Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Nita Farahany: The thing that kind of gets me the most excited is getting the privilege of watching them grow and seeing the world through their eyes. It’s just like things you don’t notice — you know, things you’ve taken for granted. Everything is new to them.

Rob & Luisa’s intro [00:00:19]

Rob Wiblin: All right, so we’re here for this compilation of different comments about parenting that have been on the show over the years. And coincidentally, I’ve just come back from parental leave. I’ve got a little boy. I’m here with Luisa to chat about some of that. How are you doing, Luisa?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I’m great. I can’t wait for this. I’m really excited to hear how it’s been going. To tease: how has it been going?

Rob Wiblin: Well, I guess the headline result has been that it hasn’t been as difficult as we expected. I guess my perception of what it’s like to have a little baby was that it’s all sleep deprivation and crying and misery and changing diapers — and kind of resenting it, perhaps. And the reality has been pretty different from that, which is a relief. Definitely the better way for things to go.

But I guess there’s a whole lot more we could say. I think our plan is to listen to some of these extracts and then kind of see how I feel about them with the benefit of hindsight, now, having had some personal experience. So should we let listeners go through all of these different comments on parenting, all the advice that I’ve solicited over the years, and then we can see what I agree and disagree with?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yes, let’s do it.

Rob Wiblin: Oh, before that, we shouldn’t forget to say that we’re putting this out on the feed in part to make more salient to everyone that we produce these highlights episodes for every interview we do, with clips just like these ones.

They’re usually between 15 and 30 minutes and pull out some interesting sections from an interview so you can get a good sense of that we talked about and what a guest is about fairly quickly. And then you can choose to listen to the whole thing or not.

We have a lot of episodes these days, and some are pretty long — so if you’re finding it hard to listen to everything, then tracking the highlights episodes are a way to still stay on top of the show and select the ones you want to finish.

And you can get them by subscribing to the feed we put them out on, which is 80k After Hours, or our 80,000 Hours YouTube channel, where they also go out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice cross-promotion there, Rob. Shall we get to it?

Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children [00:03:34]

Rob Wiblin: I recently got married, and I’m hoping to start a family in the next few years. And I guess you’ve been a dad for a couple of years now. What’s one or two pieces of advice you’ve got for me if things work out?

Ezra Klein: Oh, what a fun question. Could do a whole 80,000 Hours [episode] on parenting. Not that I’m an expert on it.

I think one is that — and this is a very long-running piece of advice — but kids see what you do; they don’t listen to what you say. And for a long time, they don’t have language. And so what you are modelling is always a thing that they are really absorbing. And that includes, by the way, their relationship to you and your relationship to them.

And something that really affected my parenting is a clip of Toni Morrison talking about how she realised at a certain point that when she saw her kids, that she knew how much she loved them, but what they heard from her sometimes was the stuff she was trying to fix, right? “Your shoes are untied, your hair’s all messed up, you’re dirty, you need to…” whatever. And that she had this conscious moment of trying to make sure that the first thing they saw from her was how she felt about them. And I actually think that’s a really profound thing as a parent: this idea that I always want my kids to feel like I am happy to see them; they feel that they are seen and wanted to be seen. So that’s something that I think about a lot.

Then another thing is you actually have to take care of yourself as a parent. And you know, I worry I’m a little more grumpier on this show today than I normally am, because my kid had croup all night, and I’m just tired. And the thing that I’ve learned as a parent is that just 75% of how I deal with the world — like, how good of a version of me the world gets — is how much sleep I got. You’ve gotta take care of yourself. And that’s not always the culture of parenting, particularly modern parenting. You need people around you. You need to let off your own steam. You need to still be a person.

But a huge part of parenting is not how you parent the kid, but how you parent yourself. And I’m just a pretty crappy parent when I do a worse job of that, and a pretty good parent when I do a good job of that. But a lot of how present I can be with my child is: Am I sleeping enough? Am I meditating enough? Am I eating well? Am I taking care of my stress level? So, you know, it’s not 100% of parenting a child is parenting yourself, but I think about 50% of parenting a child is parenting yourself. And that’s an easy thing to forget.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It is astonishing how much more irritable I get when I’m underslept. That’s maybe my greatest fear.

Ezra Klein: Yeah. It’s bad. Again, like, even in this conversation, I’ve been probably edgier than I normally am, and I’ve just felt terrible all day. It’s a crazy thing when you become a parent and you realise other parents have been doing this all the time. You see them, it’s cold and flu season, and you understand that you didn’t understand what they were telling you before. And somehow, all these people are just running around doing the same jobs they always have to do, and carrying the same amount of responsibility at work and so on, just operating at 50% of their capacity all the time and not really complaining about it that much. A whole new world of admiring others opens up to you. Like, I have two kids and now my admiration of people who have three or four is so high. So, you know, it’s a real thing.

But it does open you up to a lot of beautiful vistas of human experience. And as somebody who is interested in the world, it was really undersold to me how interesting kids are, and how interesting being a parent is. And it’s worth paying attention to, not just because you’re supposed to, but because you learn just a tremendous amount about what it means to be a human being.

Holden Karnofsky on preparing for a kid and freezing embryos [00:07:41]

Holden Karnofsky: My wife Daniela and I are having a kid soon. I think the kid will be here by the time this podcast goes up.

Rob Wiblin: Congratulations.

Holden Karnofsky: So we’ve been preparing for that and thinking about it, and that’s been a project. And will continue to be a big project.

Rob Wiblin: Are you excited? I suppose it’d be hard to say that you’re not on the podcast, but I imagine you wouldn’t be going into it if you weren’t.

Holden Karnofsky: We’re both excited to have a kid. It’s not one of us pushing the other. I’ve heard that the first months can be very difficult and not necessarily very rewarding. And we’ve been trying to prepare for those coming months so that they’re not worse than they have to be. So I’ve got some trepidation, obviously, and it’s a big decision. But yeah, I mean, certainly excited.

Daniela and I froze embryos. She’s pregnant the natural way, but we froze embryos, and that was an interesting experience. And I ended up doing a lot of research there too on just the best way to do that. I learned that the standard clinic approach now seems to be worse than the old approach. So they do this thing called ICSI, which was originally used for infertile males, and now they do it for everyone, and it seems worse. It seems worse for the kid. So if you can avoid it.

I learned that it’s better for both men and women to freeze, whether it’s sperm or eggs, to do that earlier in life. You’re going to get better quality gametes. And so I wish I had frozen mine earlier, I wish Daniela had frozen hers earlier. And any listeners, if you haven’t frozen anything and you might want kids someday, I would encourage you to think about doing it.

Emily Oster on the impact of kids on relationships [00:09:22]

Luisa Rodriguez: The stereotypes I have are just that having kids makes marital or nonmarital relationships between parents worse. What does the data say? Are people less happy?

Emily Oster: Yeah, people are less happy after kids. There’s a sort of decline after you have your kids. It’s the worst in the first year of the first kid, and then it kind of slowly rebounds, but very slowly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Does it recover fully?

Emily Oster: Yeah, by the time you have grandchildren. So it’s a lot, but it gets much better. Like, it recovers a lot in the first few years. The first year of parenthood tends to be really, really challenging for people. And I think partly that’s because people are tired, partly it’s because there’s just so much more to have conflict about than there was before. And that’s just the way it is.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, OK.

Emily Oster: Not everybody. So I think it’s worth saying, and I read a really nice essay in parent data a few weeks ago from someone who was like, you know, yes, it’s true that things decline, but doesn’t decline for everybody. So this idea that it’s inevitable, it’s both that we want to be prepared for the possibility that this will, and you want to sort of think about how you could scaffold it. But also, not everybody hates their husband after they have kids, as the title of the book suggests.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. OK, nice. And it’s pretty clear that it’s not just that people become less happy in their relationships over time?

Emily Oster: No, it’s quite discrete.

Luisa Rodriguez: Because it happens right when people have kids?

Emily Oster: Yeah. It’s quite discrete at the time of having kids.

Luisa Rodriguez: And is it a big effect?

Emily Oster: Yes. Yeah. I mean, yes, it’s a big effect. I don’t know, it’s a little hard to tell how you measure happiness, but yeah. You definitely notice it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Got it. OK. And the things that cause it are at least partly more things to have conflict about. Can you say what that looks like?

Emily Oster: Yeah. So first of all, you could ask what’s protective. People who are happier in their marriages before are likely to have smaller declines, and people who have planned: when the kid is planned, that’s associated with smaller declines. So you can see from that some of what’s going on, which is like, if we find ourselves in a circumstance that we hadn’t planned to be in, that leads to some resentments.

I think in general though, there is more to do when you have a kid than there was before. So all of a sudden, you’ve introduced a lot of new tasks; you have less money because you’re spending all this money on childcare, as discussed, so there’s just way more constraints; and then all of a sudden, doing the right thing about this baby is more important to you than anything has ever been in your whole life — but you have no idea what to do, but you feel very strongly about your opinion.

And I think that’s, for many people, this sort of moment of like, “We don’t agree on what to do. Neither of us has any idea what actually we should do, because we have never done this before, but we’re both 100% sure that our idea is correct. And we’re arguing about something that nothing has ever been more important.” And I think that’s a recipe for conflict.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yes, put that way, that sounds incredibly hard.

Emily Oster: Yeah. And oh, you haven’t slept. Also, you’re tired.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh god, yes. Basically, the main conflict between me and my partner ever is just I haven’t slept well enough.

Emily Oster: Right. Us too. Or my feet were cold.

Luisa Rodriguez: Let’s say people have already achieved some of those. So this thing is planned, and we hope we like each other in advance. Is there another single big thing that you could do to counteract some of the negative impacts of having children on a relationship?

