Parenting versus career choice thinking in teenagers
This is a somewhat modified version of a Facebook post I made a few days ago, incorporating some of the comments there. I think the Less Wrong readership may have interesting thoughts on the subject.
In recent times, especially in the developed world and among higher socio-economic status families everywhere in the world, it’s common for teenagers (and even younger children) to be encouraged to think in systematic ways about their career choice, but it’s relatively rare for them to be encouraged to think in systematic ways about how many children they’ll have or how they’ll raise their children. A lot of teenagers do have views on the subject of children, but they’re not encouraged to have views, and they’re not encouraged to refine those views. With career choice, although there’s still probably a lot of room for improvement in the quality of advice and guidance offered, people at least in principle acknowledge its importance.
What do you think explains the disparity? Here are some explanations with my thoughts on them:
Career choice is (believed to be) more important than the choice of how many children to have and how to raise them: For people who expect to generate a huge amount of value in their careers, this is probably true, because if they do have children, the children are likely to be less exceptional (regression to the mean). However, for most people, this probably isn’t the case: having children could be one of their main forms of contribution to society.
Career choice requires planning from a younger age, because it requires selection of subjects to study in school and college: There’s more lead time needed for career choice, whereas it takes only nine months to have a child. This seems to work as a reasonable explanation for people who are inclined to have very few kids, but it doesn’t work for people who are interested in keeping open the option of having a large number of kids. Also, as they say, it takes two to have a baby, so one does need to plan somewhat in advance. Finally, the choice of when to have kids can affect one’s selection of career as well.
Choices related to children are believed to be something that are best made after one has selected a life partner to discuss them with, and unilateral thinking is considered counterproductive: There’s probably some truth to this. But the point could be made in reverse as well: in order to make sure one selects life partners well, it makes sense to think of one’s choices and desires regarding children before one gets into a serious relationship so that one can check for compatibility on that front.
Teenagers aren’t sufficiently mature (physically, mentally, emotionally) to think about childbearing and childrearing choices in a meaningful manner, and/or their views on the subject are much more likely to change, relative to their views on career choices.
People will have children anyway, because it’s part of their biological instincts: This is sort of true, but not quite. Many countries in Europe and East Asia have fertility rates well below replacement. This includes some highly developed countries such as Singapore (TFR ~1.3), Germany and Japan (TFR ~1.4), as well as some middle-income countries such as China (TFR~1.6-1.8) and Eastern European countries. With the exception of Germany, most of these countries still have desired fertility greater than 2, but people aren’t generally able to achieve their fertility desires—partly because they keep delaying childrearing. Moreover, highly educated women often have similar or even higher reported ideal family size although their completed fertility is lower (see this PDF and the linked references here for more).
Thinking about career instead of children signals high status: This overlaps somewhat with the other points, but differs in that it’s a more cynical take: perhaps thinking about one’s career as opposed to one’s family signals one as high-status (by distinguishing oneself from demographic or socio-economic groups where people marry early or have out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies frequently). Something like “while other women were dropping out of high school to have babies, I was baby working hard to get into Harvard so that I could then have a great career in finance after that.” Or, “while the other men were settling down for easy-to-get jobs and thinking of marrying to settle down and have kids, I’m working hard to fulfill my ambition to become a writer. I won’t let thoughts of family distract me for now.”
What do you think of these explanations? Any others I’m missing? Correctness of the explanations at a factual level? Importance as explanations?
PS: Some of my other recent posts have been based on stuff I wrote up in connection with working for Cognito Mentoring, but this one isn’t, though it’s possible it might inform my later work for Cognito Mentoring.
If we’re talking about parental encouragement, there’s another issue. It’s much easier as a parent to admit to having made a mistake in one’s career choice and encourage one’s child to do better than it is for a parent to admit to their child’s face that they made a mistake in their reproductive decision. So if you engage in serious discussion of rational reproductive decisions, some pretty unpleasant conclusions may be forthcoming...
Very good point. Moreover, there is a social norm of not interfering with others’ parenting, except in cases of outright abuse. A parent can’t even point out someone else to their child as an example of bad parenting without committing a socially hostile act.
Having children is easy. Any idiot can do it; many of them do; some of them have dozen children.
Is it more beneficial for a society when smart people have children? Yes, it is… but good luck explaining why without saying something politically offensive.
Are people with better genes and higher IQ inherently more worthy? Nice try, Hitler! Do smart people provide better education and other support for their children? This should be solved by social engineering; we should provide better schools for everyone, maybe give everyone free books, etc.
If you are not allowed to specifically praise smart people (and only smart people!) for having more children, then having children cannot provide the same status for smart people as their careers can. A smart person in IT can proudly say they do something that 99% of people don’t understand. They even don’t have to say it; everyone already knows. A smart parent with well-mannered and educated smart children… is still perceived on the same level as an average parent with the same number of average children. You can do a better work, but most people won’t recognize it, so it will not give you status. There is no “best parent in the city” award you could show everyone; no official ladder to climb.
You cannot say “X is better at being a parent than Y” without saying “children of X are better than children of Y”. And the latter is very offensive. “My child is better than your child” is more offensive than “my understanding of quantum physics is better than your understanding of quantum physics”.
It seems like there’s an easy way around this problem. Praise people who are responsible and financially well-off for having more kids. These traits are correlated with good genes and IQ, so it’ll have the same effect.
It seems like we already do this to some extent. I hear others condemning people with who are irresponsible and low-income for having too many children fairly frequently. It’s just that we fail to extend this behavior in the other direction, to praising responsible people for having children.
