“What if lower birthrates are a good thing?” asked feminist attorney and writer Jill Filipovic. “For a great many individual women, reconsidering motherhood doesn’t reflect hardship or unmet desire, but rather a new landscape of opportunity.”
This is the common rejoinder to worries about our current baby bust: Sure, we have fewer children in America today than a decade ago, but this is a good thing because people are getting what they want and are liberated from the shackles of parenthood.
“America’s so-called ‘baby bust’ signals a glorious future for its workers and the U.S. economy more broadly,” argued John Tamny in a 2021 letter.
More to the point, those cheering on a baby bust say that babies make us less happy. “Since about the 1960s, we’ve had pretty clear evidence that being a parent doesn’t make you happier than not having children,” Professor Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas at Austin said on a Vox item about women choosing child-free lives.
There’s plenty of reason to doubt the finding that children make us less happy, but now there’s also evidence that a world with less children is a less conscientious world.
Children are tough to raise, but they really do bring out the best in us. Some relatively recent research supports that intuition.
I’ve been thinking about how declining fertility and anti-children social movements potentially influence human psychology and behavior. This new research might offer some clues. When adults see children, they are more prosocial. https://t.co/EElEAvQjvP
— Clay Routledge (@clayroutledge) March 2, 2022
Routledge is pointing out a study from a few months back that attempted to capture how the visible presence of children affects adults’ behavior. The researchers, led by British psychologist Lukas Wolf, tried to separate out confounding factors. They didn’t want to see if parents were more or less pro-social — or young people or women or anything like that. They tried to discern whether people in general were more generous and pro-social simply because children were around.
Their findings suggest that, yes, exposing adults to children makes adults better.
One aspect of the study involved fundraising efforts on different main streets. The researchers “recorded the number of children and adults on a shopping street and collected donations from adult passersby for a cause not specifically related to children.”
They found “a significant positive correlation between the proportion of children present and the number of donations.” This wasn’t explained at all by parents being more generous, the researchers said. It was the presence of children that seemed to make a difference.
Wolf and colleagues also conducted eight experiments, online or in a lab, where they asked participants to describe different settings or situations, some of which involved children. This divided the participants into those who had children on their mind and those who didn’t.
Both groups were then asked about their aspirations toward generosity, service, duty, and similar pro-social virtues. The experiments, with more than 2,000 participants, found small but significant effects suggesting that thinking about children makes people more conscientious.
As the researchers put it: “The findings suggest broad, reliable interconnections between human mental representations of children & prosocial motives, as the child salience effect was not moderated by participants’ gender, age, attitudes, or contact with children.”
In more normal terms: Being around children makes us all behave better. So we should worry about a society with fewer and fewer of them.