Emily Oster: One is to try to sleep. I sort of harp on this, but it’s really difficult. Everyone’s pretty sleep deprived. But thinking about things you can put in place to try to get a little more sleep tends to be helpful. Actually, when you sleep train your kids, that enables parents to sleep more — and actually, one of the main outcomes in randomised trials is an improvement in marital satisfaction. So sleep.

The other thing I would say, which is much more concrete, and something you probably can do, is marital checkups — there’s some evidence, I think most of the data is about every six months or something — a time when you talk about what’s going well, what’s not going well, what could we do differently, sometimes with a therapist, sometimes not. That shows up as improving satisfaction in marriage. I think there are versions of that which you can implement pretty quickly.

I was talking to somebody the other day who just had a kid, and I was like, “The thing I would do is right now put biweekly meetings on your calendar for after the baby to talk about what could happen differently.” Because it’s very easy to only have interactions in a hot state when you’re upset. And just to have a moment that you’ve planned in advance to sit down and be like, “How are things going? What’s going well? What’s not going well? What could we do differently?” — that’s kind of a short-term version of these larger checkups.

Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids [00:14:44]

Rob Wiblin: All right. Let’s turn to a different example, a more practical day-to-day example that people might be used to. I think last year, you and Julia Galef had this conversation on Twitter about how much we should use empirical research when deciding whether to have kids.

She suggested she would really love to see this study run where you recruited 10,000 people who are unsure if they wanted to have kids. Then you ask them a bunch of questions like, “Do you enjoy being around kids? Are you already enjoying your life? What do you think are the pros and cons of having kids?”

And then 20 years later, you’d follow up and ask, “Did you have kids? And are you glad you did?” And then you looked at, say, the relationship between those questions about whether they expected to enjoy kids and whether they were already enjoying their life and their satisfaction with their decision to have kids.

And you hated this idea.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was sceptical.

Rob Wiblin: Do you want to explain why you think that this wouldn’t be helpful in making a decision?

Russ Roberts: Well, it’s an interesting example now, given our previous conversation. Because one way to think about it is over the next 20 years, you’ll wait for this data to come out and then when you’re 45, you’ll know whether you should have kids or not, and maybe it’s too late. Or worse, it turns out everybody had kids, didn’t like it so much, but by the time 20 years have passed or all these wonderful policies in place to make it easier to have kids or more pleasant to have kids.

Rob Wiblin: We’ve invented external wombs. We don’t even have to get pregnant anymore.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, who knows? So the other things I think are more interesting, which have to do with just trying to measure satisfaction or happiness. We want to think of happiness as in math, what we call a scalar, a number: 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.

If you ask me right now, “How glad are you that you have four children?” Actually I’d say 11 on a scale of one to 10, but some people might… If they were honest and that’s one of the challenges of survey data, are people really going to be honest to the surveyor? The person answering the questions, are they’re going to be honest with themselves? Do they really want to admit that it was a terrible mistake to have kids? Do they really want to…? Who knows whether that’s honest or not?

But inevitably in a survey like that, it’s either often, not always, you can make it a little bit more nuanced, but it’s often a yes/no question. “Are you glad you had kids?” Or, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you, if you had kids?” And I would argue that the sterility of reducing something as complicated as being a parent to a number, it’s not so much trying to measure, it’s that what you’re trying to measure is so much more complicated than a point estimate like that, a scalar, a single number. It’s in fact a giant matrix. There are some glorious things about having children and some not so glorious things. And fundamentally, I believe that the reason most people are glad that they had kids has nothing to do with the day-to-day satisfaction and what they put on a scale of 1 to 10, it has to do with their identity, who they became after they had children.

For me, that’s the essence of that decision. It’s not like, “Oh, was it worth it?” All those diapers you changed, the vomit you cleaned up. The whining, the wailing, the tragedy, the wounds, the stitches. There’s a lot of negatives, the carpooling. Those are the negatives, OK? Then you have the glorious highs, the wondrous things, the deep satisfaction, the emotional joy that you feel and delight in having children. It’s not about comparing those two things. I mean, it just isn’t what it’s about. It’s about who you’ve become. And so to me, the whole idea of the survey… Now, I don’t want to totally denigrate the idea of a survey. I think there is a survey, it’s called “literature.” There’s an enormous amount of evidence about what it’s like to be a parent in the world’s literature: in the poems, in the plays, in the fiction.

So if you want to find out what it’s like to be a parent, you have no hope, by the way. None. If you’re not a parent now, you have no way of knowing. But if you want to get a taste of it, instead of babysitting, which gives you a little bit of a taste, you’d be better off reading books about people who are parents. And I don’t mean nonfictional accounts that try to distil that identity change that I’m talking about.

L.A. Paul, you mentioned her at the beginning of our conversation, a guest I had on EconTalk. She has a wonderful book called Transformative Experiences, where she compares a lot of these choices to the choice to become a vampire. Tongue in cheek, but it’s quite a useful way to think about it.

But the point is that until you’ve made the leap, you can’t know what it’s like. And therefore you are in the darkness. You are facing irreducible uncertainty. And so if you’ve never had kids before and you look at parents hauling around diaper bags and driving a minivan and having lousy vacations because they can’t go anywhere without their kids, and therefore they have to choose some options that you’d never choose if you didn’t have kids.

Childless people look at parents and they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to ever be that.” And then parents somehow look back at those childless people and say, “Boy, I’m so glad I left that state behind.” Now, it could be both sides are fooling themselves. But my guess is that both sides are both correct. Before you’ve had kids, it doesn’t look appealing. And after you have kids, it looks pretty good. And now what? Are you going to be one of those people before you have kids, who turns into one of those people who’s satisfied? Even though ex ante, even before the fact looking ahead, it looks miserable to you? What do you do?

Rob Wiblin: So those all seem like good reasons to put less weight on this study. And I think it’d be insane to take a study like this, a survey of a bunch of people, and then decide whether to have kids based just on that.

I’ve got to decide whether to have kids myself. And I think I would find this study kind of helpful to some extent, especially if there was a striking result where you found that the answers to some questions were like, “Are you already enjoying your life? What are the main things that you enjoy doing now?” Or, “Do you already enjoy being around kids?” If one of those had a really strong correlation with then how much people enjoyed having kids ex-post. And I think that could help me give me some idea of what reference class am I in?

Am I in the reference class of people who say that they are super glad that they had kids and they have no regrets? Or am I in the class of people who have more of a mixed response. They’re like, “Well, it made my life better in some ways and I really value my kids, but there was also some significant downsides.”

But before we go to that, in the interview with L.A. Paul, you said this, “Not everyone should have children. Not everyone can, of course, but for those who can, it’s a good idea because it’s part of the human experience. It’s something to experience and you could argue that it’s harmful. You could argue they might not like it, but it’s part of what most people through human history have experienced and it will change you. You’ll explore it and you become a new person.”

Not to be facetious, but it seems like most people through history were also farmers, say, and many of them got smallpox and things like that. And those experiences also changed them. But I doubt you would say that that kind of demonstrates that it’s good to be a farmer or to get smallpox or that have all of these other negative experiences that were for almost all of history, part of the human experience. So yeah, why does something being part of the common historical experience show that it’s a good thing to do, or usually a good thing to do?

Russ Roberts: I’m going to try to answer that, but I want to go back to your point about, you’ve learned something from that survey, about the reference class, because I remember when that Twitter discussion was going on, somebody said to me, “Well, if it turned out that 92% of the parents were satisfied and glad they had kids that would tell you something.”

Well, what it would tell you is that 92% of the people who answered that survey, answered it with a yes, assuming it was accurately transcribed, there weren’t errors, et cetera. And you forgot about the fact to ask often when you saw that headline, you forgot to ask, “I wonder who did the survey?” When they asked the reference group, how many things did they include? Did they exclude anything? Were some of those correlations just random? Given that they had so many variables and all they did was eventually, by definition, you’re going to find at least 5% that are just purely random. I would caution you there on that issue.

But on this human experience thing, I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, my first thought, it’s a great point to challenge because I’m not a big fan of smallpox, but I do think it’s interesting that a lot of people would argue, “You should be a farmer.” You should, for example, be close to your food. It’s a better world. It was a better world when we were close to nature or close to the ground and we had to see the animals we killed, for example. And therefore you might decide to be a vegetarian if you couldn’t buy your chicken in that plastic Purdue package that makes it look like something other than a chicken.

So that’s a whole interesting question. And it could go the other way, but I’m with you. I don’t think it’s a compelling argument to say, “Well, it’s part of the human experience.” I would say, there’s something a little different about having children than smallpox, but maybe I can’t make that case.

I guess I’m thinking of… I’d have to answer that in a more spiritual way. Maybe it’s not so spiritual. Maybe it’s much more scientific. I see myself as a genetic extension of them and, in particular, I’m the genetic extension of my parents that they also shaped through their environment. So I feel like my mom is still physically alive, but my dad is still alive in me. And I see things in my children that were in my dad that he passed on genetically and environmentally through me that I, in turn, passed on environmentally to my kids.

So I think this whole human longevity generational thing is kind of nontrivial. So I don’t know, but it’s a good challenge. And I will be writing about this, I hope, in my new book. And I have to think about it some more. Well, it’s a good challenge.

Spencer Greenberg on parenting surveys [00:23:58]

Rob Wiblin: You’ve mentioned that at some point you were considering having kids, or at least you were investigating what it is like to have kids. I’m going to have a kid in my life pretty soon, fingers crossed. What did you learn in the course of looking into that? Anything that I should know?

Spencer Greenberg: First of all, huge congratulations. Very exciting.

Rob Wiblin: Thank you.

