How to get more people to have kids: A primer

It's a great life!

Many others, some of them smarter than us, have written at length about the fertility crisis currently affecting Western civilization and indeed most of the world. Still others have proposed a variety of solutions to help people have more babies. Most of them involve wonky, data-driven ideas about giving people more money—more cash payouts, more subsidies, more tax breaks. This seems like a woefully uninformed approach to me: The fertility rate was much higher years ago during times of much greater financial privation, people had way more kids with way less money. The present crisis doesn’t seem to be a financial one at all. The problem is that people of childbearing age just don’t want kids—they think having kids is unpleasant and bothersome and too much work and so they’ve opted to just continue their early 20s in perpetuity, going out to bars several times a week and “traveling” and moving to new apartments every few years.

You can’t pay people out of this mindset. You have to change the cognitive incentives, not the fiduciary ones. And honestly I think little attention has been given to how people who have had children can help incentive those who don’t want children. Existing parents are perhaps the best-poised agents to demonstrate why having children is a good idea. We really shouldn’t underestimate how much of an effect we might have on this trajectory.

But it can really only work if we’re effective advertisers at this. The present culture is so heavily stacked against becoming a parent—becoming one and enjoying it—that parents who do have children have to be really good at telegraphing what a worthwhile vocation it is, so that others can see it and consider pursuing it and ultimately deciding to do so. Here are a few ideas to that end, in no particular order:

Don’t be a gentle parent. As with so many parenting disputes these days, the definition of “gentle parenting” has itself become an argument in its own right, an endless debate about what it means or if it even has any meaning anymore. But however you might define it at the margins, at its heart it refers to a parenting style in which the parents are basically ineffectual wimps, forever allowing their children to more or less dominate the direction and rhythm of the family life. One outfit defines it as “a parenting approach that encourages a partnership between you and your child to make choices based on an internal willingness instead of external pressures,” while another says it “emphasizes empathy, respect & understanding to foster a nurturing parent-child relationship.”

At this point we don’t really need to rely on a theoretical debate anymore—we know this parenting style, in the main, is awful. We’ve seen it in action! Children who misbehave and act out need firm, fair, loving discipline, not a “partnership.” And look, for the most part, kids don’t need “empathy.” Children are very often deeply irrational, illogical, unreasonable little people, and more than “empathy” they need a parent gently but very clearly telling them that their irrational little feelings are in fact wrong and they should get over them and move on.

“Gentle parenting” eschews this approach in favor of something much more, well, “gentle.” You’ve doubtlessly seen parents out in the wild practicing this: A child is going nuts, losing his mind, or stomping around and hitting and punching his siblings or maybe his parents, and the mom is squatting down, her eyes get real big, she talks softly and with big breathy rounded enunciation, like a kindergarten teacher, nodding every two seconds, getting real close. We see the parents who do this and they’re pretty much just steamrolled by their kids and they’re obviously miserable. I mean both the parents and the children are miserable in this scenario: The parents are horsewhipped and the kids are discombobulated because the adult they need to be a dependable authority figure in their lives is instead always talking to them about “internal willingness.” It sucks for everyone!

The secondary result, of course, is that people without children look at this style of parenting—one in which kids are dominant and parents are meek, submissive, ineffectual, unhappy—and they think, “No way, that looks awful, I don’t want that.” Can you blame them? So don’t do this. Be an authoritative parent instead: Be fair, thoughtful, reasonable, loving, but also very firm, clear, parental, dependable. Make your child feel safe and secure, but never let him think he’s in charge. Trust us: your kids will do better and you’ll have much less stress and humiliation. And, importantly, the people without kids will look at your example and maybe, just maybe, some of them will think, “Hey, that doesn’t look too bad.”

Make your kids into normal eaters. Few neuroses affect modern parenting—especially modern U.S. parenting—like that which surrounds the feeding of children. American parents just whiff on this one nonstop, 24/7. I don’t know when or why this arose, but for some reason in the United States of America the vast majority of parents just can’t seem to figure out how to get their kids to eat like normal human beings.

In most cases what seems to happen is that a parent tries to feed their young child or toddler normal food, the child rejects the food because it’s new or vegetal or creatively spiced, the parent freaks out and just gives the kid something bland like white bread or undressed spaghetti noodles, and the cycle continues, sometimes for years, to the point where parents often bring special food (e.g. white bread and spaghetti noodles) whenever they go to a restaurant or to someone else’s home for dinner, so their kid will actually consume something at mealtime.

Needless to say, many childless young people look at this state of affairs and just groan. Who wants to lug around a bunch of Tupperware containers full of bland, boring food to feed a four-year-old because he won’t eat chicken salad or a pork chop? It’s a pain in the butt and it’s embarrassing. It makes you look like the stereotypical Parent, just needlessly complicating your life while dragging around a bunch of noisy, clunky accessories in coolers and tote bags. It’s also insulting and irritating to your friends and family when you go over to their house for dinner—they go to the trouble to fix a good meal for your family and your kid is noisily eating Rice Chex instead.

