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

By Luisa Rodriguez and Robert Wiblin · Published November 25th, 2025 ·

Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many wealthy countries, fertility is now below 1.5. While we don’t notice it yet, in time that will mean the population halves every 60 years.

Rob Wiblin is already a parent and Luisa Rodriguez is about to be, which prompted the two hosts of the show to get together to chat about all things parenting — including why it is that far fewer people want to join them raising kids than did in the past.

While “kids are too expensive” is the most common explanation, Rob argues that money can’t be the main driver of the change: richer people don’t have many more children now, and we see fertility rates crashing even in countries where people are getting much richer.

Instead, Rob points to a massive rise in the opportunity cost of time, increasing expectations parents have of themselves, and a global collapse in socialising and coupling up. In the EU, the rate of people aged 25–35 in relationships has dropped by 20% since 1990, which he thinks will “mechanically reduce the number of children.” The overall picture is a big shift in priorities: in the US in 1993, 61% of young people said parenting was an important part of a flourishing life for them, vs just 26% today.

That leads Rob and Luisa to discuss what they might do to make the burden of parenting more manageable and attractive to people, including themselves.

In this non-typical episode, we take a break from the usual heavy topics to discuss the personal side of bringing new humans into the world, including:

Rob’s updated list of suggested purchases for new parents
How parents could try to feel comfortable doing less
How beliefs about childhood play have changed so radically
What matters and doesn’t in childhood safety
Why the decline in fertility might be impractical to reverse
Whether we should care about a population crash in a world of AI automation

This episode was recorded on September 12, 2025.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Highlights

Feminist rage over the horrors of pregnancy

Rob Wiblin: How have you found pregnancy so far? You’re six months in.
Luisa Rodriguez: The honest answer is I’ve found it pretty terrible. I had a good chunk of, I don’t know, two or three months in the middle that were very nice. But the first three months were beyond what I could have expected terrible. Just the nausea, the hormones affecting my mood. I think there are probably smaller other discomforts, but mostly the nausea just made me feel like I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work as much, I didn’t want to socialise. I felt like I just wanted to be in bed all the time. And three months is a long time to feel that way.
I think not everyone has this experience, but I think some people will at least somewhat relate. I just did not know it was going to be that bad. And it’s gotten pretty bad again recently in the third trimester. I think I’m still extremely excited to have a kid, but I’m like, why are we not outraged about this? Like a bunch of people are going around spending six months, or nine months if you’re really unlucky, having an absolutely terrible time while pregnant. It just feels totally unreasonable to me.
Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that sounds horrible. I really don’t envy women’s role in this entire process of having children. My wife had a reasonably hard time, I think not quite as bad as that. But you’ve definitely drawn the short straw of the two possible roles you could have.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, now that I’m in it, I’m like, it’s totally unacceptable that we haven’t solved this. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this much kind of like feminist rage. I feel like it’s not your fault that you don’t have to experience this, but boy am I mad and jealous and feel like we should have solved this. Or there are aspects that probably we could have solved better and haven’t — probably because of some of the systemic gender-y stuff that happens when women suffer from problems more than men, and science just decides to solve those problems less.
Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I think I’ve heard from some people that probably doctors under prescribe anti-nausea medications to women during pregnancy. Is this something you’ve looked into?
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, definitely. There are a bunch of different ways that with nausea in particular, we’ve just been really let down. Like there are drugs that work well but like there have been some scares about whether they were safe or not in pregnancy, so pharmaceutical companies have taken them off the market and not put them back on, despite lots of further tests showing that they are safe and they’re doing it kind of out of risk aversion. And I think doctors too are doing things out of risk aversion, and it makes me so livid.
Rob Wiblin: It feels like you should be the one making that choice about how much risk to take.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. And doctors, the thing they always say is like, “You can do X if the benefits outweigh the risks” — but offer no sensible guidance about whether the benefits outweigh the risks. So they’re like, “If you’re doing really terribly, you can…”
Rob Wiblin: But they kind of pressure you not to. From what I’ve heard, the risks are in fact very low.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think for most of these things they’re very low.
Rob Wiblin: Around children and pregnancy, there’s always this desire to absolutely minimise risk at almost any cost. Especially to mothers.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel very just not valued as a human when all healthcare professionals I talk to… This is actually not entirely what my experience has been like, but some are like, “Yep, that thing you’re feeling is normal. There’s not much we can do about it.”
I have migraines, so a big one was what migraine medications can and can’t I take? And the kind of ignoring of how painful a migraine is in favour of, “We don’t know with 100% certainty that that drug isn’t going to have any costs for your baby” just feels like….
Rob Wiblin: Yeah. “We know it’s debilitating for me.” So can’t we at least kind of calculate what’s the probability, like what fraction of drugs actually are bad? Is there any story or any mechanism that we’re aware of by which it could be bad?
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly.

Fertility rates are massively declining

Rob Wiblin: The maintenance fertility rate is actually 2.1, but let’s just say it’s 2 for the sake of simplicity. So if you have a fertility rate of 2, then on average your population is going to be stable. If you have a fertility rate of 1, that doesn’t mean that your population halves. It means that your population halves every generation — so it halves, and then it’s a quarter, and then it’s an eighth, and then it’s a sixteenth.
And that really adds up over time. And there’s quite a lot of countries now that do have a fertility rate around 1 and so should expect… I mean, I would say that it’s kind of a population crash basically.
I think in the UK and the US it’s more like 1.5, so you get a 25% reduction in population every generation. So not quite as much of a cratering, but a pretty significant change socially in like how much tax revenue you’ll have to support older people. And of course it’s going down. So it’s at 1.5 now, but we might expect on current trends to hit 1 in 20 years’ time or something like that if nothing changes. And I don’t really expect anything very much to change. I think all of the trends that are pushing people to have fewer children will probably only continue.
…
I should say I actually don’t worry about this at all. Despite what I’m saying, I’m not putting any effort into this. I find it an interesting intellectual exercise. But that’s because I have a fairly unusual take about how the future is going to go, which is that humans in the labour market, in terms of just influence over the world, are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence in coming decades. So there is no medium term in which we need humans to continue supporting the economy. I kind of do just expect us to be substituted, and for this to not create any kind of serious crunch, a big problem. …
But among the people who don’t expect that, who think that AI is going to be a bust and don’t really expect a full replacement, I think for those people it’s a very interesting question, at least: is this a problem? What impacts will it have? Should we do anything? Is there anything that can be done? And some people are taking that seriously.
Other people prefer not to think about it, perhaps because it’s an uncomfortable issue. It can be very uncomfortable sounding like you think that people should have more children than they want to have. I don’t think anyone wants to go to a world where people are kind of obliged to have children to benefit their country or something like that. But at the same time, if your country is having its population halved every 25 years, effectively, you might wonder, perhaps we need to change the tax system or change how our cities are organised in order to at least slow that down.

Why do fewer people want children?

Rob Wiblin: I think that definitely the fact that it costs both money and time is a reason that people don’t have more children. But that has always been the case; it’s always been expensive to have children. And in the 18th century, when it was expensive to have children, people were substantially poorer, and nonetheless, they had like three times as many children as we do now.
So I think that money is a terrible explanation for the changes that we’ve seen recently. Because in general, countries have been becoming richer. But as countries become richer, fertility tends to decline. If you look at richer people in countries like the UK and US, they used to actually have less children than people who had lower incomes. Now it’s about even. There’s not really a correlation between the amount of income that people have and how many children they have.
If it was primarily a financial issue, you might think that people who have like two or 10 or 20 times as much income as others might have more children. But in practice, the effect, if there is any, is very small. In general, income is rising even in countries like the UK or the US or Australia, which are already reasonably developed. And growth rates are somewhat slow, but fertility is crashing.
So really, I think almost none of the correlations support this, except that in some places at the very top end, people who are in the top few percent of earners, sometimes they have slightly more children than other people.
So that’s the financial cost thing. But I think an explanation that makes more sense is: while it’s not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps people’s incomes have risen, but their expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster, maybe substantially faster than that.
So yes, social norms around spending on children might have risen a lot. But the other thing that I think does make more sense rather than just financial cost, is thinking about the cost of time. All of us only have so many hours in the day, and if we’re having children, taking care of children, then we can’t do other stuff that we want to do. So we have this big opportunity cost of doing one thing rather than another.
And I think a big explanation for why people are having fewer children is that the non-child options have gotten better. Having a child has gotten easier — I think it has gotten substantially easier, actually, than it was even a few decades ago, objectively at least, to accomplish the same level of care that you would have in the past — but the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in the digital age. People just have so many other distractions, things that can occupy their time that they might find more fulfilling and interesting, so the competition between children and other stuff is looking pretty bad for having children. …
People talk about all kinds of different things that they want to do other than have children: people want to pursue careers, that’s very important to them; they want to be learning and they want to be travelling. They want to be doing all these other things.
It’s become kind of a catchall explanation for all kinds of modern social trends is people are spending more time on the internet, digital stuff, phones. But I think it actually is, to a first approximation, the best guess that you should have a lot of the time. … I think in terms of time use, that is the biggest change. And so it’s naturally potentially a big driver of changes in culture and behaviour and priorities. But there is other stuff.
…
So we’ll link to a whole lot of articles in the Financial Times recently over the last year or two about this issue. They had one gem of a statistic, which was I think that in 1993, [61%] of young people in the US said that having children was an important part of a flourishing life for them, and it’s now down to [26%]. That’s a radical change in whether that is part of their kind of dream life at all. So yeah, there’s probably a lot of factors going into that.
Another potential driver that I think probably has been unappreciated until the last couple of years, at least among people who I read, is changes in what fraction of people are having relationships that could plausibly lead to the decision to have children. …
So in the EU, the rate of people between 25 and 35 who are in relationships went from 67% in 1990 to 53.5% today, which is a bit over a 20% decline. Now, if you’re just not in a relationship in that kind of age band, even if you wanted to have children, the odds are starting to get stacked against you. So you would expect that to kind of mechanically almost lead to a 20% reduction in the number of children, almost.
…
And that’s one where I can see people probably don’t say, “I don’t want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok” — but in practice, if you spend a lot of your time just on your phone or just reading stuff on the internet, even stuff that you endorse, even doing things that you think is actually super educational, in fact, you end up spending less time with people. You’re less likely to meet someone who you want to form a relationship with. Maybe you just somewhat lose interest in dating, or your social skills or your extroversion begins to decline.

Is parenting way harder now than it used to be?

Rob Wiblin: I think there’s been a huge change in expectations for how much parents are meant to actively play with children. Certainly compared to pre-industrial times. In the 18th century — I’ve consulted with the LLMs on this — it was not at all common, the idea that parents would be playing games, playing imaginary games, physical games, playing with toys with their children, for many different reasons.
In part people were poorer then; they worked many more hours than we do today. They just didn’t have the slack in their time to be playing with a two-year-old toddler like that.
And secondly, they didn’t have to, because families were much larger. There were so many more kids in society. A larger fraction of people in your local area were under 18 or under 10 or under five — such that it would be very easy for them to find playmates. And rather than doing imaginative play and games with their parents, they would do it with the five-year-old or the four-year-old or the three-year-old who they’re playing with. It was much more normal for kids to be entertaining one another rather than actively being entertained by parents who are acting as kind of court jesters or something like that.
But that kind of is the norm and almost the ideal, I would say, in society today: that a really good parent is one that comes home and spends hours playing with their child, and really enjoys that and spends their weekend filling up with engaged activities with their kids. That was I think already beginning in the 1950s and it’s only become, I would guess, kind of monotonically more so as the decades have worn on. Does that match your perception?
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it definitely does. And it’s kind of surprising to me that I’m already preparing for the feeling of guilt for not playing enough with my child. It feels definitely like something I will experience. So the norm has been instilled in me, despite the fact that I was extremely independent as a kid and had a great time. I spent loads of time playing with friends in like parking lots, making up pretend businesses that we had. I just had a wonderful childhood that was extremely…
I mean, I also had very loving, attentive parents, but they worked plenty, and we entertained ourselves and it was great. And yet I’m currently already like, oh man, I better find ways to play enough with my child. I need to be doing that 24/7.
Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah. I think it really is important to dwell on the fact that this is a peculiar attitude basically that only exists in the modern era, that is only kind of in our culture, that is I guess a function of peculiarities of modern life. It’s not even necessarily common outside of the richest, WEIRDest — Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic — countries.
For that matter, I think it’s less common even among people who have lower incomes or have less well-paying office jobs, even in countries like the UK — because it’s just not possible if you work much longer hours in a difficult labour job to then come home and be playing with your children for so many hours. This is not at all a human universal, so it is not required for children to do well.
…
Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have a sense of what specifically people think is better about doing loads more play with their kids? Is it something like people think it’s actually better for the kids and their development? Part of me just feels like it’s kind of random that now the ideal good parent is extremely present and doing all this playing, when I can’t really think of very good reasons that that should be the recommended approach.
Rob Wiblin: Yeah. This reminds me of, I put up a poll on Twitter a couple of months ago where I was very curious to know what people would think of this hypothetical: Is it better to play with your child yourself, or hire someone who is much better at playing with children — some sort of supernanny who the child finds even more enriching and even more enjoyable to play with, because they’re a professional who does this, who has been selected for being the most capable and the most entertaining for toddlers? Hire them to do it in your place.
I was like: Is this good parenting, OK parenting, bad parenting, or very bad parenting? People were almost uniformly distributed across that. About half of people thought that this was good parenting and half of people thought it was bad parenting.
I think it’s a case that pulls apart two different desirable aspects of parenting. One is providing entertainment and happiness and enrichment and education for the child — which is being perfectly well served in the second case, where you have an extremely good nanny playing with them and taking care of them — and having a very deep personal relationship with them, where you’re taking your time not to just make them happy and educated and capable, but they love you in particular.
So you can kind of see it both ways to a point. But I would say that in order to have a positive relationship with your older child, and for them to love you, I don’t think you have to be playing with them obsessively all weekend to the exclusion of others. I think it just isn’t the case. Many people, including me, have very positive relationships with their parents, despite the fact that they didn’t feel this intense pressure to play with them all the time when they were toddlers. It’s not like I have any memory of ever, “If only my parents had played with me, I would love them so much more, or I’d feel like I had a deeper connection to them now.”
It does remind me though: Did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored? I remember just being at home often saying, like, I’m kind of bored.
Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah, I did.
Rob Wiblin: You know, I almost forgot about that. But I don’t think that is a thing that children today almost ever feel, because they’re always entertained. We would be like, “My child is bored? What a nightmare!”
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. “I’m failing.”
Rob Wiblin: “I have to fix this immediately.” But when I was five, I think my parents would say, “Well, go find something to entertain yourself. Go read a book, go figure out a game to play. It’s not my job to entertain you.” And I think I did most of the time, eventually.

Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids?

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have a sense of what our options are for increasing fertility rates globally?
Rob Wiblin: I think probably pretty poor. … I think if we were willing to spend more than 10% of GDP, we could drive up the number of children that people have pretty substantially. The strongest options are consistent transfers to people: free childcare on a really ongoing basis and a tax system that basically just hands people money based on the number of children that they have every month. I think evidence suggests that that does cause some people to have more children.
It’s really difficult though, because almost all of these policies, the big challenge is you end up paying for all of the children that would have happened anyway. Because you can’t say that this person would have had two children otherwise —
Luisa Rodriguez: “This is the marginal child.”
Rob Wiblin: — we’ll pay them for the marginal third child. You don’t know how many they would have had. And also, people would regard it as kind of unfair, I think. So in practice, you end up doing redistribution for every child, and most of them would have existed anyway. So if you’re driving up fertility from 1.5 to 1.6, then you end up paying 16 times as much as if you could perfectly pay someone to have an extra child.
Again, I’m not so much an expert on this, but I think experience across different countries — France, I think Norway, I guess not so much the US, what other countries have had fertility bills? Singapore, Hungary — if you’re willing to spend a couple of percent of GDP, you can drive up fertility by like 0.2 or 0.3. Countries have done that, but I think almost no one has managed to really counterfactually increase it by much more than that — because I think you run out of people who are willing to have that many more children. You’re just running into people actively don’t want to have children anymore. It just is not part of their picture of their life.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, these just aren’t addressing the problem of someone wanting no children. And how would one even address that problem?
Rob Wiblin: You also run into the problem that people are single.
Luisa Rodriguez: Right. You have no lever for them.
Rob Wiblin: I mean, people talk about things that you could do with housing or urban design, or different kinds of government policies that might cause people to spend more time socialising and be more likely to form relationships. You can get rid of tax penalties that sometimes in some countries you get for being married or having a partner.
But another quote that I heard many years ago that stuck in my head is, “Some things we just have to do for ourselves.” It’s not something that the government can do. I think the government can remove active impediments that are created to building relationships and having friends, but this is more something that we have to decide to change in our lives ourselves, rather than something that can be dictated by a national government, because it’s just so hard for them to influence.
And I don’t really see any signs that the trend is shifting here. I think the trends are all against it. It’s all towards spending more time on your own, towards less extroversion, towards less interest in having deep relationships.
Luisa Rodriguez: Do you think anywhere could get really dystopic, like bans on abortion or child requirement policies or something? Or does that seem pretty unlikely?
Rob Wiblin: I mean, this isn’t my area. And again, to some extent I don’t think any of this will play out. But let’s imagine that AI was not advancing particularly anytime soon. I suspect that that wouldn’t happen in many places. I think that this problem won’t be solved, isn’t on track to be solved. There isn’t enough will to solve it. A country can just tolerate having its population crash, and any solutions that you put in place now don’t pay off for 20 to 30 to 40 years — so there’s not that much urgency to, let’s really crack this and then we’ll be in a better situation. It’s so far in the future that anything that you do now…
And the cost would be massive. There isn’t the political will to spend that kind of money. Already today, the group that is most active and successful in pursuing redistribution is not students getting redistribution to support their studies or young people getting extra funding for childcare: it’s basically older people who are the most active politically, have the most at stake in redistribution to older retirees.
So a larger and larger fraction of government spending is going towards healthcare and social security transfers for people who are retired. I think that will probably only escalate. And I think that group is not going to be interested in surrendering the 10% of GDP. Just in general, all interest groups are not going to be interested in giving up the 10% to 15% of GDP that might be required to solve this on a sustainable basis.
And these other things are even less attractive than that; they’ll be even more invasive and horrifying to people. You know, if you’re North Korea or you’re some sort of authoritarian country… Famously, I think Romania, in order to boost its population when it was a dictatorship, got rid of contraception — which did briefly increase the number of children people were having. It’s obviously horrific. It’s basically just regarded as a historical atrocity in a way. But I don’t think there’s going to be appetite outside of quite authoritarian countries to pursue anything like that. Fortunately.

Returning to work with kids

Rob Wiblin: I think the ideal of a mother who stays home and takes care of their child, who’s like doing 90%+ of the work of raising a child, is a complete historical aberration. I don’t even know whether that is kind of the dominant vision that people have today anymore. But there’s not been any time when this was actually the way that people typically lived, and it absolutely is not necessary for good child development.
In fact, I was looking into this a bit this week, and probably, if anything, the evidence counts the other way: that it’s somewhat detrimental; you want children to be having multiple caregivers and learning to navigate multiple different relationships. It’s actually better for their social development. It’s very important to have an engaged parent who pays attention to them and responds to them a significant fraction of the time, maybe about half of the time is actually enough to consistently get secure attachment and not really any developmental issues. Potentially even less, maybe even being attentive a third of the time, some studies suggest it’s actually quite sufficient to have a very positive relationship between the child and the parents.
Because it was not the case that, historically, when we were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers, that parents would be able to pay attention to their children all the time. They had stuff to do. They were very busy cooking, doing all kinds of different work. The child would not always immediately get a response. If humans evolved to just fall to pieces as soon as their father was trying to collect food or was cooking or whatever else, that would be a horrible design for human beings. And we are not built that way. We are not nearly so fragile as that, that we require 100% of the time someone always has to be responding.
And furthermore, because of the nature of the work that people had to do, we had to have cooperative parenting arrangements or cooperative caretaking arrangements. So I think in almost all historical time periods, except in some cases in the modern world, it was normal that children would be handed between many different caregivers — including other family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and sometimes friends and other parents with children, who you would do this in exchange with them as a reciprocal thing.
Almost all children historically have had multiple different caregivers. It wasn’t the mother doing it overwhelmingly or either parent doing it overwhelmingly. And the evidence is very clear that children develop completely fine like that, as long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent who is taking care of them. It seems like that can even compensate for bad quality childcare. So if you put kids in a modest amount of low engagement, low-quality childcare, basically as long as the parents are the rest of the time pretty engaged with them, attentive much of the time, then there’s not apparent psychological problems.
So I think we have this image, and it’s completely a modern thing. It’s basically I think exclusively in the postwar world in the West. The idea that children will fall apart, go to pieces, not be attached, not be psychologically functional if it’s not one specific person all the time paying attention to them, and anyone ever leaves them to cry. I think it’s just incorrect. I think it flatly contradicts the scientific literature on this topic.

AI and parenting

Luisa Rodriguez: Assuming AI goes well, how much do you think your kid’s life is going to differ from your life at the same age? So like your childhood and their childhood?
Rob Wiblin: I think in the long run, radically. Radically. Hopefully, because the world will be much better. I think it’s unclear when AI is going to become a big deal in education and change school, unless we get a very hard takeoff. I suppose that’s where you might expect it to happen first, is that now they’re getting one-on-one tutoring from an AI that they talk to all the time that is kind of a substitute parent or a substitute one-on-one tutor.
I’m pretty keen for that to happen, although of course another part of being a flourishing human is learning to deal with other human beings, and how to negotiate those boundaries with other toddlers and other young children. So even on a world where they’re getting an excellent upbringing, it’s not going to eat up all of their time. Maybe it would even be quite a minority of school hours, perhaps.
In the longer term, it’s quite hard for me to imagine that a child of mine born today is going to be working an office job when they finish university in 2044. You’d have to have very long AI timelines to believe that it’s going to take so long to get AIs that are able to replicate what humans do at a computer, or even potentially what humans do physically over that kind of timeline.
So I think it’s like a real long shot, the idea that we’re training up our kid to have a normal job the way that my wife and I do. I guess never say never. You don’t want to put zero weight on it. But I would bet pretty strongly against. So at the point that he is going to school, I think I will place more importance on general development and whether he’s having a good time, and is becoming a flourishing person who would use recreation time well, and would have the ability to not get drawn in by things that are enjoyable in the short term but harmful in the long run — that sort of thing over their ability to kind of grind and be conscientious and do drudge work in any kind of work at all. Because I just think it’s unlikely to happen.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, this is basically my view too. But I find it surprisingly hard. I don’t have a kid yet, but it’s been so deeply ingrained in me that doing well in school and just kind of learning to do hard things for the sake of doing hard things are important things for your kid. And I think I’m going to find it really hard to let go of, like, my kid doesn’t have to do well in school to have a good, happy, successful life.
Like there’s a version of doing well that probably contributes to flourishing, like finding things you’re interested in and stuff. But abandoning this hope that they are successful feels hard to me. How does it feel to you?
Rob Wiblin: I don’t have a kind of success-focused philosophy or a sense of what is a good life or is fulfilling. To be honest, I think my take is I would be perfectly happy to just spend my time having recreation, contributing nothing — except that unfortunately the world is really messed up, so regrettably, I have to go and do something in order to try to help with that. And of course you have to make money in order to live. But if the world were good, if the world was solved, I would have had no interest in accomplishing stuff. Like, why would you want to do that? You work in order to solve a problem. You don’t invent problems in order to have work to do.
Anyway, if he takes after me, then I don’t think you have such an issue with feeling pointlessness or why do I exist? How do I justify my existence if I’m not working for money? And hopefully, if many people are just not working anymore, then that will become a more common culture, and fewer people will identify with work as the reason that they justify their existence to themselves and regard themselves as worthy.
So certainly if I ever see him beginning to trend towards thinking, “The reason that I’m OK is that I did well at school,” I’ll try to push against that to a point. But I’m not sure that doing well at school and flourishing as a person and becoming the kind of person who could enjoy a good world and enjoy a good life when there is no longer work for humans to do is that different, at least at early ages.
You still want to learn to use language well, you still want to learn to make good decisions — because you will still have to choose who to trust, you’ll still have to make some decisions in this world. You still want to learn enough math so you can actually think through problems and make decisions in your own life, like decide whether the AI advisor is giving you good advice or not. And also, presumably you want to be having some relationships with some other people, or AIs at least. So you want to develop some social skills, you want to be somewhat healthy.
So to some extent, for humans, I guess because of how we evolved, being a flourishing being and being able to do stuff are quite intertwined. They don’t completely come apart. Maybe at some future time they could come apart, technology could drive them apart. But for a primary school student right now, I think, while you don’t necessarily want them to be building the personality where they will just grind out doing extremely unpleasant things for long periods of time in order to get acceptance and approval, other things — like are they having good relationships, are they able to accomplish tasks, are they able to focus on anything at all — is probably still a valuable life skill.

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

Fertility and parenting data:

Financial Times coverage:
The Global Collapse of Coupling & Fertility by Alice Evans — who digs deep into more gender-based data on her Substack The Great Gender Divergence
Are parents spending less time with their kids? by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina of Our World in Data — though note this data may not be the highest quality, and OWID has since removed this content from its site
Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago by the data team at The Economist
Birth rates are plummeting worldwide. Why? — podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show with demographer Jennifer Sciubba
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think by Bryan Caplan

Rob’s recommendations:

Bluey — whether you have kids or not, just a solid show!
Purchases I’m glad (sometimes very glad) we made

Other 80,000 Hours podcast episodes:

Transcript

Table of Contents

1 Cold open [00:00:00]
2 We’re hiring [00:01:26]
3 Why did Luisa decide to have kids? [00:02:10]
4 Medicine doesn’t take the burden of pregnancy seriously enough [00:04:14]
5 Rob’s parenting experiences so far [00:09:41]
6 Fertility rates are massively declining [00:21:25]
7 Why do fewer people want children? [00:29:20]
8 In what sense is parenting harder than it used to be? [00:39:01]
9 Feeling guilty for not playing enough with our kids [00:48:07]
10 Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids? [01:00:02]
11 Returning to work with kids [01:12:07]
12 AI and parenting [01:29:22]
13 Screen time is tough [01:42:49]
14 Ways to screw up your kids [01:47:40]
15 Highs and lows of parenting [01:49:55]
16 Recommendations for babies or young kids [01:51:37]

Cold open [00:00:00]

Rob Wiblin: Did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, I did.

Rob Wiblin: I almost forget about that now, but I don’t think that that is a thing that children today almost ever feel, because they’re always entertained.

Luisa Rodriguez: No, we would never accept it.

