7 ms·

After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids

61 points by certmd 7y ago

narag 7y ago
Mind the date: Economists studying the effects of the original 2007 policy...
- wazoox 7y ago
  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...
TuringTest 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - Wellshit 7y ago
    By importing tax payers
  - skybrian 7y ago
    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.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      > 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? I believe the concern is that a lot of those people who are living paycheque to paycheque are getting to / are at retiring age - we need social safety nets to support these people, and we have a whole lot less people working to afford it.
    - lm28469 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >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? ... I would expect a lot fewer truck drivers and more healthcare workers. Who's going to pay for the healthcare workers, if the old people don't have any savings or assets to pay them? If your answer is to tax the workers, that system will collapse if there's a 1:1 ratio of workers to retired people.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >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 No problem, we'll just invent robots to take care of the elderly.
jon-wood 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- astura 7y ago
  Yep, they even used the term "quality over quantity" to describe this.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  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.
nickelcitymario 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - Kurtz79 7y ago
    That is basically what the articles is saying, although not in your terms. "After paternity leave was instituted, surveys of Spanish men ages 21 to 40 showed they desired fewer children than before. 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, and, as the researchers put it, “shifted their preferences from child quantity to quality.”" And also that that the data really cannot be used to demonstrate their point, so, whatever, another research that was able to generate a media article.
  - nickelcitymario 7y ago
    The (very limited) data supports the first part of your theory. The second part isn't supported by their data, since it shows the downward trend in men's desire for kids started years before the policy came into place.
  - basetop 7y ago
    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-population https://www.thelocal.it/20180627/italy-declining-birthrate-p... Governments are even paying women to have kids and that hasn't helped. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when-governments-pay-people-to-have-babies https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when... 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-spiral-to-record-low/ https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/japans-births-and-marriages-... 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.
tathougies 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Meh. We only find children have attention issues because we have outsized expectations of them. My mother was a public school teacher and the truth is most teachers were simply too out of shape to keep up with the kids and so labeled them ADD. For the most part, if you acknowledge children are children, they seem a lot easier. But I'm not going to try to convince you. The more people who dont want kids the more I can have!
Kurtz79 7y ago
"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".
dk1138 7y ago
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.
- roflchoppa2 7y ago
  You're not spacing them out correctly, you have to wait till the oldest one can help take care of the youngest one.
  - Domenic_S 7y ago
    Also depends on the temperament of the kids. My young daughter can dress herself, brush her hair, get her cereal, essentially take herself from waking up to ready to leave the house with minimum input from me. My son on the other hand will get distracted with toys, run around the house playing, and generally takes 90% of my attention to get ready for the day. 100% if I don't want a whirlwind of clothes and toys to clean up. Granted, he's 3... If I had two kids like that I couldn't imagine a third.
    - r00fus 7y ago
amelius 7y ago
Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
wtdata 7y ago
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.
- chrischattin 7y ago
  Exactly. Add economics and psychology to that list. Pretty easy to come to a politically convenient conclusion when there's no way to reproduce the results of your "study".
- basetop 7y ago
  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.
marssaxman 7y ago
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.

61 points by certmd 7y ago

narag 7y ago

Mind the date: Economists studying the effects of the original 2007 policy...

wazoox 7y ago
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...

TuringTest 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- Wellshit 7y ago
  By importing tax payers
- skybrian 7y ago
  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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > 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? I believe the concern is that a lot of those people who are living paycheque to paycheque are getting to / are at retiring age - we need social safety nets to support these people, and we have a whole lot less people working to afford it.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >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? ... I would expect a lot fewer truck drivers and more healthcare workers. Who's going to pay for the healthcare workers, if the old people don't have any savings or assets to pay them? If your answer is to tax the workers, that system will collapse if there's a 1:1 ratio of workers to retired people.
- magduf 7y ago
  >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 No problem, we'll just invent robots to take care of the elderly.

jon-wood 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
astura 7y ago
Yep, they even used the term "quality over quantity" to describe this.
sudhirj 7y ago
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.

nickelcitymario 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- Kurtz79 7y ago
  That is basically what the articles is saying, although not in your terms. "After paternity leave was instituted, surveys of Spanish men ages 21 to 40 showed they desired fewer children than before. 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, and, as the researchers put it, “shifted their preferences from child quantity to quality.”" And also that that the data really cannot be used to demonstrate their point, so, whatever, another research that was able to generate a media article.
- nickelcitymario 7y ago
  The (very limited) data supports the first part of your theory. The second part isn't supported by their data, since it shows the downward trend in men's desire for kids started years before the policy came into place.
- basetop 7y ago
  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-population https://www.thelocal.it/20180627/italy-declining-birthrate-p... Governments are even paying women to have kids and that hasn't helped. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when-governments-pay-people-to-have-babies https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when... 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-spiral-to-record-low/ https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/japans-births-and-marriages-... 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.

tathougies 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Meh. We only find children have attention issues because we have outsized expectations of them. My mother was a public school teacher and the truth is most teachers were simply too out of shape to keep up with the kids and so labeled them ADD. For the most part, if you acknowledge children are children, they seem a lot easier. But I'm not going to try to convince you. The more people who dont want kids the more I can have!

Kurtz79 7y ago

"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".

dk1138 7y ago

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.

roflchoppa2 7y ago
You're not spacing them out correctly, you have to wait till the oldest one can help take care of the youngest one.
- Domenic_S 7y ago
  Also depends on the temperament of the kids. My young daughter can dress herself, brush her hair, get her cereal, essentially take herself from waking up to ready to leave the house with minimum input from me. My son on the other hand will get distracted with toys, run around the house playing, and generally takes 90% of my attention to get ready for the day. 100% if I don't want a whirlwind of clothes and toys to clean up. Granted, he's 3... If I had two kids like that I couldn't imagine a third.
  - r00fus 7y ago

amelius 7y ago

Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

wtdata 7y ago

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.

chrischattin 7y ago
Exactly. Add economics and psychology to that list. Pretty easy to come to a politically convenient conclusion when there's no way to reproduce the results of your "study".
basetop 7y ago
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.

marssaxman 7y ago

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.