Rob & Luisa chat kids, the fertility crash, and how the ‘50s invented parenting that makes us miserable

Summary

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80,000 Hours Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: Rob & Luisa chat kids, the fertility crash, and how the ‘50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
Date: November 25, 2025
Hosts: Rob Wiblin & Luisa Rodriguez

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Overview

In this wide-ranging and candid episode, Rob and Luisa discuss the personal, societal, and historical dimensions of having children in the modern age. Their conversation explores everything from the joys and frustrations of pregnancy and parenting, to global fertility trends, shifting cultural norms, and how the post-war ideal of “intensive parenting” makes raising children both more demanding and less attractive. Throughout, they examine both evidence and personal experience—often questioning if our current models of parenting and work-life balance are really optimal for parents or children.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Decisions and Feelings Around Having Children

• Luisa’s Pregnancy & Decision-Making

  • Luisa describes her struggle to decide whether to have children, feeling tension between personal desire and her moral values around career impact ([02:34]).
    • Quote: “I desperately wanted to have kids, but... I couldn’t justify it kind of aligning with my values... Eventually I convinced myself that there was a tension, but I needed to do it anyways.” – Luisa ([02:34])
  • Luisa reports a tough pregnancy, particularly with nausea and feeling let down by the medical system’s hesitancy toward treatments ([04:18]-[07:14]).
    • Quote: “It just feels totally unreasonable to me... why are we not outraged about this?” – Luisa ([05:35])
    • Quote: “Doctors have this... ‘the benefits outweigh the risks,’ but offer no kind of sensible guidance about whether the benefits outweigh the risks.” – Luisa ([07:17])

• Rob’s Experience with Early Parenting

  • Rob recalls finding the newborn stage easier than anticipated, largely thanks to their child’s easy-going nature and the support of parental leave; subsequent stages became harder with increased mobility and balancing work ([09:53]).
    • Quote: “At that time we had found it significantly less difficult... than my wife and I had been anticipating.” – Rob ([10:33])
  • As his son became a toddler, the need for constant attention and entertainment rose sharply ([11:56]-[12:51]).
    • Quote: “As they get older... they become very mobile and become very active... that just requires constant attention because there’s so many ways they can hurt themselves.” – Rob ([11:56])

• Gender Expectations and Parenting Fears

  • Luisa discusses the common phenomenon of “gender disappointment,” wanting a girl due to her own experiences, and fears relating to raising boys vs. girls in the current social landscape ([18:23]-[20:51]).
    • Quote: “I only had sisters... I like know what it’s like to be a girl and raise a girl... probably there are going to be wonderful things about having a boy...” – Luisa ([18:50])

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2. The Global Fertility Crash

• Trends and Data

  • Rob summarizes the rapid decline in fertility rates worldwide, noting that after 2016 the rate of decline accelerated markedly ([21:42]-[23:39]).
    • Quote: “From 2016 through 2023... the rate of decline increased by 4.5 fold... people have had to really update their projections...” – Rob ([21:42])
  • They discuss that with total fertility rates nearing 1 in several countries, entire populations could halve each generation ([23:58]).
    • Quote: “If you have a fertility rate of 1, [the population] halves every generation... in some countries now that do have a fertility rate around 1... that is kind of a population crash.” – Rob ([23:58])

• Attempted Solutions & Their Limits

  • Most pro-natalist policies (like cash incentives, childcare provision) have minor impact; the central challenges are deep-seated, structural, and cultural ([28:16]-[29:19], [60:19]-[62:07]).
    • Quote: “Even when countries spend a couple percent of GDP, you can drive up fertility by 0.2 or 0.3... you run out of people who are willing to have more children.” – Rob ([60:19])

• Why Are People Having Fewer Kids?

  • Popular theories about financial cost don’t fit the global trend (wealthier families and countries have fewer children) ([29:42]-[30:19]).
  • It’s more about:
    • Rising opportunity cost of time: digital distractions and wider social opportunities make parenting relatively less attractive ([30:19], [32:59]).
    • Declining social pressure and cultural expectations to be parents ([34:22]).
    • Decreased rates of relationship formation in key reproductive years ([35:19]).
    • Increased economic and social independence, especially for women ([37:51]).
    • High/increased parenting standards (“intensive parenting”) ([39:24], [42:27]).

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3. The Changing Nature of Parenting: From 'Free-Range' to 'Intensive'

• Historical Perspective

  • The old ideal—large families, children spending time in self-organized play, minimal direct parental supervision—has virtually vanished ([39:24]-[43:20]).
    • Quote: “In the 18th century, it was not at all common... that parents would be playing games with their children... families were much larger. There were so many more kids...” – Rob ([41:30])
  • Modern “intensive parenting” (hours of structured play, high engagement) is a post-1950s, Western-centric ideal ([41:30], [43:20]).
    • Quote: “It really is, I think, important to dwell on the fact that this is a peculiar attitude... only exists in the modern era...” – Rob ([43:20])
  • Despite nostalgia for independent childhoods, both Rob and Luisa feel guilt and pressure to perform the “super-parent” role ([42:27], [43:20], [45:07]).

• The Harm of Perfectionism and Parental Self-Effacement

  • Rob argues that children do not need constant, high-engagement parenting and often benefit from independence and multiple caregivers ([46:34], [80:27]).
    • Quote: “Children develop completely fine... as long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent... it’s sufficient to have a very positive relationship.” – Rob ([80:27])
  • They suggest giving equal regard to parental wellbeing and children’s happiness—a surprisingly controversial suggestion ([56:02]-[56:37]).
    • Quote: “We should give kind of equal regard to the preferences and the wellbeing of parents and children.” – Rob ([56:34])

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4. Practical Parenting: Work, Childcare, and Real-Life Challenges

• Returning to Work: Strategies & Emotional Responses

  • Both hosts describe using nannies and childcare centers, with mixed initial feelings of anxiety, guilt, and practical concerns about “missing out” or fear of children becoming more attached to caregivers ([72:28], [76:00]-[80:27]).
  • Luisa finds relief in Rob’s evidence-backed reassurance that “good parenting” does not require full-time, hands-on exclusivity from parents ([84:54]).
    • Quote: “If I want to be a good parent, I need to do that hard thing and hand the kid off and give them a much wider range of experiences. Probably... that actually just does a lot for my gut level feeling.” – Luisa ([84:54])

• Impact on Work and Life

  • Parenting significantly reduces available time and energy for high-impact work tasks, especially in early years ([94:08]).
    • Quote: “It has reduced my productivity... maybe 20% or something like that. It’s pretty meaningful.” – Rob ([94:08])
  • Rob candidly admits he accepts this as an ethical tradeoff between personal fulfillment and doing good, not from any sense of ideal moral duty ([96:23]).

• AI, Parenting, and the Future of Childhood

  • They reflect on how advanced AI might make conventional career advancement less relevant—should this alter how we view what it means to prepare children for flourishing adulthood? ([97:12]-[102:49])
    • Quote: “In the long run, radically. Almost like radically. Hopefully, because the world will be much better... It’s a real long shot... that we’re training up our kid to have a normal job the way that my wife and I do.” – Rob ([97:12])
  • Tension: Even as radical AI timelines appear plausible, it’s hard to shed parental ambitions for children’s success within today’s systems ([100:06]).

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5. Other Parenting Wisdom, Concerns, and Joys

• What Really Matters in Parenting

  • Building a warm, non-angry household appears much more important than perfect educational or play routines; anger or tension has the clearest link to negative child outcomes ([108:00]-[109:53]).
  • Major risks to avoid: extreme screen exposure, nutrients deficits, accidents, a tense or angry atmosphere.

• Highlights and Hardships

  • The best parts: seeing a child’s joy, progress, and personality unfold, especially during happy or playful moments ([110:03]).
  • The worst parts: exhaustion, illness, and logistical challenges—especially when caring for a child while sick or sleep-deprived ([110:41]).

• Dealing with Parental Guilt

  • Both hosts note that guilt, pressure, and fear of judgment (internal or external) are now endemic to parenting—exacerbated by new cultural scripts rather than genuine necessity ([50:41]-[53:19]).
  • Rob: “I don't really feel like we've failed in a very significant... dimension. Maybe that's like a bad sign about me. Maybe we are failing. But no, I think we're doing an okay job.” ([115:40])

• Recommended Products and Toys

  • Rob has compiled a list (linked in show notes) but singles out changing stations, nappy bins, a ‘Jumperoo’ for physical play, and plenty of simple toys/books as especially valuable ([111:51]-[113:08]).
  • Some highly-hyped products, like the ‘Snoo’ smart bassinet, can be hit-or-miss ([113:08]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |------------|---------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:34 | Luisa | “I desperately wanted to have kids, but...I couldn’t justify it kind of aligning with my values...I needed to do it anyways.” | | 05:35 | Luisa | “Why are we not outraged about this? A bunch of people are going around spending six months or nine months having an absolutely terrible time while pregnant. It just feels totally unreasonable to me.” | | 21:42 | Rob | “From 2016 through 2023... the rate of decline increased by 4.5 fold... people have had to really update their projections...” | | 41:30 | Rob | “In the 18th century, it was not at all common... that parents would be playing games with their children.. families were much larger.” | | 56:34 | Rob | “We should give kind of equal regard to the preferences and the wellbeing of parents and children.” | | 80:27 | Rob | “Children develop completely fine... as long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent... it’s sufficient to have a very positive relationship.” | | 94:08 | Rob | “It has reduced my productivity... maybe 20% or something like that. It’s pretty meaningful.” | | 100:06 | Rob | “If the world were good, if the world was solved, I would have had no interest in accomplishing stuff...You work in order to solve a problem. You don’t invent problems in order to have work to do.” | | 115:40 | Rob | “Maybe that's like a bad sign about me. Maybe we are failing. But no, I think we're doing an okay job.” |

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Key Timestamps

• [02:10]-[05:35]: Luisa on deciding to have children and her challenging pregnancy
• [09:53]-[13:21]: Rob on parenting expectations, differences by phase, and personality of his son
• [21:42]-[23:39]: Global fertility decline explained
• [29:42]-[37:51]: Causes of low fertility: cost, time, relationships, norms
• [39:24]-[45:07]: The rise of intensive parenting; childhood then vs. now
• [56:02]-[57:54]: Why it’s OK to balance parent and child’s happiness
• [60:19]-[68:00]: What’s possible (and not) via policy for fertility
• [72:28]-[80:27]: Experiences with childcare, guilt, attachment concerns
• [94:08]-[99:17]: Work productivity, AI future, and changing aims for children
• [108:00]-[109:53]: What can actually harm a child (and what probably won’t)
• [110:03]-[111:36]: Parenting highs and lows

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Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced, evidence-based, and often refreshingly honest look at both modern parenting and the broader fertility crisis. Rob and Luisa challenge prevailing norms—reminding listeners that parenting standards are not set in stone, and that the wellbeing of parents matters too. The discussion is particularly rich for those considering parenthood, working to reconcile career and family, or simply curious about how historical change has shaped our most personal decisions.

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Transcript

[A]

Did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored? No, I almost forget about that. I did, but I don't think that that is a thing that children today almost never feel. Always we would never be like, my child is bored.

[B]

Yeah, I'm failing.

[A]

What a nightmare. I have to fix this immediately. The ideal of a mother who stays home doing 90% plus of the work of raising a child is a complete historical aberration. In the 18th century, it was not at all common the idea that like parents would be playing games with their children. While it's not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster. But the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in kind of the digital age.

[B]

I don't think you would hear people saying like, I don't want to have kids because I'd like to be on the Internet more.

[A]

People probably don't say, I don't want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok. If you spend a lot of your time on your phone reading stuff on the Internet, I think mechanically kind of feeds into fewer children. Many people might feel uncomfortable making any kind of trade off where they're saying, well, I'm going to prioritize my preferences for what to do over what my toddler wants, but I think we should give kind of equal regard to the well being of parents and children.

[B]

I feel like that one is.

[A]

Is that a shocking like claim?

[B]

It's like landing weird to hear someone say aloud.

[A]

I mean the fact that that sounds crazy to us now. Probably some weird wiggles explaining why people don't want to have kids. Yeah. Hey everyone. Just wanted to quickly let you know that the 80,000 Hours podcast is currently hiring for three new roles. There's a podcast growth specialist, someone focused on packaging, promoting and distributing the show. There's a research specialist, someone to help make the content sharper and more insightful. And finally a producer or content strategist, someone to plan episodes and figure out how to fix them in post. The roles might be done in London, San Francisco or remotely and you can find a lot more details in the job listings on our job [e-mail]. If you like the show and would like to make it better or make there be more of it or help it find a bigger and more valuable audience, then please do consider applying by the deadline of 30th November 2025. Let's get on with the show.

[B]

Today, Rob and I are chatting about parenting. We chatted about this maybe a year or a year and a half ago right after you'd come back from paternity leave. But we're chatting about it again because I'm now six months pregnant. And, yeah, I've got, I guess, a little bit more context and just a bunch more question for you.