Rob Wiblin: We would never be like, “My child is bored?!”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, “I’m failing! I have to fix this.”

Rob Wiblin: “What a nightmare! I have to fix this immediately.”

The ideal of a mother who stays home doing 90%+ of the work of raising a child is a complete historical aberration. In the 18th century, it was not at all common that parents would be playing games with their children.

While it’s not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster. But the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in the digital age.

Luisa Rodriguez: I don’t think you would hear people saying, “I don’t want to have kids because I’d like to be on the internet more.”

Rob Wiblin: People probably don’t say, “I don’t want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok.” If you spend a lot of your time on your phone, reading stuff on the internet, I think that mechanically kind of feeds into fewer children.

Many people might feel uncomfortable making any kind of tradeoff where they’re saying, “I’m going to prioritise my preferences for what to do over what my toddler wants.” But I think we should give kind of equal regard to the wellbeing of parents and children. Is that a shocking claim?

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s landing weird to hear someone say aloud.

Rob Wiblin: I mean, the fact that that sounds crazy to us now probably goes a long way toward explaining why people don’t want to have kids.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally, I agree! Yeah.

We’re hiring [00:01:26]

Rob Wiblin: Hey, everyone. Just wanted to quickly let you know that The 80,000 Hours Podcast is currently hiring for three new roles:

There’s a podcast growth specialist: someone focused on packaging, promoting, and distributing the show.
There’s a research specialist: someone to help make the content sharper and more insightful.
And finally, a producer or content strategist: someone to plan out episodes and figure out how to fix them in post.

The roles might be done in London, San Francisco, or remotely, and you can find a lot more details in the listings on our job board at jobs.80000hours.org.

If you like the show and would like to make it better, or make there be more of it, or help it find a bigger and more valuable audience, then please do consider applying by the deadline of 30th November 2025.

Let’s get on with the show.

Why did Luisa decide to have kids? [00:02:10]

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Congratulations.

Luisa Rodriguez: Thank you.

Rob Wiblin: I’m not sure that I’ve directly asked: why did you decide to have kids?

Luisa Rodriguez: I think “decision” is almost a generous word for it. I struggled with what felt like a decision for years. It felt like I desperately wanted to have kids, but it felt like I couldn’t justify it kind of aligning with my values, where really I wanted to be putting doing good with my career first. And I think for a long time, I tried to convince myself that maybe it wouldn’t take away that much from work.

What else did I try to convince myself of? Just kind of that there was no tension here. And eventually I convinced myself that there was a tension, but I needed to do it anyways.

Rob Wiblin: Just because it’s very important to you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Part of it is just gut level. There’s a part of me that feels devastated at the thought of not. And I don’t really know that that bottoms out in anything kind of reasoned.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it’s just how you felt since I guess you were a teenager?

Luisa Rodriguez: Probably longer. I think probably I just came out of the womb being genetically predisposed to be like, “I will be a mother one day.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It’s astonishing how much people’s preferences about having kids varies. Given that you’d think that this is something that evolution would really kind of home in on and have very strong preferences about how we feel. But people are all the way from just desperately wanting to have children from a young age to desperately not wanting to have them.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I remember being like, “Wait, not everyone feels this way?” I thought surely everyone was like, “Yep, we want to do it.”

Rob Wiblin: Well, many more people at least used to feel this way, which we might talk about.

Medicine doesn’t take the burden of pregnancy seriously enough [00:04:14]

Rob Wiblin: How have you found pregnancy so far? You’re six months in.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep, I am a little over six months in. And the honest answer is I’ve found it pretty terrible. I had a good chunk of, I don’t know, two or three months in the middle that were very nice. But the first three months were beyond what I could have expected terrible. Just the nausea, the hormones affecting my mood. I think there are probably smaller other discomforts, but mostly the nausea just made me feel like I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work as much, I didn’t want to socialise. I felt like I just wanted to be in bed all the time. And three months is a long time to feel that way.

I think not everyone has this experience, but I think some people will at least somewhat relate. I just did not know it was going to be that bad. And it’s gotten pretty bad again recently in the third trimester. I think I’m still extremely excited to have a kid, but I’m like, why are we not outraged about this? Like a bunch of people are going around spending six months, or nine months if you’re really unlucky, having an absolutely terrible time while pregnant. It just feels totally unreasonable to me.

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

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

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

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

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. And doctors, the thing they always say is like, “You can do X if the benefits outweigh the risks” — but offer no sensible guidance about whether the benefits outweigh the risks. So they’re like, “If you’re doing really terribly, you can…”

Rob Wiblin: But they kind of pressure you not to. From what I’ve heard, the risks are in fact very low.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think for most of these things they’re very low.

Rob Wiblin: Around children and pregnancy, there’s always this desire to absolutely minimise risk at almost any cost. Especially to mothers.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel very just not valued as a human when all healthcare professionals I talk to… This is actually not entirely what my experience has been like, but some are like, “Yep, that thing you’re feeling is normal. There’s not much we can do about it.”

I have migraines, so a big one was what migraine medications can and can’t I take? And the kind of ignoring of how painful a migraine is in favour of, “We don’t know with 100% certainty that that drug isn’t going to have any costs for your baby” just feels like….

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. “We know it’s debilitating for me.” So can’t we at least kind of calculate what’s the probability, like what fraction of drugs actually are bad? Is there any story or any mechanism that we’re aware of by which it could be bad?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly.

Rob Wiblin: But the default is just really strongly to no. It reminds me a little bit of anti-ageing stuff, where people feel it’s always been this way, there’s no apparent solution to ageing and dying, so we’re just going to do nothing about it. Or by default we’ll do almost nothing, and even deny that it’s a problem almost.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. Yeah.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It does seem like people have pretty different pregnancy experiences. It still boggles my mind that anyone is having a really great time. But I’m happy for them. I also slightly hate them, but mostly I am happy for them.

Rob’s parenting experiences so far [00:09:41]

Luisa Rodriguez: So I actually just want to ask you loads of questions now that it’s quite real for me. I think it was about a year and a half ago that we chatted. How have things been going with your son?

Rob Wiblin: We did the interview I think just after I’d gotten back from parental leave. And I think I was celebrating how straightforward we had found it, and the fact that, at that time, we had found it significantly less difficult than my wife and I had been anticipating — given that you hear really terrible stories sometimes about how sleep deprived and unhappy people are early on when they’ve got a newborn.

So we were super happy our kid turned out to not be very fussy, didn’t cry all that much, just seemed pretty cheerful. We didn’t have any significant health issues to worry about. So I was all, what are people so fussed about?

Luisa Rodriguez: I remember being like, this is maybe the best pitch for becoming a parent I’ve ever heard. Making this sound really easy.

Rob Wiblin: I’d say that was the peak of me feeling that way. I guess since then I’ve regressed perhaps to a more normal feeling about things, or finding things more typically challenging.

I think what was going on is, with a newborn, if they don’t cry a whole lot, and you don’t have medical issues, or you’re not having great difficulty breastfeeding, then they kind of just stay there in their crib. And also if they’re sleeping well, that’s also super key. And our kid fortunately was sleeping well as well.

So if you’ve got all of that, and you’re on parental leave, then you might really be on easy street — which was exactly our situation. We’ve got all of the stresses of work removed, and it’s just turned out to be significantly like there isn’t an aspect of it that is really difficult. It’s more difficult for my wife for sure, because she was waking up many times at night to breastfeed. But at least relative to expectations it was a lot more straightforward.

So that’s the newborn stage. I guess as kids get older… Fortunately, we are still very blessed that our toddler has a very happy disposition. Sleeps pretty well through the night most of the time. Not last night. So I’m a little bit frazzled. I’m probably going to be struggling for words sometimes today, because he woke up many times. He woke up three or four times in the night.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s appropriate for this chat for you to be sleep deprived.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, exactly. I was thinking that at 6:00 AM. I was like, “This is terrible. Maybe also it’ll give us material to talk about. I feel bad for myself, but it’s good content.”

But yeah, as they get older, even if they do have a good disposition and you’re not having any health crises to deal with, they become very mobile and become very active, and they begin to require entertainment and for you to be intervening all the time.

So I guess at six months he started crawling. Soon after that he was beginning to toddle and walk around. And even though he was very happy doing that, that just requires constant attention, because there’s so many ways that they can hurt themselves. And also, they just demand attention. They now need to be entertained, because they’re out there in the world learning about it in a way that they weren’t when they were mostly just drinking milk and sleeping.

So it’s definitely been a lot more. Also, we went back to work, right?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, of course.

Rob Wiblin: I maybe should have emphasised this more, that it’s going to be a very different situation balancing work and family life when you mostly aren’t working. I guess we’ll talk about this more, but the amount of slack you have in your week and your days is, as everyone says, significantly less when you have a kid and you’re working from 9:00 to 6:00, and then you go home and you’ve also got a different sort of work. Joyous in its own way, but also tiring.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel like I’ve heard people be like, “It’s so exciting when my baby develops the ability to really acknowledge you and crawl around” — and then almost as quickly they’re like, “Oh, no.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I have to be watching him all the time.

Luisa Rodriguez: How much do you feel like you have a sense now of what your son is like, personality-wise?

Rob Wiblin: I think it’s a little bit hard to say, because I don’t know what is specific to him and what is just what toddlers are like, because I don’t have great in-depth experience with that many toddlers.

I think he’s pretty happy. He explores things a tonne and is very curious, probably to more toddlers than him. He doesn’t fuss about that many things, but when he really gets in his head that he wants to play with the bubbles, he wants to play with the bubble wand, then it can be very difficult to dissuade him. He can kick up quite a fuss.

I was asking my mum, who has had experience with more toddlers than I have, what she thought were his distinctive personality traits. And she said he was very determined, very persistent in a way that some toddlers aren’t, where if things don’t work out quickly, then they kind of get upset and throw the thing away. Whereas our kid, I guess he’s happy to spend an hour just trying to make bubbles with the bubble wand and just keep going at it. He’s actually gotten into saying, when he tries to make a big bubble and it doesn’t work out, he says, “Almost!” It’s so adorable. Because that’s just copying what we say.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s so lovely.

Rob Wiblin: I guess I was trying to think of… For balance, I feel like now I want to do the critique of what are the negative personality traits.

Luisa Rodriguez: I don’t think you’re required to do that for your child.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: They do. But why? Do we have any idea? Because it does seem like it’s not that surprising that they don’t have the tools. They don’t have empathy yet in the way that we do. But it does seem like they do pushing and biting and hitting in a way that isn’t that good for anyone. Why do they go through those phases?

Rob Wiblin: It’s because it gets a reaction. Attention also just gets an interesting response from the person, and normally that’s a good thing. If they make a big bubble, we make a big fuss: “Wow, you made a massive bubble!” That’s kind of a good sign. And in this case, they notice us freaking out because we’ve just been bitten, but I think they don’t have the ability to perceive whether it’s kind of positive or negative. So you’re meant to just not react and put them to the side. We do that a lot of the time. Not all the time.

Also, whenever they develop a new capability like biting or hitting or pushing, they kind of just really are into that for a brief phase as they figure out learning about how it works. So I think it’s also partly just that. Even if they knew that it wasn’t desired, I think the temptation to try out this new skill that they have might be pretty great.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so those are his downsides.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Character flaws. I don’t know.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are there any other kind of cute or clever things from lately that he’s doing?

Rob Wiblin: I’m reluctant to go on too much about it. I feel like people are always so much more interested in their own children than in other people’s children. Sometimes I start talking stories about our son and people’s eyes begin to glaze over after 30 seconds or a minute. But I guess you could skip forward in your podcast if you don’t want to hear any more.

What’s the stuff that he’s into at the moment? He’s been obsessed with spiders the last few weeks, and he knows the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song. So every time he sees a drain along a building, he wants to sing the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song and look for spiders in the drain.

Super obsessed with bubbles. Actually, I would say of all of his interests, making bubbles is maybe the one that I’m closest to sympathising with and sharing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Bubbles are pretty cool.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s awesome.

Rob Wiblin: So he can get enjoyment for that for hours, and I can get enjoyment for that for like maybe an hour.

Luisa Rodriguez: I mean, that’s pretty good.

Rob Wiblin: It’s not bad. What are his other interests? He’s massively into singing sing-along songs, which is something that kids have more access to than I did when I was a kid. When I was this age, it would all have been cassette tapes. And I think we just didn’t have that many cassette tapes in the house. But now, of course, you can just bring up any song that they might want at any point in time with speakers in every room. So that’s something that is kind of enjoyable about childhood now. He loves doing the actions and things like that.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. I don’t think I’ve said this to you yet, but I really wanted a girl. There were a whole bunch of reasons why I wanted a girl, and most of them I think I don’t really endorse. And I’m having a boy. So I found that out, and had some kind of gender disappointment feelings.

Rob Wiblin: Which is reasonably common, right?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think it is pretty common. I think for a hot second I was like, “I shouldn’t feel this way.” And then I was just like, meh. I think mine was like, I only had a sister. I know what it’s like to be a girl and raise a girl. And who even knows actually what my child’s preferences and sense of self is going to be like. But I just feel like I had a sense of what to expect and I know how to be close to girls. And then I think probably there are going to be wonderful things about having a boy that I just don’t know about yet.

But your son was one of my, like, “That is a really cute, happy child” that gave me a bunch of like, OK, having a boy seems like it’s going to be pretty great.

Rob Wiblin: “I can live with that.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. A lot of people have since said that I’m going to have an easier time. I mean, who knows?