Spencer Greenberg: Second of all, I don’t have a child, so I’m going to be hopeless and naive in the sense of firsthand experience. But I did learn some interesting things. So I went and talked to a bunch of parents to ask them about their experience having kids, and I found it to be fascinating.

One of the really interesting things that I ended up concluding from it is that I think, on average, having children reduces people’s pleasure, but increases their sense of meaning and purpose. So that’s kind of how I think about it now: just as a tradeoff for your own life. It’s deeply, deeply meaningful having children; there’s also a lot of ways it’s not pleasant, and it reduces other forms of pleasure because you’re stressed, tired, busy, you’re looking out for another person. You’re looking out for another person. You’re sacrificing yourself constantly for this other person, right?

However, I will add one caveat. I think there are some people that just love being around kids. They just get so much joy out of it. And that kind of person, if you’re that kind of person, you might actually increase your pleasure, too, if you just get this high from being around kids. So there are a few people like that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Don’t I remember you saying, when you spoke with parents, you asked them, “What’s your favourite part of the day?” And they said, “After the kids have gone to sleep”?

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, that was a really funny one. I was talking to this couple, very power couple-y: one’s a lawyer, one’s a doctor, they work really hard. They’ve got a nearly full-time nanny. I started asking, “What’s the best time with your children?” And then they kind of looked at each other and discussed it, and then they ended up saying, “It’s like right after we put the kids to bed, and we’re looking at their sweet, smiling faces.” And I was like, “Wait, but they’re asleep. That’s the best time with your children, when they’re asleep?”

But I think that’s a nice illustration of this meaning-versus-pleasure thing, right? It’s like deeply meaningful, seeing their sweet kids’ faces, sleeping —

Rob Wiblin: But without the difficulty of the child.

Spencer Greenberg: Exactly. Another interesting thing about that couple, the man from that couple was saying he used to arrange it so that when he got home to be with his kids, he would play with them. It would be like playtime. So the nanny would have done all the logistics stuff. But he actually changed it on purpose, so that when he got home, he would feed them and bathe them and stuff like that. And I thought that was really interesting. And it, again, speaks to the meaning and pleasure. It wasn’t for him about, like, “Let me have fun with my kid”; it was like, “Let me invest in my kid. Let me take care of my kid. That is actually what I want to be doing.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Did this influence your decision whether to have kids or not, or were you just doing this out of more curiosity?

Spencer Greenberg: It was a time when I was really thinking about what do I want in life? I think it influenced me a little bit, but I think, you never know for sure — people can always change their mind — but I think there are a number of reasons why having children is not the most appealing for me.

Rob Wiblin: OK, yeah. Well, I’ll get back to you.

Spencer Greenberg: Let me know how it goes. You should start tracking your meaning and pleasure right now, so you can get some good, high-quality data. And hopefully you should have like 10 or 12 kids so you can get a decent sample size.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I’ll be able to give you a very rationalised explanation for why this was a great decision, despite the incredible sleep deprivation and so on, very soon.

Spencer Greenberg: Well, lucky for you, you’ll never be able to admit to yourself that it wasn’t a good decision. So you’ll be happy with the decision no matter how it turns out.

Rob Wiblin: Humans have a lot of flaws, but we’re well designed in some ways.

Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing problems [00:27:40]

Rob Wiblin: Final question I have is: what do you do to unwind? What do you do for fun? Who’s the man behind the cost-benefit analysis spreadsheet?

Elie Hassenfeld: What do I do for fun? I have four young kids, and sometimes, often, that’s not unwinding. That requires a lot of attention, but they are a lot of fun. I think that not only are they great to talk to and hang out with, but they often hold up a great mirror to me. I see myself in them, and I’ve learned more from them than I think I have in a long time.

It’s been not only enjoyable, but very fulfilling in a certain way. But also a very informative experience, because I’m like, “Oh my god.” My kids right now are doing something called a read-a-thon, where there’s a competition to see who can read the most minutes at their school, and they’re so anxious about winning. And when you see someone else being anxious about some ridiculous goal like that, I’m like, “Oh, I do that sometimes. Oh, man. Thank you for helping me see how wrong I was.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I’m hoping to have kids as well, before too long.

Elie Hassenfeld: That’s great, Rob.

Rob Wiblin: I spent a little while asking people were they happy when they had kids or not? People mostly don’t say that they regretted it. I guess it sounds like you haven’t regretted it.

Elie Hassenfeld: I think it would be a hard thing to say. We have four kids, so we just kept going. We did that very intentionally, and are very excited about it, and yeah, I’m very happy. I actually remember after my first daughter was born, I was hanging out with a couple of coworkers.

When I think back on those times, I remember them as being incredibly hard: the first three months of a new baby, and we weren’t sleeping, and she was crying. I also remember just being out with them and them saying, like, “Elie, you seem so much happier than you used to be.” That’s so strange. It’s weird because I can’t access that memory of my past subjective wellbeing. I’m glad that I have this objective data point from outside of me to remind me what it was actually like.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Did you have a sense of what changed in your mentality? Is it just like adding more balance to your life, perhaps?

Elie Hassenfeld: I think it probably has added more balance to my life. I find myself often, as some people might, stressed about work. And I don’t feel that same way about my family. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s this very enjoyable, very fun opportunity to do a lot of things that are creative, learn new things, learn about myself, learn about them. There are downsides to always having people around that you like, but also it’s nice to have people around that I like, and they’re fun. My wife and my kids are just always here, and I think that’s really nice. It has added and I hope it continues to add something really meaningful to my life.

Rob Wiblin: Random question: Did having kids affect how much hearing about the horrible conditions that many people are growing up in — the people having clubfoot and not being treated, or suffering from malnutrition ongoing — did it make it feel at all more visceral, perhaps because you could imagine this happening to your own kid?

Elie Hassenfeld: I think it did. Also it didn’t really change the way I relate to my work on a day-to-day basis. I definitely had the experience of going to the pharmacy and getting amoxicillin when one of my kids was sick, and then knowing that there are countries where you couldn’t get amoxicillin for your child.

When I take a moment to pause, which I don’t do enough, and say, “Wow, that’s what I’m working on” — and I think in many ways, not exactly, but that’s what you’re working on; that’s what we’re trying to do — it does help me connect to the work more, to imagine it as being helpful to someone like my children, whom I feel obviously a great deal of love for. And to think about it has made it in some ways easier to feel strong emotion.

Emily Oster on careers and kids [00:31:44]

Luisa Rodriguez: So what’s your advice to someone who wants to have kids, or who already has kids, who wants to stay on a productive and ambitious career trajectory?

Emily Oster: Get help. I think it’s useful to recognise that your kids will take time, and be deliberate about thinking about how you’re going to combine those things. I think it’s useful to recognise that there are only 24 hours in a day, and you are not going to be able to be a stay-at-home mom and also a full-time working mom, because those are both full-time jobs. And sometimes people come in with expectations which diverge from the possibilities of reality, and I think that’s when there’s more chaos. So just recognising some of the limitations upfront.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that does sound like something I need to hear. I very much, I think, am in the camp of, “Somehow I’m going to be a very present and available parent, while also working the exact same amount and having the same ambitious career.”

Emily Oster: And again, I don’t want to imply to people that they can’t, because in some ways, I absolutely think you can. I just think sometimes we have in our mind a way of being present that’s ridiculous.

So I’ll give you my most specific example: when I was a kid, Mikey Bright’s mom made these cupcakes for bake sales. (Mikey Bright was in my elementary school.) They were chocolate cupcakes, and she would dig out the top of the cupcake and put in whipped cream, and then put the top back on. And like, man. Grace Bright, if you are listening to this, I remember those cupcakes so well. And my mom was always like, “Sign up for plates. Make sure you sign up for plates or soda. And if you have to do something, box brownies, but really, you’ve got to get the sheet first so you can get the plates.”

And I remember being like, “When I have kids, I’m going to be the mom who makes the cupcakes.” And then I had kids and I was like, “Sign up for the plates!” Because you can’t actually be the… You can’t. And that’s no shade on Mikey Bright’s mom, that’s no shade on my mom. It’s just there isn’t time in the day for most of us to be both hand making cupcakes and also working a full-time job. Figuring out what are the things that you feel you need to show up for, and that are the ways that are going to serve why you became a parent, and what you want to be showing up for for your kids, I think that’s the most important thing.

The other thing I will say is that people spend so much time thinking about the first two years. And of course, that’s what’s in your mind before you have a kid. It’s like, “I’m going to need to be there for breastfeeding. I’m going to need to be there for this and this and this and this.”

And yeah, OK, those things are important. If you talk to people with older kids, one of the things they will often say is, “I was really substitutable when my kids were babies. Yeah, I provided breast milk, but fundamentally they were happy to sleep. There were many, many people who could serve the needs of my kids when they were babies. There are many fewer people who can serve the needs of my kids now.”

As your kids get older, I think for many of us, the stakes feel a little higher and the value of being there feels almost greater than it did. And I think that’s both important to recognise because you don’t want to conceive it as like, “There’s going to be two years of investment and then basically I’ll be done. They’re going to some English boarding school.” The need for you is not going to disappear. But also in those first years, there’s a lot of people who are substitutable.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. I feel like I am, again, one of the people who needed to hear that. I think I have some, like, “I’ve got to prepare for the sprint of the first two years, and then somehow it gets easier.” But it is a marathon.

Emily Oster: It’s a marathon. And the first two years, those are like you’re kind of slow, you’re not picking up the pace. Those you keep it controlled those first couple of miles, because it’s getting hard in the last 10k. It’s hard.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Well, that is frightening to me.

Going back to the thing that you said, which is that probably we need to think about what our values are, and the ways we want to show up for our kids, and then let the rest go if we’re in the position of wanting to have some significant part of our lives be spent on our careers.

