It's a real conundrum as you become successful
because you're in a situation where if your children ask you for something,
there's no formal reason for you to say no, you know...
Because you can provide whatever is being requested.
But by doing that,
you steal from them the opportunity to generate that for themselves.
And that's I suppose
it's one of the dangers of prosperity.
What that does to people over the long run, I don't think we understand well yet,
because most people haven't been prosperous for very long, right?
There's been plenty of privation to go around.
And of course, there still is in many
parts of the world, including in the United States and in the west.
There's a rule if you're a social scientist.
And the first rule is in some sense,
to look at context before you look at personality.
And I think there's been a lot of really radical changes in our society in the last
50 years, and we don't understand their consequences.
The most radical change is probably the birth control pill
because it's provided women with voluntary control over the reproductive function,
and that's equivalent to a major biological of mutation,
its consequences virtually incomprehensible.
I mean, partly one of the consequences is
where reliable birth control is provided to women.
First of all, they immediately become educated.
Second, their economies tend to grow, and third, the birth rate falls below
replacement, and then all three of those factors are monumental.
So
perhaps especially the third, the falling of the birth rate beat below
replacement, which is the case in virtually every
country in the Western world except the United States.
We don't know exactly what the optimal conditions are under which you...
Toughen up, let's say...
Most children now have older parents, right?
Because people aren't having children until they're in their 30s.
And there's a big difference between having a parent who's in his or her 30s
and having a parent who's in his or her 20s.
The 20 year olds are still kind of like
kids, and they're going to be more usefully neglectful, I would say...
Well, look... One of the things we used to do
with my daughter when she was very little, she was about a year and a half,
is we have her in a room alone, and she would usually complain about
that for a few minutes and then she'd find a way to amuse herself.
She liked to take books out of shelves and put them back in.
If you let her be, get through that initial
bit of misery, then she would learn how to regulate herself.
And she got very good at that.
So that's a good example of minor privation having a positive influence.
But children used to have multiple
siblings and siblings toughen you up because there's tremendous competition
in families among siblings, and they had younger parents who had fewer resources.
And now parents are older.
First of all, and second, they're more resource rich and so they're
more likely to schedule their children to death in some sense,
to provide them with all the opportunities that they feel would be useful.
And that's understandable.
Plus, because they have fewer children, each child is in some sense more precious.
Not like if you have ten children,
you don't love all of them, but there's ten of them.
There's only so much excess attention
that can go around, and they do a lot of socializing each
other rather than being socialized by parents.
But if you only have one child, you're going to devote all your resources
to providing them with absolutely everything you can provide them with.
And one of the dangers of that is
that you'll over protect them and you'll provide them with too much.
And we don't understand those dynamics, right?
We don't understand how much you should stay hands off your
kids and let them go out there and make their own mistakes and find their own way.
Well, that's tricky.
And we're ignorant about it.
And so I think one of the consequences
of that is that we do have a reasonable percentage of young people,
maybe young adolescents, the kind that you hear about at University
who have been overprotected and over scheduled and under challenged.
In some sense,
we extend that overprotection far longer than is helpful.
It's hard, though, because, as I said,
when you have resources, you can use them to make your children's lives...
Let's say, easier.
But the question is, do you really want to make the life of someone you love easier?
My wife and I had two kids, and
we didn't start late compared to most of the people we knew.
I think our first child was born when my wife was 29.
We certainly felt that we would have had
more children if we would have started earlier.
There's no doubt that.
And this is a very important thing to know.
There's not that many things in your life that are of central importance.
There's half a dozen.
I would say
there's your friends, there's your family, your intimate partner by family.
I mean, your siblings and your parents.
But then there's your children,
there's your career, there's your educational trajectory,
there's how you take care of yourself and protect yourself from temptation
and what sort of useful things you do in the time that you're not working.
But children are a third of life, something like that, maybe more.
And so I would certainly recommend that you don't miss it.
It's complicated because, of course, now,
in most situations, both parents have to work.
But it's always been complicated to raise children.
They're a long term investment.
That's why it's hard to even pay child care workers, right.
Because the payoff for having a child
doesn't occur until two decades later, sometimes four decades later.
But it's not something you want to miss, that's for sure, because it's
well... That's life.
It's part of the human condition.
And little children pay you back
immensely.
If you have a good relationship with them, if you're on their side and encourage them
because they're an unconditional source of joy and love,
the other thing I noticed that you should all know is that as you get older,
the family you've produced becomes more and more important.
So we teach young women in particular that
the fundamental goal of their life is going to be their career.
And first of all, most people don't have careers.
They have jobs, and those are very different things.
But you're not a very happy camper, so to speak.
If you're 45 and you have no one and it
doesn't go upwards after that.
So... Don't miss it.