Eliezer is absolutely right about deregulating childcare. The details depend on the specific country, so I don’t know how much of this applies to others, but here e.g. the regulation for kindergartens is so detailed, that the only way to start a kindergarten is to build a new building specifically for it that would comply with the regulations. If someone donated to you an existing building that was originally built for a different purpose, e.g. former company offices, fixing it to comply with the regulations would mean almost rebuilding it from scratch. So, the available kindergartens in big cities are insufficient, and it is almost impossible to build new ones.
I strongly disagree with the argument that kindergartens are inefficient, because they only subsidize parents who want to spend less time with their kids. That seems like a very stupid way to put it. First, people are often uncertain, especially before they have their first child, what will it be like. Some people expect they will enjoy having children, and then they find out that they actually hate the experience in near mode. Some people expect they will hate the experience (but are willing to endure it for some reason), and then they find out that they actually love it. You simply probably don’t know, until you try it. From this perspective, the kindergarten availability can be seen as an insurance: if you happen to love to spend 24 hours with your kids, great, but if it turns out that it actually drives you crazy, there is a way out. Second, there is a huge difference between “being with your kids” and “being with your kids 24 hours a day”. For example, when my kids get sick, so they stay at home the whole day, instead of being at the school and kindergarten, everyone’s mood gets worse. It’s not that we hate each other, it’s just that we get bored, and the kids are sometimes bad at being independent, and the parents are sometimes tired or busy doing something other than taking care of their kids. Third, parents sometimes need to leave the house, and sometimes it is difficult to take the little kids with you. -- Actually, to put it bluntly, this attitude is one of the things I consider the main reason for people having fewer kids; keep telling people that unless they spend 24 hours a day, every day, with their kids, it makes them bad parents, and some of them will decide that having kids probably isn’t the right thing for them. But our parents and grandparents also didn’t spend 24 hours a day babysitting their kids, and used whatever help was available.
When talking about education, let’s ban all homework, and all those projects that kids make at home. (Half seriously.) Because that usually means extra work for the parent, which scales linearly with the number of kids. Some kids are smart and conscientious, and will do their homework alone. But quite often it requires the parent at least nagging them to keep working. Imagine having four children, which all need some help with homework and with the extra projects; and that’s after you have returned from your full-time job, and before you start cooking the dinner.
Speaking about the full-time job, maybe it is time to shorten the workweek. That should be the common-sense response to women entering the workforce en masse. If you say that “women stay at home” is sexist and unfair, you may have a point, but the fact remains that the home still exists and requires some work to be done. So maybe a reasonable new norm could be “women stay at home half of the time, and men the other half of the time”? Thus we could get the benefits of “some adult is at home, taking care of the kids” and gender equality at the same time. In my experience, for a man, finding a part-time job is almost impossible. But if part-time jobs were easy to find for everyone, it would become easy for parents e.g. to have a part-time job each and homeschool their children.
There is a lot of anti-children propaganda in our culture. People are told all the time that having kids is difficult. Yes, that is true. You know what else is difficult? Lots of meaningful things. Are we told to avoid all meaningful things, or only to avoid having kids? I suppose it is the latter, because I do not hear the same propaganda telling people to stop having jobs, despite jobs being difficult, too. Women who have kids while young are treated as low-status, like they are too stupid to have a successful career, or too brainwashed by patriarchy to follow their dreams. (But what if having a big happy family is their dream? No, this is not the kind of the dream that is supported by the modern narrative. You are supposed to work for a corporation, and find the meaning of your life in endless meetings.)
Some anti-children beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fewer kids there are, the fewer friends they can find at playgrounds. Heck, the fewer playgrounds there will be. And that in turn makes having kids more difficult. If your friends believe that having kids young is low-status, if you have kids while young, you can no longer participate in their social activities, which will make you feel lonely and low-status. But if instead everyone had kids right after university, you could bring them to the playground together, and your social connections could grow even stronger. The fewer people have kids, the more anti-children talk you will hear, and the more anti-children legislation will be made.
A strong and often repeated argument is that women need to be financially independent, and that this goal trumps everything (the second part is not made explicitly). Honestly, I am not sure how to solve this, because it naively seems to me that even if we gave extra million dollars to every woman on her 18th birthday, it would merely result in things getting more expensive, so now the woman would need the million dollars and a full-time job in order to remain truly financially independent. My answer is that parenting was never meant to be a single-person project, but if you want both parents to contribute equally, you either need 100% free kindergartens and schools, or enough part-time jobs for men, or women need to take the risk of financial dependence. You simply can’t leave the baby at home alone while both parents are at work, duh. Even the free kindergartens and schools have their problems, because the kids often get sick. Also, we love to complain about schools and many of us would like to homeschool. Basically, our society is designed for people who have no kids, because there is no way to make it work unless (a) you get exceptionally rich, which is nice, but not an option for everyone, or (b) a woman decides to go against the narrative and risks financial dependence, or (c) we procrastinate on starting families until we have enough savings, but then we can’t have many kids because we have already run out of time.
