Thank you for writing this! I was wondering whether Kat’s babysitting test would lead to false negatives, and was thinking of writing a post polling LW on the subject. To add more anecdata, I asked a friend who’s been a dad for… 8 years, I believe, and he thought that he just cares about / likes / finds it easier to tolerate his own kids in a way that’s not true with others’ kids, and he expects this would generalize to other parents as well.
(I—a man in my mid 30s without much experience actually spending time with kids—have had a clear felt sense of wanting a kid for several years now, but value my time and energy fairly highly, so Kat’s post really gave me pause. I still feel an emotional pull to having a kid that I don’t think would be satisfied by the alternatives in her post, even though I think it will have lots of costs/difficulties.)
I endorse this conclusion. Speaking only for myself, I am not a person who “likes kids”. I tend to be indifferent and easily bored by other peoples’ kids. But I feel completely differently about my own kids, and the anecdata that I have available to me suggests that this is a common experience.
I wrote a comment on the blog, because to me Kat Wood’s reasoning is so off the mark.
To me the upside of having kids is the deep emotional connection to them. Everything else is comparatively irrelevant. Or maybe a better phrasing would be that almost all upsides of having kids are downstream of that emotional connection.
Babysitting is like parenting except without the same emotional connection. If you remove the emotional connection from an experience does the result allow you to evaluate the original experience? No, it becomes something very different.
It boggles my mind that so many women who have strong emotional reactions to little children manage to convince themselves that they don’t want any. Like, if you react like that to a random toddler … the emotion is going to be a hundred times stronger when it’s your kid.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
Given all the effort that Kat describes having spent on figuring out the question, and even doing empirical tests that led her to reverse her original decision, this feels like a very weird characterization.
Do you think that the advice she gives describes an open ended decision making process that is going to help people figure out what is the right choice for them?
I think most people should have kids. I also think most people will be led away from having kids if they follow her advice. I certainly would have been.
I think it is pretty clear that all the advice she gives is strongly colored by her own eventual conclusion. So even if her conclusion wasn’t post-hoc, her advice—the content, the framing, the situations she describes, the media she recommends—is.
I consider the interview to be large passive negative impact—to use her own terminology.
Thank you for writing this! I was wondering whether Kat’s babysitting test would lead to false negatives, and was thinking of writing a post polling LW on the subject. To add more anecdata, I asked a friend who’s been a dad for… 8 years, I believe, and he thought that he just cares about / likes / finds it easier to tolerate his own kids in a way that’s not true with others’ kids, and he expects this would generalize to other parents as well.
(I—a man in my mid 30s without much experience actually spending time with kids—have had a clear felt sense of wanting a kid for several years now, but value my time and energy fairly highly, so Kat’s post really gave me pause. I still feel an emotional pull to having a kid that I don’t think would be satisfied by the alternatives in her post, even though I think it will have lots of costs/difficulties.)
I endorse this conclusion. Speaking only for myself, I am not a person who “likes kids”. I tend to be indifferent and easily bored by other peoples’ kids. But I feel completely differently about my own kids, and the anecdata that I have available to me suggests that this is a common experience.
I wrote a comment on the blog, because to me Kat Wood’s reasoning is so off the mark.
To me the upside of having kids is the deep emotional connection to them. Everything else is comparatively irrelevant. Or maybe a better phrasing would be that almost all upsides of having kids are downstream of that emotional connection.
Babysitting is like parenting except without the same emotional connection. If you remove the emotional connection from an experience does the result allow you to evaluate the original experience? No, it becomes something very different.
It boggles my mind that so many women who have strong emotional reactions to little children manage to convince themselves that they don’t want any. Like, if you react like that to a random toddler … the emotion is going to be a hundred times stronger when it’s your kid.
The entire interview is not about decision making about having kids, it’s entirely post-hoc rationalisations for not having kids.
Given all the effort that Kat describes having spent on figuring out the question, and even doing empirical tests that led her to reverse her original decision, this feels like a very weird characterization.
Do you think that the advice she gives describes an open ended decision making process that is going to help people figure out what is the right choice for them?
I think most people should have kids. I also think most people will be led away from having kids if they follow her advice. I certainly would have been.
I think it is pretty clear that all the advice she gives is strongly colored by her own eventual conclusion. So even if her conclusion wasn’t post-hoc, her advice—the content, the framing, the situations she describes, the media she recommends—is.
I consider the interview to be large passive negative impact—to use her own terminology.