I am a woman in early/mid twenties. I am confident that I want kids, I also hold pronatalist views generally speaking. As a woman, three of my greatest concerns are timing (the whole biological clock thing), paternal investment, and social environment for child rearing. Big shocker I know :)
Someone else already asked about timing, but I think my question is slightly different. Regarding timing, I am keenly aware of the trade-offs between a) being younger and having more physical energy and strength but fewer financial resources accumulated and b) being older and having less physical strength but having greater financial resources. I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that at some point I will have to take a physical hit and a career hit if I want to procreate, but I feel conflicted about when the best time for this is. Physically, earlier seems better. Financially, later seems better. Mentally, I’m not sure. Obviously the prospective partner and his resources play a key role, but assuming full paternal investment in the mother and progeny, when do you think is the best time for a woman to have children in terms of her mental and physical health and in terms of psychological development of the child? The average age of first time mothers (26 y) and fathers (31 y) in the United States seems to continue creeping upwards
As for paternal investment, I’m not sure where to start, this topic feels like a minefield to me, partially considering that mostly men make up this forum and EA. I sometimes get the sinking feeling that even the most invested male partner I could ever find would not be able to deliver the kind of childcare or domestic skills that women are capable of delivering, which feel essential to the entire enterprise of procreating. The caretaking of both men, children, and the elderly seems to fall on women’s shoulders disproportionately, which is frustrating for any woman who wants to do or be anything other than a caretaker, especially in countries with less governmental support. I’m writing these things based on the structure and gender roles of our society, statistics on gender and families for which I would be happy to make a link post if anyone wants it, and in spite of men’s best efforts (which in turn make me think that successful child rearing is not so much about selecting an invested mate as it is about finding a community of women to help with kids). Not trying to say that men aren’t capable of being great parents or having good domestic skills (a lot of both great and inept dads out there), just sometimes that it feels this way from my perspective. My questions are, what do you think optimal paternal investment looks like or what do you think it should look like? From an anthropological or evolutionary point of view, how much direct involvement in children’s lives should women realistically expect from men? How do you think optimal paternal investment changes in the context of modern times?
It is clear to me that the nuclear family is not a good structure for child rearing, maternal health, or children’s psychological development. It takes a village as they say. What do you think is the best living arrangement or social environment for families? How valuable do you think intergenerational living is? Have you heard of cohousing and if so, what do you think of it?
Yes. I also strongly recommend the book Expecting Better; Emily Oster is an economist who takes an unusually skeptical, evidence-based approach to parenting research and advice.
On (1), another consideration you don’t mention is that having kids earlier means more years of overlap with your kids and, potentially, grandkids: you’d get to see more of their lives, which is something people usually find pretty rewarding.
Jeff—yes! I think that effect is actually more important than the concerns that people often have about whether they’ll be too tired to be good parents in their 40s or 50s. If people stay in good physical shape, it’s honestly not that hard to have the energy for parenting in middle age (speaking as a 57-year-old with a baby).
However, I’ll be 75 when my baby graduates high school, and maybe 83 by the time she has kids of her own.
Hopefully longevity interventions and regenerative medicine will help us all live long enough to meet our great-great-great-grandkids. But until then, having kids younger means you’ll get to spend a much higher proportion of life enjoying their company, and being around for future grandkids.
purplefern—I’ll write separate replies for each of your questions, so any further comments by others on my comments can be fairly well-focused.
Regarding optimal age and timing, and career/health tradeoffs:
For a woman, the main age concerns regarding health, I think, are (1) likelihood of being able to get pregnant declines fairly strongly during the 30s (but there are very big individual differences in this rate), (2) likelihood of baby having genetic defects (eg Down syndrome) increases fairly quickly in the late 30s and 40s (but implications of this depend heavily on whether a woman is willing to use genetic screening and abortion as quality control.)
