2023-12-01

Diana Fleischman

Okay. So. At this point we will hear from Diana Fleischman. We have heard a lot of reasons to panic and she will give a few reasons to not panic.

Today I am going to talk about how children are fundamentally resilient. The culture wars make it sound like this is not the case. I see there's two factions of this conference. I see a reproductive tech faction and a more trad faction. I will unite you both in your dislike of me.

I am a psychologist. I think about how human psychology evolved and how we evolved to survive and reproduce. From that perspective, it doesn't make sense that something bad happens to you and you're screwed up for the rest of your life. We evolved in severe harsh conditions compared to what we live in now.

One aspect that might prevent people from having children is the misconception that children are not resilient. One mistake and it's all over. It's a popular idea. In the Satanic panic, nobody was saying we should actually believe these children that clowns were eating children in front of them but instead ew shouldn't believe them. There are many ways to raise children and they are all basically fine.

We love our children. There's a smoke detector principle: you don't want a smoke detector that doesn't go off when there is a fire. You want it to go off when there isn't a fire. We are prone to think our children are being damaged or hurt when they might not be because it's more adaptive to make that mistake rather than the opposite mistake that our children aren't being hurt when they actually are.

When I nursed my 2 daughters, and I have to get to 2.1 so let me know how to have 10% of a daughter... I look at online forums full of neurotic professional women who were extremely worried about their children. The idea that pregnancy and children and raising them is fundamentally fragile is a common misconception.

Simone and Malcolm talk about a sterilizing meme like one that says you should get a PhD before you have a child. Another sterilizing meme is one that the idea that you'll never be able to be happy or afford retirement if you have children. The idea that children are fragile is another sterilizing meme especially among highly conscientious people. Conscientious people are those who show up on time, keep appointments, people who are responsible.

A lot of these studies about how children are harmed by different things are genetically confounded. Behavior geneticists have been studying humans for a long time. They parse the influences on human psychology in three main areas: genes, which your parents pass down. There's shared environment like family at home, and then non-shared environment. In the book "Selfish reasons to have more kids", he talks about what would happen if yo had an identical twin raised with you vs not raised with you. One not raised with you would be remarkably similar. A lot of what makes you "you" is actually genetic. Despite what the culture says, like if you read a different book you are forever screwed up, well actually your genes are way more important than the drag queen story hour.

It looks like family socialization effects are not large, prominent or pronounced for many traits. Things that you might think are heavily influenced by the family environment like what age boys start to have sex is not at all influenced by family environment. For girls it is somewhat. If you get divorced. Proneness to depression or anxiety. All these things are not influenced by your family environment. The point that Kaplan makes in his book is that this should free us from the idea that we have to micromanage every aspect of our children's lives or every aspect of their consumption of media or everyone they socialize with because these effects are not huge.

There are some... these studies tend to be on middle class western families. WEIRD: Western educated industrialized rich democracies. Most of these studies are in WEIRD countries. But the data looks like for the most part that our parents their effects on us are not huge and they tend to be somewhat short-lived. If you go to church as a kid, you might go to church in your 20s but you will eventually regress to your genetic predisposition to going to church.

The effects of family environment tend to fade out over time. We often become more and more like our parents rather than what they tried to show us to be. There's a lot of examples of how resilient people are and how resilient non-human animals are. Traditionalists don't like the comparisons to puppies or monkeys they ask why should I care but I think monkeys are very relevant to us. Even in very unnatural environments, animals tend to thrive.

There were some experiments in the 1950s and 1960s where he gave a baby monkey as much food as they needed but raised only with their own peers. The other group raised with his mother. There are very subtle differences between these two groups. There's also other studies that looked at cross-fostering where they give a baby to a genetically unrelated mother and a subset of these monkeys have anxious or depressive genetic predisposition and the genetic predisposition wins out basically in cross-fostering experiments.

Another example that people who are more traditional tried to talk about is father absence. Everyone thinks that father absence predisposes people to psychopathy which is people who don't feel guilt or are predisposed to criminality and criminal behavior. One thing that is interesting is that if a boy, and htey are more predisposed to vulnerabilities from father absence... if the father dies rather than leaves home, these effects are less pronounced. You can't randomly assign men to leave their amilies or stay. The kinds of men who leave their families are more likely to be more psychopathic or criminal or have anohter family. Rather than it being father absence perse, it's actually the genes here that causes these effects we're seeing. This is why people see confounding factors. Even if they stay, there might still be father absence predispositions.

