To Parent or Not to Parent: Is a Cost-Benefit Analysis Reprehensible?
Posted in Taboo Subjects, The Law on February 15th, 2007I am enrolled in a course entitled Thinking About Taboo Subjects:
This course will consider how to think, write and speak about issues that tend to be taboo on university campuses. These include gender, racial, ethnic, cultural and religious differences; rape and child molestation, torture; eugenics; abortion; capital punishment; race specific affirmative action; misuses of the holocaust and holocaust denial; colonialism; cultural relativity; religious sensitivities; and other subjects to be directed by the class. The object of the class will be to consider how to do scholarship on such subjects. Experts and advocates will appear periodically as guests.
The reading this week includes an article entitled “Thinking the unthinkable, sacred values and taboo cognitions”. In essentally says that we have sacred values – such as family and loyalty, and secular values, such as money, entertainment, etc. One forced to make a trade-off between two sacred values (a tragic trade-off) is judged far less harshly than those who deliberate for a long time when deciding between a secular and a sacred value (a taboo trade-off) So, for example, a hospital administrator who ponders over saving a boy’s life to save his hospital $1M is causes moral outrage, while people look more sympathetically at the administrator forced to decide between two boys. It matters not that the money could save lives, the immediate two values cannot be mismatched and still be acceptable.
This reminded me of a the outrage that some people have over some people choosing not to have children, and even over those who weigh out the pros and cons of parenting.
Indeed, one who makes a decision between so-called “selfish” values and childbearing might be inclined not to have children. A while back I posted an article on my childfree news blog; a statistical study had found that parents are more depressed than those without children.
‘‘We believe the costs associated with the role overshadow those benefits,’’ said Robin Simon, co-author of the study published in December in the journal published by the American Sociological Association. ‘‘We romanticize parenthood. It’s difficult and it is expensive.’’
This is in addition to findings that parents die sooner, eat more, and earn less, have smaller brains (during pregnancy) have less money. Add to that the fact that the above was just the latest in a long line of studies showing that the childless are happier [1] [2] [3] , and the childless may indeed feel quite smug about the superiority of their choice. Parents are quick to respond, horrified that concerns over happiness [4] and money should ever enter into the equation. Indeed, we have elevated the question of parenting to sacred status such that questioning whether it is “worth it” is taboo.
Quite illustrative is the fury sparked by the article Kids: Bad investments, big returns. As is made obvious by the title, the ultimate conclusion is that it is still “worth it” for many people because “it’s like an ongoing, lifelong investment in happiness,” and humans are not “economic creatures.” Of course, this is necessary way to wrap up an article that could otherwise be offensive to many, and its very conclusion is belied by the many studies that show children do not make people happier.
And yet the taboo is so strong, even this treacly, lets-all-have-kids article provoked a number of harsh responses. The readers stated that the author did not deserve to have kids because “I cannot believe in this day and age that people actually sit down and figure how much it’s going to cost them to have a family.” But even while readers stated “If you need to do a cost-benefit analysis on having children, then you shouldn’t be having them” they missed the irony of their own cost-benefit calculations. One states that her “13-year-old son who has given me endless hours of joy and is a constant source of pride”, another that in twenty years “I will be receiving kisses from my future grandchildren, which my dear, are priceless.”
To be fair, a few do seem to criticize cost-benefit analysis without this hypocritical bent. But they are in the minority; most extoll the rewards of parenting in the same breath. And it may well be that a ‘happiness’ cost-benefit calculus is somehow less offensive than a monetary one. After all, no sacred value is being traded in for it, at least according to most assumptions.
People who spend money on plasma TVs and gambling are all buying their own kind of enjoyment; indeed one would imagine that those who would like to save money by not having children are spending it instead on other things that make them happy. If that is the case, are we judging not the calculus itself but what makes you happy? Is someone who is made happy by traveling “bad” and someone made happy by their children “good”? Is someone who is made happy by children as a “status enhancing social resource,” somehow superior to someone who is made happy by her three dogs rescued from a pound? Is why children make you happy, or the kind of alternative you choose then dispositive, and if so, are these judges on the right track, but oversimplifying the choices people make?
The argument must depend, then, on the establishment of the choice to have children as a sacred value. Is this assigning the status of potential family such weight? Is it because it is seen as biological destiny? It could well be that childfreedom is not seen as a negative choice – to not choose to do something, but instead as a positive step to prevent something that would otherwise naturally occur. Without these perspectives, it would be difficult to see why the choice not to work in a soup kitchen or adopt a homeless pet would be given such comparable deference. Assuming for the sake of this argument that having children is always a positive good for the world, the choice not to have them is only one of many positive steps that people avoid every day, without criticism.
The taboo must lie in seeing childrearing as an obligation each and every one of us has, and the choice not to have them as shunning potential family. Only then can we explain why the readers reacted with such furor over the mere deliberation in the author’s choice.