[A]

Yeah. Congratulations.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

I'm not sure that I've directly asked. Why did you decide to have kids?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think decision is almost a generous word for it. I struggled with what felt like a decision for years. It felt like I desperately wanted to have kids, but it felt like I couldn't justify it kind of aligning with my values where really I wanted to be putting. Doing good with my career first. And I think for a long time I tried to convince myself that maybe it wouldn't take away that much from work. What else did I try to convince myself of? Yeah, just kind of like, there was no tension here. And eventually I convinced myself that there was a tension, but I needed to do it anyways.

[A]

Just because it's very important to you.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, part of it is, like, is just gut level. Like, there's a part of me that feels, like, devastated at the thought of not. And I don't really know that that bottoms out in anything. Kind of reasoned.

[A]

Yeah, it's just how you felt since, I guess you were a teenager or. Yeah, probably longer.

[B]

Like, I don't know that I've ever. I think probably I just, like, came out of the womb being, like, genetically predisposed to be, like, I will be a mother one day.

[A]

Yeah. It's astonishing how much people's preferences about having kids varies. Given that, you'd think that this is something that evolution would really kind of. And have very strong preferences about how we feel. But people all the way from just desperately wanting to have children from a young age to desperately not wanting to have them.

[B]

Yeah. I remember being like, wait, not everyone feels this way. I thought surely everyone was like, yep, we want to do it.

[A]

Well, many more people at least used to feel this way, which we might talk about. How have you found pregnancy so far? You're six months in.

[B]

Yep, I am a little over six months in. And the honest answer is I found it pretty terrible. I had a good chunk of, I don't know, two or three months in the middle that were very nice. But the first three months were beyond what I could have expected. Terrible. Just like the nausea, the hormones Affecting my mood. I think there are probably smaller other discomforts, but mostly the nausea just made me feel like I couldn't do anything. Like I couldn't work as much, I couldn't. I didn't want to socialize. I just felt like I just wanted to be in bed all the time. And three months is a long time to feel that way. And I just feel like I, I think not everyone has this experience, but I think some people will at least somewhat relate. I just did not know it was going to be that bad. Yeah, and it's gotten pretty bad again recently in the third trimester. And I, yeah, I think I'm like still extremely excited to have a kid. But I'm like, why are we not outraged about this? A bunch of people are going around spending six months or nine months if you're really unlucky having an absolutely terrible time while pregnant. It just feels totally unreasonable to me.

[A]

Yeah, sounds horrible. I really don't envy women's role in this entire process of having children. My wife had a reasonably hard time, I think not quite as bad as that. But yeah, you've definitely drawn the short, the two possible roles you could have.

[B]

Yeah, I just do. Now that I'm in it, I'm like, yeah, it's totally unacceptable that we haven't solved this. It feels very, I don't think I've ever felt this much kind of like feminist rage. I feel like it's not your fault that you don't have to experience this, but boy am I mad and jealous and feel like we should have solved this or there are aspects that probably we could have solved better and haven't. Probably because of some of the systemic gender y stuff that happens when women suffer from problems more than men and science just decides to solve those problems less.

[A]

Yeah, I think I've heard from some people that probably doctors under prescribe anti nausea medications to women during pregnancy. Is this something you've looked into?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, definitely. And there are a bunch of different ways that nausea in particular has like we've just been really let down. Like there are drugs that work well, but like there have been some scares about whether they were safe or not in pregnancy. And so pharmaceutical companies have taken them off the market and not put them back on despite lots of further tests showing that they are safe and they're doing it kind of out of risk aversion. And I think doctors too are doing things out of risk aversion. And it's makes me so livid.

[A]

It feels like you should be the one making that choice about how much risk to take.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And there's like doctors have this like the thing they always say is like you can do X if the benefits outweigh the risks but offer no kind of sensible guidance about whether the benefits outweigh the risks. So they're like yeah, if, like if you're doing really, really terribly you can. But they kind of pressure you not to.

[A]

Yeah. From what I've heard the risks are in fact very low.

[B]

Yeah. I think for most of these things they're very low.

[A]

I guess. Yeah. Around children and pregnancy there's always this desire to absolutely minimize risk at almost any cost.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I feel very, especially to mothers.

[B]

Very. Just not valued as a human. When all healthcare professionals I talk to. Not quite. This is actually not entirely what my experience has been like but some are like, like yep. That that thing you're feeling is normal. There's not much we can do about it. I don't know, maybe I'm like yeah, I guess. I mean I have migraines so a big one was like what migraine medications can and can't I take and the like kind of ignoring of like how painful a migraine is in favor of we don't know with 100% certainty that that drug isn't going to have any costs for your baby. Just feels like yeah, no, it's debilitating.

[A]

We know it's debilitating for me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. Yeah. Can't we at least kind of calculate what's the probability like what fraction of drugs actually are bad? Is there any story or any mechanism that we're aware of by which it could be bad?

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Is just really strongly to know. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of I guess anti aging stuff where totally people feel it's always been this way. There's no apparent solution to aging and dying so we're just going to do nothing about it or by default we'll do almost nothing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. No I think that's.

[A]

And even deny that it's a problem. Almost totally.

[B]

Yep. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. I think I've heard of a few people who said that they really enjoyed being pregnant and I guess very fortunate for them. I'm not sure exactly why they were. I think some of them were younger. That might be something that's helping them out. But I guess people also just radically differ on this as well.

[B]

Yeah. It does seem like people have pretty different pregnancy experiences. It's still boggles my mind that anyone is having a really great time. But I'm happy for them. I also slightly hate them, but no, mostly I am happy for them. Okay, so I actually just want to ask you loads of questions now that it's quite real for me. Yeah, I think it was about a year and a half ago that we chatted. How have things been going with your son?

[A]

Yeah, so I think we did the interview, I think just after I'd gotten back from parental leave. And I think I was celebrating how straightforward we had found it and the fact that it had turned out to be. At that time we had found it significantly less difficult, I think, than my wife and I had been anticipating, given that you hear really terrible stories sometimes about how sleep deprived and unhappy people are early on when they've got a newborn. So we were super happy by our kid, I guess. Turned out to not be very fussy, didn't cry all that much, just seemed pretty cheerful. We mostly didn't. We didn't have any significant health issues to worry about. So I was all, what are people so fussed about?

[B]

I remember being like, this is maybe the best pitch for becoming a parent I've ever heard.

[A]

Making the summer lazy. I'd say that that was the peak of me feeling that way. And I guess since then I've regressed perhaps more to a more normal, normal feeling about things or finding things more typically challenging. I think what was going on is with a newborn, if they don't cry a whole lot and you don't have medical issues or you're not having great difficulty breastfeeding, then they kind of just stay there in their crib. And also if they're sleeping well, that's also super key. And our kid fortunately was sleeping well as well. So if you've got all of that, then you actually might be on easy and you're on parental leave, then you might really be on easy street, which was exactly our situation. So in fact we've got kind of all of the stresses of work kind of removed and it's just turned out to be significantly like there isn't an aspect of it that is like really difficult. It's more, more difficult for my wife for sure. Cause she was waking up many times at night to, to breastfeed. But at least like, relative to expectations, it was a lot more straightforward. Um, so that's the newborn stage, I guess as kids get older. Fortunately we are, we are still very blessed that our, our toddler has a very like, happy disposition. Sleeps. Sleeps pretty well through the night most of the time, not last night. So I'm, I'm frazzled. I'm probably going to be like struggling for words sometimes today because he woke up many. He woke up three or four times in the night.

[B]

It's appropriate for this chat.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. I was thinking that at 6am I was like, this is terrible. Maybe like also it'll give us material to talk about. It's good, it's good. I feel bad for myself, but it's good content. But yeah. So as they get older, even if they do have a good disposition and you're not having any health crises to deal with, they become very mobile and become very active and they begin to require entertainment and for you to be intervening all the time. So I guess at six months he started crawling. Soon after that he was beginning to toddle and walk around. And even though he was very happy doing that, that just requires constant attention because there's so many ways that they can hurt themselves and also they just demand attention. They now need to be entertained because they're out there in the world learning about it in a way that they weren't when they were mostly basically just drinking milk and sleeping. So yeah, it's definitely been a lot more. I mean also we went back to work, right?

[B]

Yeah, of course.

[A]

I maybe should have emphasized this more that it's going to be a very different situation balancing work and family life when you mostly aren't working. So I guess we'll talk about this, talk about this more. But yeah, like the, the amount of slack you have in your, in your week and your days is, as everyone says, significantly less. When you have a kid, you're working from nine to six and then you go home and then you've also got kind of a different sort of work. Joyous in its own way, but also tiring.

[B]

Yeah, I feel like I've heard people be like, oh my gosh, it's so exciting when my baby kind of develops the ability to really acknowledge you and crawl around and then almost as quickly they're like, oh no.

[A]

Yeah, I have to be watching them all the time.

[B]

Yeah. How much do you feel like you have a sense now of what your son is kind of like, personality wise?

[A]

Yeah, I think it's a little bit hard to say because I don't know what is specific to him and what is just what toddlers are like because I don't have experience with that many great in depth experience with that many toddlers. I think he's pretty happy. I guess he explores things a ton and is very curious, but probably is more toddlers than him. I Guess he doesn't fuss about that many things. But when he really gets in his head that he wants to play with the bubbles, he wants to play with the bubble wand, then it can be very difficult to dissuade him. He can kick up quite a fuss. Yeah. I was asking my mum, who I guess has had experience with more toddlers than I have, what she thought was his distinctive personality traits, and she said he was very determined, very persistent in a way that some toddlers aren't, where if things don't work out quickly, then they kind of get upset and throw the thing away. Whereas our kid, I guess he's happy to spend an hour kind of just trying to make bubbles with the bubble wand and just keep going at it. He's actually got into saying when he tries to make a big bubble and it doesn't work out, he says almost because it's so adorable. Because that's just copying what we say.

[B]

That's so lovely.

[A]

I guess I was trying to think of what for balance. I feel like now I want to do the critique. What are the negative personality traits?

[B]

I don't think you're requ. Your child.

[A]

Be fair. I balanced it, but I could. He's not very possessive about toys, but, you know, he does definitely grab. Like, whenever he sees that other kids want to play with something, he naturally just wants to grab it from them. Oh. And I guess recently he's been in quite a pushing phase, so he started just walking up to other kids at the playground and pushing them over and kind of laughing. I think this is more because he doesn't realize that it's bad. I'm pretty sure it's because he doesn't realize that it's bad than that. He's sort of maniacally evil, I think. I mean, they go through these phases, you know, there was a biting phase.

[B]

Yeah, they do. But why do we have any idea? Because it does seem like it's not that surprising that they don't have the tools to kind of. They don't have empathy yet in the way that we do. But, like, it does seem like they do, like pushing and biting and hitting in a way that isn't that good for anyone. Why do they go through those phases?

[A]

Because it gets a reaction. So in general, they're looking to do things that I see. Attention. Yeah. Also just. It gets an interesting response from the person. And normally that's a good thing. If they're making the bubble, they make a big bubble. We make a big fuss. Wow. You made a massive Bubble. That's kind of a good sign. And in this case, they notice us freaking out. We've just been bitten. But I think they don't have the ability to perceive whether it's kind of positive or negative. You're meant to just kind of not react and put them to the side. We do that a lot of the time. Not all the time. I guess. Also, whenever they develop a new capability like biting or hitting or pushing, they kind of just. They really are into that for a brief phase. Yeah, exactly. Learning about how it works. So I think it's also partly just that even if they knew that it wasn't desired, I think the temptation to try out this new skill that they have might be pretty great.

[B]

Okay, so those are his downsides.

[A]

Yeah. Character flaws. I don't know.

[B]

Yeah. Are there any other kind of cute or clever things from lately that he's doing?

[A]

I guess I'm reluctant to go on too much about. I feel like people are always so much more interested in their own children than in other people's children. I think sometimes I start talking stories about our son and people's eyes begin to glaze over after 30 seconds or a minute. But I guess you could skip forward in your podcast again if you don't want to hear anymore. What's the stuff that he's into at the moment? I mean, he's been obsessed with spiders the last few weeks and he knows the Itsy Bitsy Spider song. So every time he sees a drain along a building, he wants to sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider song and look for spiders in the drain. Super obsessed with bubbles. Actually, I would say of all of his interests, I think making bubbles is maybe the one that I'm, like, closest to sympathizing with and sharing.

[B]

Bubbles are pretty, pretty cool.

[A]

They're much cooler than I thought and you can get them really big. We're talking like bubbles the size of a human's torso. And I think we're aiming for even bigger. We've bought more tools and tried to get the very best bubble making solution.

[B]

That's awesome.

[A]

So he can get enjoyment for that for hours, and I can get enjoyment for that for, like, maybe an hour. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty good. It's not bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are his other interests? I mean, he's massively into singing sing along songs, which is something that I guess kids have more access to than I think. When I was a kid, when I was this age, it would all have been cassette tapes. And I think we Just didn't have that many cassette tapes in the house. But now of course you can just bring up any song that they might want at any point in time with speakers in every room. So that's something that is kind of enjoyable about childhood now. Yeah, it loves doing the actions and things like that.

