Have Kids Whenever You Want
The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 45 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast
As is the way of things, there is now a backlash to the backlash regarding when people should have kids. It started with everyone being told they need to have kids in their 20’s. Then there was a backlash saying that waiting to have kids was the best. Now it’s swung around again, with all the cool, hip, edgy people claiming that, actually, our grandparents were right and everyone should have kids in their 20’s.
Can everyone just stop with all of this? When my daughter was born, I was 36 and my wife was 38. And it was great! It was the best decision we ever made. We got to spend our 20’s partying and our 30’s developing our careers to the point where we’re financially stable and I’m self-employed and work from home, which means I can stay home and parent all day instead of sending our daughter to daycare. It’s great. I would have been miserable doing this in my 20’s, but now that I’m older, I’ve mellowed out and am much more suited to parenting.
The new advice says not to do this because your fertility will suffer. Thankfully, Emily Oster examined the evidence for this in her book Expecting Better. First off, she found that most of the data on fertility and age is from the 19th century, so take that for what it’s worth. Second, she found that there is no decline before age 35 and from age 35-40, fertility only declines by ten percent! That’s it! Even over 40, over half of women in one more modern study were able to conceive within a year, and there are a lot more options now with IVF, cryopreservation, and other treatment options. Fertility does not fall off a cliff after 35 like some people will tell you, and even if it does, there are things that can help.
But also? Do what you want! If you want to have kids in your 20’s, go for it. If you want to have a dozen of them, knock yourself out. If you don’t ever want to have kids, that’s great too. Children are a lot of work, aggravation, and money, and are definitely not for everyone. Really, I just want the pregnancy police to shut the fuck up.
Also, there’s a sad undercurrent to a lot of the modern advice specifically from Americans, which is the assumption that if we fail to reproduce, we’re somehow destroying our civilization. This attitude seems to be mostly just plain old racism, which assumes that it’s important for our society to be made up of majority white European genes. That is, of course, very stupid, and if you can’t figure out why, please google “racism bad” and the internet will happily enlighten you. For the non-racists, remember that if our country ever suffers due to lack of population, there are many, many people who would like to live here, and we could always just let them.