Another thing that makes us think environment matters a lot more is that we choose our environments. We choose and alter our environments. Say someone is uniquely sexually motivated in their teens. The culture might say that pornography made this person a degenerate or pervert but actually they were a pervert the moment they were conceived they just didn't know it yet.

All these ideas contribute to a culture of safetyism and helicopter parenting. Safetyism is something that is uniquely applied to left-wing people. Left is associated with over-protection towards children like not letting them play outside or being afraid they will get diseases and over-vaccination against diseases. They are more concerned about injuries, bullying, or climbing trees. More trad people tend to say let kids be kids. They see things like getting injured or playing outside as being more natural. From an evolutionary perspective, this is also an effect on children: those things we evolved to cope with like being injured or even seeing things that aren't necessarily for children's eyes... we evolved to cope with those things.

Things we did not evolve to cope with are things like endocrine disruptors, prominent social media usage, all the environmental.... the environment we live in now is not like our ancestral environment.

The right-wingers are associated with other kinds of concerns, but some of those concerns are also as unfounded as the left's concerns about children playing outside. The right is more concerned about public school indoctrination. But from behavioral genetics perspective, your genes matter more about what you will believe rather than the tiktoks of your teachers in school. There's also this idea on the right about "groomers" for some reason your children are so attractive that your children would want to talk to them about social justice and becoming gay or something. This makes the world seem like a deeply unsafe place. These ideas can also have an influence on whether or not people choose to have as many children as they might want to have. Homeschooling kids is obviously a lot more difficult than putting them in public schools.

You might have heard of Katie Foust who is against surrogacy and gamete donation like creating children with eggs and sperms. The evidence doesn't bear out that being the product of surrogacy or gamete donation is uniquely harmful. Parents who choose surrogacy tend to be very wealthy, and so surrogate children tend to have quite good outcomes. But Katie has called this being a product of gamete donation is a "primal wound".... I suggested to her that the future might have artificial wombs. She asked me to imagine what it would be like to be a child who has never heard a heartbeat in the womb. I was thinking, what? Just make a heartbeat and play it to the fetus.

There's this idea that there's a right way to raise children. If something offends these sensibilities, like an artificial womb, the thinking is don't pursue it. I'm not saying artificial wombs are necessarily a solution to the birth rate issue. I have also heard from right-wingers that daycare is like making children hold their breath all day. We would see the damage in the data if there was some.

The data is mixed on many of these issues and not at all clear. There is harm for children not socializing freely, compared to the harm of being a product of sperm donation. During the pandemic we saw how harmful being kept indoors without social contact was.

Just because you see a fence in the field, you shouldn't tear it down because it might have some useful functions. We shouldn't do that to parenting either, but children are raised extremely different all around the world. You might say some ways of parenting will more likely make children more likely to be productive members of society but there are so many ways that children are raised including by other children themselves. If there was some terrible way to raise children that always turned out badly, then you might think that those memes would be more communicated.

People talk about the nuclear family, but I see a lot of things that look like that. The idea that traditional methods of raising children are better might have something to do with selection effects. Trad people are usually emotionally stable people and aren't likely to glom on to modernist memes and aren't high on openness. The idea that trad raises children better might not be about culture but rather the kinds of people who choose to be trad.

Another issue is mental illness or online dating and now they are more likely to pair up together with the same mental illnesses. People with mental illnesses are more likely to get into relationships with each othre. This increase in assortive mating is one reason we see a divergence in children.

I have a bunch of other female professor friends who are older and had one child. They believe that you should "hold space" with their toddler. Attachment parenting, where if you don't respond to every whim of the child then they would never be able to love or whatever. So if you don't hold space during their tantrum then they end up being a jigalo or something. Or agonizing over food; in toddlers, if you just let them what they want to eat they eat a pretty good macro ratio on their own.

Whether or not your kids are happy or loved is important. Every moment your child is happy and loved is important. But it is also important that you structure your children's lives in a way that makes it possible for you to have more children. It shouldn't be structured in a way that assumes if you don't respond to them in a specific way then you need to pay $500,000 in therapy.

Just looking at children from an evolutionary perspective doesn't make any sense to think of children as irreperably damaged by things that happen to them in their environment. There's a naturalist heuristic- things that we tolerated over evolutionary history including violence are things that we should be able to recover from in a reasonable way without therapy or SSRI. There's an idea that if... society tells you something is uniquely harmful, then you will experience it as such and have psychological effects. If you were told that being beaten up as a kid, then you are less likely to get over it. Our culture informs us as to whether we believe are resilient or fragile.

Life is resilient. We see this all over the planet. It finds a way. The more we understand children are resilient then maybe this will help some people have more children than they otherwise would.