Rob Wiblin: That just in general, boys are more straightforward, even if you aren’t a boy yourself?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I basically heard that boys struggle less. I mean, I have friends with four-year-old girls who are already really struggling with, like, “I don’t look like the princesses in the movies.” And like, “My friend at school has curly hair, and I want curly hair” and struggle with beauty stuff really soon. And then just continue to struggle with social stuff in a more intense way. And that sounds really tough.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: And then my husband just read a book about the negative effects of social media on kids, and it seems like that’s gendered too, and girls have a worse time with it.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. Anyways, thank you for having a cute son. That has made me much more excited.

Rob Wiblin: Anytime, Luisa.

Fertility rates are massively declining [00:21:25]

Luisa Rodriguez: Pushing on: I wanted to talk about fertility rates. I think you’ve been following this trend particularly closely recently. It sounds like fertility rates are just kind of massively declining and people are starting to notice. Can you talk about those stats?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I guess I’ve gotten interested in this partly because I have a kid. Also, it’s just felt like it’s been in the news a lot more recently. I’ve been reading a series of articles by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. It’s just kept on coming up in my podcast feed, people talking about how fertility rates have gone down.

So yeah, I have taken a slight amateur interest in it. I should say it is only an amateur interest in it. So there’s definitely a risk of me saying some wrong stuff here, but if you’re willing to bear with us.

Basically, fertility has been in the news again recently, or has been in the news for the first time in my lifetime recently, because global fertility rates have been declining so much faster in recent years. I was looking at this yesterday, and global fertility rates between 2006 and 2016 were declining 0.04 per year up until 2016. And then from 2016 through 2023, the latest year that we have data, the rate of decline increased by 4.5 fold. So it was going down at 0.04 rather than 0.009, I should say.

So a very big change in the rate of decline, and that kind of compounds year after year and means that the number of children being born is way below what we were projecting 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. So people have had to really update their projections for how many children there are going to be and what the population is going to look like, and the balance between old people versus young people that we’re going to expect.

I think that is the fundamental reason why this has become topical again. People have suddenly started to wonder, is population going to crash in a way that’s going to be very challenging to deal with? And it’s a very broad-based reduction. It’s not just a handful of countries where fertility is going down faster than expected. It’s actually, I think, the great majority. So the countries where most listeners would live in, like the US and Australia and the UK, they’ve seen quite significant reductions in the number of births or the number of children that people are choosing to have over the last decade or two.

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

Rob Wiblin: I think the thing that sometimes is a little bit hard to wrap your head around is that the fertility rate is a little bit like R with COVID: it doesn’t tell you what number you level out at; it tells you what the rate of change is from one generation to the next.

The maintenance fertility rate is actually 2.1, but let’s just say it’s 2 for the sake of simplicity. So if you have a fertility rate of 2, then on average your population is going to be stable. If you have a fertility rate of 1, that doesn’t mean that your population halves. It means that your population halves every generation — so it halves, and then it’s a quarter, and then it’s an eighth, and then it’s a sixteenth.

And that really adds up over time. And there’s quite a lot of countries now that do have a fertility rate around 1 and so should expect… I mean, I would say that it’s kind of a population crash basically.

I think in the UK and the US it’s more like 1.5, so you get a 25% reduction in population every generation. So not quite as much of a cratering, but a pretty significant change socially in like how much tax revenue you’ll have to support older people. And of course it’s going down. So it’s at 1.5 now, but we might expect on current trends to hit 1 in 20 years’ time or something like that if nothing changes. And I don’t really expect anything very much to change. I think all of the trends that are pushing people to have fewer children will probably only continue.

And how concerned you are maybe will depend on whether you think fertility has gone down, and now it’s going to stabilise — in which case you say that this is kind of a serious issue, but maybe can be handled. But if you think that the trend is the thing that’s going to remain the same, so they’re just going to keep going down, and we’ll go from low to very low to ultra low to ultra ultra low, then you’re going to be much more concerned — because you’re changing the second derivative of population; you’re changing the rate at which the rate is changing, and that escalates very fast.

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

Rob Wiblin: Well, I should say I actually don’t worry about this at all. Despite what I’m saying, I’m not putting any effort into this. I find it an interesting intellectual exercise. But that’s because I have a fairly unusual take about how the future is going to go, which is that humans in the labour market, in terms of just influence over the world, are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence in coming decades. So there is no medium term in which we need humans to continue supporting the economy. I kind of do just expect us to be substituted, and for this to not create any kind of serious crunch, a big problem.

I guess many people are expecting that, but among the people who don’t expect that, who think that AI is going to be a bust and don’t really expect a full replacement, I think for those people it’s a very interesting question, at least: is this a problem? What impacts will it have? Should we do anything? Is there anything that can be done? And some people are taking that seriously.

Other people prefer not to think about it, perhaps because it’s an uncomfortable issue. It can be very uncomfortable sounding like you think that people should have more children than they want to have. I don’t think anyone wants to go to a world where people are kind of obliged to have children to benefit their country or something like that. But at the same time, if your country is having its population halved every 25 years, effectively, you might wonder, perhaps we need to change the tax system or change how our cities are organised in order to at least slow that down.

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

Rob Wiblin: So you can interview someone who knows a lot more about this than me. I was just trying to look into this a little bit more this week. I guess Japan and South Korea have famously ultra-low fertility rates. I think they’ve put in various different programmes to try to encourage people to have more children, I think with close to no effects, or very little visible effect. Admittedly, I think often these programmes end up expending effectively less than 1% of GDP — which, given the amount of money that children cost to bring up, it’s unsurprising that spending on that level doesn’t really move the needle.

But that does kind of speak to the fact that maybe people’s commitment or interest in addressing this potential, what you might think of as a problem, or perhaps not a problem, is not really up to the scale of the challenge. The sheer amount of time that has to go into raising people up to adulthood is huge. It’s a huge fraction of all of the entire human enterprise. And trying to redistribute 0.5% or 1% of GDP to people, unsurprisingly, that just doesn’t cause them to have that many more children, because it’s not very much money spread out over so many hours if they don’t want to have children.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, yeah.

Why do fewer people want children? [00:29:20]

Luisa Rodriguez: Actually, that makes me realise we should talk about why people don’t want to have children, because I think intuitively it’s tempting to think that it’s probably just expensive and people now want to spend less on having kids, and having two seems good. And that just seems culturally less to be the case before, but it seems like maybe there are other reasons.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Whenever I see stories about this and there’s a comments section, the top-rated comment is, “Of course people aren’t having children. It’s so expensive to have children. It’s totally unaffordable. I couldn’t bring myself to pull together the money in order to do it.”

And I think that definitely the fact that it costs both money and time is a reason that people don’t have more children. But that has always been the case; it’s always been expensive to have children. And in the 18th century, when it was expensive to have children, people were substantially poorer, and nonetheless, they had like three times as many children as we do now.

So I think that money is a terrible explanation for the changes that we’ve seen recently. Because in general, countries have been becoming richer. But as countries become richer, fertility tends to decline. If you look at richer people in countries like the UK and US, they used to actually have less children than people who had lower incomes. Now it’s about even. There’s not really a correlation between the amount of income that people have and how many children they have.

If it was primarily a financial issue, you might think that people who have like two or 10 or 20 times as much income as others might have more children. But in practice, the effect, if there is any, is very small. In general, income is rising even in countries like the UK or the US or Australia, which are already reasonably developed. And growth rates are somewhat slow, but fertility is crashing.

So really, I think almost none of the correlations support this, except that in some places at the very top end, people who are in the top few percent of earners, sometimes they have slightly more children than other people.

So that’s the financial cost thing. But I think an explanation that makes more sense is: while it’s not more expensive to have children objectively than in the past, perhaps people’s incomes have risen, but their expectations for how much they should spend on their children have increased even faster, maybe substantially faster than that.

So yes, social norms around spending on children might have risen a lot. But the other thing that I think does make more sense rather than just financial cost, is thinking about the cost of time. All of us only have so many hours in the day, and if we’re having children, taking care of children, then we can’t do other stuff that we want to do. So we have this big opportunity cost of doing one thing rather than another.

And I think a big explanation for why people are having fewer children is that the non-child options have gotten better. Having a child has gotten easier — I think it has gotten substantially easier, actually, than it was even a few decades ago, objectively at least, to accomplish the same level of care that you would have in the past — but the quantity and quality of things that you can do other than having children has increased enormously in the digital age. People just have so many other distractions, things that can occupy their time that they might find more fulfilling and interesting, so the competition between children and other stuff is looking pretty bad for having children. I think that’s one factor. There’s other stuff that we could talk about.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you know if there are statistics on how common that feeling is? I think it’s particularly hard for me as someone who, it’s never really been a question of whether I have kids. I’m not like weighing whether I want to go to more concerts or have kids. I’m having kids. But how common is it for people to be like, “It’s a tricky tradeoff. There are a lot of great things I could be doing with my time”?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, don’t you hear this all the time from people who are choosing not to have children? So I don’t know of high-quality research on this, and I’m not sure how much it has been studied. People talk about all kinds of different things that they want to do other than have children: people want to pursue careers, that’s very important to them; they want to be learning and they want to be travelling. They want to be doing all these other things.

It’s become kind of a catchall explanation for all kinds of modern social trends is people are spending more time on the internet, digital stuff, phones. But I think it actually is, to a first approximation, the best guess that you should have a lot of the time. Especially when things start changing in 2016 — when I would guess that phones are becoming much more accessible and there’s a lot more online content; they reached people in the US and UK earlier, but if you’re talking globally — that would be a point at which you’re really getting a tipping point of huge numbers of young people spending much more of their time online and on phones.

I think in terms of time use, that is the biggest change. And so it’s naturally potentially a big driver of changes in culture and behaviour and priorities. But there is other stuff.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I’m trying to think of what I do hear people saying, and I don’t think you would hear people saying, “I don’t want to have kids because I’d like to be on the internet more.” But I feel like I have the sense that more people feel less societal pressure to have kids. So maybe there’s this, like, dual effect of life is good and there’s lots of stuff people want to do, and also, relative to 20 or 30 years ago, people’s parents and friends and other people around them can’t pressure them into having kids as much as they did before.

Rob Wiblin: Or don’t even care to.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, right.

Rob Wiblin: I think that’s a huge impact as well.

So we’ll link to a whole lot of articles in the Financial Times recently over the last year or two about this issue. They had one gem of a statistic, which was I think that in 1993, [61%] of young people in the US said that having children was an important part of a flourishing life for them, and it’s now down to [26%]. That’s a radical change in whether that is part of their kind of dream life at all. So yeah, there’s probably a lot of factors going into that.

Another potential driver that I think probably has been unappreciated until the last couple of years, at least among people who I read, is changes in what fraction of people are having relationships that could plausibly lead to the decision to have children.

John Burn-Murdoch and Alice Evans had a great piece of content on this that we’ll link to. Basically, if you put fertility rates in countries up against the fraction of people actually in relationships during, I think, age 25 to 35, then you see a very close relationship. And over the last 10 to 20 years, the fraction of people in that age group who are choosing to be single or ending up single has gone up a great deal in almost all countries, basically.

So in the EU, the rate of people between 25 and 35 who are in relationships went from 67% in 1990 to 53.5% today, which is a bit over a 20% decline. Now, if you’re just not in a relationship in that kind of age band, even if you wanted to have children, the odds are starting to get stacked against you. So you would expect that to kind of mechanically almost lead to a 20% reduction in the number of children, almost.

It’s kind of intertwined with people’s desire to have children, because if they’re less interested in having children, they might be less interested in pursuing a serious relationship when they’re younger. But yeah, I think that’s probably a very big driver.

And that’s one where I can see people probably don’t say, “I don’t want to have children because I want to be scrolling TikTok” — but in practice, if you spend a lot of your time just on your phone or just reading stuff on the internet, even stuff that you endorse, even doing things that you think is actually super educational, in fact, you end up spending less time with people. You’re less likely to meet someone who you want to form a relationship with. Maybe you just somewhat lose interest in dating, or your social skills or your extroversion begins to decline.

I think in young people we do see in personality surveys that there’s significant declines in extroversion. We see significant declines in the amount of time that people are just spending with other human beings at all versus alone.

So all of this I think paints a picture where people are spending more time on devices, less time socialising. They’re not meeting other people, they’re not prioritising building deep relationships. And that I think mechanically kind of feeds into fewer children.

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Alice Evans does gender studies on a more global scale. And a factor that is relevant in the UK, but probably especially relevant globally, is just an increasing number of women who are financially independent and can work and support themselves.

Wanting a partner to support you financially was a big motivation in the past for women to choose to have a partner, and perhaps settle for someone who they might otherwise might not have decided to build a family with. As these kinds of external pressures — cultural pressures, social pressures, also financial pressures — decline, more people can just choose to be single. And that might in many ways be a good thing, because they now have the option to just not be with someone who perhaps they didn’t enjoy being with in the past.

I think there’s probably a whole lot of different factors that are leading people to opt to be single more often. In many ways it probably is a good thing. Probably many relationships in the past were things that people really wouldn’t endorse being in and they were only there for pragmatic reasons. And the fact that people are wealthier, and society is more individualistic and allows them to make those kinds of choices, is somewhat good. But for better or worse, it means fewer kids.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think I basically buy that.

In what sense is parenting harder than it used to be? [00:39:01]

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

Rob Wiblin: I guess people say this all the time, that there’s been a massive increase in expectations for how much parents are going to watch their children at older and older ages, when previously they might have been regarded as more independent. And people seriously talk about how you’d let six- or seven-year-olds just roam around the neighbourhood with other kids — something that I think is very abnormal in most cities today.