For issue (1), I think it makes sense for women to get their AMH (anti-Mullerian hormone) levels checked regularly from their late 20s onwards. This is absolutely crucial in predicting how much longer one’s likely to remain fertile—it’s a test of ‘ovarian reserve’. AMH seems to be a stronger predictor of a woman’s remaining fertility than her chronological age is. (In many countries, you can get an over-the-counter on in-lab AMH test for about $100-200 that just requires a finger prick or blood draw.) It’s also very helpful to know when one’s mother, older sisters, or female relatives reached menopause. To risk-hedge, it can be helpful for women to freeze some eggs and/or embryos by age 30-35, which could use later by the woman herself or by a surrogate.
Likewise, for men, I think it can make sense to get sperm checked with a lab semen analysis (typically less than $200), to assess semen volume, and sperm count, vitality, motility, and morphology.
It baffles me that many smart young men and women who invest hundreds of hours into planning their work career won’t spend a few hours getting the crucial tests that would allow much more accurate planning of their reproductive career.
Overall, I think the optimal time to start having kids depends much more on one’s romantic partnership situation than on one’s education/career. If you’ve found an excellent mate who’s compatible, committed, reliable, pro-child, and likely to be at last moderately successful and financially stable, then the best time might be right after marriage, whenever that is. (Having a kid with someone, without the many legal protections of formal marriage—protections which seem silly and outdated until the point when you really, really need them—is foolish and often regretted, IMHO.)
I’m most familiar with the academic situation when smart young women are trying to decide whether to have kids in grad school, or after they get tenure—they assume that the 6 years of intense tenure-track work as an assistant professor will make pregnancy impossible then. I think that is a very misguided way to think about it, for a few reasons (1) most universities are actually very generous with parental leave for faculty, and you can pause the ‘tenure clock’ multiple times before going up for tenure, (2) professors aren’t actually that much less busy after tenure than before, (3) realistically, in the current job market, most people who get PhDs in most fields will never get a tenure-track job, so there’s a huge danger that women get stuck in ‘post-doc limbo’ for several years in their late 20s and early 30s, then don’t get a tenure-track job until their early/mid 30s, then don’t get tenure until their early 40s… and then it might be too late to have kids. There might be analogous issues in other fields such as medicine, law, finance, etc.
even the most invested male partner I could ever find would not be able to deliver the kind of childcare or domestic skills that women are capable of delivering
As a pro-natalist myself, I’m really curious about this remark. What aspect of childcare are men not capable of delivering? Is it just that they generally don’t know domestic skills or is there something you think we can’t learn as well as women?
I know men are very capable, I just sometimes get the feeling that they aren’t…
I sometimes get the sinking feeling that even the most invested male partner…
I think there are two separate things to parse out here. One is domestic work, and another is child care.
I think I largely feel this way because I see that men generally don’t have as strong domestic skills, and are not socialized in a way that they either have or highly value these skills. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, stuff like that. I get the sense that most men pick up these skills later in life, whereas a lot of women seem to have (more of) them to begin with (I know that there are plenty of counter examples for this and that it is a generalization). I think men are less likely to care about maintaining a clean household, or “running a household,” or engaging in domestic work largely for the sake of others. In some cultures, it even seems like children themselves contribute more domestic work (and/or childcare) than men do. Maybe domestic work isn’t all that important to creating a good family environment. Maybe it is.
In terms of childcare, I think men can be great, imaginative caretakers, but that on average first time fathers have much less experience with babies and children than first time mothers (again, I’m sure there are many counter examples out there, but I am talking about averages). I also believe that men tend to be more risk taking than women, and that this can manifest in their child care. In some cases, letting children take more risks might be good developmentally speaking. In other cases, not so much. If women perceive men as both a) less skilled or experienced caretakers and/or b) more risk taking, then they may be disinclined to hand the babies over. (Again, speaking in generalizations, I know there are dads out there who are very nervous / careful / risk averse / protective.)
Some larger things underlying sex differences in domestic skills and/or caretaking skills might be developmental differences or cognitive differences (chemical changes caused by gestation?) or differences in empathy. There seems to be a question of nature and nurture here that is very controversial and hard to address. Are males or females innately better caregivers or domestic workers? Or are socialization and culture fully responsible for any of these differences?
purplefern—regarding your question (2) about parental investment, and your follow-up comment above:
As an evolutionary psychologist, I tend to take a rather biological view of sex differences, and I think this can be quite helpful in thinking about sexual divisions of labor in parenting. This is not to say that people should pursue a 1950s-style male breadwinner/female housewife model in the 2020s.
