Are parents better people?

Some pros and cons of the love we have for our children

A few weeks ago, Darby Saxbe wrote a guest post for Small Potatoes (buy her book!) that began with an excellent question: Does having children make people more empathic?

If you include empathy toward one’s children, Darby sees the answer as an obvious yes.

Many of our social interactions have a transactional component: We do favors hoping that others will return them in the near future. We scratch other people’s backs and they scratch ours. But as parents, we prepare food, change diapers, and wake up in the middle of the night for the benefit of a child who will not be able to reciprocate that care for decades, if ever. What could be more selfless than that?

But how does having a child influence our feelings toward everyone else? Darby notes that parenting makes us more parochial.

It concentrates our focus on our own genetic kin and motivates us to favor our children over everyone else.

But then she says that the story is more complicated.

Whether parenthood is selfish or selfless ultimately depends on larger structural conditions. A competitive, individualistic society with a winner-takes-all economy pits parents against each other, but we can dream about a society that treats child-rearing as a collective enterprise and invests in policies that benefit every kid.

You’d think there would be data that bears on this general issue, but it’s not easy to study. You don’t want to just compare parents with non-parents, because parents start off, on average, as different kinds of people from non-parents, so any effects you find might be due to longstanding personality differences, not the actual effect of having or not having children. (Ideally, you would take two thousand people and randomly assign half of them to have children and the other half to be childless, but this is a somewhat hard study to run.)

A good study would look at what happens to a person once they have a child—how it changes them—and there is work on this, as in this study that finds that lactating mothers are more aggressive toward strangers. But the interesting question really isn’t about such short-term effects; it concerns a larger shift in priorities as one’s children grow up. To be fair, there are studies that attempt this—for instance, looking at the relationship between parenthood and environmental concerns—but they suffer from various methodological limitations that make interpretation difficult, and, in any case, the findings are decidedly mixed.

So, unencumbered by data, let’s speculate a little bit.

In the long run

Many years ago, the historian Niall Ferguson got himself into a spot of trouble for saying at a conference that John Maynard Keynes probably did not care about future generations because he was childless and homosexual. He was asked about Keynes’ often-quoted dismissal of the future—‘In the long run we are all dead.’—and responded

in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.

And then he said the thing about Keynes not caring. He later apologized (he called his remarks “stupid and tactless”). But, forgetting about Keynes in particular, was Ferguson’s general point right?

The logic makes sense. Imagine reading that there is a crisis in some distant country—maybe a bloody civil war. Lots of death, torture, and atrocity. Now, you’re not a monster; I’m sure you feel a bit bad when you hear about it. But it’s not going to ruin your day. People die all the time. Your mind will quickly move on to other things.

Now imagine that the people you love the most happen to be living in that country. This makes an enormous difference, both to how much you care and what you’re willing to do to help.

Well, to mangle a famous quote, the future is a foreign country. If my children are there, I do not want their lives to be ravaged by war, famine, or poverty. And so I want things to turn out better for everyone. This is not because having children makes me care more about everyone else, but because if the future is a nice place overall, it’ll be a nice place for those I love. I’ll want this even if I’m indifferent to the fates of others—or even wish them ill. (When do I want Hitler to have a safe car ride? When my children are in the backseat.)

Yes, those who are not parents may have other forces driving them to care about the future, and, of course, they might love other young people who are not their children. But still, parents have a particularly powerful and concrete reason to care. Ferguson shouldn’t have invoked Keynes’s homosexuality, but his core argument was plausible: Parents might not be better people, but, for purely instrumental reasons, it makes sense that the future state of the world really matters to them.

Unhealthily obsessed

In other ways, though, parenting makes us worse. Being a parent directs our time, energy, and love towards our children, and since these are finite, there is less left for everyone else. Julie Bindel worries about this in her own response to Ferguson:

I have seen the most passionately committed feminist activists go gaga once they give birth. All the promises such as "I'll still come on that march/go to that conference/burn down that sex shop" disappear when they sprog. All those in my circle with offspring seem to become unhealthily obsessed with their own little world. Principles go out of the window ("I still hate the private education system/healthcare but I am not putting my politics before my children"), and socialising becomes impossible.

