In Defense of the Marginal Baby

Casey Handmer's blog

This Father’s Day, I took some notes on parenting and put them together here. The purpose of this post is to strongly advocate for people to increment their child number, ideally recursively. If you have two, go for three! Five? Six is barely 16% more. I currently have four children, and I think I’m just getting the hang of it.

This post indexes on my own experience and is thus most likely to be helpful to younger men. It’s necessarily contingent and personal, but I think it may be useful to others. Your mileage may vary.

Here are some of my observations around having children. Some of these I was quite surprised by. I may update this list from time to time.

1. Children are surprisingly fun, even in the pre-verbal, highly dependent stage. The first one is a bit of a shock, but my working assumption was that family life would involve two kids, five years of frustration and pain, then some enjoyable family life, then them leaving for college as I move into late middle age. Instead, I’m in my late 30s with four children and trying to figure out how to have another four. My eldest is seven, but they’re all a lot of fun.

2. Babies can be messy but you don’t care. A firmware update changes how you feel about diapers. You get good at washing your hands or running clothes through the washer.

3. Similarly, the flaw in our evolution is that the appeal of children is not very salient until you actually have them. Evolution didn’t need us to want children, it just gave us sex drive and the rest took care of itself. This process is thwarted by the modern world. But you can just do things – like make arbitrary quantities of individually sovereign trainable natural intelligences, all with equipment you can find in your own home!

4. The first few months of the first baby is hard work for all involved. But you only get to experience that variety of suffering once, and adapting to irregular sleep is like altitude training. It gives you superpowers.

5. A Snoo is worth the money. Mostly because it becomes the first line of defence for a fussing baby who wants to go back to sleep, and breaks the reflex to go pick up a baby who just needs to fart or something.

6. There are few experiences better than being a napping substrate for a newborn baby.

7. Newborn babies are only super tiny for a few weeks. Enjoy it! The later children go by much faster.

8. Babies heads smell really good because they live on milk and emit ketones.

9. Being a new dad can be a bit nerve-wracking. Babies seem so helpless and fragile. But they’re actually very robust and have usability features, otherwise humans would have gone extinct long ago. There are only about four things that could be wrong (hungry, tired, bored, wrong temp) and you’ll just know what it is.

10. Babies get a software update about every week. After 50 software updates they gain walking. After about 100, talking.

11. Children are very adaptable and down for adventures. I know a few young families that are overwhelmed by the very concept of leaving the house. And I know others who take kids with them everywhere. Humans are a nomadic species, and children are very transportable. I have hiked all day in the Sierras with my then four year old, who never felt tired or hungry as long as she was holding my hand. We routinely do long road trips and fly in planes with our whole tribe. Remember, the ancestral environment did not contain iPads. Keep the dopamine diet under control!

12. Family life is an incredible adventure. You never know what will happen. It has exceeded every expectation. But you have to approach it understanding that you don’t get to unilaterally set every agenda and surprises will occur!

13. I had no idea what was in store when I married Christine Moran! Many excellent surprises!

14. 98% of the parents I know regret not starting (much) sooner. Younger parents have more energy and fewer fertility issues.

15. Your (n+1)th child will be easier, cheaper, and more fun. You have more experience. You already have all the stuff. Your personal life is already oriented around the family. All the older siblings get a new playmate.

16. Children love getting a new baby in the house! My two year old regularly proclaims “I’m a BIG sister!”

17. Children love being around other children. Two children have one playmate. Three have two, with 7 different play configurations. Four have fifteen combinations. With two more children and a bit of work, I’ll be able to sing eight part harmony around the piano. Family life improves as the factorial of the number of children.

18. I don’t know anyone who regrets having children, but numerous people who regret not having them, or not having more. I only ever heard one guy say that he had too many children, and I think he was joking. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of older childless couples in uncertain health – it’s not ideal.

19. If you want your parents to help with your kids, don’t wait until they’re in failing health to reproduce. You may find yourself short of time and resources. I know a number of people who missed out on having their own kids because it was never the right time, then their parents got sick during the last years of their family formation window.

20. Two of my grandparents are still alive, and a decent fraction of their great grandchildren are old enough to hold a conversation and remember it. They’re no longer super mobile but they live independently in their early 90s.