Rather, it’s to say that people should learn about the deep evolutionary history of sexual selection and parental investment, the sexual divisions of labor typically found in hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and agricultural societies, the recent historical changes in parental care patterns, etc. This helps put any negotiations between modern moms and dads in a much more realistic, grounded context.
One key insight I got from evolutionary biology is that female mammals have evolved for about 70 million years to be very high-investing parents, in terms of gestation (pregnancy), lactation (breast-feeding), foraging (finding and preparing food for offspring), and general maternal care. Whereas, male mammals are typically focused on mating rather than parenting, and typically do either zero parental care, or very minimal protection against infanticide by other males. Human males are extremely unusual in having evolved much more intensive parental care, but this happened only in the last 2-3 million years or so, and it mostly involved increased effort in hunting, protecting the kids and family from rivals within the tribe, protecting the tribe from other tribes, and doing some care-taking and teaching of kids, especially in middle childhood (ages 6-12, roughly) and adolescence (ages 12-18).
So, from the viewpoint of a modern woman who doesn’t appreciate the evolutionary history, it might be frustrating that a man is doing only 40% of the child care instead of 50%. Whereas any other female mammal might feel incredibly envious that a human male is doing 40% rather than 0% as in her own species. This is not to say that a mom shouldn’t try to negotiate with the dad to do 50%. It’s just to offer some context for why these imbalances often emerge.
In general, a frequent failure mode for busy couples with kids is that the mom and dad each feel like they’re doing much more than their partner, because their own contributions are more salient to them. I think it’s important for couples to switch duties and roles enough that they can cover for each other in emergencies, and so they have a full and salient appreciation of what each of them are doing day-to-day for their kids.
I have returned to this post after reading the entirety of Mothers and Others.
Depending on someone’s interpersonal situation, I now believe that parental contributions ideally comprise the following:
Maternal care ~ 30-50%
Paternal care ~ 30-50%
Other care (mostly grandmothers/aunts/child’s siblings/mother’s friends) ~ 30-50%
It seems that “other caretakers” (most desirable being maternal grandmothers) are an absolutely essential requirement for children to thrive, even for those who have highly invested fathers and especially for those who have absent fathers.
My attitude towards absent or apathetic fathers is slightly less negative than it was before reading the book, and subsequently, my belief that successful child rearing requires a strong community of women is slightly up-weighted.
Based on the theory presented in Mothers and Others, I would update my earlier comment…
I know men are very capable, but sometimes get the feeling that they aren’t
…to instead say that men are completely capable as caretakers, but have a bit more of a choice in the matter as to how they contribute their childcare, given societal pressures and competing priorities including mating, hunting, and impressing or protecting others.
I would still be really interested to read others’ thoughts on how paternal priorities change in modern contexts (i.e. what is the modern equivalent of hunting / is hunting obsolete), or the benefits of patriarchal versus matriarchal societies!
Thank you so much Dr. Miller for all of your responses
purplefern—glad you enjoyed the ‘Mothers and Others’ book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy!
I agree that we see a fair amount of variety in child rearing practices across cultures and time, with varying weights on maternal care, paternal care, and ‘alloparental care’ by other people, which can include close relatives, friends, or neighbors—often female, but of either sex. Modern life does make it difficult to organize informal alloparenting networks, but I guess paid child care and school try to fill the gaps.
In my experience as someone belonging to the WEIRD demographic, males in heterosexual relationships provide less domestic or child support, on average, than their spouse, where by “less” I mean both lower frequency and lower quality in terms of attention and emotional support provided. Males seem entirely capable of learning such skills, but there does seem to some discrepancy in the amount of support actually provided. I would be convinced otherwise were someone to show me a meta-analysis or two of parental care behaviors in heterosexual relationships that found, generally speaking, males and females provide analogous levels of care. In my demographic though, this does not seem to be the case.
