
After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids - certmd
https://qz.com/work/1614893/after-men-in-spain-got-paternity-leave-they-wanted-fewer-kids/
======
dk1138
As a dad who has taken two 12w paternity, I realized a few things after the
birth of my second child.

• There was no limit to the amount of love I could give to my second child.

• There was a limit of time and attention I could share with both children
which I felt started to hamper my ability to share that love.

• The logistics of a second child made everything take exponentially more
time. Meals, transport, dressing, wrangling...it all became much harder.
Manageable with my wife--far more difficult when I am alone with them (which
is every morning and evening since my wife has a longer commute).

At this point, I can't envision having a third child. I can't imagine
splitting my time and attention into thirds. I have a minivan and I'm not sure
how I'd fit the kids and requisite stuff in the car. I'm certainly not ready
to handle getting three kids ready in the morning alone. And I'm not ready for
the guilt when I travel for work.

How did paternity play into this? With insights from my brother who has two
kids, the costs didn't take me by surprise. The effort and complete
consumption of time and energy did. Would I trade it for anything? No. Do I
think I can handle more children? I think I've learned about myself that no, I
can't--both because I don't feel like I would be my best self in that
situation and because that would then reflect on my interactions with my kids.

~~~
pwinnski
As father to three children, my experience is that you only think two is
exponentially more complex than one. At least with two, they don't always
outnumber you!

~~~
lostphilosopher
"It's a whole different game when you have to switch from man on man coverage
to zone defense."

~~~
geebee
And eventually, perimeter ;)

------
nickelcitymario
While the idea of the article is entertaining, the data is ridiculous.

3 data points: '00, '05, and '10.

The policy came into play in '07\. Yet the downward trend was already visible
in '05\. It barely changed for '10.

A more interesting (and honest) take of the data is in women's desire for more
children. It was on a decline in '05, but ticked up sharply for '10\. So if I
was writing this, I would have said: "After men in Spain got paternity leave,
women wanted more kids."

~~~
magduf
Here's my snarky theory about it: after men got paternity leave, they were
forced to be at home and help with the child-rearing, which took some of the
burden off the mothers. This made the mothers want more kids because now they
didn't have to do so much work.

However, now the men got to see firsthand what a pain in the ass kids are,
instead of being able to relegate that work to their wives, so now they don't
want so many.

~~~
basetop
That's the pathetic "liberal" sexist caricature you see on TV and media. And
like most caricature in media, it's nonsense.

The problem is that both men and women are deciding to having less kids. And
that trend has continued with maternity leave, paternity leave and even paying
people to have children.

In poor countries, they have more kids. Is that because of your caricature or
lack of it?

Europe has provided great benefits to women and men to have more kids. Birth
rates have declined.

[https://www.thelocal.it/20180627/italy-declining-
birthrate-p...](https://www.thelocal.it/20180627/italy-declining-birthrate-
population)

Governments are even paying women to have kids and that hasn't helped.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when-
governments-pay-people-to-have-babies)

The only thing that increases birth rates is an increase of poorer and less
educated women. The wealthier and better educated women are, the less children
they have. That is the only consistent correlation across ethnicities,
cultures, religions, etc. Educate women and reach a certain level of wealth
and birth rates drop.

It's true in japan

[https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/japans-births-and-
marriages-...](https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/japans-births-and-marriages-
spiral-to-record-low/)

korea, china to iran and all the way to europe.

If we really wanted to increase birth rates, kicking females out of school and
removing any and all benefits would be better than increasing benefits. It's
counterintuitive, but it's true. Or maybe we could accept that population
decline is going to happen and prepare for that? It's strange how we think we
can bribe women to have more children. That's never going to happen, so we
should learn to live with our current reality.

~~~
bazooka_penguin
I think you've walked around the part where traditional cultures actively
pushed women to get married and have kids, forced even, through arranged
marriages or selling them to basically go live with the man's family. It's not
so much as drawing back benefits as it is literally forcing them either
through extreme social pressure and isolation or physical force. Anything less
has been a slow decline as we slowly drift away from that sort of strict
culture

I recall at least a few articles suggesting that among ancient humans far
fewer men than women engage in reproduction, suggesting that only a handful of
men (proportionally speaking) were selected to breed by a larger population of
women. I hate that it sounds like incel speak but we could probably see more
babies if we 1) get rid of monogamous culture altogether and 2) limit birth
control options. The alternative is to return to a stricter marriage and baby
making enforcement culture.

I'm not advocating for anything here to be clear. I just dont think theres a
"solution" that lands perfectly where everyone wants it to

~~~
magduf
Exactly. Birthrates were high in the past largely because women had no power,
no choices about their future, and birth control didn't really exist. Their
entire value in society was as an incubator and sex toy. Now that's changed,
and surprise surprise, they don't want to have a bunch of kids, because kids
are a lot of work.

Add into this that families have changed. It used to be that people lived with
their extended families, so parents had help raising kids, from the
grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, etc. Now no one lives with their extended
families, and have gone to the "nuclear family" model, and raising a bunch of
kids with only 2 parents is just too much work, so parents stop at 1 or 2, if
they have any at all.

Paying women to have kids isn't going to work unless you're going to pay them
enough to hire a full-time nanny.

------
wtdata
And this (the jumping to conclusions and the lack of data points in the
article) is the reason people in real sciences sneer at sociology...

This isn't science, this is politics.