This got me interested in looking into this topic. There’s a graph that goes around that many people will have seen online, on Twitter. It’s [was previously] on the Our World in Data website, a website that I normally really like. It shows in some countries massive increases in the number of hours that parents spend with children — in some cases, increases or four- or five- or sixfold since the ’60s.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Rob Wiblin: We’ll stick up a link to some people reacting to that, saying that the data here is not really very solid. A big issue is that there’s a big difference between primary childcare and secondary childcare and what people count as childcare and don’t. Plus also just some of these surveys from previous decades are kind of low quality. They wouldn’t pass muster today. So if you see an extraordinary result — like people spent 20 minutes with their kids in the ’60s and now they spend 200 minutes with them — I think remarkable claims require remarkable evidence to support them. So probably some of that is exaggerated.

But I guess almost everyone anecdotally thinks — I mean, my mum thinks this — that there’s been a radical change in the expectations of parents, and that we put a lot more on ourselves than what she did when I was a child, despite the fact that I think that I had super attentive and caring parents.

I think there’s been a huge change in expectations for how much parents are meant to actively play with children. Certainly compared to pre-industrial times. In the 18th century — I’ve consulted with the LLMs on this — it was not at all common, the idea that parents would be playing games, playing imaginary games, physical games, playing with toys with their children, for many different reasons.

In part people were poorer then; they worked many more hours than we do today. They just didn’t have the slack in their time to be playing with a two-year-old toddler like that.

And secondly, they didn’t have to, because families were much larger. There were so many more kids in society. A larger fraction of people in your local area were under 18 or under 10 or under five — such that it would be very easy for them to find playmates. And rather than doing imaginative play and games with their parents, they would do it with the five-year-old or the four-year-old or the three-year-old who they’re playing with. It was much more normal for kids to be entertaining one another rather than actively being entertained by parents who are acting as kind of court jesters or something like that.

But that kind of is the norm and almost the ideal, I would say, in society today: that a really good parent is one that comes home and spends hours playing with their child, and really enjoys that and spends their weekend filling up with engaged activities with their kids. That was I think already beginning in the 1950s and it’s only become, I would guess, kind of monotonically more so as the decades have worn on. Does that match your perception?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it definitely does. And it’s kind of surprising to me that I’m already preparing for the feeling of guilt for not playing enough with my child. It feels definitely like something I will experience. So the norm has been instilled in me, despite the fact that I was extremely independent as a kid and had a great time. I spent loads of time playing with friends in like parking lots, making up pretend businesses that we had. I just had a wonderful childhood that was extremely…

I mean, I also had very loving, attentive parents, but they worked plenty, and we entertained ourselves and it was great. And yet I’m currently already like, oh man, I better find ways to play enough with my child. I need to be doing that 24/7.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah. I think it really is important to dwell on the fact that this is a peculiar attitude basically that only exists in the modern era, that is only kind of in our culture, that is I guess a function of peculiarities of modern life. It’s not even necessarily common outside of the richest, WEIRDest — Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic — countries.

For that matter, I think it’s less common even among people who have lower incomes or have less well-paying office jobs, even in countries like the UK — because it’s just not possible if you work much longer hours in a difficult labour job to then come home and be playing with your children for so many hours. This is not at all a human universal, so it is not required for children to do well.

I mean, our kid is only 19 months old, but he can entertain himself for very extended periods just playing with toys, playing in the backyard, playing with rocks — just the same as I did when I was a kid. I think my mom has commented on just how much time we spent in the backyard, just playing around in the grass and exploring stuff, not being entertained at all. And I feel like I’ve worked out all right, and it worked out for almost all of us, basically. That’s how almost everyone who’s listening to this show would have been brought up.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I feel like if anything I have real nostalgia for it, and I feel sad if my child ends up having a much more… It feels like it’ll probably end up being more sheltered. It feels like it’ll probably end up being more homogenous.

Are you kind of succeeding at having your kid play by themself more than social norms in our circles would want you to?

Rob Wiblin: Yes. Although maybe not as much as I would endorse. I definitely do still feel the pressure, like, you should be playing with your child. It should be your favourite thing ever is playing with your child. I mean, in time, people do report that it’s a super enjoyable thing. I think the synthesis there is that it’s very enjoyable in moderation. It’s something that is very enjoyable for an hour.

One thing that I have been a little bit surprised by in recent times: people said that young children enjoy the same thing again and again. I underestimated the degree to which toddlers enjoy the same thing again and again. I imagined you might want to read the same book a couple of times; they might not really get bored of the book very quickly. But it’s more like they will be open to reading — or potentially insist on reading — the same 10-page book 10 times in a row, every day for four weeks. Or that will be their preference if you don’t push back. And they can have a little thing that they’re meant to be sticking blocks into that can entertain them for hours. I think it’s not natural for a human adult to find repetition on that level enjoyable.

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, almost. I think there’s times when he would have been willing to play with light switches and turning the dimmer light up and down just for as long as we were willing to hold him at the light switch more or less. And you know, I enjoy making bubbles and trying to make big bubbles — but I don’t want to spend my entire weekend on it. And I don’t think that makes me a terrible dad either.

So I think I’m managing to some extent to push back, and when I see him playing on his own, I’m not like, “I am failing.” I’m like, “This is great.” It’s good that he is learning to be independent and playing with toys and not needing constant entertainment. We keep some eye on to make sure that he’s safe, because he is only 19 months old.

But the other thing you can do if, fingers crossed, you know other people who have kids, just get other kids into the house. He has such a great time whenever there are other kids around and is able to play with them. And they entertain one another, almost better than they can be by adults, because they’re just on the same level.

But it’s often easier said than done, right? Do you have other parents who are close enough by that after work you’re going to bring them over? It is just a challenge with urban design, with the way that we schedule our days, with the fact that often people move away from where they know the most family, and where they have the most family and friends who they grew up with or went to university with.

Especially listeners to this show very often will have migrated from one place to another city. Perhaps they don’t have the kind of social network of other people who have lots of young children, living in the same neighbourhood, ideally on the same street. But if you can make it work, then I guess that’s a blessing.

Feeling guilty for not playing enough with our kids [00:48:07]

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. This reminds me of, I put up a poll on Twitter a couple of months ago where I was very curious to know what people would think of this hypothetical: Is it better to play with your child yourself, or hire someone who is much better at playing with children — some sort of supernanny who the child finds even more enriching and even more enjoyable to play with, because they’re a professional who does this, who has been selected for being the most capable and the most entertaining for toddlers? Hire them to do it in your place.

I was like: Is this good parenting, OK parenting, bad parenting, or very bad parenting? People were almost uniformly distributed across that. About half of people thought that this was good parenting and half of people thought it was bad parenting.

I think it’s a case that pulls apart two different desirable aspects of parenting. One is providing entertainment and happiness and enrichment and education for the child — which is being perfectly well served in the second case, where you have an extremely good nanny playing with them and taking care of them — and having a very deep personal relationship with them, where you’re taking your time not to just make them happy and educated and capable, but they love you in particular.

So you can kind of see it both ways to a point. But I would say that in order to have a positive relationship with your older child, and for them to love you, I don’t think you have to be playing with them obsessively all weekend to the exclusion of others. I think it just isn’t the case. Many people, including me, have very positive relationships with their parents, despite the fact that they didn’t feel this intense pressure to play with them all the time when they were toddlers. It’s not like I have any memory of ever, “If only my parents had played with me, I would love them so much more, or I’d feel like I had a deeper connection to them now.”

It does remind me though: Did you ever have the experience when you were young of being bored? I remember just being at home often saying, like, I’m kind of bored.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah, I did.

Rob Wiblin: You know, I almost forgot about that. But I don’t think that is a thing that children today almost ever feel, because they’re always entertained. We would be like, “My child is bored? What a nightmare!”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. “I’m failing.”

Rob Wiblin: “I have to fix this immediately.” But when I was five, I think my parents would say, “Well, go find something to entertain yourself. Go read a book, go figure out a game to play. It’s not my job to entertain you.” And I think I did most of the time, eventually.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. I feel the same way. I do think I can just tell I’m going to struggle with this, and I wonder… I mean, there probably isn’t that much really good advice here, other than just like, I need to do some CBT. But do you have…?

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Good questions. I think when I really try to get in touch with it, I am not having worries about actually the child having any negative repercussions.

Maybe the two things coming to mind are, one, I already have this with my dog. I find it hard when she’s bored. I feel I think an unhealthy amount of empathy. I’m like, “Oh, she’s suffering. I could be making her life better and enriching it and giving her more fun.” Probably there’s a negative cycle there where she has learned less to entertain herself. And that’s the kind of thing that probably happens with kids, too. So there’s something like, I’m gonna find it hard if I think my kid’s not having a great time and I could give them a great time. That sounds really possible.

And the other one is really not connected to value for the kid. It’s really just like, it’s somehow gotten into my psyche.

Rob Wiblin: That it’s just intuitive.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. You need to be a good parent. And that’s just the definition for me now is being super engaged and super present and doing all the playing. I think it’s just going to be a very unendorsed shame that I’m going to have to regularly be like, “It is actually not worse for the child. There’s no reason to have the shame.”

Rob Wiblin: “I reject this.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Wiblin: Isn’t it in some ways a little bit surprising that culture has trended in this direction? Because in other respects, we’ve trended towards people wanting to spend more time on their career and on education. You can imagine an alternative bizarro timeline when parents, when they do have children, spend less time playing with them, because they’re like, “I had children, but my bigger passion was my career. So I want to spend less time playing with them and find more ways to entertain them otherwise.” That is a little bit surprising.

And also it’s so acceptable: I think it’s basically acceptable, at least among our crowd, to say, “I don’t think I would really enjoy playing with children that much, so I’m not going to have children.” Or, “I don’t think this is such a big passion of mine. I would rather be doing other stuff. I’d rather be travelling, I’d rather be working, I would rather be playing computer games.” I don’t think that is stigmatised anymore. It’s not really stigmatised virtually at all.

Yet once you have a child, I guess because now it’s a specific person who you’re meant to have a deep personal relationship with, now you have to say that you enjoy reading the same book to them without limit for weeks on end. There’s a funny tension there.

Luisa Rodriguez: It is. Another reason it’s funny is I think broadly we’re becoming more hedonistic and individualistic, and we celebrate more when we choose things that just give us a good time.

Rob Wiblin: You do you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that also feels like it conflicts. I really just don’t feel like I have a good understanding of where this comes from.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes sense to me too. I’m still kind of interested in the concrete advice thing. And maybe there’s something about, do you have any script? Like, do you say anything to yourself when you’re like, “He seems kind of bored, but I endorse letting him go play outside. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘I should play with him,’ but I reject that.” Is this a dialogue in your head at all that you’ve kind of rehearsed?

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

Luisa Rodriguez: I feel like that one is —

Rob Wiblin: Is that a shocking claim?

Luisa Rodriguez: It feels like I completely agree, but it’s landing weird to hear someone say aloud. I think probably…

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. Yeah, I agree.

Rob Wiblin: Because they’re like, if I have a child now, it’s unacceptable for me to care about my own wellbeing even equally as theirs. I just have to become a servant to them always. Always pursuing small benefits to them at large costs to myself.

I do sometimes think that I don’t want to have such intensive helicopter parenting, such that I would regret having a child, such that I could not tell someone else, “Maybe you should have a child too.”

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s a really good one.

Rob Wiblin: So you think you should have a level of intensity and a style of parenting that causes you to endorse having a child, and maybe endorse having another child, and feel comfortable saying to other people, “Maybe you should have children too.”

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that is a style of reasoning that works for me really well, and maybe I can internalise something like: Arguably, at some point it is worse for your relationship with your child if you feel exhausted, bored, and resentful about the amount that you’re sacrificing yourself to entertain them. Which doesn’t seem at all crazy to me that that at some point is a tradeoff that starts hitting.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. What about another kid? I’m not sure how many kids you’re planning to have, but I imagine there’s some uncertainty. Maybe it’s two or three or possibly three or four. There’s some margin.

You should try to aim for a style of parenting and a level of stress and input that’s consistent with having the larger number rather than the smaller number. Do you want to be playing with them to make them slightly happier than what they would have done on their own, if that means having a smaller, less happy, or less boisterous home and family life in the longer term, because you couldn’t bring yourself or you just didn’t have the capacity to have another child?

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

Rob Wiblin: There’s a quote, I think it was on The Ezra Klein Show, or maybe it was even just in the show notes, but it was saying people used to regard having a lively, boisterous house full of children as an important vision of what it is to be a successful person and what it is to live a good life. I think just so many people do not feel that way anymore. The thought of having noisy kids around, playing with one another, making trouble, is to them super off-putting because they’re like, “Well, I won’t be able to read my book.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, totally.

Rob Wiblin: That just really stuck in my mind. Imagine coming home and there’s a whole lot of kids who have come home from school, and they’re playing with one another, bickering maybe, but all doing all kinds of different things, and it’s a little bit overwhelming. But that is your vision of a good life. If people felt that way, we would certainly have a lot more children, for good or for bad.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that’s really true.

Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids? [01:00:02]

Luisa Rodriguez: That vaguely ties into bringing it back to the fertility question more broadly. Do you have a sense of what our options are for increasing fertility rates globally?

Rob Wiblin: I think probably pretty poor. I’ll stick up a link to the Financial Times article throwing some water on proposals that people have had. I think if we were willing to spend more than 10% of GDP, we could drive up the number of children that people have pretty substantially. The strongest options are consistent transfers to people: free childcare on a really ongoing basis and a tax system that basically just hands people money based on the number of children that they have every month. I think evidence suggests that that does cause some people to have more children.