I guess guilt has already come up, but it feels really likely to me that I’m going to be on board with, like, “It’s just not that important to fill my kids’ cupcakes with whipped cream. If I had the time, and that is the thing I want to do most in the world, that would be great. But I don’t, and it isn’t. So I’m not going to do it.” I still think I’m going to feel like an inadequate parent if I don’t do that kind of thing. To what extent have you had that? And does anything help?

Emily Oster: Oh, no. Everybody feels inadequate. That’s part of parenting, right? It’s really hard to feel like you’re doing a good job.

Like, there was a recent time when I did think I did a good job, and it was so notable that I wrote to my husband. I was like, “I did a good job this morning!” It’s like teaching evaluations or something: you just hang on to the mistakes, and the good parts are easy to forget. So that is to say, some fraction of the time you will feel like you’re doing a poor job.

And I would make a distinction between the feeling of sometimes thinking, “Boy, I would have managed that situation differently” — which is unavoidable — and the feeling of, “I’m doing my life wrong. This isn’t the life I wanted.”

At various times — before you have the kid, after you have the kid — it’s useful to sit down and think about: What do I want the shape of this to look like? What time do I want to be spending? Which hours? How do I want the weekends to look? The things that are going to shape the way your day-to-day goes, and the time you spend with your kids, and what you’re doing in that time with your kids, and all of those things: you have an opportunity to deliberately plan them.

And you can then feel like, “I’ve thought about this, and this is a life that I want. This is a life that we’re trying to craft for our family, for our kids.” And that is distinct from thinking you’re doing a good job in every moment — which you can’t achieve. But you can achieve, “I’m doing this the way that I think works for my family.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah. I can imagine it being, maybe not 100% comforting, but at least somewhat comforting when you’re feeling a bit of guilt about not making the cupcakes, being like, “This was the plan. I never planned to make the cupcakes.”

Emily Oster: “I didn’t plan to make the cupcakes.” And yeah, you’re never going to avoid the feeling, when you see the other family with the cupcakes, you’re never going to be like, “Those cupcakes suck.” You’re going to be like, looks like a good cupcake, with the whipped cream in the middle and everything. But you can think, “No, I made a plan, which did not involve making the cupcakes.”

Holden Karnofsky on the experience of having kids [00:38:44]

Rob Wiblin: Last time we did an interview, you said you were about to take some leave because your partner was about to have a kid. I’m now intending to start a family as well, fingers crossed.

Holden Karnofsky: Oh, nice.

Rob Wiblin: How’s it been for you? What surprising stuff has happened?

Holden Karnofsky: I think the biggest surprise for me has been on the positive side. It’s weird. I’m in a weird part of the discourse, where the discourse on kids is just like, “You’ll hate every minute of it. It’ll have all these downsides. But you know you want to do it, or maybe part of you needs to do it, or you’ll be glad you did it.” Or something. And I think the happiness impact for me has been way more positive than I expected.

So the hard parts have been, whatever, as hard as they were supposed to be. But both my wife and I are just, like, wow, we did not think it would be this much fun. We did not think it would increase our happiness. That was not what we were expecting.

And I don’t know. I just feel like it’s a complicated experience. Everyone experiences it differently, but that was the thing that surprised me most. It’s just like the best part of my day, like 80% of the time or something, is just hanging out with the kid and kind of doing nothing. So yeah, it’s just weird and surprising.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Do you have any idea of what the mechanism is? The standard narrative is that you sacrifice short-term happiness for long-term fulfilment or something. But no?

Holden Karnofsky: That’s why I was surprised. I just don’t understand it. I just feel like I just enjoy hanging out with him for absolutely no good reason at all. I don’t know. I just expected it to be like, “I want to do it, but it’s not fun.” But no, it’s just super fun. It’s like way more fun than other things I do for fun. It’s weird.

Rob Wiblin: Well, I’m very partial to myself, so fingers crossed I get lots of pleasure from it as well.

Bryan Caplan on homeschooling [00:40:30]

Rob Wiblin: You homeschool all your children, I think. Do you have four now?

Bryan Caplan: Only four.

Rob Wiblin: Only four, yeah. Isn’t there a huge opportunity cost for you in that? You could be spending that time to do research or writing or just having fun because you’d think you’re not specialised in teaching young children? So given that huge time cost, should listeners seriously consider homeschooling their kids or not?

Bryan Caplan: The actual story is that I was doing just my older sons, and then during COVID I did all four. And then there was a negative opportunity cost during COVID, because it was either that or monitor them doing Zoom school or whatever. So I found it easier to do it myself than to monitor. And then after kids started going back to school in person, my older sons were in college, and the younger ones, we gave them a choice. One wanted to stay in regular school; one came back.

In terms of the opportunity cost, it is much lower than most people would think, because of the system that I have. Basically I put in a modest upfront investment in just the curriculum — that might be 20 hours for a year or something like that, or probably less, once I’m doing it repeatedly. And then every day they’ve got a schedule, and most of the time I’ve scheduled it so they’re working on their own. And then I budget a certain amount of time where it’s feedback, where we go over it, but it’s not interrupting my day, normally. Basically, normally, I’ve got somewhere between 20 minutes and 90 minutes where I am going over and helping my kids with the work. But it’s not like a constant interruption by any means.

In terms of why I did it, I am definitely not an effective altruist with respect to my kids. I care about them a lot more than strangers. I do a lot more for them than I do for strangers. For my older sons, it really came down to they were just really unhappy in regular school, and I knew from some past trial periods that I could go and just give them a much better life. Since I love them, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s just really enjoyable. And my older sons are the kinds of students that you pray to get as a teacher: students who are really engaged, really curious.

The only downside of homeschooling my older sons was really the college application process, where they were whining and bellyaching a lot about how stupid it was. “I agree, but I can’t change it. Why are you complaining to me? Yes, I know these essays are stupid. I know the system is a giant farce.”

Rob Wiblin: You should be proud of them, Bryan. They’re going to be fantastic bloggers one day.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Now, for my younger kids, during COVID they were not thrilled to be there. It was our best option, but that was a very different experience and a lot more draining. For COVID, I just said the story, well, this is better for me to just do it myself. So that was the reason.

Right now, I’m just doing my younger son. He is a great kid, but he’s not like his brothers. He’s not that interested in doing this stuff. He’s here because it’s better than the alternative.

He really wanted to study Japanese, and I’ve been wanting to go to Japan for a long time, and my wife just has zero interest in Japan. So not only would I not want to go by myself, but now I’ve got this great excuse, like it’s part of his Japanese education to take him to Japan. I took him there almost as soon as Japan opened to foreigners, we went. And I’m taking him again in December. And actually, I’m plotting to take him at least once a year, every year, all through high school, which is super fun for me, but he’s the one that makes it so.

Rob Wiblin: I’ve rarely thought of homeschooling as a junket, but I suppose when you have conflict within the family, it can potentially make sense. How much time do the kids save? Because like a typical school day is seven hours, right? Do they actually spend seven hours doing schoolwork, or did they manage to do the same in a lot less time?

Bryan Caplan: It’s not a lot less time. With my older kids, they’re so motivated that they didn’t want that much free time. In fact, they would just go and do their own academic interests in what was nominally free time. With my younger son, I’d say that it’s probably about two-thirds of a normal school day, all things considered.

But basically this year we’re just doing three things: we’re doing math (he’s doing Algebra 2), I’m prepping him for AP microeconomics, and he’s doing Japanese. Especially with one kid, the positive is we don’t move on until you’re good. This is not one where we have covered the material, and even though you don’t know it, now it’s time to move to the next subject. If we don’t understand it, we just keep working on it until you’ve got it.

Also double back, make sure you still remember this stuff, because I always say, “I’m not teaching you so you can do well on a test. I’m only teaching material that is worth knowing. And if you forget it the day after the test, then we’ve both failed.”

Rob Wiblin: I mean, a kid at a normal school only gets 20 minutes on average of teacher time, so I suppose they’re probably getting a massively better education from an hour or two of you. It’d be interesting to see in five years’ time, when my first kid hopefully is of school age, how good the large language models will be at substituting for teachers. I mean, it seems like they’re already quite educational, but they need a lot of fine-tuning in order to be able to do the wider range of educational things that a teacher does.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, they’ve got that “explain it to a second-grader” function on GPT. I would say that I actually pay at least double, probably more like three or four times the Zoom cost, for Japanese tutoring, so my son can get in-person tutoring. And partly I just think that he is going to learn better. And just partly I want him to go and have time with other people besides me.

I don’t consider Zoom to be just psychologically the same. A lot of people feel the same way.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Caplan: I remember during COVID, we had a couple of lunches with you, Rob.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, we did. Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Caplan: But they were Zoom lunches. It’s just not the same as having real Rob.

Rob Wiblin: I’ve got to come visit sometime.

Bryan Caplan: Totally. Totally. I want to meet the baby. You’ve got to bring the baby, Rob.

Rob Wiblin: That’d be wonderful.

Emily Oster on what actually makes a difference in young kids’ lives [00:46:02]

Emily Oster: There are two things that I think are simultaneously true but hard to hold in your head at the same time. One is that most of the choices, the individual choices that you are going to make about your kid when they’re little, do not matter at all. So most of whether you choose to breastfeed or sleep train or not sleep train, or whether they go to the Montessori preschool, or whether they go to the preschool down the street that has Reggio Emilia — these things, the effects are so small that they are very, very unlikely to matter.

It’s also true that the experience that kids have between zero and three is probably the most important that they will ever have to set them up for a life of success.