For men reading this and thinking “I want to be an equal partner in raising kids, but I know a lot of men who intellectually want this don’t end up doing their share; what should I do”, you might be interested in my Equal Parenting Advice for Dads
I am a woman in early/mid twenties. I am confident that I want kids, I also hold pronatalist views generally speaking. As a woman, three of my greatest concerns are timing (the whole biological clock thing), paternal investment, and social environment for child rearing. Big shocker I know :)
Someone else already asked about timing, but I think my question is slightly different. Regarding timing, I am keenly aware of the trade-offs between a) being younger and having more physical energy and strength but fewer financial resources accumulated and b) being older and having less physical strength but having greater financial resources. I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that at some point I will have to take a physical hit and a career hit if I want to procreate, but I feel conflicted about when the best time for this is. Physically, earlier seems better. Financially, later seems better. Mentally, I’m not sure. Obviously the prospective partner and his resources play a key role, but assuming full paternal investment in the mother and progeny, when do you think is the best time for a woman to have children in terms of her mental and physical health and in terms of psychological development of the child? The average age of first time mothers (26 y) and fathers (31 y) in the United States seems to continue creeping upwards
As for paternal investment, I’m not sure where to start, this topic feels like a minefield to me, partially considering that mostly men make up this forum and EA. I sometimes get the sinking feeling that even the most invested male partner I could ever find would not be able to deliver the kind of childcare or domestic skills that women are capable of delivering, which feel essential to the entire enterprise of procreating. The caretaking of both men, children, and the elderly seems to fall on women’s shoulders disproportionately, which is frustrating for any woman who wants to do or be anything other than a caretaker, especially in countries with less governmental support. I’m writing these things based on the structure and gender roles of our society, statistics on gender and families for which I would be happy to make a link post if anyone wants it, and in spite of men’s best efforts (which in turn make me think that successful child rearing is not so much about selecting an invested mate as it is about finding a community of women to help with kids). Not trying to say that men aren’t capable of being great parents or having good domestic skills (a lot of both great and inept dads out there), just sometimes that it feels this way from my perspective. My questions are, what do you think optimal paternal investment looks like or what do you think it should look like? From an anthropological or evolutionary point of view, how much direct involvement in children’s lives should women realistically expect from men? How do you think optimal paternal investment changes in the context of modern times?
It is clear to me that the nuclear family is not a good structure for child rearing, maternal health, or children’s psychological development. It takes a village as they say. What do you think is the best living arrangement or social environment for families? How valuable do you think intergenerational living is? Have you heard of cohousing and if so, what do you think of it?
Also, not a question, but a book recommendation for Expecting Better by Emily Oster
Yes. I also strongly recommend the book Expecting Better; Emily Oster is an economist who takes an unusually skeptical, evidence-based approach to parenting research and advice.
On (1), another consideration you don’t mention is that having kids earlier means more years of overlap with your kids and, potentially, grandkids: you’d get to see more of their lives, which is something people usually find pretty rewarding.
Jeff—yes! I think that effect is actually more important than the concerns that people often have about whether they’ll be too tired to be good parents in their 40s or 50s. If people stay in good physical shape, it’s honestly not that hard to have the energy for parenting in middle age (speaking as a 57-year-old with a baby).
However, I’ll be 75 when my baby graduates high school, and maybe 83 by the time she has kids of her own.
Hopefully longevity interventions and regenerative medicine will help us all live long enough to meet our great-great-great-grandkids. But until then, having kids younger means you’ll get to spend a much higher proportion of life enjoying their company, and being around for future grandkids.
purplefern—I’ll write separate replies for each of your questions, so any further comments by others on my comments can be fairly well-focused.
Regarding optimal age and timing, and career/health tradeoffs:
For a woman, the main age concerns regarding health, I think, are (1) likelihood of being able to get pregnant declines fairly strongly during the 30s (but there are very big individual differences in this rate), (2) likelihood of baby having genetic defects (eg Down syndrome) increases fairly quickly in the late 30s and 40s (but implications of this depend heavily on whether a woman is willing to use genetic screening and abortion as quality control.)