It’s really difficult though, because almost all of these policies, the big challenge is you end up paying for all of the children that would have happened anyway. Because you can’t say that this person would have had two children otherwise —

Luisa Rodriguez: “This is the marginal child.”

Rob Wiblin: — we’ll pay them for the marginal third child. You don’t know how many they would have had. And also, people would regard it as kind of unfair, I think. So in practice, you end up doing redistribution for every child, and most of them would have existed anyway. So if you’re driving up fertility from 1.5 to 1.6, then you end up paying 16 times as much as if you could perfectly pay someone to have an extra child.

Again, I’m not so much an expert on this, but I think experience across different countries — France, I think Norway, I guess not so much the US, what other countries have had fertility bills? Singapore, Hungary — if you’re willing to spend a couple of percent of GDP, you can drive up fertility by like 0.2 or 0.3. Countries have done that, but I think almost no one has managed to really counterfactually increase it by much more than that — because I think you run out of people who are willing to have that many more children. You’re just running into people actively don’t want to have children anymore. It just is not part of their picture of their life.

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

Rob Wiblin: You also run into the problem that people are single.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. You have no lever for them.

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

But another quote that I heard many years ago that stuck in my head is, “Some things we just have to do for ourselves.” It’s not something that the government can do. I think the government can remove active impediments that are created to building relationships and having friends, but this is more something that we have to decide to change in our lives ourselves, rather than something that can be dictated by a national government, because it’s just so hard for them to influence.

And I don’t really see any signs that the trend is shifting here. I think the trends are all against it. It’s all towards spending more time on your own, towards less extroversion, towards less interest in having deep relationships.

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

Rob Wiblin: I think there’s some evidence that countries that are facing external threats, some people think that increases their fertility. Often the case that is cited is Israel, which is almost the only rich country that has above-replacement-level fertility. I guess it’s distinctive culturally. You’d have to say it’s quite an unusual country in some ways. I guess it could be that people are committed to the mission of the country in a way that encourages them to have children. But we don’t see that working in Taiwan. I don’t think that was working in Ukraine. I guess that’s not a generalised solution, certainly.

And I think we often have this idea that if the situation gets bad enough, population is crashing enough, then people will choose to have children or people will choose to volunteer to solve the problem. But the problem is it’s a collective issue. Why would you volunteer to basically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of your time and money to slightly incrementally improve it? It’s a collective action problem.

That’s why I think more about policy solutions or redistribution. If the country as a whole wants to have more births, and people just aren’t enjoying having children enough, or that’s not important enough to them, then you think now it is looking a bit more like work. So we want to basically pay for it through taxation. It’s now kind of a job that we want to pay people to do.

Of course some people will do it for joy, and it’s a combination of these different factors. But why wouldn’t you socialise the costs to some extent and basically just be transferring people money in order to have children? That seems like the more equitable, fair and more natural, sensible way to do things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you think anywhere could get really dystopic, like bans on abortion or child requirement policies or something? Or does that seem pretty unlikely?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, this isn’t my area. And again, to some extent I don’t think any of this will play out. But let’s imagine that AI was not advancing particularly anytime soon. I suspect that that wouldn’t happen in many places. I think that this problem won’t be solved, isn’t on track to be solved. There isn’t enough will to solve it. A country can just tolerate having its population crash, and any solutions that you put in place now don’t pay off for 20 to 30 to 40 years — so there’s not that much urgency to, let’s really crack this and then we’ll be in a better situation. It’s so far in the future that anything that you do now…

And the cost would be massive. There isn’t the political will to spend that kind of money. Already today, the group that is most active and successful in pursuing redistribution is not students getting redistribution to support their studies or young people getting extra funding for childcare: it’s basically older people who are the most active politically, have the most at stake in redistribution to older retirees.

So a larger and larger fraction of government spending is going towards healthcare and social security transfers for people who are retired. I think that will probably only escalate. And I think that group is not going to be interested in surrendering the 10% of GDP. Just in general, all interest groups are not going to be interested in giving up the 10% to 15% of GDP that might be required to solve this on a sustainable basis.

And these other things are even less attractive than that; they’ll be even more invasive and horrifying to people. You know, if you’re North Korea or you’re some sort of authoritarian country… Famously, I think Romania, in order to boost its population when it was a dictatorship, got rid of contraception — which did briefly increase the number of children people were having. It’s obviously horrific. It’s basically just regarded as a historical atrocity in a way. But I don’t think there’s going to be appetite outside of quite authoritarian countries to pursue anything like that. Fortunately.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Before we move on, are there any other things about this issue, statistics that are worth mentioning?

Rob Wiblin: On the point of government policy to increase the number of children that people have, although it is potentially difficult to get us up to two children plus, I think there is stuff that you can do that is affordable, like spending that 1% to 3% of GDP on free childcare. That does boost it by a meaningful amount, and does solve at least like 20% of this issue, putting you 20% or 30% of the way towards a stable population. That probably does seem worth doing. So I don’t want to say that there’s actually nothing to be done, or nothing that could be done.

I guess an interesting phenomenon is: we talked about in the past how lower income and lower education was correlated with having more children. And now it’s basically flat; there’s not really a relationship anymore. It could be the relationship thing: that maybe it’s easier to find a partner to have children with in this slightly less relationship-friendly world if you’re reasonably successful. That could be a factor.

Just mercilessly continuing to crib from the Financial Times, this series of articles that we’ll link to, a few things stand out.

One is that across almost all kinds of countries now, many more people say that they’re going to have fewer children than they want rather than more children than they want. Access to birth control has improved so dramatically that now many more people are kind of disappointed with when they’re beginning to start a family or whether they’re finding a partner. I think this is a big flip on the past when many people expected to have more children than they might have desired.

Another really interesting one was looking at changes in the number of children that people have depending on their political views. Looking across developed countries, the Financial Times looked into how the number of children has changed over time among people who are more conservative versus more liberal.

It’s gone down for both, but it’s gone down about twice as much for liberals, for progressives. So now, I think across the developed world the difference was something like 1.7. This must be including a bunch of middle-income countries, I think. But it’s 1.7 children for liberals for the most liberal group versus 2.2 for the most conservative. And there used to be no difference at all. So I guess that leads probably to some modest effect on politics, because politics is to some extent passed down through families.

It’s interesting. I don’t know what the factor is. Potentially people who are liberal often spend more time in education. I think education is an independent factor that tends to lead people to prioritise children less. Probably all kinds of things going on. But yeah, interesting.

Luisa Rodriguez: Are there people worried about, from the liberal progressive perspective, losing voters from this?

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I have the feeling that it is very common for kids to share political views with their parents, but I don’t actually know really concretely. Do you know what share of one’s political views are explained by one’s parents’ political views?

Rob Wiblin: I actually don’t. I remember in Bryan Caplan’s book he pointed out that people’s reported religious affiliation and reported party affiliation was much more strongly correlated with their parents than their actual policy views or their actual religious attendance at church. So people’s identification is influenced more perhaps than when they have more skin in the game and more cost involved. But I actually don’t know. That’s something we could look up.

Returning to work with kids [01:12:07]

Luisa Rodriguez: I want to ask you more about your personal experience. I’m a few months away. I just feel really interested in what it’s all going to feel like. And one thing on my mind is what work is going to feel like. What was your transition back to work like?

Rob Wiblin: We took six weeks off completely and then we did another 12 weeks of half time. I think the half-time thing was probably a misfire that we wouldn’t do again. It’s just very hard to be meaningfully productive at work working two-and-a-half days a week. There’s so much fixed overhead with having a job at all that I think both of us felt we were just working very hard in order to stay still, and not really accomplish so much.

So I think especially now that we understand more what the transition would look like, and we’re more familiar with having nannies take care of a young child, I think we would just basically go straight back into full-time work, have a hard transition. When our kid was young, we had nannies taking care of him at home whenever both of us were working. I should say during the half-time period, we would work opposite times so that one of us would always be caring for him. That was the system.

But then once that was over, we brought in nannies to take care of him, which worked great, actually. It was maybe less expensive than I expected. It’s still expensive for sure. But it was something that we could afford. We didn’t have difficulty finding nannies who were able to do a pretty good job. Especially at that age, at the earlier ages, the ceiling on how well I think you can perform with a five-month-old is not so great because their needs are just fairly contained and you can just meet them all, and a reasonable number of people have experience and are willing to do that. So that worked well. We had nannies taking care of him full time for quite a while, and we kind of narrowed in on the ones that he seemed to get along best with and had them in repeatedly.

Then at 11 months, he started going to nursery two days a week. So this is UK childcare or childcare centres: the staff ratios at this age are three children to one staff member, so reasonably intensive. I think that went reasonably well. He cried a bit to begin with, as I think all children do when they first start at any kind of childcare thing, even if they’re older. But it didn’t take very long for him to get reasonably comfortable with it. I think possibly I might have extended that to 12 or 13 or 14 months, perhaps waited till the next term, but not a big deal.

So we had him on this combination. It was very hard to tell actually which he enjoyed more, the nannies or the childcare. I think probably the nannies — though we have more evidence about the nannies, because we can see that, than we do about the childcare care, where it’s a little bit opaque.

Anyway, the situation now is we’ve gone to three days a week of nursery, where he seems very happy now, and two days a week of his two favourite nannies where he’s also extremely happy. So I think he’s having a very good time during the day pretty consistently. And the nannies take him out on adventures through London to parks, to museums, to visit his favourite rocks. All of these different things. So yeah, I think we’ve gotten to a very good place.

Luisa Rodriguez: He has favourite rocks.

Rob Wiblin: He has a favourite rock place where he can play with the rocks.

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

Rob Wiblin: I haven’t felt any judgement. Maybe people in our social circles are pretty comfortable with both parents returning to work. I’m not sure whether my wife has felt more of that, but I don’t think we’ve talked about it, so I don’t think it’s at least a common thing.

How did I find it handing over? I guess whenever you do a new thing, whenever we first started having nannies take care of him, I guess I’m a bit anxious about safety. I would hang around at home and kind of train them, perhaps even more than was necessary, in order to assuage my anxiety and always be kind of tutoring them and have a written guide and things like that. So there’s a bit of anxiety whenever you’re handing over your kid to someone else. At the same time, I had pretty high confidence in them. And ultimately you get comfortable reasonably quickly once something starts working out.

Likewise, I think the first week or two of nursery we had anxiety. We were worried that he was having a bad time. But eventually you start picking him up and he’s perfectly chirpy and happy in the evenings and you’re like, things seem fine.

I think you have other worries that perhaps almost didn’t occur to me.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I definitely have this strong, like, I want to do this, but I think it is going to at least initially feel really bad.

So yeah, I got Claude to basically be like, what are reasons parents tend to find this hard? And the ones that really resonated were the kid attaching more to the nanny than to me. I interviewed Emily Oster a few years ago now, and she said that if you get a nanny, your child might call them mommy. And the idea of that, I think it could feel really bad to me. I think one part of me is like, it’s great that my kid might have another person that they love a lot, but another part of me is like, I want to be the mommy and be the most important person to them. So that’s one.

Another was missing key moments. It seems very likely that you’d be more likely to. That feels sad.

I guess you kind of touched on this with the safety anxiety, but I can imagine being like, I really want my kid to have certain kinds of positive reinforcement and stuff around like parenting styles. And handing off to a nanny feels like giving up some of that control a bit.

And then the last one, I think there’s just kind of an abstract, like, I’m having a kid. It’s this huge decision, change to your life. And in some ways, it’s quite selfish. I’m doing it in part because I think I could give a kid a really good life, but I’m doing it in part because I think it’s a very interesting experience that probably humans have evolved to find very meaningful. And I just want to know what that’s like, and I want to have that kind of relationship with someone. And the idea that I’m going to spend so much money and effort but hand a bunch of that off just feels kind of like, why am I even doing it then?

Already I don’t really endorse very many of these, but I still think they’re going to hit me really hard. What are your reactions?

Rob Wiblin: There’s a lot there. I couldn’t tell you how to feel, but I guess I could tell you how I feel about it. I think my wife has had a bit more of these feelings, although not so much that it’s really been a significant problem.

On the you want to be the most special person: I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that you will remain the most special person, even if you have a nanny coming many days a week. I mean, there’ll be breastfeeding. There’ll be the fact that you’re with them every day rather than just sometimes. You’re by far the most consistent figure. They’re definitely going to know that you’re their mum, even if they might call someone else mum, I think that probably is a pretty unusual connection case. So I think if you want to be the most important person in their life, if you are an engaged parent, as you are, I think you very likely will be.

If you wanted to make an adjustment there, you could potentially have two different nannies who cycle. So you have one nanny who does three days a week, another who does two days a week, but you’re the most constant figure. And plenty of people want to do this kind of stuff part time, so it’s actually almost easier to find someone part time than full time. So that would be a halfway adjustment that might be satisfying.

You were saying you’re worried about having this enormous cost and then not getting the benefit of taking care of them. I think for us it wasn’t really a question of would we go back to work. We considered going back part time, but then realised that we would just work full time, but be pretending that we’re only working four days a week. So why not just bite the bullet and accept that we’re working five days a week and we’re working full time?

But the thing is you have competing values: you’ve decided to have children, but you still do still value your impact, and you still value your work and your intellectual engagement for that matter. So I don’t think it’s really inconsistent at all.

