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Except the median mother is happy about her decision to have children, enjoys being a mother, and in fact IIRC desires more children than she’s likely to have. Convincing young people and especially women that the trade offs aren’t worth it is itself the result of a propaganda campaign, which is effected in part by separated non-mothers from mothers.
This seems analogous to the obesity epidemic that's also been called a "crisis" in many Western nations. The revealed preference of many people is that they would prefer to indulge in high calorie foods and lack of exercise, and then they suffer health issues including possibly early death later on. This is an eminently reasonable preference, especially in modern Western nations, where the deliciousness and diversity of food is at incredibly high levels and the importance of physical fitness and downsides of bad health issues are at incredibly low levels. It seems that at least some of these obese people regret their eating/exercise decisions that caused their health issues, but then all that means is that their revealed preference is to indulge in their youth, then later on suffer the negative consequences including regretting those indulgences, rather than to not indulge and to not suffer health consequences of obesity by not being obese.
I suppose this points to the difficulty of figuring out how exactly to weight revealed preferences when that preference includes both a decision and regretting that decision. In those cases, do we just say that everything is hunky dory, since they're meeting their preference of regretting their present decision in the future? Or do we say that something has gone wrong, because preferring to regret something is a concept that's in tension with itself?
I'm sure exceptions exist, but in my experience, most obese individuals I’ve encountered fit one or more of the following categories:
a) They struggle with poverty,
b) They deal with depression or isolation, or
c) They're part of a family with substance abuse issues, like alcoholism.
Revealed preferences are not a great way to model addictive or stress-driven behavior. Overeating, for example, may appear to be a revealed preference of someone who is depressed, but this behavior is highly contextual. It often vanishes when the individual is removed from those circumstances.
Furthermore, individuals aren't monolithic. Everyone is more like a collection of competing drives wrapped in a trenchcoat. "Revealed preferences" are often better understood as the final outcome of an internal, contingent battle between various drives and impulses, rather than the true essence of a person. What we observe as a preference in the moment may simply reflect which drive happened to win out in that context, not a consistent, rational choice.
As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.
Yes, and that's the rub, isn't it? In such cases, do we say that someone's myopic short-term drives are their "true" preferences that ought to override whatever they genuinely value in the long term, or do we say that what they genuinely value in the long term are their "true" preferences that ought to override their myopic short-term drives?
If it turns out that some significant proportion of women who choose not to have children when they can end up regretting it when they age up to when they no longer can - a big if, IMHO - then should the next generation of young women celebrate them and follow in their footsteps, since those older women got to live out their short-term drives in their youth, short-term drives that they would have had considerable difficulty living out even just 100 years ago due to the lower freedoms and opportunities offered to women back then? Or should the next generation of young women see these older women as warnings for how they could end up suffering in the long run due to following their own short-term drives? I could see different people having different answers to these depending on their values.
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You don't need any such campaign to convince people the trade offs aren't worth it. It's blatantly obvious that parenting is full of unpleasantness, and not at all obvious that there's any upside. If anything, you need a propaganda campaign to convince young people "no really, you'll be glad you had children in the end".
It is obvious to young women(or anyone else) who are around mothers and identify with mothers that mothers like and enjoy being mothers and consider the trade offs worth it. But that’s not the information diet of young women/girls- the information diet is a stream of exaggeration about how much it sucks.
I’m reminded of the Australian study about the girls who were required to care for a doll programmed to cry and the like in order to try to convince them not to get pregnant. They wound up getting pregnant at higher rates, because their information diet was unrealistically negative about having babies and it was a needed corrective.
I have been around plenty of mothers in my day. That is not at all obvious to me. So no, I don't agree with your argument that its obvious and that our culture is just suppressing that.
When mothers express woe, it is difficult to discern ...
I mean, women are figuring out how to avoid it, it turns out.
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A lot of parenting issues that look very unpleasant from the outside are far more rewarding when actually experienced as the parent, because it is your child. Even holding my two-year old in my arms while he throws a tantrum is rewarding for me, even if unpleasant to the person passing me in the store.
I don't think most parents enjoy that. You may be a statistically odd person for enjoying a public tantrum.
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It's clear a lot of people are basically entirely replaced by some sort of parent-version of themselves once they have a child. But the non-parent version doesn't have much reason to believe this will happen... or, more importantly, to desire it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife wrote a cute story about that, "Attunements".
But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood seems like a boy being afraid of having his values and personality altered by puberty; it's a fundamentally natural part of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.
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The data bears this out as being true. That's why you do need a propaganda campaign, to convince young people to make the decision which heavily weighs towards deferred gratification and, more importantly, societal health.
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It’s certainly true that many women in their forties and fifties wish they’d had another child (my mother had three and has said this, and many other older women I’ve known have said this too). But at the time they didn’t, even when they often could have. Often this is a kind of wistful feeling, because when your children are grown you miss the people they were when they were younger and you wish you were still in that phase of life - it’s tied up with a lot of things, and I don’t know that I’d say it tells us much.
A good point. When you put it that way it’s similar to the lament “I wish I’d worked harder at school” which always sounded to me like “now that it’s reaping time I wish I’d done more sowing”, privileging the wants of your current self over those of your past self.
Yes, another classic is “I wish my parents had been tougher on me”.
Pay it forward by being tough on your kids!
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It does tell us a lot. How many people say "I wish I had 2 instead of 4 so I could have had more free time in my 30s or gone out more". Never heard that in my life. "I wish we had X more" I have heard several times.
Imagine "I wish I had more children" compared to "I wish I had more free time in my 30s." The former is so much more tragic than the latter.
To be fair... it's not really socially acceptable to say "I wish I didn't have kids, so that I could spend more time drinking/sleeping around." But that might be true! people are complicated.
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Part of it is that most kids turn out fine enough and that as an adult in late middle age or old age your children are mostly nice people who love you and come over once in a while to hang out, whose lives you follow and cherish, who bear you grandchildren and who might help you out around the house and/or financially too. It’s kind of the inverse of the younger person overfocusing on diapers and vomit and screaming babies and sleepless nights.
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