Tyler Cowen sees market failure: "raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis." This is inspired by Knocked Up. I have tickets for a showing later tonight and am looking forward to some film-related debate with Ross.
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The Trouble With Marriage
02 Jun 2007 04:38 pm
Comments (27)
If Cowen thinks raising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, he is really doing it wrong. Possibly so wrong that he'll never have to worry about having children.
. Possibly so wrong that he'll never have to worry about having children.
Umm, too late? He has mentioned at least a daughter. And I know a lot of married people who say that the only real reason to get married is kids.
I, too, wonder about the premise that having children is the main activity of a marriage. There is the possibility that it will be an endeavor that really only consumes a half to a third of married years, and I can't really imagine those other years before and after child rearing being written off as unimportant.
As I noted at Tyler's site, any market analysis would have to start off with the fact that having children is absurd. They drain you of huge sums of money, large chunks of your leisure time, drastically curtail your social life, fill you with angst of really unimagined proportions and strain your relationship with your spouse. There is no "rational" reason to have children.
As a parent of a 14 year old and having been a husband for 19 years, it is an utter and amazing crap shoot marrying somone with whom you will share child rearing duties. You can have the same basic political outlook, be equally religious/non religous, have similar degrees of education, like the same sort of life style, have many interests in common and even roughly agree about the manner in which children will be reared and you can still end up fighting like banshees over this little intruder in your lives. Raising our son has been the source of extraordinary conflict in my marriage on a virtually daily basis for as long as I can remember. You can fight about eating, TV viewing, homework, bed times, going out, schools, discipline, academic expectations, praise versus punishment and a number of other things that I've probably repressed.
I have no idea how you evaluate a prospective mate for these kinds of issues. The only thing that comes to mind is beware people who really sweat all of the small stuff in life, unless I guess, you are one of those people too. I feel utterly unqualified to offer advice beyond this. I guess you can think of it as an extremely interesting venture, "interesting" here being used in the same sense of the old Chinese curse.
My girlfriend and I lived together for eight years, in three different cities, and never felt the slightest need to get married until we decided to have children. We never even talked about marriage until we decided we were ready for kids. The proposal went something like this: Me: Don't you think it's time to have kids? Her: Should we get married first? Me: Okay, we can do that.
Klein, before I got to it I knew you were a man because a woman just doesn't feel that way. Children are incredible, yes difficult but the good things in life are always more difficult. I feel sorry for you that you are so empty because as a single parent of a 15 and 13 year I am full, great kids, great job and lack of an idiot to fight with. I love being able to have my needs met when I need them met and send the man on his way to wash his own socks. Sounds like your wife should try it!!
Nancy,
I don't think you understood my post in the least and I think you are making some gender based assumptions about me that are not true. I've been the exclusive doer of laundry in this household since our marriage began and, for myself, long before that. No women except my mother has ever washed my socks, and I have no problem with that by the way. I have also always done more than my share of the housework and the child rearing, as we both work full time.
My point was that raising children can be very difficult and create disagreements that you couldn't imagine when you met someone. (We're in the midst of yelling at each other about an 8th grade science project as we speak.)
And of course you love your children passionately, which is a joy and a curse, because your life is inextricably entwined with everything that befalls them. You realize in fact that if anything truly bad happened to one of them that you would never be the same.
Many of life's great things, by the way, aren't difficult at all.
"I feel sorry for you that you are so empty"
cripes, nancy, that's really not reading with much care.
i read the post by klein and thought "yeah, sounds familiar--life is crazy but good, you make a lot of compromises but that's what makes life full and rich".
in my case the crap shoot turned out a little better--my wife and i are more compatible maybe, two kids and 22 years of marriage, but the same issues still apply.
i don't think it's a gender thing, nancy, or an empty/full thing. maybe if we caught you on a different day you'd be more willing to remember the frantic/hectic sides. and klein is more willing on refresh to highlight the satisfying sides.
to put it in unfogged-speak, 'comity!'
My wife's and my son is only a few months old, so maybe my perspective is a bit lacking at the moment, but I can completely understand why he says it is the "main thing" involved in marriage. There's nothing I've done with my wife that demanded so much coordinated effort. I mean, if that's not the "main thing" involved in marriage, then what is?
Regarding Klein's left nut's statement:
As I noted at Tyler's site, any market analysis would have to start off with the fact that having children is absurd. They drain you of huge sums of money, large chunks of your leisure time, drastically curtail your social life, fill you with angst of really unimagined proportions and strain your relationship with your spouse. There is no "rational" reason to have children.
Tyler has posted on this before. Studies have shown that having a child increases the parents' happiness relative to being childless. (Interestingly, having additional children does not further increase happiness, only the first child does.) Accordingly, if you goal is to maximize your happiness, then you should have a child (one only). See:
In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers' happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?]. The first child's sex doesn't matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/04/should_you_have.html
Al,
I want you over my house, STAT, to help finish the damn science project. I will take my leave and pretend to be happy at the local saloon.
By the way, said child is a son, but I don't know that this makes much of a difference in terms of satisfaction. I'd like to think not actually.
By the way, I think the happiness guy from Harvard has contrary ideas about children and happiness. I could look it up, but I'm going to imitate some of our right wing brethren and just assert it.
