Normalize Mediocre Parenting

The kids will be alright.

Epistemic status: this started out as hot take. Contains discussion of dark subject matter such as abuse and rape.

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Two controversial assumptions:

1. Life is good. Most lives in the First World¹, including those of poor people, are worth living. It is quite difficult, if at all possible, to find people who would have been better off never being born.

2. We need more people. The world is not overpopulated or even adequately populated, but, in fact, underpopulated. The economic, scientific and cultural gains brought about by population growth far exceed any related ecological or scarcity risks. Notwithstanding the intrinsic value of human life, most babies born today in the First World² will be a net extrinsic benefit to the rest of society.

As I said, both of these assumptions are pretty controversial; many intelligent people disagree with at least one of them³.

But let’s suppose we accept both. Then, let’s imagine a couple, Alice and Bob, who say:

All in all, we’d like to have children. But we refuse to slave away to give them the best childhood possible. Either we’ll put in the reasonable bare minimum effort into raising them, or else we won’t have kids at all.

In other words, Alice and Bob are choosing between being childfree and being mediocre parents. As a society, which choice would we prefer them to make?

Perhaps we should specify what we might mean by mediocre parenting. To be clear: we’re not talking about chagrined parents who have given it their all but their all didn’t seem to be enough. Those people are excellent parents with bad luck.

Rather, a mediocre parent might:

• instead of working overtime at a job they don’t like so that they can send their kid to a good private school…

  • …work a fun cushy job with good hours and send the kid to a public school

• instead of going on a vacation trip to Disneyland…

  • …go on a trip to the Boring Museum for Grownups, and drag their kid with them

• instead of buying their kid a Nintendo Switch…

  • …spend that money on a premium cigar collection, and let their kid entertain themselves with a bag of bouncy marbles or something

• instead of going to their kid’s dumb baseball game…

  • go fishing with their buddies

And so on. Assume that all of the above choices are made out of the parent’s self-interest (and not, say, out of wanting to teach the child discipline).

Some of these examples may seem pretty distasteful. Most of us feel we deserve better parents than that. And yet, is it worse to parent like that than to not parent at all?

I argue that if we accept the aforementioned controversial assumptions (life is good, we need more people), then it’s not worse. And so if we wouldn’t judge Alice and Bob for choosing not to have children at all (I assume most of you reading this wouldn’t), then we shouldn’t judge them for having them without trying too hard to raise them.

If a suboptimal life is still a gift, then we should normalize mediocre parenting.

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I recognize that this is a counterintuitive thesis. I’ll now try to address some possible objections to it. I’ll start by seeing whether its overall logic is sound, and then move on to seeing whether applying it outside of mediocre parenting would lead us to any unpalatable conclusions.

The overall logic of my thesis mirrors that of the famous blogpost, The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

The post then lists several examples of people who were criticized for making some problem a little (but not a lot) better, such as an event hiring homeless people for a kind of a silly job, or Uber implementing surge pricing. It concludes:

But what if – what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better. If everyone did that, the world would be a vastly better place. If everyone “exploited” opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people’s suffering at the same time, we’d all be better off.

Seems convincing to me.

There is also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on exploitation⁴, which talks about what it calls the “non-worseness claim”:

NWC: Interaction between 𝐴 and 𝐵 cannot be worse than non-interaction when 𝐴 has a right not to interact with 𝐵 at all, and when the interaction is mutually advantageous, consensual, and free from negative externalities (Wertheimer 1996, 2011; Zwolinski 2009; Powell and Zwolinski 2012).

I think I agree with the NWC (and disagree with the Copenhagen Interpretation). This essay’s central argument pretty much relies on it. So is it true?

Most exploitation theorists are skeptical that the NWC is correct (Wertheimer 1996; Bailey 2010; Arneson 2013; Barnes 2013; Malmqvist 2016). For if it were, then it would seem to be a mistake to blame individuals who engage in certain forms of mutually beneficial exploitation—for example, those who engage in “price gouging” by selling electrical generators to victims of natural disasters at inflated prices. (Zwolinski 2008). After all, we usually would not blame those individuals if they stayed home and did nothing. […]

Woah! I didn’t realize that there could be so much opposition from ethicists to the NWC. My impression from my more libertarian⁵ days was that anti-NWC ideas are primarily an emotional kneejerk reaction that goes away under rational analysis. Apparently not!

The article discusses several ways of thinking about the NWC without completely abandoning the idea that price gouging (and other mutually beneficial but still seemingly exploitative deals) can be morally wrong. I will briefly summarize them here, and try to see how they apply to mediocre parenting.

• The NWC may be correct, but it should then lead us to greater moral condemnation of non-interaction

In other words, in some cases, in order be consistent in believing that exploiting someone is immoral even if it’s better than doing nothing, we must believe that doing nothing is even more immoral.

