You're Wrong About Being Right About Being Wrong About Fertility

I recently decided to pick on a good article by a small author on Substack. Considering that Skylar only published one post that did great numbers and then didn’t seem to do anything else on the platform, there’s a good chance he doesn’t even know he knocked it out of the park on his first try.

While I maintain that I am Completely Correct regarding the contradiction between the idea that older kids can help parents with younger kids and the idea that a couple in their thirties can still have three or four kids if they truly wanted to, this post isn’t about that.

Skylar is making the accurate observation that delayed marriage/family formation and childless adults are not the full story behind the decline in fertility. His claim that the decrease from large families (more than three kids) down to the standard one or two kids normalized in modern society explains a large portion of the drop in births. This is obviously correct in the sense that, yes, there are a lot fewer large families around these days and a theoretically ideal replacement TFR of 2.1 is hard to arrive at if everyone who has kids only has one or two.

My issue isn’t with any of the specific claims that Skylar or anyone else who attempts to put their finger on the causes of declining fertility is making. Most of the time, people are accurately identifying one piece of the puzzle, sometimes a more or less crucial component, of what we’re seeing happen but can’t quite put into words. The problem I have with not only this post, but basically every post on the topic is that I have a pathological impulse to flip the proposed cause-and-effect around to ask if maybe the thing that we’re identifying as the cause is actually the consequence.

To continue with this example, if it’s true that modern parenting doesn’t scale well—it’s highly-involved, requires a lot of resources like time & money, etc.—how do we know that it’s the intensive parenting that’s causing people to only have one or two kids? Couldn’t it be the other way around? Couldn’t it be true that intensive parenting is the effect of people only having one or two kids? The only facts we have on hand (people have fewer kids and modern parenting is very intensive) would look similar regardless of which way the cause-and-effect relationship worked.

My issue is really that we can’t separate all the factors independently and examine them in a vacuum. Take the other idea Skylar proposed in his article: larger families require a shift in parenting styles that are more hands-off or free-range. Yes, an intensive parenting style does not scale beyond two or three kids. The implication, even if not explicitly stated, is that a change in parenting could result in being able to juggle more kids. How do we know it’s not the other way around? Why can’t it be that people who have more kids are forced to adjust their family life as a result?

I’m technically on record as claiming that neurotic moms are killing birth rates, but if we’re being totally honest, that was a post intended to make fun of neurotic women more than it was a true attempt to establish an actual cause for declining fertility rates.

The truth is, I have absolutely no idea if there is one or one thousand causes for our Impending Population Collapse. What I do know is that my contrarian ass can’t help but immediately question if it’s the other way around from what the author is claiming. Not in some sort of “college kid who just learned about causation not equaling correlation” kind of way, but in a more “annoying personality” kind of way.

In my very first interaction with professor Darby Saxbe on Substack, I asked her if her noted decline in brain gray matter among new fathers was actually caused by the act of becoming a father or if it was just the result of not sleeping anymore. It would look the same either way! If holding your newborn baby suddenly triggered the release of a protein that attached to some receptor or if the fact that you’re constantly waking up every night to change the baby for feeding, the gray matter would decline. For the record, I think we can recreate the decline in brain function in men by blowing an air horn in their ear every three to four hours. No baby needed.

I’m going to continue to ask this very simple (and annoying) question every time I see either an explicit or implicit claim about basically any cause-and-effect dynamic, regardless of whether it has to do with parenting or not. Is it the baby toy that’s causing the development or the development that’s causing the baby to play with the toy? Are video games causing modern men to be less handy or a lack of independent outdoor activities? Can a parent teach their kids how to speak another language or does linguistic development happen through peer groups? Can a father of two young children who works full time and has household chores to do and also runs a Substack blog publish weekly posts or will he start running out of steam at some point?