For issue (1), I think it makes sense for women to get their AMH (anti-Mullerian hormone) levels checked regularly from their late 20s onwards. This is absolutely crucial in predicting how much longer one’s likely to remain fertile—it’s a test of ‘ovarian reserve’. AMH seems to be a stronger predictor of a woman’s remaining fertility than her chronological age is. (In many countries, you can get an over-the-counter on in-lab AMH test for about $100-200 that just requires a finger prick or blood draw.) It’s also very helpful to know when one’s mother, older sisters, or female relatives reached menopause. To risk-hedge, it can be helpful for women to freeze some eggs and/or embryos by age 30-35, which could use later by the woman herself or by a surrogate.
Likewise, for men, I think it can make sense to get sperm checked with a lab semen analysis (typically less than $200), to assess semen volume, and sperm count, vitality, motility, and morphology.
It baffles me that many smart young men and women who invest hundreds of hours into planning their work career won’t spend a few hours getting the crucial tests that would allow much more accurate planning of their reproductive career.
Overall, I think the optimal time to start having kids depends much more on one’s romantic partnership situation than on one’s education/career. If you’ve found an excellent mate who’s compatible, committed, reliable, pro-child, and likely to be at last moderately successful and financially stable, then the best time might be right after marriage, whenever that is. (Having a kid with someone, without the many legal protections of formal marriage—protections which seem silly and outdated until the point when you really, really need them—is foolish and often regretted, IMHO.)
I’m most familiar with the academic situation when smart young women are trying to decide whether to have kids in grad school, or after they get tenure—they assume that the 6 years of intense tenure-track work as an assistant professor will make pregnancy impossible then. I think that is a very misguided way to think about it, for a few reasons (1) most universities are actually very generous with parental leave for faculty, and you can pause the ‘tenure clock’ multiple times before going up for tenure, (2) professors aren’t actually that much less busy after tenure than before, (3) realistically, in the current job market, most people who get PhDs in most fields will never get a tenure-track job, so there’s a huge danger that women get stuck in ‘post-doc limbo’ for several years in their late 20s and early 30s, then don’t get a tenure-track job until their early/mid 30s, then don’t get tenure until their early 40s… and then it might be too late to have kids. There might be analogous issues in other fields such as medicine, law, finance, etc.
As a pro-natalist myself, I’m really curious about this remark. What aspect of childcare are men not capable of delivering? Is it just that they generally don’t know domestic skills or is there something you think we can’t learn as well as women?
I know men are very capable, I just sometimes get the feeling that they aren’t…
I think there are two separate things to parse out here. One is domestic work, and another is child care.
I think I largely feel this way because I see that men generally don’t have as strong domestic skills, and are not socialized in a way that they either have or highly value these skills. Laundry, cooking, cleaning, stuff like that. I get the sense that most men pick up these skills later in life, whereas a lot of women seem to have (more of) them to begin with (I know that there are plenty of counter examples for this and that it is a generalization). I think men are less likely to care about maintaining a clean household, or “running a household,” or engaging in domestic work largely for the sake of others. In some cultures, it even seems like children themselves contribute more domestic work (and/or childcare) than men do. Maybe domestic work isn’t all that important to creating a good family environment. Maybe it is.
In terms of childcare, I think men can be great, imaginative caretakers, but that on average first time fathers have much less experience with babies and children than first time mothers (again, I’m sure there are many counter examples out there, but I am talking about averages). I also believe that men tend to be more risk taking than women, and that this can manifest in their child care. In some cases, letting children take more risks might be good developmentally speaking. In other cases, not so much. If women perceive men as both a) less skilled or experienced caretakers and/or b) more risk taking, then they may be disinclined to hand the babies over. (Again, speaking in generalizations, I know there are dads out there who are very nervous / careful / risk averse / protective.)
Some larger things underlying sex differences in domestic skills and/or caretaking skills might be developmental differences or cognitive differences (chemical changes caused by gestation?) or differences in empathy. There seems to be a question of nature and nurture here that is very controversial and hard to address. Are males or females innately better caregivers or domestic workers? Or are socialization and culture fully responsible for any of these differences?
purplefern—regarding your question (2) about parental investment, and your follow-up comment above:
As an evolutionary psychologist, I tend to take a rather biological view of sex differences, and I think this can be quite helpful in thinking about sexual divisions of labor in parenting. This is not to say that people should pursue a 1950s-style male breadwinner/female housewife model in the 2020s.