It’s also true that the experience that kids have between zero and three is probably the most important that they will ever have to set them up for a life of success. And by the time you get kids at three, the difference between kids who are raised in poverty and kids who are not, it’s already there. Eva Moskowitz has a really nice thing in her book about the block achievement gap. When she gets kids at kindergarten, the kids who have grown up with fewer resources are not building block towers up: when she has them play with blocks, they build flat. And the kids who are raised with more resources are building up. So there’s so much that happens before five. And yet these things that you’re like, “How do I pick the preschool? This one has a master’s degree.” It’s like, that’s completely effing irrelevant.

The answer is that there are things that are relevant, and they are: having a stable place to come home to; having some loving caregiver who is paying attention to you — could be a daycare provider, can be a nanny, can be a parent, can be another parent, can be a grandparent — it’s like having somebody that feels stable, or several people who feel stable; having enough to eat every day; having enough sleep; having access to childcare; not being exposed to abuse and trauma and toxic stress. That’s the whole thing. And the thing is you’re not asking about those things, because that’s not a thing you’re thinking about choosing: that’s already something your kid is going to have, because of the privilege of where they’re going to be born into.

And so that feels to me so important, because we spend all this time in policy space. The people making the policy are spending all of this time in their heads with these decisions that feel really fraught — but actually are completely irrelevant. And we’ve sort of missed that there are things we could impact with policy — by having better paid leave for everybody, by having better childcare subsidies, by giving people all of those things we could be. And those things really do matter, and yet we’re not talking about them because they seem so obvious to the sets of people who are making the policy. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Sorry.

Luisa Rodriguez: No, it’s great. It’s very compelling and reassuring. Again, I do feel like a really big part of me believes you, and another part of me is like, “But I have so many stories about people remembering that their parents worked super late and felt sad or neglected by that!”

Emily Oster: I mean, you’ve really got to be careful with anecdotes because you’re also going to find people are like, “My mom quit her job so she could be home every minute with me, and then I was the repository for all of her failed dreams. And I wish she had had a job so she wasn’t constantly on me about how I had to be.” I think it’s tricky. Many people don’t like their upbringing, and one of the features of humans is that we’re always trying to fix the stuff that we feel that our parents messed up.

Like, my son the other day, I told him… I walk my kids to school almost every day. I’m home for dinner every single night. I rarely travel. I spend a lot of time with them. The other day I told my son that I would see him in the morning, but I wasn’t going to be able to walk him to school because I was going out on my long run, and I wanted to leave early enough to whatever. And he told me, “Do you care about your long run more than you care about me?” So no matter how much time you spend with your kids, sometimes they’ll ask you that. And you have to have the fortitude as a parent to be like, “I love you more. I would choose you over running, but for tomorrow I care more about my long run than I do about you. And so you’ll have to walk to school by yourself.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think you’re right. It totally sounds consistent with what I actually think about these anecdotes: that most people have complaints about their childhood, and mostly when people have really strong complaints, it is because things have gone more wrong at the level that you’re talking about — with stability and basic needs being met or not. I’m curious if there’s anything else that might matter, besides those basic things?

Emily Oster: Not spanking your kids. No physical punishment. Reading. Reading shows up. Reading to your kids, talking to them. But not talking in an obsessive, weird way, where you have to like narrate every diaper change. But we do see that it’s probably something like the number of words kids hear tend to show up. Those are kind of it.

Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently [00:51:16]

Luisa Rodriguez: What is something that you’re excited about possibly happening over your lifetime? Maybe this is in the space of neurotechnology; maybe it’s something totally unrelated.

Nita Farahany: Honestly, the thing that I’m most excited about is seeing my kids grow up. I have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. We lost a child in between, so I’d say I probably have an even greater appreciation for our living children and getting to see them grow, and the privilege that it is to see them get bigger and to take on interests and to see what makes them curious.

I think one of the great privileges of being a parent is getting to see the world anew through the innocent and curious eyes of children. So the thing that kind of gets me the most excited is getting the privilege of watching them grow and seeing the world through their eyes. It’s just like things you don’t notice, things you’ve taken for granted. Everything is new to them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have examples?

Nita Farahany: I don’t have a specific one right now for you off the top of my head, but they catch you by surprise all the time. You’ll be driving down the road and we’ll have never noticed a road sign there or something. And they’ll be like, “Isn’t that interesting? Why does it say that?” And you’ll read it, and it totally changes your perspective of that drive. Just anything. You take most things for granted and have filtered out a lot of things in your environment. Kids don’t, and it forces you to really think about life and the world differently.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s really lovely. Thank you for sharing.

Rob’s first impressions of parenthood [00:52:59]

Rob Wiblin: OK, well we’re back in the future — which is to say we’re in the present, after all those clips — to talk about how things have actually gone for me in real life.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, since doing all of those interviews, you’ve had a baby. How old is your baby now?

Rob Wiblin: He is six months old. So we’re six months in. We’re not going to use his name, by the way, because it’s a pretty unique name. I won’t tell you what it is, but it would be pretty uniquely identifiable even in 15 or 20 years’ time, when this kid is on the internet and I guess might be looking up what I said about him. But, yeah. Six months in.

Luisa Rodriguez: And what is he like so far?

Rob Wiblin: I guess he’s pretty curious. A word that I want to apply, which is maybe a little bit odd to use to describe a baby, but he’s kind of cooperative in this weird way. Seems like most of the time he’s happy to go along with getting changed, and having his diaper changed, and being fed. It feels like it’s a collaborative thing, which I wouldn’t have guessed would be how things would go.

Apparently, he acts quite a lot like I did as a little kid. That’s what my mom says. He kind of has this habit of whenever you show him anything new, he sort of furrows his brow and studies it intently, and maybe doesn’t have that strong of a reaction to it initially. But yeah, he’s very curious, trying to understand the things around him. I mean, of course all babies are, but he seems calm, but a bit serious, maybe.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. Yeah. Do you think he’s calmer than you expected, but like other babies? Or do you think he’s an especially calm, cooperative baby?

Rob Wiblin: He’s way calmer than a typical baby. That’s pretty clear. I mean, he cries very infrequently. If he’s really hungry or wants something, he kind of yelps, and will make it clear that we need to pay attention to him. But he’s only melted down once or twice, maybe, in six months. So yeah, he’s definitely a lot more chill than average, I would say.

So a lot of the stuff that I’ve got to say here maybe is relevant to you if you have a baby that’s in the top third of relaxedness, and maybe you’ll be resenting and disagreeing with it if you have a baby that has colic or is very grumpy. But I guess I could explain a little bit what things I can comment on, what it’s like if you have a baby that’s of this disposition.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I guess you talked to quite a few guests about how to make the decision to have kids. For example, you talked about studies about whether parents ending up regret having kids as you were making the decision yourself. How do you feel about your decision now?

Rob Wiblin: I definitely think I feel more vindicated than regretful. I felt good about having kids. I wasn’t completely sure that it was going to be the right decision by any means. I mean, we’re only six months in and we only have one of them, so things could yet turn around and maybe I’ll end up having some regrets, or wondering about what life would have been otherwise. But having more direct firsthand experience with it I think has made me appreciate the benefits more, or they’re more salient now and the costs don’t seem as large as I expected them to be.

I guess there’s lots of examples of that. I think if you’d asked me 10 years ago what it’s like having a kid, I think that the stuff that would have jumped to mind that would have been really salient to me is: you’re not getting any sleep, you’ve got this crying baby at night all the time, you can’t get rid of them, you’ve just got to deal with them all the time. Changing diapers, isn’t that really unpleasant. You need to change the nappy every hour or two and maybe they’re fussing about it, they don’t like it and maybe, and it smells bad. It’s kind of disgusting.

But you know, my sleep has basically been affected not at all. Now, that is unusual. I think that is not typical. And if I was the one doing the breastfeeding, it would be almost impossible for that to be the case. But yeah, over the last six months, at least my sleep has been roughly the same. I’d say my wife’s sleep has also not been that… I mean, she has to get up to breastfeed at various times in the night. Although now I guess we’re down to only twice in the night. But other than that, I think her sleep has not been affected all that much.

Changing nappies, it turns out, is not even unpleasant. That would have been maybe the top of my… I would have appreciated, if I’d reflected on it, that this isn’t the number one thing that you should think about when having a child, given that it’s only temporary and surely not that big a deal.

But I would say not only is it not bad, I would say maybe it’s almost enjoyable to be changing a child’s baby’s nappy, because you’re interacting with them. And at least our kid is kind of delighted when he’s on the changing table and you’re changing his nappy and he kind of plays with you. So, yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff that I think I would have previously expected would be bad that, at least so far, at least with this particular baby, has been neutral or positive.

How Rob has changed his views about parenthood [00:58:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: Did you have expectations about what the benefits were? And did you think, like, “They’re not going to be as big for me as they are for other people, or they just don’t seem that big in general at all, and so maybe this is a giant mistake many people are making?”

Rob Wiblin: I mean, I am one of those people who has not had much of an interest in kids over the years. Sometimes people would bring their babies into the office, who would have family members who have babies, and I wasn’t that excited to interact with them. When I was interacting with a baby, I’d often feel kind of awkward, like, am I holding them right? What do you do with a baby? How do you play with them? Until you’ve had a little bit of experience with it, you can feel a little bit like you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

I would even say I spent most of my adult life avoiding babies actively because I think of them as these little germ bombs that are going to carry around all these illnesses. They’re likely to make you sick. Do I really want to get a cold so I can hold a baby for five minutes? I kind of didn’t.

So I basically just didn’t interact with them, and I didn’t really skill up on how you would have fun. But as it turns out, playing with a baby is one of the funnest things that there is. Or at least my experience has been that it’s a lot more enjoyable than I would have anticipated, even at these very young ages.

