.
Second: Some worries paradoxically both oppress and empower people at the same time. They give you a permanent _get out of responsibility free_ card whose backside says _because of my feelings_ -- but the price of being able to use the card is to be at the mercy of those feelings. They also make it much easier for a certain type of selfish bully to behave aggressively, and get away with it. When they get called out on their selfishness, they assert that <whatever it was> cannot be selfish, because they didn't do it for themselves, but for *the children*, or whoever is a proxy for the children at the present time. Some of them, misunderstanding cowardice, even think that this aggression is brave.
Yes. So many people who claim to care about children only really care about their own feelings.
This essay makes many good points. But I think that its main hypothesis, that women have come to fear having children, is not the explanation of the fertility drop. I think instead that postponing the decision to marry is at the heart of the fertility drop. Instead, look for the causes of women marrying later or not at all.
I think there are several reasons behind the fertility crisis. Worried mothers pressing for perpetually increasing standards for childrearing is not the most important of them. Still, I think it is one of several reasons. When standards for childrearing increases, that imposes higher costs on parents for every child. Everything else being equal, that should have some kind of effect.
I don't have any statistics on this, but anecdotally I have understood that also women in steady relationships tend to postpone childbearing until around 30. At least in many social groups, there is a norm for doing so. So in addition to inspiring people to marry early and marry at all, the norm against having children before one's late 20s has to be reversed too.
After talking to many women "in the wild" (and being one myself), my impression is that the reason for late marriage is the lack of men who are good enough. Why were there more "good enough" men in the past? Because a man was highly necessary, so that even low-quality ones were better than nothing. My grandma's sister had a small inborn foot problem; to get her married, her parents bought off a poor man in the village - they had to give him so much money and stuff from their farm that not much was left for the younger siblings of the "happy bride". The guy was a drunk with a bad temper; fortunately for the family he was later imprisoned for assault. So the man was of low quality, but at least she got to be a married woman able to have legal children, which was better than nothing. Nowadays, in welfare countries, a low quality man is worse than nothing, even a good-but-not-perfect man is worse than nothing for many. Therefore, like you say, women keep looking and postpone marriage.
However, even though late marriage is part of the fertility crisis, the preference for smaller numbers of kids is the other half of it. We know how many children young women dream of having (if they imagine their perfect future) in Europe and US, there are poll results. If I remember correctly, it's somewhere around two on average, with slight regional differences. Much less than five. If all women realized their perfect number of offspring we still would have no crisis. But the unfortunate lack of perfect men reduces the number of actual kids to a crisis level.
I just read this article from 2004 (Rob Henderson linked to it).
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-frivolity-of-evil/
Theodore Dalrymple (rightly) complained a lot of the bad taste for male partners among English lower class women. Did well-meaning people like him cause the fertility crisis through criticizing women for having children with substandard men?
Or should we even call it a crisis if women are not tethered to undesirable men?
Well, a crisis for fertility (and thereby for our civilization) doesn't need to be a crisis for women. It can be the reverse. Many flourishing societies have treated women abysmally. We have yet to see a gender equal society that doesn't get outnumbered by patriarchal societies.