Bryan Caplan on Parenting

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2011

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and EconLog talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in Caplan's new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Caplan argues that parents spend too much time trying to influence how their kids will turn out as adults. Using research on twins and adopted children, Caplan argues that nature dominates nurture and that parents have little lasting influence on many aspects of their children's lives. He concludes that parents should spend less time and energy trying to influence their children. If parenting takes less time, then have more kids, says Caplan. The conversation concludes with a discussion of whether a larger population is bad for the planet.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:35.5	Today's April 28, 2011, and my guest is Brian Kaplan of George Mason University. He blogs
0:44.8	at our sister site econlog and his latest book is Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Brian,
0:50.5	welcome back to econtalk. Thanks so much for having me, Russ.
0:53.7	The central argument of your book is that kids are less burdensome and more fun than they
0:57.4	appear as a father for sympathetic to that idea. But for those people who might be less
1:03.8	sympathetic, what's the basic idea?
1:05.8	The basic idea of the book is that it is true that parents push themselves very hard today.
1:11.2	Actually, they spend more time taking care of their kids than they did during the baby
1:14.6	boom, surprisingly enough. But a lot of what they're doing is based on the idea that they
1:21.9	have to do a lot of unpleasant things to their kids in order to protect their kids' future.
1:26.2	So you have to do a lot of different activities with them. You have to ride them very hard so
1:30.8	that they can succeed in today's tough competitive world. The kids often push back on this, and
1:35.4	many people feel like, if you're a decent parent, you have to make your kid unhappy now in
1:39.4	a lot of ways in order to give your kid a decent future. So a lot of what's going on is that
1:45.3	people are doing things that aren't very fun, and they're really stressing and stressing
1:52.0	the relationship with their kids on the theory that if they do so, they'll be some long-wind
1:57.0	benefit. Now, this brings us to the million dollar question, which is, does all of this
	...

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