And I looked into some research on what activities do people report enjoying the most. Playing with your children was in the top handful out of maybe 50 different things that they studied. It was up there with going to the theatre, which I think was one of the top activities in terms of enjoyment per hour. I mean, I think many people would have guessed that. I suppose most people end up having kids, and so older people might have understood that it really is quite fun, but I don’t know that that message ever really got through to me very much in the past.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. The impression I’ve gotten from you since you’ve had your baby, and since we’ve caught up about it a bit, is that you get way more joy than you expected from kind of meeting his needs and making him happy. And so playing is like… In theory, when I picture it, the kinds of things babies like to do sound boring. But just the act of seeing them delighted is really delightful to you. Does that sound right?

Rob Wiblin: The part of that that I agree with is that I can’t really energetically play with our baby for 10 hours a day. At this age, there’s only a limited range of things that he’s up to doing. So after a couple of hours of time playing with him, I am kind of out of ideas. I’m a bit out of material. And at that point, I might put in some earbuds and listen to something while I’m playing with him, or stick him in the baby carrier while I go for a walk and do some chores. That’s kind of what I was doing during parental leave. So I think something can be enjoyable, but not enjoyable for an unlimited amount of time.

But yeah, what’s enjoyable about it? I mean, in a sense, it is quite dumb, because you’re just throwing around a baby and they’re laughing, or you’re helping them to grasp things or feeding them. It’s a little bit hard to see, on the intellectual side, why would this be so enjoyable. But it is just having a baby that is laughing and having fun and learning and seeing them upskill that, for whatever reason… I mean, it’s got to be evolution, right? Biologically, it makes a tonne of sense that this is something that is very appealing to us and really taps into something quite deep.

Just the other day, we started giving him sticks of carrots, so he’s starting to learn to actually be able to handle and move actual food towards his mouth. And it’s just so delightful watching him gum on his food. I don’t think I would necessarily enjoy another baby that wasn’t mine doing that. And I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed watching this 10 years ago, but it is just so delightful. I’m not sure there’s much more I can add.

Can the pros and cons of parenthood be studied? [01:01:49]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. It’s really lovely for me to hear you talk about it. But it just feels really interesting to have heard these questions you were asking parents as you were doing these interviews, being like, “The studies say that parents mostly don’t regret having kids — but could they even report on it if they did?” You just seemed, I think, to really seriously think that you might be much less happy if you had a baby. And to think that it might be true that that was widely true of parents, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves. And now you just sound just really, really to be enjoying it.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I do have thoughts on this. I did look at papers on what effect does it have on subjective wellbeing and reported satisfaction to have a kid. And I have also looked at what fraction of people report regretting having children, and I’ve asked people who have had kids, “Do you regret it?”

On the regret point, I think I was in the habit of asking people, “Do you regret having children?” — which now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think is quite a stupid question to ask. Because when someone asks me that, they’re asking me to imagine that this person who I have a relationship with, my baby, that they didn’t exist. It’s like wishing someone out of existence. And you can imagine that even if you’re not enjoying it very much, actively wishing out of existence this little baby that you’re meant to be taking care of, and that you have a great relationship with, a very important relationship with… It’s just you are going to have a mental block to doing that — even if your life is worse, and you could concede that.

So I think these days I would ask a different question, which might be, “If you imagine that you’d gone down a different track in life, and not had kids, and instead dedicated yourself to leisure or your career or whatever else, do you think you would have had more moment-to-moment happiness or more satisfaction?” I think that’s a somewhat more neutral question that it is possible to answer.

Then there’s studies looking at how do parents feel, and the standard narrative is that, in the short term, parents’ subjective wellbeing goes down in the first few years, I think particularly maybe in the first year, but their reported life satisfaction goes up, or they feel they have more meaning in their life.

So that hasn’t really been my experience, that my subjective wellbeing, moment-to-moment happiness goes down. It hasn’t been my partner’s experience. It hasn’t been the experience of most people in my social circles who’ve had kids. Could just be that it’s a small sample. At least it’s not a big sample. So maybe we just got lucky.

I do wonder, though. Those kinds of papers tend to cast a pretty wide net. They look at lots of people who had kids and track them and see how their life satisfaction and their reported happiness changes. But people are in very different situations when they end up having kids. Some people are desperate to have children and are going to extreme measures in order to make sure that they do have them because they’re having difficulty. On the other hand, there are some people who desperately don’t want children, but end up lumped with them by circumstance against their will. It wouldn’t be surprising if these folks had extremely different reactions if their wellbeing was changing in radically different ways. But they do tend to just get lumped together in these studies.

Also, I mean, we all know that we’re not average in a lot of different ways. Some people have much higher incomes than others. Some people are much more interested in their careers than others. Some people are just happier to start with. Some people feel like, in general, they have their life together, whereas other people feel like they kind of jump, lurching from crisis to crisis. Some people are in relationships that they’re very happy with. Other people are maybe not sure, and looking at the exits.

And it would be unsurprising to me if these had pretty enormous impacts on whether adding a child into the mix makes your life happy or makes it worse. If you’re in a relationship where you’re thinking, maybe, “Should we be breaking up?,” and you have cash flow issues week to week, and you’re not sleeping well, and maybe you’re kind of not satisfied with your life in general — but the one thing that is good in your life is that you’re really into your career and you want to be spending more time on that, then if you then throw a baby into the mix that you didn’t want, of course, this might be quite devastating for your wellbeing.

On the other hand, if you flip all of the signs of all of those things — you’re financially well off, your relationship is good, you’re actually not that interested in your career — it would not be shocking if this was enormously beneficial. So I think I would really like to see papers that break down the impact of kids on happiness by all of these different covariates.

I think that would actually be way more decision-relevant to the people who read these papers, because then you could actually see, people in my reference class, how much do they enjoy it? I think it would be just much more likely to be an accurate forecast rather than an average across the whole population.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. That all just makes a bunch of sense to me. So it sounds like in the short term, your wellbeing and pleasure actually just has either stayed the same or gone up.

And then there’s also this meaning question. Do you have a sense of whether you have this feeling of a more meaningful or varied life, or like your identity has changed now that you’re a parent?

Rob Wiblin: I guess I didn’t feel short of meaning to start with, so I don’t really feel like that’s filled a gap that was missing in my life. So I’d say my life is meaningful now. I think it was meaningful before, so not a big shift. And on moment-to-moment happiness, I’d say I’m a little bit happier. I was already reasonably happy, and now I’m maybe a little bit happier than that, but I guess not less happy, which was maybe where my expectation was. What was the other part of the question?

Luisa Rodriguez: Something about your identity. Does it feel meaningful or important to be a father? Does that change any of your self-conception?

Rob Wiblin: Yes, it does. I feel older. I have thoughts like, “Well, that’s something for the next generation.” You’re kind of at this different stage of life. And maybe, unlike five years ago — when I think I would have felt a little bit horrified by that, or would have been grasping to maintain my self-image and sense of youthfulness — I’m now happy to say, “The kids are going to do this thing, and that’s wonderful. But I’m a parent now. I’m going to be doing something different, and that’s fine.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. OK. That’s really interesting.

Rob Wiblin: I guess the big shift perhaps is starting to feel more risk averse about things now you’ve got someone who’s dependent on you kind of financially, personally. More worried about things going wrong for me because of the problems that would create for our kid. Otherwise, maybe not a huge shift in identification. Otherwise, I mean, you’re still mostly the same person.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny. You just kind of turned the studies’ results slightly on their head, at least in your case.

Rob Wiblin: Well, I guess truly turning it on its head would be that I was happier, but less satisfied: more lacking in meaning. Which I guess could happen if you were really into your career, and then have to take time away from it, but I guess I just don’t get the meaning thing. The whole meaningfulness, life satisfaction stuff has never super resonated with me, because it’s never felt like something that was very lacking.

So I don’t really know. I don’t know what it would be like to feel like your life was meaningless and empty. I guess that would be quite bad. But I don’t feel that way. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way. And I don’t really know that I know other people in my life who feel like their life is not meaningful. So I don’t know. Not something that I may be very useful to comment on.

Do people have skewed impressions of what parenthood is like? [01:09:24]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep, makes sense. So then do you feel like you’re just hearing kind of biased reports about all the negatives? People talk about the negatives, but people don’t happen to as often — maybe because it feels like bragging — say something like, “Having kids is the best, and if you don’t have them, you really should.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I’ve wondered about this. What’s going on? I think part of it is just that we’ve had an unusually easy time. So our baby doesn’t have digestive problems. You know, we’re blessed with a kid that hasn’t had health problems yet. Touch wood that that remains the case. So obviously, I think our experience is just not the average.

But at the same time, I do think there are some odd things going on in the kind of reporting that you hear about parents. I think just social media in general — and I suppose the news for sure — skews negative things. For some reason, stuff that is critical, stuff that is sad, I think, just tends to get reported way more. Simply saying things are going smoothly with our kids, we enjoy playing with them, it hasn’t really created any hassles: it’s not much of a news story, or it’s not a very interesting thing to say.

Maybe on Instagram or something, you could have photos of idyllic parenthood that get promoted. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there is a bit of a tendency to report negative experiences more than just the mundane positive ones that I think are very common.

I guess also, when people said, “It’s just really fun having a kid, it makes me happy” — I heard that from quite a few people, but it slightly bounced off because it doesn’t sound very credible. There’s something that feels gritty and realistic about saying, “No, it’s shit. You’re in the trenches every day. You won’t believe the things I’ve seen.” Whereas someone just saying, “It’s just really fun playing with my baby” feels like it kind of just bounces off, because isn’t that what you would expect someone to say?

What other effects might be going on? I mean, one thing is I had the perception that most babies cried on planes a lot, but I’ve learned our baby doesn’t cry on planes at all. And I think that’s actually normal. Most babies are not crying that much on planes, at least if you manage to get them chewing or feeding when you’re going up and down so that they don’t have pressure brought up in their ears.