Rather, it’s to say that people should learn about the deep evolutionary history of sexual selection and parental investment, the sexual divisions of labor typically found in hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and agricultural societies, the recent historical changes in parental care patterns, etc. This helps put any negotiations between modern moms and dads in a much more realistic, grounded context.
One key insight I got from evolutionary biology is that female mammals have evolved for about 70 million years to be very high-investing parents, in terms of gestation (pregnancy), lactation (breast-feeding), foraging (finding and preparing food for offspring), and general maternal care. Whereas, male mammals are typically focused on mating rather than parenting, and typically do either zero parental care, or very minimal protection against infanticide by other males. Human males are extremely unusual in having evolved much more intensive parental care, but this happened only in the last 2-3 million years or so, and it mostly involved increased effort in hunting, protecting the kids and family from rivals within the tribe, protecting the tribe from other tribes, and doing some care-taking and teaching of kids, especially in middle childhood (ages 6-12, roughly) and adolescence (ages 12-18).
So, from the viewpoint of a modern woman who doesn’t appreciate the evolutionary history, it might be frustrating that a man is doing only 40% of the child care instead of 50%. Whereas any other female mammal might feel incredibly envious that a human male is doing 40% rather than 0% as in her own species. This is not to say that a mom shouldn’t try to negotiate with the dad to do 50%. It’s just to offer some context for why these imbalances often emerge.
In general, a frequent failure mode for busy couples with kids is that the mom and dad each feel like they’re doing much more than their partner, because their own contributions are more salient to them. I think it’s important for couples to switch duties and roles enough that they can cover for each other in emergencies, and so they have a full and salient appreciation of what each of them are doing day-to-day for their kids.
I have returned to this post after reading the entirety of Mothers and Others.
Depending on someone’s interpersonal situation, I now believe that parental contributions ideally comprise the following:
Maternal care ~ 30-50%
Paternal care ~ 30-50%
Other care (mostly grandmothers/aunts/child’s siblings/mother’s friends) ~ 30-50%
It seems that “other caretakers” (most desirable being maternal grandmothers) are an absolutely essential requirement for children to thrive, even for those who have highly invested fathers and especially for those who have absent fathers.
My attitude towards absent or apathetic fathers is slightly less negative than it was before reading the book, and subsequently, my belief that successful child rearing requires a strong community of women is slightly up-weighted.
Based on the theory presented in Mothers and Others, I would update my earlier comment…
…to instead say that men are completely capable as caretakers, but have a bit more of a choice in the matter as to how they contribute their childcare, given societal pressures and competing priorities including mating, hunting, and impressing or protecting others.
I would still be really interested to read others’ thoughts on how paternal priorities change in modern contexts (i.e. what is the modern equivalent of hunting / is hunting obsolete), or the benefits of patriarchal versus matriarchal societies!
Thank you so much Dr. Miller for all of your responses
purplefern—glad you enjoyed the ‘Mothers and Others’ book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy!
I agree that we see a fair amount of variety in child rearing practices across cultures and time, with varying weights on maternal care, paternal care, and ‘alloparental care’ by other people, which can include close relatives, friends, or neighbors—often female, but of either sex. Modern life does make it difficult to organize informal alloparenting networks, but I guess paid child care and school try to fill the gaps.
In my experience as someone belonging to the WEIRD demographic, males in heterosexual relationships provide less domestic or child support, on average, than their spouse, where by “less” I mean both lower frequency and lower quality in terms of attention and emotional support provided. Males seem entirely capable of learning such skills, but there does seem to some discrepancy in the amount of support actually provided. I would be convinced otherwise were someone to show me a meta-analysis or two of parental care behaviors in heterosexual relationships that found, generally speaking, males and females provide analogous levels of care. In my demographic though, this does not seem to be the case.
For men reading this and thinking “I want to be an equal partner in raising kids, but I know a lot of men who intellectually want this don’t end up doing their share; what should I do”, you might be interested in my Equal Parenting Advice for Dads
N of 1 here, but FWIW this has very much not been my experience (gestating and breastfeeding aside).