I wrote a comment on the blog, because to me Kat Wood’s reasoning is so off the mark.
To me the upside of having kids is the deep emotional connection to them. Everything else is comparatively irrelevant. Or maybe a better phrasing would be that almost all upsides of having kids are downstream of that emotional connection.
Babysitting is like parenting except without the same emotional connection. If you remove the emotional connection from an experience does the result allow you to evaluate the original experience? No, it becomes something very different.
It boggles my mind that so many women who have strong emotional reactions to little children manage to convince themselves that they don’t want any. Like, if you react like that to a random toddler … the emotion is going to be a hundred times stronger when it’s your kid.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
Given all the effort that Kat describes having spent on figuring out the question, and even doing empirical tests that led her to reverse her original decision, this feels like a very weird characterization.
Do you think that the advice she gives describes an open ended decision making process that is going to help people figure out what is the right choice for them?
I think most people should have kids. I also think most people will be led away from having kids if they follow her advice. I certainly would have been.
I think it is pretty clear that all the advice she gives is strongly colored by her own eventual conclusion. So even if her conclusion wasn’t post-hoc, her advice—the content, the framing, the situations she describes, the media she recommends—is.
I consider the interview to be large passive negative impact—to use her own terminology.
I wrote a comment on the blog, because to me Kat Wood’s reasoning is so off the mark.
To me the upside of having kids is the deep emotional connection to them. Everything else is comparatively irrelevant. Or maybe a better phrasing would be that almost all upsides of having kids are downstream of that emotional connection.
Babysitting is like parenting except without the same emotional connection. If you remove the emotional connection from an experience does the result allow you to evaluate the original experience? No, it becomes something very different.
It boggles my mind that so many women who have strong emotional reactions to little children manage to convince themselves that they don’t want any. Like, if you react like that to a random toddler … the emotion is going to be a hundred times stronger when it’s your kid.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
Given all the effort that Kat describes having spent on figuring out the question, and even doing empirical tests that led her to reverse her original decision, this feels like a very weird characterization.
Do you think that the advice she gives describes an open ended decision making process that is going to help people figure out what is the right choice for them?
I think most people should have kids. I also think most people will be led away from having kids if they follow her advice. I certainly would have been.
I think it is pretty clear that all the advice she gives is strongly colored by her own eventual conclusion. So even if her conclusion wasn’t post-hoc, her advice—the content, the framing, the situations she describes, the media she recommends—is.
I consider the interview to be large passive negative impact—to use her own terminology.