[B]

Nice. I don't know if I, I don't think I've said this to you yet, but I really wanted a girl and there were a whole bunch of reasons why I wanted a girl and most of them I think I don't really endorse, but I was trying to. I was basically like, how can I? Oh, and I'm having a boy. So I found that out and had some kind of gender disappointment feelings.

[A]

Which is reasonably common, right?

[B]

Yeah, I think it is pretty common. I definitely, I think for a hot second I was like, I shouldn't feel this way. And then I was just like, probably badass. Like, I think mine was like, I only had sister. Like I, I like know what it's like to be a girl and raise a girl and who even knows like actually what my child's, you know, preferences and sense of self is going to be like? But yeah, I just feel like I had a sense of what to expect and I know how to be close to girls. And then I think probably, I think probably they're going to be wonderful things about having a boy that I just don't know about yet. But your son was one of my, like that is a really cute, happy child that gave me a bunch of like, okay, having a boy seems like.

[A]

It'S going to be. I can live with that.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I didn't have a stronger preference gender wise as you did, but I think probably I felt the same way in reverse that it's probably easier to have a boy. You know, I understand what boys are like. I like had a brother, so I did. Well, I didn't really have a strong preference. I did feel like this is probably going to be a bit more straightforward having a boy.

[B]

Yeah, a lot of people have since said, like, you're going to have an easier time. And I think that, I mean, you know, who knows, maybe on average that does.

[A]

Just in general boys are more straightforward. Like even if you aren't a boy yourself.

[B]

Yeah, I basically heard that boys struggle less. I mean, I have friends with like four year old girls who are already really struggling with like, I don't look like the princesses in the movies and like my friend at school has curly hair and I Want curly hair and struggle with kind of beauty stuff really soon and then kind of just like continue to struggle with social stuff in a more intense way. And that. That sounds.

[A]

Yeah, it seems like that stuff is really grim and really only getting worse, unfortunately.

[B]

And then my husband just read a book, kind of Negative Effects of Social Media on Kids, and it seems like that's gendered too, and girls have a worse time with it.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think, I guess in the aggregate statistics, seems like boys are struggling more in a whole lot of different ways. Doing worse at school, doing worse in the job market, more juvenile delinquency. But I guess the social media in particular, it seems like those social pressures are much worse for girls and trending in the wrong direction as well. Yeah, so that would be like, I think, a difficult thing to manage as a parent. Very difficult to shield your. Your child from that kind of stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, well, anyways, thank you for having a cute son has made me much more sense.

[A]

Anytime, Louisa.

[B]

Okay, pushing on. I wanted to talk about fertility rates. So I think you've been following this trend particularly closely recently. It sounds like fertility rates are just kind of massively declining and people are starting to notice. Can you talk about those stats?

[A]

Yeah, I think I've gotten into. I guess gotten interested in this partly because I have a kid. Also, it's just felt like it's been in the news a lot more recently. I've been reading a series of articles by John Burns Murdoch in the Financial Times. I guess it's just kept on coming up in my podcast feed, people talking about how fertility rates have gone down. So, yeah, I have taken a slight amateur interest in it, I should say. I am. Yeah, it is only an amateur interest in it, so there's definitely, definitely a risk of me saying some wrong stuff here, but if you're willing to bear with us. Yeah. So basically, I think it's been. Fertility has been in the news again recent, or like, has been in the news for the first time in my lifetime recently because basically global fertility rates have been declining so much faster in recent years. I was looking at this yesterday, and I think global fertility rates between 2006 and 2016 were declining 0.04 per year up until 2016. And then from 2016 through 2023, the latest year that we have data, the rate of Decline increased by 4.5 fold. So it was going down at 0.04 rather than 0.009, I should say. So a very big change in the rate of decline and that kind of compounds year after year and means that the number of children being born is way below what we were projecting 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And so people have had to really update their projections for how many children there are going to be and what population is going to look like and kind of, I guess the balance between old people versus young people that we're going to expect. I think that is the fundamental reason why this has become topical again. And people have suddenly started to wonder, is population going to crash in a way that's going to be very challenging to deal with? And it's a very broad based reduction. It's not just a handful of countries where fertility is going down faster than expected. It's actually, I think, the great majority. So the kind of countries where most listeners would live in the US and Australia and the uk. Yeah, they've seen quite significant reductions in the number of births or the number of children that people are choosing to have over the last decade or two.

[B]

Yeah. I feel like I find the rate figures a little hard to kind of intuitively understand. Maybe you can talk about the difference in the projections, like long term projections. I don't know if you have those numbers to hand, but roughly what did they expect from world population and what's it looking like?

[A]

Well, I think the thing that sometimes is a little bit hard to wrap your head around is that kind of the fertility rate is a little bit like ah, with COVID but it doesn't tell you what, what number you level out at. It tells you what the rate of change is from one generation to the next. So if you have a fertility rate of let's. I think the maintenance fertility rate is actually 2.1. Let's just say it's 2 for the sake of simplicity. So if you have a fertility rate of 2, then on average your population is going to be stable. If you have a fertility rate of 1, that doesn't mean that your population halves. It means that your population halves every generation. So it halves and then it's a quarter and then it's an eight and then it's a 16. And that really adds up over time. And there's quite a lot of countries now that do have a fertility rate around 1 and so should expect, I would say that is kind of a population crash. Basically. I think the UK, it's more like in US it's more like 1.5. So you get a 25% reduction in population every generation. So not quite as much of a cratering, but a pretty significant Change, especially in how many children would expect to see, I guess like how much tax revenue you'll have to support older people. And of course it's going down. So it's kind of 1.5 now. But we might expect like on current trends, I guess we might expect it to hit 1 in 20 years time or something like that if nothing changes. And I kind of don't really expect anything very much to change. I think all of the trends that are pushing people to have fewer children will probably only continue get more significant. And that's how concerned you are maybe will depend on whether you think fertility has gone down and now it's going to stabilize, in which case you say, well, this is kind of a serious issue, but maybe can be handled. But if you think that the trend is the thing that's going to remain the same and so they're just going to keep going down and we'll go from low to very low to ultra low to ultra ultra low, then you're going to be much, much more concerned because you're changing the second derivative of population where you're changing the rate at which the rate is changing and that escalates very fast.

[B]

Yeah, so I think this felt really hard for me to understand because I just have this strong intuitive feeling that, that this leads to a plateau in population. Not that it leads to a crash, but it leads to a crash. It leads to. Even if the fertility rate is 1 for a long time, it leads to a crash. It doesn't have to get that much lower for it to be bad in 50 to 100 years. And there's no real reason to think. Well, I don't know, are there reasons to think that it will stable out or. Yeah, or bounce back?

[A]

Well, I should say I actually don't worry about this at all. Despite what I'm saying. I'm not putting any effort into this. And I find it an interesting intellectual exercise. But that's because I have a fairly unusual take about how the future is going to go, which is that humans are going to be in the labor market in terms of just like influence over the world, going to be replaced by artificial intelligence in coming decades. So there is no medium term in which we need humans to continue supporting the economy. I kind of do just expect us to be substituted and for this to not create any kind of serious crunch, a big problem. But I guess most people, I don't know many people are expecting that. But among the people who don't expect that, who think that AI is going to be A bust and don't really expect a full replacement. I think for those people, this should be. It's a very interesting question, at least, is this a problem? What impacts will it have? Should we do anything? Is there anything that can be done? And I guess some people are taking that seriously and I think other people, I guess preferably not to. Not to think about it, perhaps because it's like an. It's an uncomfortable issue.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, it can be very uncomfortable sounding like you think, well, people should have more. More children than they. Than they want to have.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't think anyone wants to go to a world where people are kind of obliged to have children out of, you know, just to benefit their country or something like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But at the same time, I guess, you know, if your country is having its population halve every 25 years, effectively, you might wonder, well, perhaps we need to change the tax system or change how our cities are organised in order to at least slow that down.

[B]

Yeah. It sounds like some countries already have kind of this low fertility rate and are trying to do things about it, and it sounds like the results have been kind of disappointing. Yeah. What are some examples of those?

[A]

Yeah. So you could interview someone who knows a lot more about this than me. I was just trying to look into this a little bit more this week. I mean, I guess Japan and South Korea are kind of have famously ultra low fertility rates. I think they've put in various different programs to try to encourage people to have more children, I think with close to no effects or very little visible effect, admittedly. I think often these programs end up expending effectively less than 1% of GDP, which, given the amount of money that children cost to bring up, it's unsurprising that spending on that kind of level doesn't really move the needle. But that does kind of speak to the fact that maybe people's commitment or interest in addressing this, what you might think of as a problem, or perhaps not a problem, is not really up to the scale of the challenge. The sheer amount of time that has to go into raising people up to adulthood is huge. It's a huge fraction of just all of the entire human enterprise. And trying to redistribute 0.5% or 1% of GDP to people, unsurprisingly, that just doesn't cause them to have that many more children, because it's not very much money spread out over so many hours if they don't want to have children.

[B]

Right. Yeah. Actually, that makes me realize we should Talk about why people don't want to have children, because I think intuitively it's tempting to think that it's probably just finite. It's expensive, and people now want to spend less on having kids. And having two seems good, and that just seems culturally less to be the case before, but it seems like maybe there are other reasons.

[A]

Yeah, I think almost whenever I see stories about this and there's a comment section, the top rated comment is, of course people aren't having children. It's so expensive to have children. It's totally unaffordable. I couldn't bring myself to pull together the money in order to do it. And I think that definitely the fact that it costs both money and time is a reason that people don't have more children. But that has always been the case. It's always been expensive to have children. And in the 18th century, when it was expensive to have children, people were substantially poor. And yet nonetheless, they had like, three times as many children as we do now. So I think money, I think, is a terrible explanation for the changes that we've seen recently.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because in general, countries have been becoming richer. But as countries become richer, fertility tends to decline. If you look at richer people in countries like the UK and us, they used to actually have less children than people who had lower incomes. Now it's about even. There's not really a correlation between the amount of income that people have and how many children they have. If it was primarily a financial issue, you might think that people who have two or 10 or 20 times as much income as others might have more children. But in practice, the effect, if there's any, is very, very small. In general, income is rising even in countries like the UK or the US or Australia, which are already reasonably developed, and growth rates are somewhat slow. But fertility is crashing. So really, I think almost none of the correlations support this, except that in some places at the very top end are people who are in the top few percent of earners. Sometimes they have slightly more children than other people. So that's the financial cost thing. But I think an explanation that makes more sense is while it's not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps people's incomes have risen, but their expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster, maybe substantially faster than that. So, yes, social norms around spending on children might have risen a lot. But the other thing that I think does make more sense, rather than just like financial cost, is thinking about the cost of time. So all of us only have so many hours in the day. And if we're having children, taking care of children, then we can't do other stuff that we want to do. So we have this big opportunity cost of doing one thing rather than another. And I think a big explanation for why people are having fewer children is that the non child options have gotten better. Having a child has gotten easier. And I think it has gotten substantially easier, actually than it was even a few decades ago, objectively at least, to accomplish kind of the same level of care that you would have in the past. But the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in kind of the digital age. People just have so many other distractions, things that can occupy their time that they might find more fulfilling and interesting. And so the competition between children and other stuff is looking pretty bad for having children. I think that's one factor. There's other stuff that we could talk about.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, do you know if there are statistics on how common that feeling is? I think it's particularly hard for me as someone who's like, it's never really been a question of whether I have kids. I'm not like weighing whether I want to go to more concerts or have kids. I'm like, I'm having kids. But how common is it for people to be like, yes, it's a tricky trade off. There are a lot of great things I could be doing with my time.

[A]

I mean, don't you hear this all the time from people who are choosing not to have children? I mean, yeah, so I don't know of high quality research on this and I really would. I'm not sure how much it has been studied. I mean, people talk about all kinds of different things that they want to do other than have children. Like, people want to pursue careers. That's very important to them. They want to be learning and they want to be traveling. They want to be doing all these other things. I think the question, I mean, it's become kind of a catch all explanation for all kinds of modern social trends is where people are spending more time on the Internet, digital stuff, phones. But I think it actually is, to a first approximation, the best guess that you should have a lot of the time, especially when things start changing in 2016, when I would guess that phones are becoming much more accessible and there's a lot more online content. They reached people in the US and UK earlier, But I think if you're talking globally, that would be a point at which you're really getting a tipping point of huge numbers of young people spending much more of their time online and on phones. I think in terms of time use, that is the biggest change. And so it's naturally, potentially a big driver of changes in culture and behavior and priorities. Yeah, but there is other stuff. Yeah.

[B]

I mean, I'm trying to think of what I do hear people saying, and I don't think you would hear people saying, like, I don't want to have kids because I'd like to be on the Internet more. But I do feel like. I feel like I have the sense that more people feel less societal pressure to have kids.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so maybe there's. Yeah, this, like, dual life is good. There's lots of stuff people want to do. And Also relative to 20 or 30 years ago, people, people's parents and friends and, I don't know, other people around them can't pressure them into having kids as much as they did before or just like.

[A]

Or don't even care to.

[B]

Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, right.