21. Putting off kids for one year now costs you one year at the other end. You will (all else being equal) have one year less with your grandchildren. There is also a big difference between being a physically robust 62 year old grandfather who can throw the grandchildren into the air and teach them how to swim and hike to the creek to go fishing, and a forgetful deaf 78 year old who can barely walk. That 16 year difference is only 8 years compounded over two generations – starting a family at 25 vs 33.

22. The obvious caveat is that children require nonzero economic inputs and if you’re an unemployed high school student with no support network, children will be pretty demanding. That said, people almost always overestimate the expense of children. You don’t have to pay full ride college tuition on day one. Or ever, actually.

23. Children are quite compact, you can easily fit one more into the kid’s room. If they want their own room later on, you can have them help build it. In the meantime, being around other sleeping children helps them stay asleep.

24. I sometimes joke that children thrive on “benign neglect”. The truth of the matter is that children actually need time away from adults to experiment and learn, and so I have learned to strategically ignore them or look the other way or leave them to their own devices. My children and their similarly-raised companions are actually very self-sufficient and almost always do well in the company of other children. They don’t require constant stimulation and supervision.

25. Producing children is optimism praxis. Parents have a stake in the future.

26. Humans are currently producing far too few children. Headlines stating that South Korea’s current birth rate of 0.8 will result in the population contracting from 51 million to 3 million by 2100 miss the tragic detail that even if South Korea can survive as a political entity with 8% of its current population, 80% of its population in 2100 will be over the age of 70. This is shockingly unsustainable. We’re already seeing ballooning dependency ratios bring previously rich dynamic societies to the edge of fiscal ruin now, in 2026. Some day, perhaps, radical life extension technology will buy us more time. Until then, the future will belong to the children we create.

27. I am constantly surprised how few childless people in their 20s and 30s have ever even held a baby. I can think of a half a dozen women of about 30 who are determined to settle down and have children but have never actually held one, until I dangled one of mine in front of them and said “hold!” If you’re older than 25 and have never held a baby, I am assigning you homework!

28. Not everyone can physically produce children. Historically something like 80% of women and 40% of men had children – so options are generally better now, but it’s non ideal. Even if you can’t have your own children, you can still be an important part of the lives of your relatives and friends. My non-blood-relative “uncles” were an important part of exposing me to positive parts of masculine culture, particularly cultivating mental and physical toughness in hiking/camping and farm work. 30 years later, one of them finally got around to having a daughter via sperm donation to a friend, and the other has a very quiet late middle age and a well-organized house.

29. All children are special but your own children are extra special. Each one is a random remix of parts of you and your spouse and your relatives. You can fill your visual field with descendants who are a bit like your favorite people.

30. I have known a number of men who didn’t get their shit together until they had to provide. Probably the most powerful nootropic and career accelerant I’ve seen.

31. Statistically speaking, in the US, women who start families after 30 have fewer than 3 children. At 35, about 90% of a woman’s fertility is behind her, and 80% of babies are born to younger women, but obviously statistics vary both ways by quite a bit.

32. Children of younger parents and non-IVF children generally enjoy better health.

33. Human fertility is not yet a problem 100% sublimated by science. We have egg freezing, surrogacy, and IVF, but they don’t buy infinite time and they’re rather exotic and expensive for the vast majority of potential parents. I know dozens of people who thought they had time and ran out.

34. I know women who found out at 32, which is relatively young, that they had run out of time. I know a woman who got naturally pregnant for the first time at 48 (surprise!). But the former situation is far more common. I know women who have spent their 30s trying to find the ideal guy, and eventually run into adverse selection. That is, among the set of family-oriented eligible bachelors who are still available between the ages of 35 and 45, relatively few are willing to bet it all on a potential partner/wife, no matter how well suited, if she’s 40.

35. It’s not only a problem for women. Aside from the physical challenges of being an older dad or granddad, if you’re a man in your forties and want to start a family, you will necessarily have to court much younger women. They are in a different phase of life and almost always will have different preferences, all of which shrink the pool and lengthen the odds.

36. In neither case is the situation hopeless but revealed preference comes into play. I have a male friend who has been all about settling down and starting a family for 15 years and still hasn’t. No-one deploys personality as a contraceptive *that* effectively, and I would know. It’s not entirely trivial to meet the right person and get going, but it’s easier than getting a degree or emigrating to the US. No excuses!

37. Even if you knew with 100% certainty that you can start a family at 35, what’s your plan when you realize that you actually want six children, not just one?

38. There is never an ideal time to have children. But sooner is better than later!

What have I missed? Questions?