I always sound like an economist because it is my background, but something can be very enjoyable for half of your time but kind of unpleasant on the margin for the other half. We want diversity in what we’re doing. I think many people who end up doing absolutely full-time childcare with no work or other activities going on just become quite bored, because it’s too repetitive and there’s not enough variation in their life, which is something that adults really care about.

I think the ideal of a mother who stays home and takes care of their child, who’s like doing 90%+ of the work of raising a child, is a complete historical aberration. I don’t even know whether that is kind of the dominant vision that people have today anymore. But there’s not been any time when this was actually the way that people typically lived, and it absolutely is not necessary for good child development.

In fact, I was looking into this a bit this week, and probably, if anything, the evidence counts the other way: that it’s somewhat detrimental; you want children to be having multiple caregivers and learning to navigate multiple different relationships.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting.

Rob Wiblin: It’s actually better for their social development. It’s very important to have an engaged parent who pays attention to them and responds to them a significant fraction of the time, maybe about half of the time is actually enough to consistently get secure attachment and not really any developmental issues. Potentially even less, maybe even being attentive a third of the time, some studies suggest it’s actually quite sufficient to have a very positive relationship between the child and the parents.

Because it was not the case that, historically, when we were hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers, that parents would be able to pay attention to their children all the time. They had stuff to do. They were very busy cooking, doing all kinds of different work. The child would not always immediately get a response. If humans evolved to just fall to pieces as soon as their father was trying to collect food or was cooking or whatever else, that would be a horrible design for human beings. And we are not built that way. We are not nearly so fragile as that, that we require 100% of the time someone always has to be responding.

And furthermore, because of the nature of the work that people had to do, we had to have cooperative parenting arrangements or cooperative caretaking arrangements. So I think in almost all historical time periods, except in some cases in the modern world, it was normal that children would be handed between many different caregivers — including other family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and sometimes friends and other parents with children, who you would do this in exchange with them as a reciprocal thing.

Almost all children historically have had multiple different caregivers. It wasn’t the mother doing it overwhelmingly or either parent doing it overwhelmingly. And the evidence is very clear that children develop completely fine like that, as long as they do have an attentive, concerned parent who is taking care of them. It seems like that can even compensate for bad quality childcare. So if you put kids in a modest amount of low engagement, low-quality childcare, basically as long as the parents are the rest of the time pretty engaged with them, attentive much of the time, then there’s not apparent psychological problems.

So I think we have this image, and it’s completely a modern thing. It’s basically I think exclusively in the postwar world in the West. The idea that children will fall apart, go to pieces, not be attached, not be psychologically functional if it’s not one specific person all the time paying attention to them, and anyone ever leaves them to cry. I think it’s just incorrect. I think it flatly contradicts the scientific literature on this topic.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that is more helpful than I expected. I was like, maybe you’ll say some things that I’ll intellectually endorse, but it probably won’t actually move my feelings — but I think the idea that it really probably is best for my child to have a range of social experiences and a range of caregivers. And that there really is no historical precedent for the best thing for them being one-on-one, only me and them — or maybe two-on-one, if you want both parents there all the time — which some part of me thinks is what we should be doing.

I think it is a little hard for me to feel like a bad parent because I’m not doing the thing that has been kind of distilled in me that maybe I should do. But actually, if I want to be a good parent, I need to do that hard thing and hand the kid off and give them a much wider range of experiences. I think that actually just does a lot for my gut-level feeling.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I mean, I think I am in general not a very neurotic person, but I have felt more neuroticism about having a kid. In my case, it’s about safety. I’m worried about is he going to get hit by a car? Is he going to accidentally poison himself? Is he going to fall down the stairs? Is he going to drown?

I guess these are possibilities. It’s not completely made up. But I think it’s very natural for people to become quite very concerned about their children. You can see why evolution would push us in that direction. And I think maybe all parents need to have some effort to put the brakes on and say, what stuff do I need to worry about less? Where can I take my foot off the accelerator? Because otherwise you can just spiral towards ever more concern about ever more things.

And I think you do see that in some kinds of really intense parenting culture, that sometimes I think is encouraged by influencers or by people who are slightly selling a product or selling a solution. So while it’s very understandable, I think people can give themselves a break. It’s a very good thing to find some way to give yourself a break.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I’m curious: is it surprising to you that your neuroticism is coming out towards safety, or is that a thing that you already worried more than usual about?

Rob Wiblin: I think it’s not, because I am very worried about physical injury myself. I’m too scared to go skiing, for example. I mean, people do get injured skiing, so there’s a lot of this stuff that is reasonable. But I’m also kind of scared of ledges, heights and things like that, probably more than is reasonable. But just in general I’m very conscious of physical injury.

Luisa Rodriguez: How much have you tried to do this, like, “I should put on the brakes” for some of this neuroticism, because it’s actually overdoing it?

Rob Wiblin: I tried talking to ChatGPT to get it to investigate what childhood safety things you don’t need to do, that aren’t that important. Unfortunately, I came up slightly empty-handed on things that I could stop doing because I think it was already somewhat calibrated to what are the real risks. So things like drowning, like choking.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, right.

Rob Wiblin: So I wasn’t doing completely silly stuff. At the same time, it’s such a difficult issue, because probably parents are somewhat too concerned in some sense. They invest a lot of time in these incremental things that slightly reduce the risk of your child drowning or choking. But what is the right level? What is the right level of acceptance of your child dying? It’s so hard to contemplate. What if I worried less about choking, and then he dies choking on a grape? And I will have to live for the rest of my life with that.

In practice, I guess through all of history childhood mortality was high. People got on with their lives and continued to live.

Luisa Rodriguez: But I don’t find that super reassuring.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, and I think that sense of horror at the prospect and then the intense regret that you would feel makes it very easy to overinvest in child safety. Plus also the ambiguity about what’s reasonable or not. So I haven’t got a great solution on that. I do try to look for what stuff I am doing that’s not necessary, and if there’s anything that’s clear then you cut it out.

AI and parenting [01:29:22]

Luisa Rodriguez: Another topic I wanted to talk to you about: I feel like I’ve not really harmonised my views on AI with my views on parenting. I think my views on AI are pretty radical. But my views on parenting, at least intuitively, are like, my kids are going to have lives like mine, they’re going to have childhoods like mine. And I think that’s probably just not true on my views.

And similarly, I think probably AI does have implications, for at least the people who feel like they can decide one way or the other [to have children], which wasn’t super my experience, but it’s definitely some people’s experiences. So I’m curious: how have your views on AI affected the question of whether to have kids for you, and how to raise them?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I think the AI situation probably makes it less attractive to have kids now, all things considered, if you have the option of delaying. Because it’s just so unclear what the world will look like. It could get much better, could get much worse. Or at least if you do have the view where things could get much better, things could get much worse, if you were 20 and you had plenty of time potentially left to decide whether to have kids or not, then there is an argument, I think, for kicking the can down the road and seeing how things play out a little bit more, so we have a bit more clarity on that.

I guess it’s just a very difficult spot if you’re more 35 or 40, and you kind of have to decide to have kids now or not at all. An interesting argument that I’ve heard is people talk about now being a particularly perilous time to have children, or isn’t it particularly dangerous for the children?

Of course it’s not, on a historical level, because a third of children might have died before the age of five in the 15th century. So I guess if you think that there’s like a one-third (p)doom or one-third chance of extinction, then perhaps it actually isn’t that different than the situation that our ancestors faced in some sense. I don’t know whether people would find that terribly reassuring or not.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I think I mostly am like, it just means we’re in a terrible world.

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. So there are a couple of aspects there. One is just like, people die. And obviously that’s a terrible outcome, but from the perspective of having kids, I’m like, I could decide not to have kids and then they would never live, or I could decide to have kids and there’s some chance they will die — hopefully quick and painless deaths. And it seems better to me to have had the kids.

The world that really freaks me out is one where people don’t die but live terrible lives one way or another. Do you have a take on how likely that is, and was it a consideration for you for having kids?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I don’t have a strong take on how likely that it is, but I’d say it’s probably one of the strongest considerations against having kids for me.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. And were you like, “I’m just not going to deal with it,” or were you like, “All things considered, I think it’s OK”?

Rob Wiblin: I think to some extent perhaps I’m being inconsistent, or perhaps I don’t think that I made the decision in a fully expected-value framework where I’m just assigning probabilities to different outcomes and then taking the number. To some extent I endorse people not organising their personal lives around big-picture worldview things like AI or climate change or their view on politics, and to some extent keeping it separate.

But I think someone could say I’m acting inconsistently. And I think to some extent, when you decide I’m not going to organise my relationships and my personal life and my decision to have children around these big-picture worldview, longtermist concerns, then you are going to be potentially acting inconsistently. I don’t even know whether I endorse that or not. It’s just very unclear.

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that’s probably the other biggest argument against having kids, at least for me, is it takes you away from important work. Hopefully making this show is a useful thing to do. So wouldn’t it be good if we had even more time and energy to do even more of it? And couldn’t that possibly even be of world historical importance? It’s a horrible thought to contemplate.

And I think it has reduced my productivity. I think it has reduced the amount of energy. Partly that’s because we’re at the earlier ages when it is most draining. They haven’t gone off to school, they don’t have their independent lives so much yet.

I have heard from some people who say that they think having children didn’t really reduce their work productivity at all. I think in some cases that’s because they have so much assistance or are wealthy enough to afford constant help. So that maybe makes sense. But I just think for the great majority of listeners, if they have kids, they’re either going to spend less time on work or it’s harder to work late in the evening, it’s harder to take off weekends; or you’re going to have less energy because you’re sleeping worse, you are doing more work-like activities in the evenings during the week. All kinds of different reasons.

How much has it reduced my productivity? Maybe 20% or something like that. It’s pretty meaningful. So yeah, I just think people should probably be clear-eyed. Unless you’re wealthy enough that you’re just going to have basically constant nannies to substitute for you, or you had a tonne of slack in your schedule already so you were not anywhere near the limits of what you could accomplish, so the shift is only from pleasure time or personal time into child rearing, and then you can keep the work stuff the same. But I think many listeners will not be in that camp where they have so much slack in their time that can absorb all of their extra needs.

Luisa Rodriguez: Both you and your wife have very, I would say, high-impact, meaningful jobs. Did you two decide that you were just willing to take that cut, because doing good is important, but you’ve got other values? Or how did you think about it?

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Assuming AI goes well, how much do you think your kid’s life is going to differ from your life at the same age? So like your childhood and their childhood?

Rob Wiblin: I think in the long run, radically. Radically. Hopefully, because the world will be much better. I think it’s unclear when AI is going to become a big deal in education and change school, unless we get a very hard takeoff. I suppose that’s where you might expect it to happen first, is that now they’re getting one-on-one tutoring from an AI that they talk to all the time that is kind of a substitute parent or a substitute one-on-one tutor.

I’m pretty keen for that to happen, although of course another part of being a flourishing human is learning to deal with other human beings, and how to negotiate those boundaries with other toddlers and other young children. So even on a world where they’re getting an excellent upbringing, it’s not going to eat up all of their time. Maybe it would even be quite a minority of school hours, perhaps.

In the longer term, it’s quite hard for me to imagine that a child of mine born today is going to be working an office job when they finish university in 2044. You’d have to have very long AI timelines to believe that it’s going to take so long to get AIs that are able to replicate what humans do at a computer, or even potentially what humans do physically over that kind of timeline.

So I think it’s like a real long shot, the idea that we’re training up our kid to have a normal job the way that my wife and I do. I guess never say never. You don’t want to put zero weight on it. But I would bet pretty strongly against. So at the point that he is going to school, I think I will place more importance on general development and whether he’s having a good time, and is becoming a flourishing person who would use recreation time well, and would have the ability to not get drawn in by things that are enjoyable in the short term but harmful in the long run — that sort of thing over their ability to kind of grind and be conscientious and do drudge work in any kind of work at all. Because I just think it’s unlikely to happen.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, this is basically my view too. But I find it surprisingly hard. I don’t have a kid yet, but it’s been so deeply ingrained in me that doing well in school and just kind of learning to do hard things for the sake of doing hard things are important things for your kid. And I think I’m going to find it really hard to let go of, like, my kid doesn’t have to do well in school to have a good, happy, successful life.

Like there’s a version of doing well that probably contributes to flourishing, like finding things you’re interested in and stuff. But abandoning this hope that they are successful feels hard to me. How does it feel to you?

Rob Wiblin: I don’t have a kind of success-focused philosophy or a sense of what is a good life or is fulfilling. To be honest, I think my take is I would be perfectly happy to just spend my time having recreation, contributing nothing — except that unfortunately the world is really messed up, so regrettably, I have to go and do something in order to try to help with that. And of course you have to make money in order to live. But if the world were good, if the world was solved, I would have had no interest in accomplishing stuff. Like, why would you want to do that? You work in order to solve a problem. You don’t invent problems in order to have work to do.

Anyway, if he takes after me, then I don’t think you have such an issue with feeling pointlessness or why do I exist? How do I justify my existence if I’m not working for money? And hopefully, if many people are just not working anymore, then that will become a more common culture, and fewer people will identify with work as the reason that they justify their existence to themselves and regard themselves as worthy.

So certainly if I ever see him beginning to trend towards thinking, “The reason that I’m OK is that I did well at school,” I’ll try to push against that to a point. But I’m not sure that doing well at school and flourishing as a person and becoming the kind of person who could enjoy a good world and enjoy a good life when there is no longer work for humans to do is that different, at least at early ages.