~~~
basetop
Or as Richard Feynmann wisely and correctly called it - pseudoscience.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo)

It's pseudoscience used by people to push ideological and political agenda.
Ever since science pretty much knocked religion down a peg or two, the
activists created a new form of "religion" to further political goals.

------
amelius
Fallacy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc)

------
narag
Mind the date:

 _Economists studying the effects of the original 2007 policy..._

~~~
wazoox
_The global financial crisis, for example, hit Spain in full force about a
year after the leave policy was introduced._ Yes, I'd been extremely cautious
drawing any conclusion...

------
tathougies
California's (or san Francisco's... Not sure) six weeks of paid paternity
leave made this dad want more kids. Babies are the best! Maybe if they gave
more time off they'd want more children

~~~
magduf
After seeing other peoples' ADHD kids and what misery it is to try to parent
them, I don't have much desire to have any kids.

~~~
Domenic_S
You do you, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that anyone who says "I
don't want kids" should be left alone on the matter.

On the flip side I think a lot of parents do this to themselves. Kids are not
born knowing how to be polite, respectful, play well with others, etc, it has
to be trained. It is an exhausting thing to train but it pays dividends.
Ironically the less effort you spend on this the worse your kids get, making
it even more of a misery to parent them.

Of course there are exceptions (I don't know if you were being
serious/clinical with ADHD but that's one of them)

~~~
magduf
I don't know about a _clinical_ diagnosis of ADHD, but in my observation,
American kids certainly act this way, and have terrible behavior in general.
You're right, this stuff has to be trained, but American parents have been
failing badly at this for a while now.

I was recently in Japan on vacation, and by contrast, all the children there
were extremely-well behaved. It made me think I might actually like to have a
kid even, something I never feel when I'm in the US because kids (and adults
too) are so poorly behaved.

------
jon-wood
According to the article "Farré and González think that spending more time
with their children—or the prospect of having to do so—may have made men more
acutely aware of the effort and costs associated with childrearing".

Another (arguably more positive) reason could be that new fathers formed a
better relationship with their child, and be extension felt more fulfilled in
that relationship. That could potentially then lead to them not feeling the
need to have more children.

~~~
sudhirj
Whether the study or data is flawed or not, anecdotally it makes perfect
sense. Splitting childcare duties with my wife have given me an excellent
relationship with my child, but I’m sure as hell not going to do this shit
again.

------
marssaxman
Well, that certainly congrues with my personal experience. As the oldest of
eleven children, I left home with a strong set of babysitting skills and an
even stronger desire not to raise any children of my own.

------
Kurtz79
"As the authors point out, it’s impossible to draw sweeping conclusions from
this observation of a single data point in a single country. Correlation isn’t
causation, and it’s possible that other factors weighed more heavily than
paternity leave on men’s family preferences."

TLDR: "You just wasted 5 minutes of your life".

------
TuringTest
That's a good thing, there are too many people in the world already. Funny how
values change when you actually have to deal with the consequences of your
actions, though.

~~~
lm28469
Let's see how we handle going from a 4+:1 working:retired ratio to something
closer to 1:1 though. It's very concerning, especially with all these "XX% of
the population live pay-check to pay-check" articles. Up until now the whole
system was relying on continuous growth to take care of the elderly (both
physically and financially).

It's a good thing in the long term, but it might suck big time short term
wise.

~~~
skybrian
I'm confused by your reference to people who live paycheck to paycheck.
Shouldn't lower supply and higher demand for workers result in higher wages?

At the same time, automation will result in lower demand. Hard to say which
trend is more important. Combined, I would expect a lot fewer truck drivers
and more healthcare workers.

~~~
lm28469
When you have a 4:1 worker:retired ratio the burden on workers is much lighter
than when you have a 1:1 ratio. See public retirement funds as a big ponzi
scheme, it only works if people getting in > people cashing out. Living pay
checks to pay checks means that you have 0 margin and will l00% rely on
society to survive.

> Shouldn't lower supply and higher demand for workers result in higher wages?

I don't think it's that simple. It's a societal / economical problem on a
world scale, not an economy 101 course, I don't think anyone can predict where
we're going but it'll definitely require some major changes.

> At the same time, automation will

"Automation will ..." has been used for 60+ years. If all these prophets were
right we'd be working 3 hours a day by now. As long as we (collectively) are
not ok with people not working, all automation does is moving people from
shitty jobs to other shitty jobs (mostly in the service industry).

~~~
skybrian
I see a combination of concern for the elderly (who will take care of them)
and contempt for the work required (these are shitty jobs, aren't they)?

I don't particularly want to do that work either, so I'm certainly not immune
to this criticism. But I think we might need to get over that. Since it's
actually pretty important, this work should be respected and better paid, and
it's actually a good thing if other work can be automated and more people move
into taking care of others.

