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Notes -
One issue that’s lurking in the background of your post is that most parents in the West massively overindex on the marginal impact of parenting, largely due to major misconceptions about the relative contributions of genes versus environment. The best act you can ever do for your kids is picking a high quality spouse to have them with. As for parenting time… did you know that contrary to the public handwringing about kids growing up zombified by TV and YouTube, parents in the West today spend roughly twice as much time with their kids as parents did 50 years ago?
While you can definitely fuck your kids up, there’s minimal difference on children’s outcomes between good and great parenting (though there’s a caveat here I’ll come to in a second). This is the whole thrust of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and I agree with his big picture.
I honestly think most kids today are horribly overparented, mostly to the detriment of their parents’ free time, but also a little to the kids’ detriment insofar as they don’t acquire autonomy and self-confidence as easily. I have lots of friends whose lives have been transformed by having kids in ways that don’t seem very fun. They live by a rigid schedule of violin practice, swimming lessons, reading hour, and so on, and they don’t have any spontaneity. My wife and I by contrast are lazy as fuck parents. Our kids learned early on that “mum and dad have their own lives and priorities” and they should too. Obviously we cook for them and clean for them and have fun family days out, as well as lots of nice spontaneous family time, but my average day isn’t drastically different from how it used to be before the kids arrived. Other parents are often amazed at how much free time we seem to have and honestly a big part of it is because when my wife and I are watching a movie we just tell the kids to buzz off and go for a bike ride or read a book.
To go back to my point about overindexing on impacts of parenting, I think the real problem is that people are over indexing on the wrong thing, long-term childhood outcomes, with empirically dubious motivation. Instead life is much better if you prioritise “how can my spouse and I and the kids have a fun chill time.” Of course that assumes you’re a competent adult whose idea of a fun time isn’t shooting up fentanyl or getting blackout drunk every night but with that proviso I think it’s a good parenting mantra. And I also think if people could learn to just relax about parenting rather than treating it like another demanding job then that would help at least slightly boost TFR.
Furthermore, if you structure things right, having your kids go to various activities isn't much of a bother and can often even be a break for you as a parent. Key here is that the activities need to actually fit kids, are group activities, and are close to home/school.
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