(“When they sprog”! I love the British.)

Putting aside the specifics (burning down the sex shop?), Bindel is on the right track. Some parents are blunt about how little others matter relative to their own children. Here is Stephen Asma, in his book Against Fairness:

If some science-fiction sorcerer came to me with a button and said that I could save my son’s life by pressing it, but then (cue the dissonant music) ten strangers would die somewhere I’d have my finger down on it before he finished his cryptic challenge. If he raised it to one hundred strangers, a million, or the whole population, it would still take the same microsecond for me to push the button.

Let’s make it a bit more realistic. Suppose you have a 4-year-old who was born with damage to her heart and who will soon die. A mobster friend of yours makes you an offer: He will have his henchmen kidnap a child of the same age and then have a team of surgeons remove her heart and give it to your daughter. Your daughter will be perfectly healthy, and nobody will ever discover what you’ve done.¹

I don’t know what Asma would say about this, but even though I think of myself as a pretty partial person, and I really do love my children, I’m a hard no. We all draw lines somewhere; there are some limits to our biases. Asma might commit mass murder to save his son’s life, but I assume he wouldn’t do so to save his son from getting a sprained ankle.

But it’s not like I’m unbiased. If there is a waiting list for a life-saving operation, I’m willing to do what I can to get my kid to the top of the list. (Even though I’m aware that my child moving up the list means that some other child, perhaps more deserving in some objective sense, moves down.) I would do the same sort of thing when the stakes are lower; I have hustled to get my children access to good daycares and good schools.

Or consider Bindel’s description of the selfish parent who sends their kid to private schools and private doctors. That’s me! I’m all in favor of well-funded public education and public health care (I’m Canadian for God’s sake), but if the public options are awful and I can afford a better private education and health care, then no, I’m not going to let my kid suffer out of some diffuse sense of solidarity.

This brings me back to Darby’s line, which I think is very wise.

A competitive, individualistic society with a winner-takes-all economy pits parents against each other, but we can dream about a society that treats child-rearing as a collective enterprise and invests in policies that benefit every kid.

There are many people in Canada and elsewhere who think there should be no private option at all; it should be forbidden. I’m not one of them, but I can appreciate the logic here. If a private option is available and is better, those who love their children more than they love everyone else (that is, just about every parent) will, if they can afford it, consider exiting the public option. If you want the wealthy to have a personal stake in improving the options available to everyone, including the poor, then it’s reasonable enough to try to block that escape hatch. (But good luck with that: Outside of a totalitarian state, it’s hard to block parents from hiring tutors, or traveling for foreign medical care.)

To go back to the metaphor above, if you want people to really care about a foreign country, make sure their children are stuck there and can’t leave.

Not from benevolence

Somewhat perversely, the argument above for this sort of restriction reminds me of Adam Smith’s famous case in the free market’s favor. He argues that the genius of the market is that it transmutes selfishness into mutual benefit.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

I think Smith is right. But the same sort of logic can undergird a defense of a coercive mirror image of his free market, or (to put it in the gentler way that Darby does), “a society that treats child-rearing as a collective enterprise.” Adopting the language of Smith, in a world where one cannot exit the system that the poor have to use,

It is not from the benevolence of the rich parents that our public schools and public health care will thrive, but from their regard to the interests of their own beloved children.

Are parents better people? Not really. Parental love directs enormous concern toward a few particular people, leaving less for everyone else. But under the right circumstances, that partial love can be channeled into making the world better for everyone.²

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1. This example is adapted from an earlier post I wrote on loyalty.

2. Thanks to Christina Starmans and Claude’s Opus 5 for helpful comments on an earlier draft.