You still want to learn to use language well, you still want to learn to make good decisions — because you will still have to choose who to trust, you’ll still have to make some decisions in this world. You still want to learn enough math so you can actually think through problems and make decisions in your own life, like decide whether the AI advisor is giving you good advice or not. And also, presumably you want to be having some relationships with some other people, or AIs at least. So you want to develop some social skills, you want to be somewhat healthy.

So to some extent, for humans, I guess because of how we evolved, being a flourishing being and being able to do stuff are quite intertwined. They don’t completely come apart. Maybe at some future time they could come apart, technology could drive them apart. But for a primary school student right now, I think, while you don’t necessarily want them to be building the personality where they will just grind out doing extremely unpleasant things for long periods of time in order to get acceptance and approval, other things — like are they having good relationships, are they able to accomplish tasks, are they able to focus on anything at all — is probably still a valuable life skill.

Screen time is tough [01:42:49]

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. OK, I’ve got some questions that are just kind of general advice-y questions. How do you think about screen time? This feels like a thing that might actually matter a bit, but it could be really easy to get to kind of a suboptimal default.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. He’s only 19 months old, so you’d think this wouldn’t be such a big issue. But it already is definitely an issue. We, like many parents, will use a screen in order to basically keep him calm and quiet during times when you really need that. Like at a wedding, for example, we put him down in front of a screen during dinner so he wouldn’t disturb everyone. And during the ceremony.

Parents will recognise Cocomelon, and non-parents might not know what Cocomelon is, but it’s very bright colours and lots of things moving. We try to do the least engaging thing that is sufficiently engaging that he’s not upset or creating problems for other people. So on flights, sometimes on the train, times when he just has to be in a pram. But then of course he really likes it. Then he wants it all the time. And also sometimes we put on sing-along videos on YouTube, on the TV — which is all very well and good when you’re doing sing-along together, but then he really wants to watch more sing-along videos all the time.

So it’s already something where you face some tension. Fortunately, the fact that when you show him videos and music, he immediately starts pestering you for more, chastens you and causes you to do it less than you might otherwise. It’s actually perhaps not a very good strategy on his part if he wanted to maximise the amount of screen time.

I think there’s different ways you can think about the harms. One is watching actively harmful material. The one that people talk about a lot is just, this is a new shot every second. So they’re learning to expect an incredible amount, incredible intensity of engagement. That’s the only kind of thing that they would find enjoyable. And parents worry about that themselves, watching TikTok and whatever else. So it’s like actively harmful content.

Of course, then there’s like AI slop. There’s so much disturbing, creepy, just weird stuff on YouTube — even on YouTube Kids. Google’s really got to get on top of this. If you put on a good video, like a super simple songs version of Wheels on the Bus, it will potentially, if it just is left to autoplay, just get to weirder and weirder videos. So I wish they would get rid of that. And there’s just so much going up because people can just generate garbage children’s videos and upload them en masse, and then some of them take off and the algorithm promotes them. Children of course find it very engaging to watch this really weird, surreal stuff.

Anyway, our desired amount of that is zero. I just want super simple songs, like nice songs for him to watch inasmuch as he’s going to be watching anything at all.

Then there’s the other concern, which is displacement of other things, other valuable experiences. So what if you were watching so much screen time that you were no longer spending that much time with other children? You weren’t spending time with your caregiver and forming a bond with them or learning from them or doing language? Kids don’t really learn language from screens.

There, I think if that was the only worry then you’d say, well, watching an hour a day, even as a 19-month-old, it’s not a very big proportional decrease in the amount of time that they spend with other children. Indeed, you could make it up easily by just giving them more engaging other activities to do when they’re not watching music. Just get more children around them, have more stuff going on. I think that kind of would make sense up to a point.

I guess on the harmful stuff you can just try to cut out all of the things that you think are actively bad, but it is tough. You want things to be not hyper engaging, not super stimuluses. But then of course the super stimulus is more attractive to them, so they’ll hassle you for it inasmuch as they get any exposure. And of course, if something becomes sufficiently dull, then it no longer holds their attention. So it doesn’t serve the purpose of keeping them quiet in a situation where that’s really important.

So I don’t know where we’re going to go. We do watch Bluey together sometimes in the evenings. Bluey is a great show. You should watch Bluey if you haven’t watched Bluey. Even if you don’t have kids. Just a top TV show, honestly.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice.

Rob Wiblin: And I think as a family watching something, I think Kelsey Piper has had this point recently: she has a bunch of kids, and she thinks that watching TV with siblings and with your family around you is much less bad than staring at a screen as a young child, because your attention gets distracted to other people, other things end up happening and it’s a social experience.

Perhaps it’s not the very best thing you could be doing, but when you just have your sight completely focused in on a tiny cube, then you’re just much less likely to be pulled away by an interaction with another person or a sibling or start playing a game. And I think there’s probably a lot of truth to that.

Ways to screw up your kids [01:47:40]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. My impression is that you think that there aren’t actually that many ways to really screw up your kid, as long as you’re meeting their basic needs and giving them a reasonable amount of love and attention. Are there things, maybe screen time would be one, but are there other things that you think really might matter?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, huge amounts of screen time, probably bad. Or like really disturbing content which you can avoid. Safety, like if you die in a car crash, then you are not going to come back. So that is an argument for worrying about that a little bit more. I guess nutrient deficiencies, lead exposure. We do have air purifiers in the house to reduce exposure to air pollution. That sort of stuff stands out.

I think I’d be very worried if we had kind of an angry, tense household and were getting angry with him and he could sense the tension. That doesn’t happen basically at all. I think that is something that probably you could do. You could put a child more on edge and make them less happy. I think many people report that there was tension and anxiety and anger in their household when they were younger and that made their life worse. And it’s very hard to deal with as a child because you don’t really understand. It’s so hard to contextualise, why are my parents angry? Maybe it’s because they didn’t sleep, or it’s not about me, or even if it is about me, it’s kind of their fault because the parents should be the ones holding it together.

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think it’s probably primarily personality factors that neither of us is a very angry, explosive person. And our child also is not that aggravating either, and our child is also not a very angry child, so we’re probably just fortunate in that regard. I don’t have a tonne to add on anger management. Sleep is probably the key issue — inasmuch as we do get angry or tense, it’s overwhelmingly illness and sleep deprivation.

Highs and lows of parenting [01:49:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: I’m curious what either the highs or the lows or both have looked like for you.

Rob Wiblin: I guess the highs are playing with him when he’s super happy, and just really enjoying what’s going on. Like just seeing him squeal with delight because of some sort of chasing game, or bubbles, or he’s at a museum where something is super fascinating, or like a child’s soft play area where he’s just squealing with delight and having an amazing time. Also seeing him develop, like learning to climb up on things and seeing new capabilities come online also ranks among the highs.

The lows: I think probably my darkest moment was when we were flying all the way to Australia from the UK. He was like a year and three months.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow, that sounds like a really hard time.

Rob Wiblin: Or a year and one month. And I started getting a stomach illness basically, at the change in Singapore. So I’m like, really feeling awful.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, god.

Rob Wiblin: But you kind of can’t… You have to continue taking care of them.

Luisa Rodriguez: That would be a low even without a child. Long-haul flight with…

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

Recommendations for babies or young kids [01:51:37]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. OK, last few minutes. Just a couple rapid-fire questions. Do you have a product recommendation or something for babies or young kids that you really rate?

Rob Wiblin: Do I ever have product recommendations! Thanks for setting me up. Yeah, I made a Google Doc with all of the good stuff that my wife and I bought that we are glad that we bought. I’m not getting any money from this. I just did it because I was like, this will be a helpful thing for other people we know who are having kids. So we’ll stick up a link to that. It’s got dozens of toys, like our favourite books, and the things that really are essential. It runs through from pregnancy to infanthood to toddler and so on.

To be honest I said this last time, and I stand by it still: I was surprised how useful products are in general. You might think people are pushing products on you; you don’t really need to have the nappy bin, you don’t really need to have the changing station — but actually it is quite a big help to have the changing station and to have the nappy bin.

And so many toys, like toys that we’ve gotten him that didn’t cost that much can entertain him for dozens of hours. One that stands out there is this Jumperoo thing where you put a toddler in and it helps them to stand up and then they can bounce up and down. You can only put them in there for like half an hour at a time, and I think like not more than an hour a day. But that was like six months or something when that was his favourite toy, and he would love to bounce around in there.

So yeah, I will stick up a link to that. I comment on which ones particularly stand out as huge, as the most valuable things to get, if you can afford it.

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

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

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Yeah, I’ve heard that kids either love the SNOO or hate the SNOO.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It seems like that’s the situation. Some people swear by it. They’re like, this saved my life. Not for us.

Luisa Rodriguez: Anything you wish people had warned you about that they didn’t?

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

Luisa Rodriguez: What is the most fun play that you found?

Rob Wiblin: I’m not that into imaginative play. I’m not very good at improv. It feels like it’s kind of in that vein. I’m just not very good at thinking and dynamically making up stuff, for better or worse. I think I wasn’t even into imaginative play as a kid, actually, which is carrying through. I’m not so great at it with children.

But I really enjoy physical play. So like swinging around and throwing and chasing. And we have a goodnight routine, which is kind of fun, where he’s usually in bed having a bottle, and I get in there and kiss him all over. And he tries to push me off, and I’m like, “I love you. Good night. Night, night.” So he’s like, pushing me off and going, “Bye, bye.” Like, he’s kind of playing me off. And eventually I relent and I’m like, “I love you. Good night. I’ll see you tomorrow.” So that’s another sort of physical play thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s so cute. Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, I feel like I’ve got a lot of excitement. I’ve also got a lot of fear, and people do talk about the negative stuff quite a bit. So thank you for very wholesome, cute stories.

OK, last two questions. First, do you ever feel like you’re kind of failing as a parent?

Rob Wiblin: Maybe this sounds conceited, but I don’t really feel like we’ve failed in a very significant way or on a significant dimension. I think we’ve never really snapped or made a terrible mistake. There’ve been a few cases where I wish I’d been more on the ball about a safety thing. It’s really imprinted in your mind if you ever have anything that’s even near a near miss, but you just live and learn, like your car is like this or that.

But yeah, I don’t really feel… Maybe that’s like a bad sign about me. Maybe it’s more of a sign that maybe we are failing. But no, I think we’re doing an OK job.

Luisa Rodriguez: Seems like a pretty happy kid. That is wonderful. Do you ever feel like you are crushing it?

Rob Wiblin: I feel like there’s an idea embedded in the “crushing it” phrase that implies that it’s a thing with a very high ceiling, where it’s very difficult and you could accomplish some extraordinary level of happiness for them. Like, for adults, we’re so jaded. We’ve seen everything. To truly entertain an adult, to truly impress them, you have to do something amazing.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Rob Wiblin: For a 19-month-old, they haven’t seen very much yet. They’re amazed by the existence of spiders or bubbles. And I think you can kind of hit peak experience for them without that great of difficulty. If you’re just supporting all of the needs, they’ve got all of the food that they want and need, you’re changing their nappy on time, you’re giving them a fantastic fun thing to play with, you don’t have to perform miracles in order for them to have about as good a Saturday afternoon as they are capable of having.

So on that dimension, how often does he have about as good a time as he can roughly have? I think it’s kind of every week there’s some sort of activity that just absolutely delights him. And I don’t feel like we could do a whole lot better on that. I suppose we could do that super-high-effort stuff constantly, though maybe then we would regret having a child if that was the level that we were trying to reach all the time.

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

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think listeners will miss you when you’re on maternity leave for however long that turns out to be.

Luisa Rodriguez: So I’ll be going on maternity leave in December, so I’ll take a break then. And I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Going to play it a bit by ear, but I think I’ll probably be excited to come back and do some more interviews.

Rob Wiblin: I think a lot of people, after some amount of time, they’re like… Especially because we have a pretty interesting job. And I guess listeners, they might be missing you for a while. They can look forward to finding out about how it’s going with your kid when you’re back. We can see whether the stuff that I said resonated with you or you just totally disagree.

Luisa Rodriguez: Or all of it goes out the window. Yep. That sounds great. Thank you so much, Rob.

Rob Wiblin: This has been super fun.

Luisa Rodriguez: It has.

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About the show

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them. We invite guests pursuing a wide range of career paths — from academics and activists to entrepreneurs and policymakers — to analyse the case for and against working on different issues and which approaches are best for solving them.

Get in touch with feedback or guest suggestions by emailing [email protected].

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Highlights

Feminist rage over the horrors of pregnancy

Fertility rates are massively declining

Why do fewer people want children?

Is parenting way harder now than it used to be?

Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids?

Returning to work with kids

AI and parenting

Articles, books, and other media discussed in the show

Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

We’re hiring [00:01:26]

Why did Luisa decide to have kids? [00:02:10]

Medicine doesn’t take the burden of pregnancy seriously enough [00:04:14]

Rob’s parenting experiences so far [00:09:41]

Fertility rates are massively declining [00:21:25]

Why do fewer people want children? [00:29:20]

In what sense is parenting harder than it used to be? [00:39:01]

Feeling guilty for not playing enough with our kids [00:48:07]

Are there any good options to encourage people to have more kids? [01:00:02]

Returning to work with kids [01:12:07]

AI and parenting [01:29:22]

Screen time is tough [01:42:49]

Ways to screw up your kids [01:47:40]

Highs and lows of parenting [01:49:55]

Recommendations for babies or young kids [01:51:37]

Learn more

My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career

Find a fulfilling career that does good

Related episodes

Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests

#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

#32 – Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.

About the show

What should I listen to first?