[A]

Yes. I think that's a huge impact as well. So I saw some. So here I'm going to be drawing. We'll link to a whole lot of articles in the Financial Times recently over the last year or two about this issue. I had one gem of a statistic which was, I think that in 1993, 63% of young people in the US said that having children was an important part of a flourishing life for them. And it's now down to 25%. That's like a radical change in how important people are, like, whether that. That is part of their kind of dream life at all. So, yeah, there's probably a lot of factors going into that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So another potential driver that I think probably has been unappreciated until the last couple of years, at least among people who, I read is changes in what fraction of people are having relationships, relationships that could plausibly lead to the decision to have children. John Burns Murdoch and Alice Evans had a great piece of content on this that they were linked to. But basically, if you put fertility rates in countries up against the fraction of people actually in relationships during, I think, age 25 to 35, then you see a very close relationship. And over the last 10 to 20 years, the fraction of people in that age group who are choosing to be single or ending up single has gone up a great deal in almost all countries, basically. So in the EU, the rate of people between 25 and 35 who are in relationships went from 67% in 1990 to 53.5% today, which is a bit over a 20% decline. Now, if you're just not in a relationship in that kind of age band, even if you wanted to have children, the odds are starting to get stacked against you. And so you would expect that to kind of mechanically almost lead to a 20% reduction in the number of children. Almost. It's kind of intertwined with people's desire to have children, because if they're less interested in having children, they might be less interested in pursuing a serious relationship when they're younger. But, yeah, I think that that's probably a very big driver, and that's one where I can see people probably don't say, I don't want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok. But in practice, if you spend a lot of your time just on your phone or just reading stuff on the Internet, even stuff that you endorse, even doing things that you think is actually super educational, in fact, you end up spending less time with people, you're less likely to meet someone who you want to form a relationship with. Maybe you just kind of somewhat lose interest in dating or your social skills or your extroversion begins to decline. I think in young people, we do see in personality surveys significant declines in extraversion. We see the significant declines in the amount of time that people are just spending with other human beings at all versus alone. So then kind of all of this, I think, paints a picture where people are spending more time on devices, less time socializing, they're not meeting other people, they are not prioritizing, building deep relationships. And that I think mechanically kind of feeds into fewer children.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I don't know if you've looked into this literature quite as much, but are there other big drivers of people kind of being single during childbearing years and probably just like throughout their lives?

[A]

Yeah, I guess Alice Evans, I guess she does kind of gender studies on a more global scale. And I guess a factor that is relevant in the uk, but probably especially relevant globally, is just increasing number of women who are financially independent and can work and support themselves. So wanting a partner to support you financially, I think was a big motivation in the past for women to choose to have a partner and perhaps settle for someone who they otherwise might not have have decided to build a family with. As these kinds of external pressures, I guess, like both cultural pressures, social pressures, also like financial pressures, decline, more people can just choose to be single. And that might in many ways be a good Thing because they now have the option to just not be with someone who perhaps they didn't enjoy being with in the past. Yeah, I think there's probably a whole lot of different factors that are leading people to opt to be single more often. In many ways it probably is a good thing. Probably like many relationships in the past were things that people really wouldn't endorse being in and they were only there for pragmatic reasons. And the fact that people are wealthier, I guess society is more individualistic and allows them to make those kinds of choices is somewhat good, but for better or worse, it means fewer kids.

[B]

Yeah, I think I basically buy that. Going back to the kind of fertility parenting question, it seems like maybe part of what's going on is a change in social norms toward just very, very intensive parenting. So kind of a sense that being a good parent means doing a lot more, very hands on playing with your child than used to be the case. Can you say more about that?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I guess people say this all the time, that there's been a massive increase in kind of expectations for how much parents are going to watch their children at older and older ages when previously they might have been regarded as kind of more independent. And I guess people seriously talk about how six or seven year olds just roam around the neighborhood with other kids. Something that I think is very abnormal in most cities today. Yeah, this got me interested in looking into this topic. I think there's a graph that goes around that many people will have seen online on Twitter. It is on the Our World and Data website, a website that I normally really like, but it shows in some countries massive increases in the number of hours that parents spend with children. In some cases kind of increases of four or five or six fold since the 60s.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

We'll stick up a link I think to some people reacting to that, saying that the data here is not really very solid. A big issue is that there's a big difference between primary childcare and secondary childcare and what people kind of count as childcare and don't. Plus also just some of these surveys from previous decades are kind of low quality. They wouldn't pass master today. So if you see an extraordinary result, like people spent 20 minutes with their kids in the 60s and now they spend 200 minutes with them. I think like, like remarkable claims require remarkable evidence to support them. So I think probably some of that is exaggerated, but I guess almost everyone anecdotally thinks that, I mean my mum thinks this, that there's been a radical Change in the expectations of parents and that we put like a lot more on ourselves than what she did when, when I was a child, despite the fact that I think that I had super attentive and caring parents. Yeah, I think there's been a huge change in expectations for how much parents are meant to like actively play with children. Certainly compared to kind of pre industrial times, certainly in the 18th century. I've consulted with the LLMs on this and it was not at all common for the idea that parents would be playing games, playing imaginary games, like physical games, playing with toys with their children for many different reasons. But in part people were poorer then, they worked many more hours than we do today. They just didn't have the slack in their time to be playing with a two year old toddler like that. And secondly, they didn't have to because families were much larger. There were so many more kids in society. Such a larger fraction of people in your local area were under 18 or under 10 or under 5 such that it would be very easy for them to find playmates. And rather than doing imaginative play and games with their parents, they would do it with the five year old or the four year old or the three year old who they're playing with. It was much more normal for kids to be entertaining one another rather than actively being entertained by parents who are acting as kind of court jesters or something like that. But that kind of is the normal and almost the ideal. I would say in society today that a really good parent is one that comes home and spends hours playing with their child and really enjoys that and spends their weekend filling up with engaged activities with their kids. That was, I think beginning in the 1950s and it's kind of only become, I would guess, kind of monotonically more so as the decades have worn on, I guess. Yeah. Does that match your.

[B]

Yeah, I mean it definitely does. And it's kind of surprising to me that like I have clearly like I'm, I'm already preparing for the feeling of guilt for not playing enough with my child. It feels definitely like something I will experience. And so the like norm has been instilled in me. Despite the fact that I was extremely independent as a kid and had a great time. Like I spent loads of time playing with friends in like parking lots, making up like pretend businesses that we had. Like, I just had a wonderful childhood that was extremely, I mean I also had very loving, attentive parents, but they worked plenty and like we entertained ourselves and it was, it was great. And yet I'm Currently already, like, oh man, I better find ways to play enough with my child. I need to like be doing that 24 7.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I think it really is, I think important to dwell on the fact that this is a peculiar attitude basically that only exists in the modern era, that is only kind of in our culture. That is, I guess, a function of peculiarities of modern life. It's not even necessarily common outside of countries like I guess the richest, weirdest, western industrialized, educated countries. And for that matter, I think it's less common even among people who have lower incomes or have less well paying office jobs, even in countries like the uk because it's just not possible. You work much longer hours in a difficult labor job to then come home and be playing with your children for so many hours. This is not at all a human universe. So it is not required for children to do well. I mean, our kid is only 19 months old, but he can entertain himself for very extended periods just playing with toys, playing in the backyard, playing with rocks, just the same that I did when I was a kid. I think my mom has commented on just how much time we spent in the backyard, just playing around in the grass and exploring stuff, not being entertained at all. And I feel like I've worked out all right and it worked out for almost all of us. Basically. That's how almost everyone who's listening to this show would have been brought up.

[B]

Yeah. And I feel like, if anything, I'm like, yeah, I have real nostalgia for it and I feel sad if my child ends up having a much more like, it feels like it'll probably end up being more sheltered. It feels like it'll probably end up being more homogenous. Are you kind of succeeding at having your kid play by themself more than, I don't know, social norms in our circles would want you to?

[A]

Yes. Although maybe not as much as I would endorse. I definitely do still feel the pressure. It's like, oh yeah, you should be playing with your child. This should be your favorite thing ever with a child. I mean, in time, you service people do report that it's a super enjoyable thing. And I think the synthesis there is that it's very enjoyable in moderation, but it's something that is very enjoyable for an hour. I mean, I guess one thing that I have been a little bit surprised by in recent times, people said that young children, they enjoy the same thing again and again. I underestimated the degree to which toddlers enjoy the same thing again and again. I imagine you might want to read the same book a couple of times. They might not really get bored of the book very quickly, but it's more like they will be open to reading or potentially insist on reading the same 10 page book 10 times in a row every day for four weeks. Or that will be their preference if you don't push back. And they can have a little thing that they're meant to be sticking blocks into that can entertain them for hours. And I think it's not natural for a human adult to find repetition on that level enjoyable.

[B]

Totally. I think I'm unusually kind of. I, I love really little kids and I love figuring out like, what is the thing I can do to make them like really giggle. And it is wild to me how even I, after like four times I'm like, oh, can we stop? And they would just, it really seems like they would just do it forever.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Almost. Yeah. I mean, I think there's times when he would have been willing to, you know, play with light switches and you know, turning with them like up and down just for as long as we were willing to hold him at the light switch, more or less. And you know, I enjoy making bubbles and trying to make big bubbles, but I don't want to spend my entire weekend. And I don't think that makes me a terrible dad either. But so the other. So I think we are doing like, I'm managing to some extent to push back and you know, when I see him playing on his own, I'm not like I am failing. I'm like, this is great. It's good that he is like learning to be independent and playing with toys and not needing constant entertainment. We like, you know, keep some eye on, to make sure that he's safe because he is only 19 months old. But the thing you can do if fingers crossed, you know, other people have kids is to get, just get other kids into the house. I mean he has such a great time whenever there are other, other other kids around and is able to, able to, able to play with them. Yeah. And they entertain one another like almost better than, than they can be by adults. They're just on the same level.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because it's like often easier said than done. Right?

[B]

Yeah. No.

[A]

Do you have other parents who are like close enough by that after work you're going to bring them over. It is just a challenge I guess with the way like with urban design, with the way that we like schedule our days with the fact that often people move away from where they know the most family and where they have the most family and friends who they kind of grew up with or went to university with? I guess. Yeah. Especially listeners to this show very often will have migrated from one place to another city. Perhaps they don't have the kind of social network of other people who have lots of young children, like living in the same neighborhood, ideally on the same street. But if you can make it work, then I guess that's a blessing.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you have a sense of what specifically people think is better about doing loads more play with their kids? Is it something like people think it's actually better for the kids and their development, or is it something like part of me just feels like it's kind of random that now the ideal good parent is. Is extremely present and doing all this playing when I can't really think of very good reasons that that should be the recommended approach.

[A]

Yeah, I think this reminds me of. I put up a poll on Twitter a couple of months ago where I was very curious to know what people would think of this hypothetical is it better to play with your child yourself or hire someone who is much better at playing with children? So some sort of super nanny who the child finds much even more enriching and even more enjoyable to play with because they're a professional who does this, who has been selected in for being the most capable and the most entertaining for toddlers, or hire them to do it in your place. And I was like, is this good parenting? Like okay parenting or bad parenting or very bad parenting? People were almost uniformly distributed across that. So about half of people thought that this was good parenting and half of people thought it was bad parenting. I think it's a case that pulls apart two different desirable aspects of parenting. One is providing entertainment and happiness and enrichment and education for the child, which is being perfectly well served. In the second case, where you have an extremely good nanny playing with them and taking care of them and having a very deep personal relationship with them, where you're taking your time not to just make them happy and educated and capable, but they love you in particular. And so you can kind of see it both ways to a point. But I would say I don't think that you have to play in order to have a positive relationship with your older child and for them to love you. I don't think you have to be playing with them obsessively all weekend to the exclusion of others. I think it just isn't the case. Many people, including me, have very positive relationships with their parents, despite the fact that they didn't feel this intense pressure to play with them all the time when. When they were toddlers. It's not like I have any memory of, like, ever. If only my parents had played with me, I would, like, love them so much more or I'd feel like I had a deeper connection to them now. Yeah, it does. It does remind me, though, did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored? I remember just, like, just being at home often saying, like, I'm kind of bored.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And I, you know, I almost forget about that. But I don't think that that is a thing that children today almost never feel. Always. We would never be like, my child is boy.

[B]

Yeah, I'm failing. Yeah.

[A]

What a nightmare. I have to fix this immediately. But, you know, when I was five, my. I think my parents would say, well, go find something to entertain yourself. Go read a book.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Go figure out a game to play. It's not my job to entertain you. Yep. And I think I did most of the time, eventually.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I feel the same way. I do think I can just tell I'm going to struggle with this. And I wonder. I mean, there probably isn't that much really good advice here other than just like, I need to do some cbt. But. Yeah. Do you have, like.