Eliezer is absolutely right about deregulating childcare. The details depend on the specific country, so I don’t know how much of this applies to others, but here e.g. the regulation for kindergartens is so detailed, that the only way to start a kindergarten is to build a new building specifically for it that would comply with the regulations. If someone donated to you an existing building that was originally built for a different purpose, e.g. former company offices, fixing it to comply with the regulations would mean almost rebuilding it from scratch. So, the available kindergartens in big cities are insufficient, and it is almost impossible to build new ones.
I strongly disagree with the argument that kindergartens are inefficient, because they only subsidize parents who want to spend less time with their kids. That seems like a very stupid way to put it. First, people are often uncertain, especially before they have their first child, what will it be like. Some people expect they will enjoy having children, and then they find out that they actually hate the experience in near mode. Some people expect they will hate the experience (but are willing to endure it for some reason), and then they find out that they actually love it. You simply probably don’t know, until you try it. From this perspective, the kindergarten availability can be seen as an insurance: if you happen to love to spend 24 hours with your kids, great, but if it turns out that it actually drives you crazy, there is a way out. Second, there is a huge difference between “being with your kids” and “being with your kids 24 hours a day”. For example, when my kids get sick, so they stay at home the whole day, instead of being at the school and kindergarten, everyone’s mood gets worse. It’s not that we hate each other, it’s just that we get bored, and the kids are sometimes bad at being independent, and the parents are sometimes tired or busy doing something other than taking care of their kids. Third, parents sometimes need to leave the house, and sometimes it is difficult to take the little kids with you. -- Actually, to put it bluntly, this attitude is one of the things I consider the main reason for people having fewer kids; keep telling people that unless they spend 24 hours a day, every day, with their kids, it makes them bad parents, and some of them will decide that having kids probably isn’t the right thing for them. But our parents and grandparents also didn’t spend 24 hours a day babysitting their kids, and used whatever help was available.
When talking about education, let’s ban all homework, and all those projects that kids make at home. (Half seriously.) Because that usually means extra work for the parent, which scales linearly with the number of kids. Some kids are smart and conscientious, and will do their homework alone. But quite often it requires the parent at least nagging them to keep working. Imagine having four children, which all need some help with homework and with the extra projects; and that’s after you have returned from your full-time job, and before you start cooking the dinner.
Speaking about the full-time job, maybe it is time to shorten the workweek. That should be the common-sense response to women entering the workforce en masse. If you say that “women stay at home” is sexist and unfair, you may have a point, but the fact remains that the home still exists and requires some work to be done. So maybe a reasonable new norm could be “women stay at home half of the time, and men the other half of the time”? Thus we could get the benefits of “some adult is at home, taking care of the kids” and gender equality at the same time. In my experience, for a man, finding a part-time job is almost impossible. But if part-time jobs were easy to find for everyone, it would become easy for parents e.g. to have a part-time job each and homeschool their children.
There is a lot of anti-children propaganda in our culture. People are told all the time that having kids is difficult. Yes, that is true. You know what else is difficult? Lots of meaningful things. Are we told to avoid all meaningful things, or only to avoid having kids? I suppose it is the latter, because I do not hear the same propaganda telling people to stop having jobs, despite jobs being difficult, too. Women who have kids while young are treated as low-status, like they are too stupid to have a successful career, or too brainwashed by patriarchy to follow their dreams. (But what if having a big happy family is their dream? No, this is not the kind of the dream that is supported by the modern narrative. You are supposed to work for a corporation, and find the meaning of your life in endless meetings.)
Some anti-children beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fewer kids there are, the fewer friends they can find at playgrounds. Heck, the fewer playgrounds there will be. And that in turn makes having kids more difficult. If your friends believe that having kids young is low-status, if you have kids while young, you can no longer participate in their social activities, which will make you feel lonely and low-status. But if instead everyone had kids right after university, you could bring them to the playground together, and your social connections could grow even stronger. The fewer people have kids, the more anti-children talk you will hear, and the more anti-children legislation will be made.
A strong and often repeated argument is that women need to be financially independent, and that this goal trumps everything (the second part is not made explicitly). Honestly, I am not sure how to solve this, because it naively seems to me that even if we gave extra million dollars to every woman on her 18th birthday, it would merely result in things getting more expensive, so now the woman would need the million dollars and a full-time job in order to remain truly financially independent. My answer is that parenting was never meant to be a single-person project, but if you want both parents to contribute equally, you either need 100% free kindergartens and schools, or enough part-time jobs for men, or women need to take the risk of financial dependence. You simply can’t leave the baby at home alone while both parents are at work, duh. Even the free kindergartens and schools have their problems, because the kids often get sick. Also, we love to complain about schools and many of us would like to homeschool. Basically, our society is designed for people who have no kids, because there is no way to make it work unless (a) you get exceptionally rich, which is nice, but not an option for everyone, or (b) a woman decides to go against the narrative and risks financial dependence, or (c) we procrastinate on starting families until we have enough savings, but then we can’t have many kids because we have already run out of time.