Now, why would I have the perception that most babies are crying? Obviously, it’s because the only babies I notice on planes are the ones that are screaming. The ones that are sleeping quietly I don’t even know they’re there, because I’m not scanning around all the seats to look for them.

I think you could see how that would apply in other areas as well. That parents who are really sleep deprived and their experience seems kind of harrowing are going to be much more visible than people who are just having a good time. I think your eyes just glaze over that a little bit. So yeah, that could be another effect.

Maybe the average experience is just quite a lot worse. That would also be another simple explanation.

Maybe another thing that’s going on is I read some guides to parenting before we had a kid. And again, with the benefit of hindsight, I think they’re trying to guide you through what you would do if you had an extremely difficult child. Naturally, they have to say something. They can’t just say, “This is trivial. You’re not going to need this guide to raising children.” So they want to identify everything that could be going wrong and then guide you through how you would deal with it. But they made it sound like getting out of the house with a baby is just impossibly difficult. And how would you get them to sleep? They just never sleep.

But I think for many babies, at least some of these specific problems, they’re just not going to have at all. Maybe you won’t have any difficulty getting out of the house with a kid. Maybe you won’t have any difficulty getting them into the carrier. Maybe your baby will just sleep really easily. But of course, then there’s nothing to write in the guide. So the guide always covers the worst case in order to help you through that. And maybe in order to sell the books, they want to play up how difficult it’s going to be, so that you feel like you need this thing.

I mean, we didn’t go to antenatal classes. We just briefly looked at something online and we’re like, this seems way too basic and not informative and not necessary for us to do. I mean, my partner is a doctor, so she comes in knowing some information that you might require. But for all the kind of stress that is put on that, and the need to prepare yourself, honestly, it would just be fine to learn this stuff day to day after the fact: it just isn’t that hard, at least if you’re not super sleep deprived or things haven’t gone wrong in some dimension.

I would say, though, giving birth people think of as quite a serious business, and I would say it is pretty serious business. Or at least I think the typical case is that giving birth is quite a significant undertaking. So I’m glad that we read a book about it. I think the book that I read was The Birth Partner, which is probably actually maybe also the best guide that I can think of for the person giving birth themselves, because it really does go through a lot of the information that you want and the different paths that you might go down there: if things go wrong in this way, then what choices would you be faced with? And so on.

When you’re giving birth, you don’t want to be thinking, all right, now I’m going to bone up on what it’s like giving birth, so I’ll open the book at this point. But when you’re bringing the baby home and you’re thinking, well, exactly how are we going to feed them? How are we going to change them? You can kind of learn that on the fly, because it’s not coming at you quite as fast.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. OK. So as you’re going as a parent, once you’ve brought the baby home, you can actually just learn about it as you go, for the most part. But also, I’ve never really heard anyone say, “Giving birth was better than I thought.” It’s probably going to be serious stuff, whereas having a baby, it turns out there’s a big range of experiences.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I can think of more than one person who had a surprisingly easy birth. But I guess even then, it’s still a lot.

Maybe the other thing is, I would guess that most people in our audience would probably be having kids in their 30s, and giving birth is more difficult in your 30s. So I think someone who’s giving birth at 20 probably just does have a fairly different experience on average, or they’re much more likely to have a very straightforward birth relative to someone who’s doing it when they’re older — which, many people who are pretty professionally focused, like our listeners, tend to do.

Work and parenting tradeoffs [01:15:26]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, actually, how are you finding the work and parenting tradeoffs?

Rob Wiblin: We took three months of parental leave each. Initially for the first six weeks, we were off full time, and then we were both half time, kind of alternating. As we said in the intro, we’ve kind of just gone back to full-time work, both of us, and we have a nanny in the house taking care of our baby.

We’re both managing to get quite a bit done at work. I don’t think it’s been a big hit to our productivity. That said, I guess when you’ve both got a baby and you’re working full time, it does mean that you have less time for other stuff, especially if you’re then throwing on something that you’re dealing with in your personal life — you know, you’re moving house, hypothetically, or you’ve got family visiting. Those things are then going to add up to a lot of your time, and you’re not going to have time to do a whole lot of other random leisure activities, or be going out and meeting your friends that much. At least that’s our experience at the moment.

It is not, at least for us, cost prohibitive to have someone come to the house during the day for eight hours to take care of our kid while we’re at work. That is within our means, and that seems to be going really well. We tried a bunch of different people, and we found some that had a good chemistry with our kid, and he seems to have a good time.

Honestly, I guess nannies, unsurprisingly, are selected for being the kinds of people who love babies the most. So he might well be getting more active playtime with them than he was with us towards the end of parental leave, because they can just focus on the kid, whereas we had to be doing all sorts of other things as well. So I think, so far so good.

Maybe if we do have a second kid, then we should come back and reconsider. Because I think people say it’s a substantial step up in difficulty, balancing everything, because you’re then dealing with two kids at two different stages. You maybe have to divide and conquer: have one parent dealing with the younger kid and another parent doing what the older kid needs. But yeah, we’ll see.

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess it seems like at least some parents struggle more with decisions about when to go back to work, how much to work each. Did that feel complicated to you and your partner? Or did it just feel more obvious what you wanted to do, and you are the kind of people who are fortunate enough to be able to make it work and afford it?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I don’t think that we were really torn about that. I mean, I think both of us would probably on a personal level enjoy not working and instead taking care of our kid. But both of us are pretty dedicated to our careers and pretty interested in having an impact and doing something that’s really useful for the world. So for that reason, I don’t think it was ever really on the table that we would take very long parental leave or be taking years off. We could have considered taking a bit longer than we did, but given that things are working reasonably well now, I’m kind of happy with how things have panned out.

It is true that you can end up during the week with only a couple of hours with your baby. Because you imagine in the mornings mum goes into work, I take care of him for a couple of hours until the nanny arrives, then I go to work, and then on the other side we flip around: mum gets home before I do, takes over, but then he’s going to go to sleep a couple of hours after she gets home. So basically mum is only hanging out with him for maybe two or three hours while he’s awake. And then, I mean he’s sleeping in the room with us, so I guess in a sense you’re getting more time, and he wakes up during the night to feed, as he’s getting some more time.

But yeah, if you’re working full time, you’re not going to get another eight hours with your kid, because they’ll be sleeping for a lot of that time, or just you’ll have to be doing other things other than taking care of them. I think that’s unfortunate. I think we would like having more time than that. But to some extent you get to make it up during the weekend, and I guess that means that you do end up really treasuring the time that you have with your kid, rather than you’re on your eighth hour in the day and maybe wishing you were doing something else. So yeah, some pros, some cons.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Emily Oster described the thing that really resonated with me — but that I’m not hearing from you — this, like, you want to be the parent that works, but you also want to be the parent that makes cupcakes filled with whipped cream for your child, and just go the extra, extra, extra mile. And obviously your baby’s not of the age to have cupcake school needs. But do you relate at all to feeling like working this much takes away from being as good a parent as you want to be?

Rob Wiblin: No, it doesn’t resonate with me at all, to be honest. Maybe that’s not so surprising for me. But I guess also I think it’s the thing that’s more likely to resonate with mom. I don’t think it’s resonating that strongly with her at the moment.

Look, he’s six months old. What does he do? What does he need? He’s practicing standing up. He’s kind of practicing manipulating toys, sticking carrot into his face. I guess he’s interested in helium balloons and kind of likes to tap things that are floating and learning about mirrors and so on. And basically what he needs is a bunch of sleep each day, regular feedings, not a stressful environment.

I guess Oster sort of says things like this: that at an early age their needs are kind of narrow, and also you just max out on how good a parent you can plausibly be at that stage relatively quickly. And that feels very intuitive to me. I’m just like, he’s happy almost all the time. He’s getting all of his needs met. He’s playing most of his waking hours, just enjoying doing things. He’s hearing plenty of speech. I think he’s probably going to be learning to speak perfectly on schedule. He’s going to learn to crawl on schedule. I feel like we’re 95% of the way there. I’m pretty sure he’s not getting any significant lead exposure, one of the most important things.

And I guess , did you just also mention feeling anxious all the time about maybe you’re not doing things right, maybe you’re exposing them to risk? I’d say I’m like maybe 80th percentile low anxiety. I don’t really feel anxious at all about the risks that he’s facing. I’m not worried that things are going to go horribly wrong. I suppose there’s been some unusual things that he’s done that we’ve been kind of googling, but then ultimately you almost always think, well, actually, that’s fine. This is within the range of things that kids do. So yeah, not much anxiety from me on any of these counts.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great. I mean, it actually sounds like a different point Emily Oster made, which was when your kids are really young, you’re super replaceable — and it sounds like you’re just being replaceable and feeling great about that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Oster said in that interview, something that stood out in my mind is I guess she’s fairly career focused. I think she had a nanny in from relatively early on, and I guess some people feel bad about that, that they’re an absent parent. She was like, no, you should feel proud that you’re out earning enough money that you can provide one-on-one attention for your child at all times. Having a professional really know how to take care of them, and be giving them attention, and playing with them actively — in a way that, realistically, a parent is probably not going to be able to put in quite that much effort. And I think it’s an unusual way to think, but I think it’s kind of a sound way to think.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Yeah. It basically sounds like everything’s been pretty wonderful for the most part, so far. Part of that is things could get tougher when your kid gets older, and part of it is you’re really lucky with having a baby who’s so cooperative and happy most of the time. But it also just sounds like a really pleasant surprise. What has been a challenge?

Rob Wiblin: I guess for mum, it’s pretty full on. She’s very committed to her job, she tries really hard to do a good job, puts in good hours — and then she’s coming home, also having to deal with baby and then get to sleep. On weekdays, she doesn’t have a lot of downtime. So I think it’s a bit more challenging for her than it is for me during the week. I think she’d probably report that as challenging.