[A]

Yeah. So when you. When you're struggling with it, will it be that you feel shame of the judgment of other people or that you worry that, in fact they're having a bad time or, like, somehow not developing as much as possible because you're not playing with them enough or something else, or you're going to lack the personal relationship with them when they're five because you only played with them four hours on Saturday rather than eight.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Good questions. I think when I really try to get in touch with it, it's like I am not having worries about actually the child having any negative repercussions. I don't even particularly. Maybe the two things coming to mind are one, finding it, like, I already have this with my dog. I find it hard when she's bored. I feel like, I think an unhealthy amount of empathy. And I'm like, oh, she's suffering. I could be making her life better and enriching it and giving her more fun. And probably there's a negative cycle there where she has learned less to entertain herself. And that's the kind of thing that probably happens with kids, too. And so there's something like, oh, I'm gonna find it hard if I Think my kid's not having a great time and I could give them a great time. That sounds really possible. And the other one is really not connected to value for the kid. It's really just like, it's somehow gotten into my psyche that people are just.

[A]

Intuitive that you're like, yeah, you need.

[B]

To be a good parent. And that's just the definition for me now is being super, super engaged and super present and doing all the playing. And I think it's just gonna be, like, a very unendorsed shame that I'm gonna have to regularly be like, it is actually not worse for the child. There's no reason to have the shame.

[A]

I reject this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

You mentioned, isn't it in some ways a little bit surprising that culture has trended in this direction? Because, like, in other respects, we've trended towards people wanting to spend more time on their career and on education. You can imagine an alternative bizarro. A timeline when parents, when they do have children, they spend less time playing with them because they're like, well, actually, I kind of. I had children, but, like, my bigger passion was my career, so I want to, like, spend less time playing with them and find more ways to entertain them otherwise. So that. That is a little bit surprising. Oh, and also it's so acceptable. I think it's basically acceptable, so at least, like, among our crowd to say, look, I don't think I would really enjoy playing with children that much, so I'm not going to have children or. I don't think this is, like, such a big passion of mine. I would rather be doing other stuff. I'd rather be traveling. I'd rather be working. I would rather be playing computer games. I don't think that that is a. Cause it's not really stigmatized virtually at all.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And yet once you have a child. Yeah, I guess because, like, now it's a specific person who you're meant to have a deep personal relationship with.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now you have to say that you enjoy reading the same book to them without limit for, like, weeks on. Weeks on end. Yeah. There's like, a funny tension there.

[B]

It is. I mean, I think it's. I mean, another reason it's funny is, like, I think broadly, we're becoming more hedonistic and individualistic, and we celebrate more when. Yeah. We, like, choose things that just give us a good time. Yeah, exactly.

[A]

You do you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, yeah, that also feels like it conflicts. Like, I really just don't. I don't feel Like, I have a good understanding of where this comes from.

[A]

It feels like it has a romantic aspect to it, surely. I think we have this romantic. I mean, people talk about how we romanticize childhood so much more now than we did in any other historical era that, like the magical time when you don't have to worry, you're just playing all the time. And I guess that is what we regard as the ideal childhood. I just think someone in the 19th century wouldn't have thought that that was like so central. That is like the key to a good childhood. They would have thought it was more like bringing someone up with the right values. Something like somewhat sterner. So perhaps that romanticism is playing into people's visions.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. No, that. That makes sense to me too. Yeah. I guess I'm still kind of interested in the concrete advice thing. And maybe there's something about, like, do you have any script? Like, do you say anything to yourself when you're like, ah, my. Like, he seems kind of bored, but I endorse letting him go play outside. Like, maybe there's a part of me that's like, I should play with him, but I reject that. Do you have. Is this a dialogue in your head at all that you've kind of rehearsed?

[A]

Yeah, I think I do say it's good that he's playing. He's learning to play by himself. It's good that he's learning to entertain himself or good that he's playing with another child. I think I'm unusual in being willing to say, I could play with my kid, but he seems like he's doing fine playing with those rocks. And I also want to read this thing. Many people might feel uncomfortable making any kind of trade off where they're saying, well, I'm going to prioritize my preferences for what to do over what my toddler wants, but I think we should give kind of equal regard to the preferences and the wellbeing of parents and children.

[B]

I feel like that one is.

[A]

Is that a shocking claim?

[B]

It feels like. I completely agree, but it's like landing weird to hear someone say aloud. I think probably.

[A]

I mean, the fact that that sounds crazy to us now, or at least crazy to some people, it probably goes some way towards explaining why people don't want to have kids.

[B]

Yeah, I agree.

[A]

Because they're like, if I have a child now, it's unacceptable for me to care about my own well being even equally right as theirs. I just have to become a servant to them always, like, always pursuing like small benefits. To them at large. Cost to myself. I mean, Yeah. I do sometimes think I don't want to have like such intensive helicopter parenting, such that I would regret having a child. Such that I would. I could not, like, tell someone else. Well, you might want to have a. Like, maybe you should have a child too.

[B]

That's a really good one.

[A]

So you think you should have a. Yeah. Have a level of intensity and a style of parenting that causes you to endorse having a child and maybe endorse having another child and feel comfortable saying to other people, maybe you should have children too.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if you're like so anxious about what's happening and so trying to, like, eke out tiny gains that you no longer feel away, that's like, it's a bad that way for society as a whole to operate. At least if you think that the fertility thing matters at all, which again, because of AI, I personally am not so worried about. Nevertheless, I think it's a better generalizable principle.

[B]

Yeah, no, that is a style of reasoning that works for me really well. And maybe I can internalize something like, arguably at some point it is worse for your relationship with your child if you feel exhausted, bored, and resentful about the amount that. That you're kind of sacrificing yourself to entertain them. Which doesn't seem at all crazy to me that. That at some point is a trade off that starts hitting.

[A]

Yeah. What about another. So I'm not sure how many kids you're planning to have, but I imagine there's some uncertainty. Maybe it's 2 or 3, or possibly 3 or 4. There's some margin. You think you should try to aim for a style of parenting and a level of stress and input that's consistent with having the larger number rather than the smaller number. Do you want to be playing with them to make them slightly happier than what they would have done on their own? If that means having a smaller, less happy or less boisterous home and family life in the longer term because you couldn't bring yourself or you just didn't have the capacity to have another child.

[B]

Totally. Yeah. Actually, I think that applies to me unusually much, or maybe a lot of people feel this way. But I would like two kids, but I'm three curious. I'm quite open to having three, depending on how the first two go. So I think this actually just probably wouldn't be a meaningful effect for me. Yeah. If I really sacrifice myself for the first two, I would probably not have a third. I think it'd be really nice to have a third.

[A]

Yeah. There's this quote, I think it was on the Klein show, maybe it was even just in the show notes, but it was saying people used to regard having, like, a lively, boisterous house full of children as, like, an important vision of, like, what it is to be a successful person and what it is to, like, live a good life. I think just so many people do not feel that way anymore. The thought of having, like, noisy kids around, playing with one another, making trouble is. To them it's ost. Well, I won't be able to read my book.

[B]

Yeah, totally.

[A]

And I think that, like, just really stuck in my mind. It's like, imagine that you thought that having, like, coming home and there's like a whole lot of kids who have come home from school and they're kind of, like playing with one another, like bickering maybe, but all doing all kinds of different things. And it's like, it's a little bit overwhelming. But that is your vision of a good life. If people felt that way, we would certainly have a lot more children, for good or for bad.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. No, that's really true. Yeah. I guess vaguely ties into bringing it back to the kind of fertility question more broadly. Do you have a sense of what our options are for increasing fertility rates globally?

[A]

I think probably pretty poor. Yeah. I'll stick a link to the Financial Times article, like, I guess throwing some water on proposals that people have had. I think if we were willing to spend more than 10% of GDP, we could drive up the number of children that people have pretty substantially. I think the strongest options are kind of consistent transfers to people, so free childcare on a really ongoing basis and a tax system that basically just hands people money based on the number of children that they have every month. I think evidence suggests that that does cause some people to have more children. It's really difficult, though, because almost all of these policies, the big challenge is you end up paying for all of the children. That would have happened anyway because you can't say this person would have had two children otherwise. So we're going to pay them for the third. We'll pay them for the marginal third child. You don't know how many they would have had. And also people would regard it as kind of unfair, I think. So in practice, you end up doing redistribution for every child, and most of them would have existed anyway. And so if you're driving up fertility from like 1.5 to 1.6, then you end up paying 16 times as much as as if you could perfectly pay someone to have an extra child. Might have managed. I think, again, I'm not so much an expert on this, but I think experience across different countries. France, I think Norway, I guess not so much the US But I guess I'm trying to think what other countries have had fertility policy like Singapore, Hungary. If you're willing to spend a couple of percent of GDP, you can drive up fertility by 0.2 or 0.3. Countries have done that. But I think almost no one has managed to really kind of factually increase it by much more than that. Because I think you run out of people who are kind of willing to have that many more children. You're just running into people who actively don't want to have children anymore. It just is not part of their picture of their life.

[B]

Yeah, these just aren't addressing the problem of someone wanting no children. And how would one even address that problem?

[A]

So you also run into the problem that people are single. Single. So you run out of, like, you.

[B]

Have no lever for them.

[A]

I mean, like, people talk about things that you could do with housing or urban design or I guess different kinds of government policies that might cause people to spend more time socializing and be more likely to form relationships. I guess you can get rid of like tax penalties that people sometimes in some countries you get for being married.

[B]

Yeah, okay.

[A]

Or having a partner. But another quote that I heard many years ago that stuck in my head is like. Like some things we just have to do for ourselves. It's not something that the government can do. And I think the government can remove active impediments that are created to building relationships and having friends. But I think this is more something that we have to decide to change our lives ourselves rather than something that can be dictated by a national government because it's just so hard for them to influence. And I don't really see any signs that the trend is shifting here. I think the trends are all against it. It's all towards spending more time on your own, like towards less extroversion, towards less interest in having deep relationships.

[B]

Do you think some countries where it's going to become quite a noticeable problem, that population is shrinking super rapidly, could end up with a kind of cultural shift that's for the nationalism. We need to have kids because otherwise our population's going to shrink from. Yeah, I don't know. In some countries, many, many millions to not very many. Can you imagine just like a broad psychological shift that's like, okay, it's wartime effort. We need to have kids for the good of the nation.

[A]

So I think there's some evidence, I guess, that countries that are facing external threats, I think some people think that that increases their fertility. And I guess often the case that is cited is Israel, which has, it's almost the only that has above replacement level fertility. I guess it's like distinctive culturally, you'd have to say it's like, I guess, quite an unusual country in some ways. And I guess it could be that people are committed to the mission of the country in a way that encourages them to have children. But I guess we don't see that working in Taiwan. I don't think that was working in Ukraine. I guess that's not a generalized solution, certainly. And I think we often have this idea that, well, if the situation gets bad enough, like population is crashing enough, then people will choose to have children or people will choose to volunteer to solve the problem. But the problem is it's a collective issue. Why would you volunteer to basically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of your time and money to slightly incrementally improve it? It's a collective action problem. And that's why I think more about policy solutions or redistribution. It's kind of if the country as a whole wants to have more births and people just aren't enjoying having children enough or that's not important enough to them, then you think, well, well now it is looking a bit more like work. So we want to basically pay for it through taxation. It's now kind of a job that we want to pay people to do. Now of course, some people will do it for joy and it's like it's a combination of these different factors. But why wouldn't you kind of socialize the cost to some extent and basically just be like transferring people money in order to have children? That seems like the more equitable kind of fair and more natural, sensible way to do things.

[B]

Do you think, do you think any word could get really dystopic like bans on abortion or child requirement policies or something? Or does that seem pretty unlikely?

[A]

I mean, this isn't my area and I guess again, to some extent I don't think any of this will play out. But let's imagine that AI was not advancing particularly anytime soon. I suspect that that wouldn't happen in many places. I think that this problem won't be solved, isn't on track to be solved, There isn't enough will to solve it. A country kind of can just tolerate having its population crash and any solutions that you put in place now don't pay off for 20 to 30 to 40 years. So there's not that much urgency to like, well, let's really crack this and then we'll be in a better situation. It's so far in the future, anything that you do now, and the costs would be massive. There isn't the political will to spend that kind of money. Already today the group that is most active and successful in pursuing redistribution is not sort of like students getting redistribution to support their studies or young people getting extra funding for childcare. It's basically older people who are the most active politically, I guess, have the most at stake in redistribution to older retirees. So a larger and larger fraction of government spending is going towards healthcare and Social Security transfers for people who are retired. I think that will probably only escalate. And I think that group is not going to be interested in surrendering the 10% of GDP. Just in general, all interest groups are not going to be interested in giving up the 10 to 15% of GDP that might be required to solve this on a sustainable basis. And these other things are even less attractive than that. They'll be even more invasive and horrifying to people. So, you know, if you're North Korea or you're some sort of authoritarian country, you know, famously, I think Romania, in order to boost its population when it was a dictatorship, got rid of contraception, which did briefly increase the number of children people were having. It's like obviously horrific. It's basically just regarded as historical atrocity in a way. But I don't think there's going to be appetite outside of like quite authoritarian countries to pursue anything like that. I mean, fortunately.

[B]

Yeah. Before we move on. Yeah. Are there any other things kind of about this issue, the statistics that are worth mentioning?