Here is a great pro tip: In many if not most other cultures, including in most of Europe and Asia, parents don’t do this. Instead they just serve the child the same meal everyone else is getting. Often they’ll gently encourage the child to eat, explaining why a food is delicious and fun and worth eating. Sometimes a child will obstinately reject the food; in most cases the child will learn that if he does this, he won’t eat. Given the option between (a) not eating and (b) trying (and usually enjoying) something new, pretty much every single kid on Earth will opt for the latter almost all of the time. This is the solution for parents who don’t want to essentially create picky eaters and then short-order cook for them for years.

The kicker is this: If you want to make your kids into good eaters, you have to hold up your end of the deal too. You have to cook and serve them a wide variety of well-prepared, delicious food, pretty much every night. You have to offer a wide variety of different and interesting cuisines and meals. You have to teach them the joy of eating: The pleasures of different flavors, textures, colors, condiments, how enjoying food increases the sum total of pleasure in one’s life, why life is better with a wide variety of good food. And, importantly, you have to stand firm if they pitch a fit about something on their plate: “You don’t have to eat it, but I’m not making you anything else.” Parents who do this overwhelmingly find, rather quickly, that their children are really capable of eating and enjoying foods more or less like adults. And those without children will see these little people enjoying their meals and likely feel a little more relaxed about the whole endeavor, as they should be.

Bring your kids everywhere, but also take them away when you need to. We have four children and another on the way, and from the age when any of them is able to leave the house for errands, I’ve always taken them with me wherever I go, whenever possible: To the grocery store, to the hardware store, to pick up an HDMI cable or to buy a book at Barnes & Noble. Sometimes if I’m in a rush I have to leave some or all of them behind, but for the most part I bring them along whenever I can, because: It’s fun! I love going places with my kids, talking to them, showing them things, letting them help with household errands, pointing out landmarks, teaching them how to shop. Sometimes they can be maniacs, of course, and in those cases the whole trip can be stressful. But more often than not it’s a good time for everyone.

And it also serves as a valuable sort of witness to the wider world, which has become intensely hostile toward children in public places in recent years. Many people increasingly just don’t like to be around kids out in public anymore. And weirdly, this hostility often extends to parents themselves, many of whom prefer, whenever possible, to leave their children behind if they’re running an errand or something. Childless young people and cranky older people uncomfortable being around children, parents looking to go solo whenever possible—in a world that has become largely hostile to the very idea of children, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Which is why taking your kids out with you most everywhere you go is such a powerful statement. It demonstrates to the world not only that you love your children but that, in the main, you like being around them, you are patient with them, you want to spend time with them, you are capable of and willing to deal with the headaches that sometimes (and sometimes often) come with hauling a bunch of kids around. It also helps your children become acclimated to being in public, conducting themselves appropriately, respecting the boundaries of strangers and businesses and public decorum. This is a win for everyone, including people without kids, who need to be accustomed to seeing children, and seeing parents being with children, even when it’s sometimes sub-convenient to do so.

As ever, the flipside: You also have to be able to remove your kids from public situations if they flip out and throw a tantrum, which they will do sometimes. Some parents get pretty weird about that sort of thing and insist that they don’t have to excuse themselves and their child if the kid starts shrieking and flailing and hitting or even just being intrusively loud in a public space. They get all prideful about it and insist that you just have to deal with it. This is false. There is nothing in any public code of conduct that requires non-parents to be subject to the explosive tempers and outbursts of children that are not theirs. There is no merit in making everyone else have to endure that kind of disruptive and unpleasant showing. If your kid is having a tantrum, take him out, calm him down, then bring him back in. Easy as pie, and—once again—a great example for those who do not have children.

Enjoy your kids. Few things drive potential parents away from the endeavor more than seeing parents who look miserable and who seem to have just no joy in the work. It’s a job killer. Nobody wants to be unhappy, and if they see parents who look unhappy whenever they’re around their kids—or who even just look unenthused, bored, dull, uninterested—they’ll pretty reasonably conclude, “Eh, not for me.”

The antidote is for us to enjoy our kids, publicly and visibly, whenever we can. Commit to enjoying being around your kids, and then do it publicly and visibly whenever you’re out and about. Look: These years are short. You never get them back, ever. You should make the best of them, enjoy them, and let others see you doing it. Talk to your kids and laugh with them. Engage with them. Be animated in your dealings with them: Have fun, play along with the jokes, tell jokes of your own. Take time to explain things to them that you care about, and listen to them explain things as well, and ask them questions about what they’re explaining, and do it all with a nice joie de vivre. Don’t be a sourpuss about it! This is a great life, a great vocation, and it should be demonstrated as such.

Above all, in this respect: Put away that stupid phone, that idiotic, time-sucking, eyeball-wasting smartphone that takes productive hours of your day and turns them into useless pits of scrolling and flicking and tapping, all to no end. Few things are more indicative of “uninterested parent” than seeing a dad at a playground, sitting on a bench and mindlessly swiping his thumb on his Apple iPhone, as his kids dangle by themselves on swings nearby, unpushed and unnoticed by their father. It’s a pathetic, lamentable sight, just a modern tragedy playing out in millions of families, millions of times per day. Few things dull the vivacious excitement of being a parent more than diverting your attention to something on the Internet on your “mobile device.” Leave it at home when you go out! Better yet, throw it away and get a flip phone or a landline! Above all, show those without kids: Life is so much better when you’re looking up, at your children, rather than down, at your stupid phone.