Then there was a couple of weeks there where we kept getting sick, all of us. I think baby was getting sick from other babies and then passing these illnesses on to us, and that was pretty rubbish, I would say. We haven’t been kind of at the limits of what we could do, but we’re busy. And then when you’re feeling sick and tired all the time and having to take days where you’re not really accomplishing very much, it’s not enjoyable.

I think Ezra Klein says something like that in his extract, where it’s amazing that parents manage to function when they’re both sleep deprived and actively ill. Yeah, I think the way to think about it is, at some point a baby’s inherited immune system… As you probably know, babies get colostrum from the mother early on, which gives them some immunity to bugs that the mother has been exposed to. Around six months that starts to wane, and then they’re kind of on their own, and they’ve got to get exposed to all of the circulating colds and flus and various other viruses and bacteria that are out there.

And the only way to do that is to get exposed to them, and then have an immune response to it — which basically means that just given how interconnected human civilisation is now, and how many bugs there are circulating at any point in time, they’re kind of committed to being sick for three to six months maybe, while they build up immunity to all of those things. And then the next time they’re exposed to a similar cold virus, they’re going to be able to respond to it much better, not have such serious symptoms.

So they’re getting sick. They’re pretty much committed to sooner or later getting sick, once they’re exposed to a lot of other children being sick, three to six months, and you get exposed to all of those things as well. So you’re going to be sick for definitely a couple of months at some point during their childhood. And I think that does just suck. I don’t like being sick. That probably will end up being the most significant downside, the biggest drag in the first few years of his life. So I just have to eat that, I guess.

Tough decisions about screen time [01:25:11]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. I mean, that does sound bad. I guess it also just sounds… And hopefully, I would love to get as lucky as you’ve been, but if that is the hardest part about being a parent in the first few years, I will take it. Any challenges coming up that you’re thinking about?

Rob Wiblin: I guess one that we’re getting inklings of is: mum and I, we watch TV. We were watching House of the Dragon the other day. We like to play video games together sometimes as well. And it turns out our kid is mesmerised by our TV whenever we’re watching it. He’s more interested in watching House of the Dragon than he is in feeding.

Luisa Rodriguez: Whoa.

Rob Wiblin: I mean, I guess this is widely reported, that as kids get older, it can be hard to keep them focused on feeding. But yeah, there’s a question. As he gets older, he might actually be able to engage with some of these things. But are we comfortable, frankly, with him spending as much time watching screens as we do ourselves? The reality is probably not. But then what do we do about that? Do as we say, not as we do? Or do we have to change how we spend our time so that we’re not setting a poor example?

I think this is a parenting challenge of our age that many people deal with. I haven’t yet googled what is the typical advice, but yeah, we’ll figure that out.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are you worried about the amount of time you spend in front of a screen for yourself, or are you more worried about it for a developing mind?

Rob Wiblin: For myself, to be honest, I’m not that bothered. I’m sure I could live a better life in some ways, or at least by some value systems, by not playing computer games, and, I don’t know, meditating or whatever else. But I could have got realistic about who I am and who I’m likely to become by this stage of my life.

I’m a little bit more worried that… I think I’m able to impose some, I think I have more discipline and ability to think, “This is the kind of screen time that I think is acceptable, that’s not too bad for my life, or not too addictive, not too compulsive.” And here’s other things that I would not do that they just rot your brain somehow, I guess. I think we actually do make quite a lot of active choices about that. We’re watching House of the Dragon, but we’re not just watching random videos. We’re watching stuff that we are willing to tell people that we watch without being too ashamed of it.

But yeah, I think a child that just spends all their time on screens is probably not developing social skills the way you would want. They might not be skilling up physically or verbally, all of these other things. That’s something I’d have to look into. How serious an issue is that.

Does it end up making them kind of jerks, because they’re not having to interact with other children and develop the kind of give-and-take social skills that you might want? Or maybe are their interests just too narrow? Are they going to end up only interested in doing things on screens, and not even able to do stuff out in the real world? The kind of early limiting of someone’s interests, I think, wouldn’t be too desirable.

Do you have a view on this? On what you would do?

Luisa Rodriguez: I feel like I kind of don’t want to be overly rigid. I think I’m going to have a super strong tendency to want to just be the perfect parent. And so I think actually, just for everyone’s sake, my kid will be happier if I don’t try to have rigid rules for the sake of them becoming the best adult they could be through zero screens or something.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the recommendations seem to be zero screens until a kid is several years old. I can’t remember exactly, but it’s quite extreme. I think most people are probably not doing that, realistically. I mean, they’re at least getting incidental screen exposure, and they’re growing up fine. But it’s kind of apparent that current generations do seem a little bit unhappy and a bit on edge in some ways, so maybe it is taking a toll.

I guess when they’re a bit older, you could have some middle ground where it’s like they can play computer games but only with you, or they can play computer games but only in social situations, not by themselves, which seems a little bit healthier. At least they’re developing social skills and not just disappearing into their own world. What you do when a kid is three, I’m not so sure.

I will say — I guess lots of people will know this; people who have kids will know this — but there is just unbelievable baby crack that is out there on YouTube and on other channels. I mean, the stuff that is made specifically for children is often just frenetic and insane and designed to hold their attention. Some people scroll TikTok and I guess are encountering this sort of wild content that is just constant surprises in order to keep their attention. Adults at least have the ability to reflect on that and maybe reject it, but of course a three-year-old doesn’t: they’re just captivated by the insane stuff that’s happening on the screen and the constant cuts.

I think that’s stuff we definitely want to keep our kid away from. You could at least have them watch Sesame Street rather than YouTube shorts, which at least some of them are quite mental.

Rob’s advice to future parents [01:30:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. OK, so we’re almost out of time. Now that you are on the other side and have a kid, is there any advice you’d give a future parent?

Rob Wiblin: I suppose we’ve alluded to a lot of it through these other questions. Maybe one that hasn’t come up yet is: in the modern world, if you can afford it, there are a lot of products out there for parents, and you can get everything basically delivered to your door the next day. That should, and I think does, make parenting a hell of a lot easier. You don’t have to go out with your kid and try to find some specific item. You can just browse the internet and just buy all the things that you think will help you.

I think I would have thought that a lot of this kind of baby and kid paraphernalia was kind of useless junk. You know, it’s like all of these very specific kitchen appliances that you buy and you think you’ll use, but you never really use. My experience has actually been almost all of the things that we’ve purchased, almost all of the toys, all of the stuff that was for his enjoyment and all the stuff that was for our convenience, 90% of it, I’m glad that we bought: it was kind of worth it.

I mean, most of it is just these little plastic or metal objects one way or another. So it’s not very expensive stuff to buy. But yeah, it has made stuff a whole lot easier to just be able to order anything that we think is useful on Amazon and then try it out the next day. Maybe we can stick up a link perhaps to a couple of these things that I can suggest in a Google Doc. We can stick that in the links that go with this episode or maybe stick it in the episode description somewhere if people want to take a look.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, great. I can say I’ve seen this list already, and there are a bunch of things that surprised me that I didn’t know existed, and then that I was surprised to learn that you actually found useful. So I recommend people look.

Rob Wiblin: Great teasing job there, Luisa. “You have to click through! We’re not going to tell you in the episode!” I don’t know what we get out of that, but yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez: Your Google Doc will be getting many views. Cool. Well, let’s leave it there. Thanks so much, Rob. This was really fun.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Well, we can come back while we’ve got the second one. Six months in and I can take it all back.

Luisa Rodriguez: Exactly. Exactly. Great.

Coda: Rob’s updated experience at nine months [01:32:09]

Rob Wiblin: All right, just a coda from me, seeing as we’re putting this out three or four months after Luisa and I recorded our chat.

I will say things have gotten a bit trickier since then, since baby has now learned to dart around the house crawling and doing some assisted walking. And he continues to put everything in his mouth. And he wants to open every drawer in the house and play with what’s inside.

So there’s much more need to pay attention to him at all times so he doesn’t fall down the stairs or eat a Tide pod or whatever. That’s definitely more draining than when he slept more, or could be put down and you’d expect him to stay in place.

And now that he’s spending more time with other people and babies, we’ve also had multiple more ways of all of us getting sick, which has continued to suck roughly as much as it did before and as you’d expect. It makes us more grumpy and him more grumpy, so it’s a tough one all around.

Of course he’s also way more interactive now, and much like a little human being, so it’s also more rewarding to spend time with him. And he’s still more relaxed and cooperative than I expected by a decent margin.

We’ve now both been working full-time with a baby for a while, and that has basically worked. Tiring for both of us, especially mum, but probably still less bad than I would have expected.

So I’d say we’ve regressed a bit towards the more typical parenting experience at nine months, but still are finding it easier than most.

What will the future bring? Only the gods know, but we’ll talk about it on the show at some point — no doubt once they get in touch to fill us in.

Don’t forget about our highlights episodes, which you can get for every interview on the feed called 80k After Hours.

But otherwise, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

Audio engineering by Simon Monsour, Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.

Emily Oster on her amazing nanny [01:35:01]

Emily Oster: Our current babysitter, our current nanny, is trained as a professional chef, and her last job was chocolate modeller at a bakery. This is totally random, like, the luckiest thing. We found her during the pandemic. She’s the most wonderful person. She’s the only reason I’m able to do anything. And at the last bake sale, which was animal-shelter-themed, she made cupcakes, each of which was decorated with a different animal on it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, stop.

Emily Oster: And then you find that you can be the parent with the cupcakes, but you have to give the credit to somebody else. So thank you, Claire, for those amazing dog cupcakes.