[A]

I guess actually on the point of government policy to increase the number of children that people have, although it is potentially difficult get us up to two children. Plus I think there is stuff that you can do that is affordable, like spending that 1 to 3% of GDP on free childcare. That kind of does boost it by a meaningful amount and does solve at least like 20% of this issue, 20 or 30% of the way towards a stable population. And that probably does seem worth doing. So I don't want to say that there's actually nothing to be done or nothing that could be done. Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon, is in the past. Well, we talked about in the past how lower income and lower education was correlated with having more children, and now it's basically flat there's not really a relationship anymore, I guess because, well, it could be the relationship thing. Then maybe it's easier to find a partner to have children with in this slightly less relationship friendly world. If you're reasonably successful, that could be a factor. Yeah, I guess just mercilessly continuing to crib from the Financial Times this series of articles that they're willing to. Yeah, I guess a few things that stand out. One is that across almost all kinds of countries now many more people say that they're going to have fewer children than they want rather than more children than they want. I guess access to birth control has improved so dramatically that now many more people are kind of disappointed, I guess with when they're beginning to start a family or whether they're finding a partner. And I think this is a big flip on the past when many people, I guess, expected to have more children than they might have desired. Another really interesting one was looking at changes in the number of children that people have depending on their political views. I think looking across developed countries, I guess the Financial Times looked into how the number of children has, has changed over time among people who are more like a conservative versus more liberal. And it's gone down for both. But it's gone down about twice as much I think for liberals, for progressives. So now I think across the developed world the difference was something like 1.7. So this must be including a bunch of middle income countries, I think. But it's 1.7 children for liberals for the most liberal group versus 2.2 for the most conservative. And there used to be no difference at all.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So I guess that leads probably to some like modest effect on politics because like politics is to some extent passed down through families. Yeah, I guess, yeah. It's just interesting, I suppose that there's perhaps, I don't know, I don't know what the factor is. And I guess potentially people who are liberal often spend more time in education. I think education is kind of an independent factor that tends to lead people to prioritize children less. Probably all kinds of things going on. Yeah, but yeah, interesting.

[B]

Yeah. Are there people worried about kind of from the liberal progressive perspective kind of losing voters from this.

[A]

Yeah, I think this article had that angle a little bit, saying, well, you know, I guess if liberals want their culture to continue to continue to be influential, then probably they should have some culture in which like they reproduce themselves and pass down their values. I think any effects are going to be very gradual with that kind of difference, especially as it's only Partially inherited. And plenty of people like Flip that have conservative parents and they become liberal and vice versa.

[B]

You know, I actually don't. I have the feeling that it is very common for kids to share political views with their parents. But I don't actually know really concretely. Do you know kind of what share.

[A]

Of.

[B]

One'S political views are explained by one's parents political views views?

[A]

I actually don't. Yeah. I remember in Brian Kaplan's book he pointed out that people's reported religious affiliation and reported party affiliation was much more strongly correlated with their parents than their actual policy views or their actual like religious, like attendance at church. So it's like people's identification I think is influenced more perhaps than their. When they have more skin in the game and more, more like, more like cost involved. Yeah, but I actually don't know. Yeah, that's something we could look at.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. I want to ask you more about kind of your personal experience. Yeah, I'm like a few months away. It feels very. I just feel really interested in what it's all going to feel like. And one thing on my mind is what work is going to feel like. What was your transition back to work like?

[A]

Yeah, I think so. We took six weeks off completely and then we did another 12 weeks of half time. I think the halftime thing was probably a misfire that we wouldn't do again. It's just very hard, I think, to be meaningfully productive at work working two and a half hour days a week. There's so much overhead fixed kind of overhead with having a job at all. And I think both of us felt we were just kind of like working very hard in order to stay still and not really accomplish so much. So I think especially now that we understand more what the transition would look like and we're more familiar with having nannies take care of a young child, I think we would just basically go straight back into full time work, have a hard transition. I guess so. Yeah. When our kid was young, we had nannies taking care of him at home. Whenever both of us were working, I should say during the halftime period, we would work opposite times so that one of us would always be caring for him. That was the system. But then once that was over, then we brought in nannies to take care of him. Gym, which worked great actually. It was maybe less expensive than I expected. It's still expensive for sure, but it was something that we could afford. We didn't have difficulty, I think finding nannies who were able to do a pretty good job, especially at that age, at the earlier ages, the ceiling on how well I think he can perform with a five month old is not so great because their needs are just fairly contained and you can just meet them all. And a reasonable number of people have experience and are willing to do that. So that worked well. We had nannies taking care of him full time for quite a while and we kind of narrowed in on the ones that he seemed to get along best with and had them in repeatedly. Then at 11 months, he started going to nursery two days a week. So this is kind of UK childcare or like childcare centers. The. The staff ratios at this age are three children to one staff member. So reasonably intensive. I think that was. That went reasonably well. He like, he cried a bit to begin with with, as I think all children do when they first start at any kind of childcare thing, even if they're older. But it didn't take very long for him to get reasonably comfortable with it. I think possibly I might have extended that to 12 or 13 or 14 months, perhaps waited till the next term, but not a big deal. And so we had him on this combination. It was very hard to tell actually which he enjoyed more, the nannies or the childcare. I think probably the nannies, though we have more evidence about the nannies because we can see that than we do about the childcare there, where it's a little bit opaque anyway. Yeah. So the situation now is we've gone to three days a week of nursery where he seems very happy now and like two days a week of his two favorite nannies where he's also extremely happy. So I think he's having a very good time during the day pretty consistently. And the nannies take him out on adventures through London to parks, to museums, to visit his favorite rocks. All of these different things. So, yeah, I think we've gotten to a very good place.

[B]

Place he has favorite rocks.

[A]

Oh, he has a favorite rock place where he can play with the rocks in. That's great.

[B]

Okay. Yeah, I think this sounds like the setup I think I will want. At least intellectually. I worry I'm going to struggle kind of with feelings we've already talked about guilt about not being more present and maybe fear of judgment from others. But I think mostly it will just be me judging myself. How have you found kind of handing off a bunch of childcare to nannies?

[A]

I haven't felt any judgment. I guess maybe people in our social circles are pretty comfortable with both parents returning to work. I'm not sure whether my Wife has felt more of that, but I don't think we've talked about it, so I don't think it's at least a common thing. How did I find it, handing over? I mean, I guess whenever you do a new thing, like whenever we first started having nannies take care of him, I guess I'm a bit anxious about safety. And I would hang around at home and kind of train them, perhaps even more than was necessary in order to assuage my anxiety and always be kind of tutoring them and have a written guide and things like that. So there's a bit of anxiety whenever you're handing over your kid to someone else at the same time. I've had pretty high confidence in them. And ultimately you get comfortable, I think, reasonably quickly once something starts working out. Out. And likewise, I think the first week or two of nursery, we had anxiety. We were worried that he was having a bad time. But eventually you start picking him up and he's perfectly chirpy and happy in the evenings, and you're like, things seem fine. I guess. I think you have other worries that perhaps almost didn't occur to me.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I was basically talking to Claude and I was like, what are some. I definitely have this strong. Like, I want to do this, but I think it is gonna at least initially feel really bad. So. Yeah. So what did I. What did I get Claude to. Yeah, I got Claude to basically be like, what are. What are reasons parents tend to find this hard? And the ones that really resonated were the kid attaching more to the nanny than to me. I think I interviewed Emily Oster, might have been a few years ago now, and she said that, like, if you get a nanny, your child might call them mommy. And the idea of that, that I think could feel really. I think it could feel really bad to me, which I think one part of me is like, it's great that my kid might have another person that they love a lot, but another part of me is like, I want to be the mommy and be. Yeah. The most important person to them. So that's one. Another was missing key moments. So just, like, seems very likely that you'd be more likely to. That feels sad. Yeah. I guess you kind of touched on this with the safety anxiety. But, like, I can imagine being like, I really want my kid to have, like, certain kinds of positive reinforcement and stuff around, like, parenting styles. And handing off to a nanny feels like giving up some of that control a bit. And then. Yeah, I mean, the last one, I think there's just kind of an abstract, like. Like, I'm having a kid. It's this huge decision change to your life. And the idea that. And it's like, in some ways, it's quite selfish. I'm doing it in part because I think I could give a kid a really good life, but I'm doing it in part because I think it's a very interesting experience that probably humans have evolved to find very meaningful. And I just want to know what that's like. And I want to have that kind of relationship with someone. And the idea that I'm like, I'm gonna spend so much money and effort, but hand a bunch of that off just feels kind of like, why am I even doing it then? Which I. Yeah, I think, like, already I'm like, oh, I don't really endorse very many of these, but I still think they're gonna hit me really hard. Yeah. What are your reactions?

[A]

Yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah. I mean, I could tell you how to feel, but I guess I could tell you how I feel about it. And I guess I think my wife has had a bit more of these feelings, although not so much that it's really been a significant problem. So, on the. You want to be the most special person. I think it's overwhelmingly likely that you will remain the most special person even if you have a nanny coming, like, many days a week. I mean, there'll be breastfeeding, there'll be the fact that you're with them every day rather than just sometimes. You're by far the most consistent figure. They're definitely going to know, I think, that you're their mum. Even if they might call someone else mum, I think that probably is a pretty unusual case. Case. So I think if you want to be the most important person in their life, if you are an engaged parent, as you are, I think you very likely will be. If you, like, if you wanted to make unadjustment there, you could potentially have, like, two different nannies who cycle. So you have, like, you know, one nanny who does three days a week, another who does two days a week. But you're like, the most constant figure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And plenty of people want to do this kind of stuff part time. So it's, like, actually almost easier to find someone part time than full time. So that would be a.

[B]

That makes sense.

[A]

Like, what do you call it? Halfway adjustment. That might be satisfying. I guess you were saying you're worried about having this enormous cost and then not getting the benefit of taking care of them. I mean, I think for us it wasn't really a question would we go back to work? We considered going back part time, but then realized that we would just work full time, but be pretending that we're only working four days a week. So why not just bite the bullet and accept that we're working five days a week and working full time? But the thing is you have like different. You have competing values, you've decided to have children, but you still do still value your impact and you still value your work and your intellectual engagement for that matter. So I don't think it's really inconsistent at all. And just in, I guess I always sound like an economist because it is my background. But something can be very enjoyable for half of your time, but kind of unpleasant on the margin for the other half. We want diversity in what we're doing. I think many people who end up doing absolutely full time childcare with like no work or like other activities going on just become like quite bored because it's too repetitive and there's not enough like variation in their life, which is like something that adults really, really care about. I mean, I think the, the ideal of a mother who stays home and takes care of their child, who's like doing 90 plus of the work of raising a child, is a complete historical aberration. I mean, I don't even know whether that is like kind of the dominant vision that people have today anymore, but, but there's not been at any time when this was actually the way that people typically lived. And it absolutely is not necessarily for good child development. In fact, I was looking into this a bit this week and probably if anything, the evidence counts the other way that it's somewhat detrimental that you want children to be having multiple caregivers and learning to navigate multiple different relationships, especially better for their social development. It's very important to have an engaged parent who pays attention to them and responds to them a significant fraction of the time. Maybe about half of the time is actually, actually enough to consistently get kind of secure attachment and not really any developmental issues. Potentially even less, maybe even being attentive a third of the time. And some studies suggest it's actually quite sufficient to have a very positive relationship between the child and the parents. Because it was not the case that historically when we were kind of hunter gatherers or subsistence farmers, that parents would be able to pay attention to their children all the time. They had stuff to do, they were very busy cooking, doing all kinds of different work. The child would not always immediately Get a response. If humans evolved to just fall to pieces as soon as their father was trying to collect food or was cooking or whatever else, that would be a horrible design for human beings. And we are not built that way. We are not nearly so fragile as that, that we need require like 100% of the time. Someone always has to be responding. And furthermore, because of the nature of the work that people had to do, we had to have kind of cooperative parenting arrangements or cooperative caretaking arrangements. So I think in almost all historical time periods, except in some cases in the modern world, it was normal that children would be handed between many different caregivers, including other family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and sometimes friends, other parents with children who you would kind of do this in exchange with them as a reciprocal thing. Thing. Almost all children historically have had multiple different caregivers. It wasn't the mother doing it overwhelmingly or either parent doing it overwhelmingly. And the evidence is very clear. Children develop completely fine like that. As long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent who is taking care of them. It seems like that can even compensate for bad quality childcare. So if you put kids in a modest amount of low engagement, low quality childcare, basically, as long as the parents are the rest of the time pretty engaged with them, attentive much of the time, then there's not apparent psychological problems. So I think we have this image and it's completely a modern thing. Basically, I think exclusively in the post war world in the west, the idea that children will fall apart, go to pieces, not be attached, not be psychologically functional. If the parents, it's like if it's not one specific person all the time paying attention to them and anyone ever leaves them to cry. I think it's just incorrect. I think it flatly contradicts the scientific literature on this topic.