I’m not sure why this is. It could be for one of the reasons listed in the OP. Or it could just be because the tendency to praise and the tendency to condemn are not correlated.
I’d really like to see a qualified rational explanation of this. I agree that teenagers have different goals than ‘mature’ adults but that doesn’t mean that they are irrational. Different? Sure. Causing social disturbances? Probably. But not meaningful? Come on.
I can’t help but think that some of this has to do with feminism, at least in the case of girl teenagers. I hear a lot of people emphasizing that having children is a choice, and it’s not for everyone. People are constantly saying things like “Having children is a huge responsibility and you have to think very carefully whether you want to do it.” The people saying this seem to have a sense that they’re counterbalancing societal pressures that say everyone should have children, or that women should focus on raising kids instead of having a career.
It’s interesting, though, that no one applies the same advice to careers. (At least, not in my demographic.) No one says “Following a career path is a huge responsibility, so think very carefully whether you want to do it.” A lot of people say “think very carefully about which career you want” but not “think carefully about whether you want a career at all”.
I wonder, also, if there’s gender differences. Do parents talk to male teenagers about their careers, and female teenagers about their future children, or anything like that?
A career is often equated with having a job. Or rather, a stable job, job security, a good salary that increases with time, etc. Therefore, unless you are independently wealthy, having a job / career is seen as both good and necessary: the alternative is to be poor.
On the other hand, having children is related mostly to happiness, satisfaction, and perhaps the social life. We know some people have no children and are still happy. So it’s much easier to accept that having children is optional for others (whether or not you want it for yourself or for your children).
There are certainly negative concepts associated with being childless-by-choice, but not as many or as strong as those associated with being poor-by-choice.
Sure, but that understanding is very specific to our culture. It’s only recently that we’ve come to see procreation as “recreation”—something unnecessary that we do for personal fulfillment.
Many people don’t hold jobs just to avoid being poor. It’s also a duty to society. If you can’t support yourself, then you’re a burden on society and its infrastructure.
Similarly, having children was once thought of as a duty to society. I read an article about this recently: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/03/the-3-ps-of-manhood-procreate/
Anyway, my point is, our idea that career is necessary but children are not is culture-specific.
Maybe in other cultures children get more instructions on eventually having children of their own, too? I don’t know.
That’s what I’m wondering.
Explanation: adults are uncomfortable with teenagers discussing having children and wish to suppress it, or at least do not encourage it. This is because the association available to most adults will be “teenage pregnancy”, not “rational, mature planning of far-future behavior.” And they may be right: people adopt far-view opinions to justify near-view actions.
Yeah, I think #2 is the clear winner- get the degree, attract the high quality mate, then have the kids- with a modification. You don’t want to encourage your child to have kids until they’ve found a high quality mate, because if they have kids when they’re a teenager that will lower their lifetime prospects.
There’s a difference between encouraging kids to have children, and encouraging them to imagine having children after they’ve got good odds of being able to take care of them well.
I think #2 may be correct for men (mostly), but less so for women where a late baby break likely sets back your career more than the delay due to having a small child early e.g. during university. And most careers go significantly beyond menopause.
In practice having a small child during university usually leads to dropping out of university. Anecdotally, I’m in university currently and cannot imagine having to take care of a small child when I’m already struggling to get 8 hours of sleep a night just doing my schoolwork, internship hunt and extracurriculars. From my vantage point having a child while young and unmarried in university seems like a much, much more career (and life) destroying move than having a child in one’s early thirties with a co-parent, even in a career like academia where that coincides with the race for tenure. Elaborate on why you think the opposite?
Cultural bias I guess. In Germany part time story with children is quite possible. There are special rules for it. And the competition at university doesn’t seem to be as strong as in the US. My sister has too small girls and does study in education, so this is not hearsay.
I was quite frankly told by my father that I’d find a wife to love, and she would eventually force me to have children. I was eight at the time, and somehow managed not to draw the obvious conclusion about his own life. Probably just as well.
I have the impression that wanting children is seen as rather feminine in traditional cultures, and therefore not something to discuss with a son. Women seem to get more advice on it (In ireland and Germany at least).
Additional explanations: Some children are (acknowledged by their parents to be) accidents, especially in previous generations. But even careers that built on largely random events are often seen in hindsight as the logical choice at the time. This may create a hindsight-based impression that careers need more planning than childrearing.
Not sure about teens, but in my experience most adults don’t understand squat about raising children until they have a couple of their own.
Maybe that’s in part because they don’t plan and discuss it through their teenage years.
Or because the really important things have to be learned by doing to take.
Tangential gripe: I hate hearing people talk about how people shouldn’t do X before age Y because they “don’t know how to handle it yet”, when not being allowed to try it and fail is the reason they can’t handle it, and the reason they will continue to be unable to handle it until well past age Y. If something must be learned through experience, you can’t postpone experience until after you’ve learned it. It doesn’t work.
X is usually sex, but insert whatever.
Depends on how many siblings and cousins you have.
The effect of parenthood on income is significant esp. for women (naturally) and seem to be the largest remaining part of the gender wage gap: A Grand Gender Convergence
There is a rather obvious difference. You can start investing time and effort into your expected career at an early age. Mistakes can be costly. You cannot invest time and effort into your expected number children when you’re a teenager. You can change your mind easily (until you actually start having children) at no cost.
Well...
Yeah, well, I know :-)
But note that the OP complains that parents talk to their kids about careers but don’t talk about the number of children to have. I suspect that parents do talk about teenage pregnancy.
On the other hand, women tend to underestimate how quickly their fertility will decline.