Married life and raising children would be vastly improved by eliminating all middle school projects that require poster board.
How about simply eliminating middle school. Let the kids wander the streets in feral fashion for a few years and then when they are fully human they can go back to the classroom.
Sure parents with children say they happier.
Do you really expect someone like nancy saying. 'damn these kids have ruined my life.'
In truth often having children is great, sometimes it is difficult, and occasionally, it is a pain in the ass to the third power.
Clearly, Nancy has never been impregnated by the devil.
Hm. how to put this? I'm on the side of being married and having children as a great thing and I think that, for me and my spouse, being married and not having children wouldn't be nearly as much fun and personally fulfilling. But I can say that because we were married first, and then had children. Sad commentary on both my spouse and me, no doubt. However, the same can't really be said for people who never had children. They can't really *know* that they wouldn't be happier with children. Its kind of a version of the forbidden experiment (isolating children on an island to see whether they develop language in total isolation from other speakers). But its always going to be horses for courses, that is to say whether something makes you happy, adds to your life, or subtracts from your life is peculiar to you and your ideas of your life and your partner's predilections. There is an "opportunity cost" to everything we do, or don't do, in life if we are lucky enough to live high enough on the economic scale that we can do anhything other than labor all day and half the night. Children are, in this society, a luxury good--high cost, high return. In other socities children are a luxury *anyone* can afford--low cost, high return. Its only in this society with so many other high value things for the individual to do and experience that the oportunity cost of children is also high, leading people to talk about the things they aren't getting to do because of children, or the problems that they expirience parenting, working, being a spouse simultaneously. These things only come into conflict because of a cultural model of permanent free adolesence with no duties towards the future and the past. Under this cultural model (which I have no problem with, by the way) of course children, like pets, are a hindrance. I'd never say everyone should have to raise puppies because I like dogs (I don't). And I'd never say everyone should raise children because I like raising children. But the very notion that raising children is work and not play is a very modern american one. Its culturally determined.
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aimai,
I agree with you on both points that you raise -- it's very difficult to rule out having children as a matter of course for most of us because it seems like you are turning your back on a very fundamental human experience. Some people are very confident in making this call, but I think it is a distinct minority. And it is a genuinely profound experience -- I am much wiser in many respects for having had a child. Whether wiser and happier are synonomous is a rather vast philoophical question.
A big part of the experience of having a child can be the attitude of the person with whom you share the child rearing. I am afraid I am part of a certain milieu that I often find unattractive in this regard -- relatively wealthy, highly educated, ambitious, urban people who project all of their energy and ambition into a child like it was a major production for work. The amount of effort and anxiety I see my peer group put into child reaing is astonishing. But it is also joy sapping. It's all about school achievement, and musical lessons, and cultivating interesting hobbies, and learning a language, all in order to get into a good school, which is somehow the holy grail for this set.
It is very hard for children to just be in this world -- they must always do -- and the parents are supposed to help them "do" and constantly look to mold them rather than just accept them as the people they are.
Of course it is simply off limits to suggest you might have been happier remaining childless. You are some sort of moral monster then, no doubt a sexist who is unwilling to wash his own socks.
the issue of happiness and children can be read a variety of ways. here, for instance, is a discussion that points out that when you have children, your average happiness lowers because of all the additional hassles, but your peak happiness increases:
http://www.babble.com/content/articles/features/dispatches/mitchell/happiness/index.aspx
that said, i'm completely onboard with klein's tiny left nut: there is no meaninful way to figure out in advance how you, as a couple, will relate to having a child.
Well, in 1945 millions of soldiers and sailors came home to America with one thought on their minds- get married, have kids, have a family. Which they did.
And this was a total disaster. When those kids got old enough to drive or hitchhike, society exploded. And not just the kids, either. The parents actually changed the divorce laws so they could get out of bad marriages. And some years after that, when asked if they would do it again, over half of those people said that if they could live their lives over, they would not have children.
Or, you could do the short form- get a vasectomy. There will never be any shortage of children to adopt, usually the offspring of people who thought that raising children was the most important thing they could do in their lives.
serial catowner, you have the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to criticize the "greatest generation?"
more seriously, do you have a link to the study you reference?
The conundrum is summed up in an aphorism by Kiergegaard:
"We live forward but can only think backwards."
Translated loosely -- you never know.
Gotta go -- trying to learn rudmimentary physics now instead of doing the Sunday Times crossword. Hate middle school. Hate it.
It was probably just a survey, published in the paper years before any of us heard of links. It struck me as so surprising that I've never forgotten it.
Women are always saying it's "so sad" and pitying us if we don't have children, but that can't really be true, or they would give us one of their own.
I mean, hey, they can always make more, right?
Serial catowner,
You've never seen anyone give birth, have you? I still can't believe there are women who do it multiple times. It seemed really, really unpleasant and I was just watching and saying stupid things like, hang in there honey -- and it will be over soon -- and please let go of my testacles, you're hurting me.
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Comments closed June 16, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
2. High-status men and attractive women are also best at raising children, so seek those sorts of partners in any case.
errr, what?!
Posted by novakant | June 2, 2007 6:29 PM