[B]

Yeah, okay. That is more helpful than I expected. I think I was like, maybe you'll say some things that I'll intellectually endorse and they probably won't actually move my feelings. But I think the idea that it really probably is best for my child to have a range of social experiences and a range of caregivers and that they're like, like really is no historical precedent for the best thing for them being one on one, only me and them. Or maybe two on one if you want both parents there all the time. Which like some part of me thinks is what we should be doing. Yeah, I think I'm just like, I can much more easily be like, it is a little hard for me to feel like a bad parent because I'm not doing the thing that has been kind of distilled in me maybe I should do. But actually, if I want to be a good parent, I need to do that hard thing and hand the kid off and give them a much wider range of experiences. Probably. Yeah. I think that actually just does a lot for my gut level feeling.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I think I am in general not a very neurotic person, but I have felt more neuroticism about having a kid and about. I mean, in my case, it's about safety. So worried about, is he going to get hit by a car, Is he going to accidentally poison himself? Is he going to fall down the stairs, Is he going to drown? And I guess these are like possibilities. It's not completely made up. But I think it's very natural for I think people to become quite very concerned about their children. You can see why evolution would push us in that direction. And I think maybe all people or all parents need to have some effort to put the brakes on and say, what stuff do I need to worry about less? Where can I take my foot off the accelerator? Because otherwise you can just spiral towards ever more concern about ever more things. And I guess I think you do see that in some kinds of really intense parenting culture that sometimes I think is encouraged by influencers or by people who are slightly selling a product or selling a solution. Yeah. So while it's very understandable, I think people can give themselves a break. It's like a very good thing, I guess, to find some way to give yourself a break.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I'm curious, is it surprising to you that your neuroticism is kind of. It's coming out towards safety, or is that a thing that you already worried more than usual about?

[A]

Yeah, I think it's not because I am very worried about physical injury myself. So, yeah, always like, I'm too scared to go skiing, for example.

[B]

It's like a.

[A]

Interesting margin. Yeah. I mean, people do get into skiing, so there's a lot of this stuff that is reasonable. But I'm like, I'm also kind of scared of ledges or heights and things like that. Probably more than is reasonable, but just in general, I'm very conscious of physical injury.

[B]

How much have you tried to do this? I should put on the brakes for some of this neuroticism because it's actually overdoing it.

[A]

Yeah. I tried talking to Chatgpt to get it to investigate what childhood safety things you don't need to do that aren't that important. And unfortunately I came up slightly empty handed on things that I could stop doing because I think it was already somewhat calibrated to what are the real risks. So things like drowning, like choking. So I wasn't doing completely silly stuff. At the same time, probably it's such a difficult issue because probably parents are somewhat too concerned in some sense. They invest a lot of time in these incremental things that slightly reduce the risk of your child drowning or choking. But what is the right level, like what is the right level of acceptance of your child dying?

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's so hard to contemplate what if I like worried less about choking and then he dies choking on a grape.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I will like have to live for the rest of my life like with that. Yeah, I mean in practice I guess like people through all of history, childhood mentality was high. Like people got on with their lives and continued to live.

[B]

But like don't find that super reassuring.

[A]

Imagine vision. And I think that is that sense of horror at the prospect and then regret, the sense of the intense regret that you would feel makes it very easy to over invest in child safety. Plus also the ambiguity about what's reasonable or not. So I haven't got a great solution on that. I do try to look for what stuff am I doing that's not necessary. If there's anything that's clear, then you cut it out. It.

[B]

Okay, another topic I wanted to talk to you about. I feel like I've kind of not really harmonized my views on AI with my views on parenting. I think my views on AI are pretty radical. But my views, I think at least intuitively on parenting are like my kids are going to have lives like mine, they're going to have childhoods like mine. And I think that's probably just just not true on my views. And similarly, I think probably AI does have implications for at least the people who feel like they can decide one way or the other, which wasn't super my experience, but it's definitely some people's experiences. So I'm curious, how have your views on AI affected, I guess the question of whether to have kids for you and how to raise them.

[A]

Yeah, I think the AI situation probably makes it less attractive to have kids now, all things considered, if you have the option of delaying because it's just like so unclear what the world will look like, it could get much better, could get much worse. Or at least if you do have the view where things could get much better, things could get much Worse there's got to be. If you were 20 and you had plenty of time potentially left to decide whether to have kids or not, then there is an argument, I think, for kicking the can down the road and seeing how things play out a little bit more. So we have a bit more clarity on that. I guess it's a very, you know, it's just a very difficult spot. I suppose if you're more, you know, 35 or 40 and you kind of have to decide to have kids now or not at all. I mean, an interesting argument that I've heard is people talk about, like, now being a particularly perilous time to have children, or isn't it particularly dangerous for the children? Of course it's not perhaps on a historical level, because a third of children might have died before the age of five in the 15th century. So I guess if you think there's like a 1/3 PDUM or 1/3 chance of extinction, then perhaps it actually isn't that different than the situation that our ancestors faced in some sense. I don't know whether people would find that terribly reassuring or not.

[B]

Yeah, I think I mostly am like. Like, it just means we're in a terrible world. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, I guess if you're a big optimist about AI, then maybe it makes it more attractive. If you think it's overwhelmingly likely to go well, then maybe it's more of a blessing to create a new person who will enjoy it.

[B]

Yeah. So there are a couple of aspects there. One is just like, people die and I think I feel pretty. I mean, obviously that's a terrible outcome, but from the perspective of having kids, I'm like, well, I could decide not to have kids and then they would never live. Or I could decide to have kids and there's some chance they will die, hopefully quick and painless deaths. And it seems better to me to have had the kids. The world that really freaks me out is one where people don't die but live terrible lives one way or another. Do you have a take on how likely that is and how, like, was it a consideration for you for having kids?

[A]

Yeah, I don't have a strong take on how like that it is, but I would say it's like, probably the. One of the strongest considerations against having kids for me.

[B]

Yeah. Okay.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And were you like, I'm just not gonna deal with it or were you like, all things considered, I think it's okay.

[A]

I mean, I think, yeah, to some extent, perhaps I'm being inconsistent or perhaps I. I don't think that I made the decision in a fully expected value framework where I'm just assigning probabilities to different outcomes and then taking the number. To some extent I endorse people not organizing their personal lives around big picture worldview, things like AI or climate change or their view on politics, and to some extent keeping it separately. But I think someone could say, well, you're not taking, you're kind of acting inconsistently. And I think to some extent that is when you decide I'm not going to organize my relationships and my personal life and my decision to have children around these big picture worldview long termist concerns, then you are going to be potentially acting inconsistently. And I think I don't even know whether I endorse that or not. It's just very unclear.

[B]

Right, okay. And so is that, I guess another part of it is, is then how it affects your career and your ability to do good. And it sounds like your feeling is that yeah, probably it will have a meaningful impact on how productive and kind of good at your job you are. Was that a big consideration for you?

[A]

Yeah, that's probably the other biggest argument against having kids, at least for me. Takes you away from important work work. Hopefully making the show is a useful thing to do. So wouldn't it be good if we had even more time and energy to do even more of it? And couldn't that possibly even be of what historical importance? It's a horrible thought to contemplate and I think it has reduced my productivity. I think it has reduced the amount of energy. I mean, partly that's because we're at the earlier ages when it is most draining. They haven't gone off to school, they don't have their independent lives so much. Yet I have heard from some people who say that they think having children didn't really reduce their work product activity at all. I think in some cases that's because they have so much assistance or so wealthy enough to afford kind of constant help. So that maybe makes sense. But I just think for the great majority of listeners, if they have kids, they're either going to spend less time on work, it's harder to work late on the evening, it's harder to take off weekends, or you're going to have less energy because you're sleeping worse, like are doing more work, like activities in the evenings during the week. All kinds of different reasons. Like how much has it reduced my productivity? I mean like maybe 20% or something like that. It's pretty meaningful. So yeah, I just think people should probably be clear eyed unless you're wealthy enough that you're just going to have basically constant nannies to substitute for you. Or you had a ton of slack in your schedule already so you were not anywhere near the limits of what you could accomplish. And so you can basically just shift. All of the shift is only from pleasure time or personal time into child rearing and then you can keep the work stuff the same. But that kind of. I think many listeners will not be in that camp where they have so much slack in their time that can absorb all of the extra needs.

[B]

And so did you, I mean, both you and your wife have very kind of, I would say, high impact meaningful jobs. Did you two decide that, that you were just willing to take that cut? Because yeah, doing good is important, but you've got other values or how did you think about it?

[A]

Yeah, I think it's probably unethical by my lights, because the cost to others is great relative to the gain to me, but I am somewhat selfish. So I think it's just a case of doing something that I wanted to do for my own personal preferences. I'm not going to contort and claim that this is like the ethically required thing to do or the ethically best thing to do. It's just like almost everyone draws a line somewhere where they say, well, I'm willing to put this much into improving the world and helping other people, but then I also want to spend time and money and energy on myself. So it kind of falls into that bucket.

[B]

Okay, assuming AI goes well, how much do you think your kid's life is going to differ from kind of your life, I guess at the same age. So like your childhood and their childhood?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think in the long run, radically. Almost like radically. Hopefully, because the world will be much better. I think it's unclear when AI is going to become a big deal in education and change school. I think that's unless we get very hard takeoff. I suppose that's where you might expect it to happen first, is that now they're getting one on one tutoring from an AI guy that they talk to all the time. That is like kind of a substitute parent or like a substitute one on one tutor. I'm like, I think I'm pretty keen for that to happen. Although of course another part of being a flourishing human is learning to deal with other human beings and how to negotiate those boundaries with other toddlers and other young children. So it's not going to end up even on a world where they're getting an excellent upbringing, it's not going to eat up all of that time. Maybe it would even be like quite a minority of school hours perhaps. I mean, I think in the longer term it's quite hard for me to imagine that a child of mine born today is going to be working an office job when they Finish University in 2044. You'd have to have very long AI timelines, I think, to believe that it's going to take so long to get AIs that are able to replicate what kind of humans do at a computer or even potentially what humans do physically over that kind of timeline. So I think it's like a real long shot. The idea that we're training up our kid to have a normal job the way that my wife and I do. I guess never say never. You don't want to put zero weight on it. But I would bet pretty strongly against. And so at the point that he is going to school, I think I will place more importance on general development and whether he's having a good time and is kind of becoming a flourishing person who would use recreation time well and would have the ability to not get drawn in by things that are enjoyable in the short term but harmful in the long run, that sort of thing over their ability to kind of grind and be conscientious and do drudge work in any kind of work at all. Because I just think it's unlikely to happen.

[B]

Yeah, this is basically my view too, but I find it surprisingly hard to. I mean, I don't have a kid yet, but it's been so deeply ingrained in me that doing well in school and just kind of learning to do hard things for the sake of doing hard things are important things for your kid. And I think I'm going to find it really hard to let go of. My kid doesn't have to do well in school to have a good, happy, successful life. They can probably. Like there's a version of doing well that probably contributes to flourishing, like finding things you're interested in and stuff. But this abandoning this hope that they are successful feels hard to me. How does it feel to you?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I don't have a kind of success focused philosophy or a sense of what is a good life or is fulfilling. I mean, yeah, to be honest, I think my take is I would be perfectly happy to just spend my time having recreation contributing nothing except that unfortunately the world is really messed up. And so regrettably, I have to go and do something in order to try to help with that and I guess, of course you have to make money in order to live. But if the world were good, if the world was solved, I would have had no interest in accomplishing stuff. Like, why would you want to do that? You work in order to solve a problem. You don't invent problems in order to have work to do. And so I guess, I don't know. Anyway, if he takes after me, then I don't think you have such an issue with feeling like pointlessness or why do I exist? How do I justify my existence if I'm not working for money? And I mean, hopefully if many people are just not working anymore, then that will become a more common culture and it won't be like fewer people will identify with work as the reason that they justify their existence to themselves and regard themselves as worthy. So certainly, yeah, I think if I ever see him beginning to trend towards thinking, well, the reason that I'm okay is that I did well at school. I'll try to push against that to a point, but I think I'm not sure that kind of flourish, like doing well at school and flourishing as a person and becoming the kind of person who could enjoy a good world and enjoy a good life when there is no longer work for humans to do, is that different? At least at early ages. I mean, you still want to learn to use language well, you still want to learn to make good decisions because you will still have to choose who to trust. You'll still have to make some decisions in this world. You still want to learn enough maths that you can actually think through problems and make decisions in your own life, decide whether the AI advisor is giving you good advice or not. And also, presumably you'll want to be having some relationships with some other people or AIs at least. So you want to develop some social skills, you want to be somewhat healthy. So to some extent, for humans, I guess because of how we evolved, being a flourishing being and being able to do stuff are quite intertwined. They don't completely come apart. Maybe at some future time they could come apart, like technology could drive them apart. But for a primary school student right now, I think while you don't necessarily want them to be building the personality where they will just grind out doing extremely unpleasant things for long periods of time in order to get acceptance and approval, other things like are they having good relationships, are they able to accomplish tasks, are they able to focus on anything at all is probably still a valuable life skill.

[B]

Nice. Okay, I've got some questions that are just kind of like general advicey questions. How do you think about screen time? This feels like a thing that might actually matter a bit but could be really easily or it could be really easy to get to. Kind of a suboptimal default.

[A]

Yeah, I mean so he's only 19 months old so you think this wouldn't be such a big issue. But it already is definitely an issue. I mean, so I think we like many parents will use a screen in order to basically keep him calm and quiet during times when you really need that. Like at a wedding for example, we put him down in front of a screen during dinner so he wouldn't disturb everyone during the ceremony. Like on flights and up, parents will recognize cocomelon and non parents might not know what cocomelon is, but it's like very bright colors and lots of things moving. We try to do the least engaging thing that is sufficiently engaging that he's not upset or creating problems for other people. But yeah, so flights sometimes on the train times when he kind of just has to be in a pram. But then of course he really likes it, then he wants it all the time. And also there's sometimes we put on sing along videos on YouTube on the TV, which is all very well and good when you're doing sing along together. But then he really wants to watch more sing along videos all the time. So it's already something where you face some tension. I mean fortunately the fact that when you show him videos and music, he immediately starts pestering you for more, chastens you and causes you to do it less than you might otherwise. It's actually perhaps not a very good strategy on his part if he wanted to maximize the amount of screed time. I mean I think there's different ways you can think about the harms. One is watching actively harmful material that is like. I mean the one that people talk about a lot is just this is a new shot every second. So they're learning to expect an incredible amount, incredible intensity of engagement. That's the only kind of thing that they would find enjoyable. And parents worry about that themselves watching TikTok and whatever else. So it's like actively harmful content. Of course then there's like eight AI slop. There's so much disturbing creep like just weird stuff on YouTube even on YouTube kids, Google's really got to get on top of this where if you put on a good video, like a nice super simple songs version of Wheels on the Bus, it will potentially, if it just is left to autoplay, it will just get to weirder and weirder videos. And so I wish they would get rid of that. And there's just so much going up because people can just generate garbage children's videos and upload them en masse and then some of them take off and the algorithm promotes them. Children of course, find it very, very engaging to watch this really weird, surreal stuff. So anyway, we like want our desired amount of that is zero. I kind of just want super simple songs, like nice songs for him to watch inasmuch as he's going to be watching anything at all. Then there's the other concern, which is just displacement of other things that other valuable experiences. So what if you were watching so much screen time that you were no longer spending that much time with other children? You weren't spending time with your caregiver and forming a bond with them or learning from them or doing language like kids don't really learn language from screens there. I think if that was the only worry, then you'd say, well, watching an hour a day, Even as a 19 month old, it's not a very big proportional decrease in the amount of time that they spend with other children. Indeed, you could make it up easily by just giving them more engaging other activities to do when they're not watching music. Just get more children around them, have more stuff going on. I think that kind of would make sense up to a point. I guess on the harmful stuff you can just try to cut out all of the things that you think are actively bad. But it is tough. You want things to be not hyper engaging, not super stimuluses. But then of course the super stimulus is more attractive to them so they'll hassle you for it inasmuch as they get any exposure. And of course if something becomes sufficiently dull, then it no longer holds their attention. So it doesn't, I guess, serve the purpose of keeping them quiet in a situation where that's really important. So I don't know where we're going to go. I think we do watch Bluey together sometimes in the evenings, which he can somewhat try. I mean, Bluey is a great show. You should watch Bluey if you haven't watched Bluey, even if you don't have kids, just want a top TV show, honestly nice. And I think as a family watching something. I think Kelsey Piper has had this point recently that she has a bunch of kids and she thinks that watching TV with siblings and with your family around you is much less bad than staring at a screen as a young child because your attention gets distracted to other People, other things end up happening. And it's a social experience. Perhaps it's not the very best thing you could be doing, but when you just have your sight completely focused in on a tiny cube, then you're just much less likely to be pulled away by an interaction with another person or a sibling or start playing a game. Yeah. And I think there's probably a lot of truth to that.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. My impression is that you think that there aren't actually that many ways to really screw up your kid. As long as you're kind of meeting their basic needs and kind of giving them a reasonable amount of love and attention. Are there things. Maybe screen time would be one. But are there other things that you think really might matter?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, huge amounts of screen time, probably bad or like really disturbing content which you can avoid. I mean, safety, like dying. If you die in a car crash, then you are not going to come back. So that is an argument for worrying about that a little bit more, I guess. Nutrient deficiencies, lead exposure. We do have air purifiers in the house to reduce exposure to air pollution, so that sort of stuff stands out. I mean, I think I'd be very worried if we had kind of an angry, tense household and we were getting angry with him and he could sense the tension. That kind of doesn't happen basically at all. So I think. I think that is something that probably you could do. You could put, put. Put a child more on edge and make them less happy. I think, like, many people kind of, I think report that there was like tension and anxiety and anger in their household when they were younger and that made their life worse. And it's very hard to deal with as a child because you don't really understand. It's like, so hard to contextualize, like, why are my parents angry? Or like, maybe it's because they didn't sleep or it's not about me.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Or even if it is about me, it's kind of their fault because the parents should be the one holding it together. No.

[B]

It does seem like many kids internalize, realize probably anger is my fault, even when it isn't. Is this because you and your partner have a relationship without much tension and anger? I guess I'm wondering how hard is it to be a household without losing your temper very much?

[A]

Yeah. I think it's probably primarily personality factors that neither of us is a very angry, explosive personality.

[B]

And your child kind of doesn't.

[A]

Yeah. And our child also is not that aggravating either. And our child Is also not very angry child. So probably just fortunate in that regard. I think I don't have a ton to add on anger management. I mean, sleep is probably the key issue in as much as we do get angry or tense. It's overwhelmingly illness and sleep deprivation.

[B]

Yep. Yep. Okay. I'm curious what either the highs or the lows or both have looked like for you.

[A]

Yeah, I guess the highs are playing with him when he's super happy and just really enjoying what's going on. Just seeing him squeal with delight because. Because some sort of chasing game or bubbles or he's at like a museum where something is super fascinating or like a child's soft play area where he's just like squealing with delight and having an amazing time. I guess also maybe seeing him develop like learn to climb up on things and seeing new capabilities come online also ranks among the highs, I guess the lows I think probably like my darkest moment was we were flying all the way to Australia from the uk. God. He was I guess like a year and three months.

[B]

Wow, that sounds like a really hard time.

[A]

A year and one month and I started getting like a stomach illness basically like at the, at the change in Singapore. So I'm like really feeling awful.

[B]

Oh God.

[A]

But you kind of can't stop. You have to continue taking care of them.

[B]

That would be a low without a child.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like a long haul flight. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So that was tough and it took me like, I mean, sorry. And then when you arrive, traveling that many, what do you call it, time zones with a kid is extremely difficult because they can't understand that they need to just stay awake in order to. Or go to sleep early in order to adjust their clock cycle. So you just kind of have to wait like that a day for every hour that you're expecting them to move. In Australia's case, that's like 10 days for them to adjust. And so I couldn't get enough sleep because he was just waking up at random times. So that was, that was a tough run. That was a bit of a low time. So it's like illness, tiredness, it always comes back to that.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, last few minutes. Just a couple rapid fire questions. Do you have, I don't know, like a product recommendation or something for babies or young kids that you really rate?

[A]

Do I ever have product recommendations? Thanks for setting me up. Yeah, no, I made a Google Doc with kind of all of the good stuff that my wife and I bought that we are glad that we bought. But I'm not getting any money from this. It's just did it because I was like, this will be a helpful thing for other people we know who are having kids. So we'll stick up a link to that. It's got dozens of toys, like our favorite books and I guess the things that really are essential. It kind of runs through from pregnancy to infanthood to toddler and so on. I guess what stuff is. I mean, to be honest, I said this last time, and I stand by it still, that I was surprised how useful products are in general. You might find. Think people are, like, pushing products on you, but you don't really need to have the nappy bin. You don't really need to have the changing station. But actually, it is, like, quite a big help to have the changing station and to have the nappy bin. And like, so many toys, like, toys that we've gotten him that didn't cost that much. It can entertain him for dozens of hours. I guess, like, one that stands out there is this, like, Jumperoo thing where, you know, where you, like, put a toddler in and it helps them to stand up and then they can, like.

[B]

Bounce up and down.

[A]

He spent, like, a lot of. You can only put them in there for, like, half an hour at a time. And I think, like, not more than an hour a day. But that was like. Like six months or something when he was like, kind of his favorite toy and he would love to bounce around in there. So, yeah, we'll stick up a link to that. I comment on which ones particularly stand out as the most valuable things to get if you can afford it.

[B]

That sounds great. Yeah. Were there any products that you bought that just totally were kind of gimmicky and not worth the money?

[A]

Well, it's certainly not gimmicky, but the Snoo is this famous automatic rocking electric bed for newborns. And our customers kid. It's, like, very expensive. And our kid just did not like being swaddled, so that was just game over. He was like. He refused to be swaddled, and that's necessary to be in the snooze. So fortunately, we rented that rather than bought it. So we just returned it after paying one month of it and we were done.

[B]

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that kids either love the snoo or hate the snoo.

[A]

Yeah, it seems like that's the situation. Some people swear by it. They're like, this saved my life.

[B]

Not for us anything. You wish people had warned you about that. They didn't.

[A]

I feel like I was pretty forewarned and forearmed about the great majority of stuff. Yeah, I think the degree to which toddlers like repetition perhaps is something that I'd underestimated. But there haven't been that many surprises, honestly. I mean, people said sleep is like a big issue. Illness is the thing that makes it really challenging. It's difficult to balance work and family. It's all on point.

[B]

What is the most fun play that you found?

[A]

I think I'm not that into imaginative playing. I think I just, like. I'm not very good at improv. It feels like it's kind of in that vein. I'm just not very good at thinking and dynamically making up stuff, for better or worse. I think I wasn't even into imaginative play as a kid, actually, which carrying through. I'm like, not so great at it with children, but I really enjoy physical play. So it's like swinging around and throwing and chasing and I guess we. We have a good night routine, which is kind of fun, where I guess he's, you know, he's usually in bed, like, having a bottle, and I, like, get in there and, like, kiss him all over. And he, like, tries to, like, push. Push me off. And I'm like, I love you. Good night. Night, night, night, night. And. And so he's, like, pushing me off and going, bye, bye, bye, bye. Like, like, he's kind of playing me off. And eventually I relent and I'm like, I love you. Good night. See you tomorrow. So that's like another sort of physical play thing.

[B]

That's so cute. Oh, wow. Okay. Nice. Yeah, I feel like it is. Yeah. I've got a lot of excitement. I've also got a lot of fear. And people do talk about the negative stuff quite a bit. So it is. Thank you for the very wholesome, cute stories. Okay, last two questions. First, do you ever feel like you're kind of failing as a parent?

[A]

Maybe this sounds like conceited, but I don't really feel like we've failed in a very significant. On a significant dimension. I think we've never really snapped or made a terrible mistake. I guess there's been a few cases where I wish I'd been more on the ball about a safety thing. And I'm like, it's really imprinted in your mind if you ever have anything that's even near and near miss. But you just live and learn and, oh, you like cars like this or that. But yeah, I don't really feel. I don't know, maybe that's Like a bad side about me. Maybe it's more of a side that maybe we are failing. But no, I think we're doing an okay job.

[B]

Seems like a pretty happy kid. Yeah. That is wonderful. Okay. Do you ever feel like you are crushing it?

[A]

I feel like there's like an idea embedded in the crushing it phrase that implies that it's a thing with a very high ceiling where it's very difficult and you could accomplish some extraordinary level of happiness for them. I think at least for adults, we're so jaded, we've seen everything. To truly entertain an adult, to truly impress them, you have to do something amazing. For a 19 month old, they haven't seen very much yet. They're amazed by the existence of spiders or bubbles. And I think you can kind of hit sort of peak experience for them without that great a difficulty. If you're just, just like you're supporting all of the needs, they've got all of the food that they want and need. You're changing their nappy on time, you're giving them a fantastic fun thing to play with. You don't have to perform miracles in order for them to have about as good a Saturday afternoon as they are capable of having. So I think on that dimension, how often does he have about as good a time as he can roughly have? I think it's like kind of every week there's some sort of activity that just absolutely delights him. And I don't feel like we could do a whole lot better on, but we could do that kind of a super high effort stuff constantly though maybe then we would regret having a child if that was the level that we were trying to reach all the time.

[B]

Yeah, I mean this is sounding pretty good. It sounds like it is harder maybe than I would have expected to feel like you're failing dramatically and also easier to feel like you're meeting all their needs and making them happy. I don't know that I will always have the same psychological attitude, attitude to it, but maybe when I struggle with it, I will pull you aside and you can remind me that actually probably there's. There's a narrower window of experience and probably we are doing enough. Yeah, I guess.

[A]

I think listeners will miss you when you're on maternity leave for however long that that turns out to be.

[B]

Yeah, so I'll be going on maternity leave in December, so I'll take a break then and I'm not sure when I'll be back. Kind of going to play it a bit by ear, but I think I'LL probably. I think I'll be excited to come back and do some more interviews.

[A]

I think, I think a lot of people. Yeah. After some amount of time, they're like, I would especially we have a pretty interesting job. Yeah. And I guess listeners, they might be sad to they might be missing you for a while. They can look forward to finding out about how it's going with it with your kid when you're back.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We could see whether the stuff that I said resonated with you. You just totally disagree.

[B]

All of it goes out the window. Yep. That sounds great.

[A]

Thank you so much.

[B]

It has.