When it comes to mediocre parenting, accepting this would mean believing that mediocre parenting may be bad, but choosing to have no children (or fewer children than reasonably possible) is even worse. I definitely don’t accept that conclusion, but some of the more militant natalists might.

• Exploitation in a NWC-type situation is morally wrong (it has negative moral weight) but third parties can do nothing to improve this and shouldn’t interfere (it has no moral force)

I find this generally kind of unconvincing. Isn’t it pointless to call something immoral if we can’t even do anything that would pressure people not to do it, e.g. ban it or shame people for it?⁶

• Interference might be justified if it can benefit the exploitee by informing them that they have better options than accepting the exploiter’s offer

Clearly true⁷; but not, I think, applicable to parenting.

• Interference might be justified if it can force the exploiter to offer a better deal to the exploitee (that’s still profitable to the exploiter)

I think I agree with this, too.

Parenting application: maybe it is very hard to convince or pressure people who don’t want children into being parents, but much easier to convince or pressure mediocre parents into being good parents. In that case, should we do it? Hmmmm.

• Instead of direct interference into NWC-type situations, third parties should prevent them by preventing exploitees from being vulnerable to exploitation in the first place (e.g. via redistribution)

Easier said than done! But yes, assuming successful implementation and no negative externalities (these are huge assumptions!), this is true.

For parenting, this would mean protecting children from the negative effects of mediocre parenting by subsidizing various aspects of child care. This is generally a popular kind of policy, but remember that some of the examples of said negative effects we talked about above include being deprived of luxuries like amusement park trips or game consoles. Anyone wanna volunteer your money to subsidize these?

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Overall, I don’t find the article’s⁸ objections to the NWC very persuasive, and so I’m going to hold on to it.

I will now look at objections from a different angle: does the thesis prove too much? In other words, if my logic implies that we should normalize mediocre parenting, what else does it imply we should normalize?

What about same sex adoption?

Should gay couples be able to adopt kids? Opponents say that a child needs a mom and a dad for healthy development, and that having two dads would mess them up. Proponents respond with studies which show that children who grew up in same sex families score about as well on tests of psychological wellness as those who grew up in heterosexual families.

As a non-expert, I see no reason to substantially distrust the studies here. But even if they’re wrong, and living with a gay family is, for whatever reason, inferior to living with a straight family, the question we should be asking is whether it’s inferior to not living at all. If I were to consider switching my stance on same sex parenting, I would want to see evidence that it’s really bad (instead of just suboptimal).

What about “frivolous” adoption relinquishment?

I recently saw a social media post about a minor celebrity (can’t find who it is anymore, sorry) who gave up her child for adoption. Accurately or not, it portrayed her as having done it not out of desperation but out of laziness. “Ugh, motherhood is so lame!” was the sentiment, and it attracted angry responses.

That kind of emotional attitude towards one’s child (if actually real) seems unusual, but the angry reaction is misplaced. The child will most likely be fine, certainly better off than if they were never born.

What about safety?

I was in no way a neglected child (more on that later), but my parents did trust me to be home alone and to take 45+ minute bus trips since I was eight. I was surprised to learn that nowadays that kind of thing would actually be illegal.⁹

I’m sure mandatory supervision of 8-year-olds does nontrivially reduce the risk of them getting seriously injured, but if it discourages them being born in the first place then it’s not worth it. Free-range children are fine.

What about disinheritance?

Another celebrity parent story: Jeff Goldblum says he won’t leave his children any of his money. He claims that this’ll teach them independence.

I question whether this will actually be for their own good. But it’s a valid choice. Even if they’re perfectly fine kids, he is fully entitled not to leave them his millions. Being born to a rich man who disinherits you is better than not being born at all. Jeff Goldblum’s kids will be fine.

What about exowombs?

The Tumblr blog Centrally Unplanned posted an essay about the fertility transition which argues that the solution to low birth rates is artificial wombs:

[M]ost people only want 1-2 kids, they don’t want to raise more than that. However, with exowombs, you don’t need to [change that]; you can make children outside of a family’s desire for one. You can do that pretty trivially, actually. A society, if committed to solving its fertility issues, could mass-produce people with exowombs. Which would be very good to do ethically, because living is good and I personally don’t think kids at orphanages should be euthanized to end their suffering, they are fine.

This is a pretty extreme opinion and (as the essay admits) not a politically feasible one at the moment. Yet I will bite even this bullet and admit that I’m convinced by it. Indeed, mass-produced orphans will be fine.

All of the above implications I am fairly certain about. Now it’s time to move on to the actually controversial stuff.

What about deadbeat parents?

The stereotypical story: the dad goes to the store for some milk and never comes back. The mom is left to raise her kids on her own. By our logic, isn’t the dad’s behavior still better than not having kids at all?

Well, one difference is that here, the mom is unexpectedly and unduly burdened with the challenges of single parenthood. So she is victimized by the dad’s actions. Also, we might speculate that, in a counterfactual timeline, the mom might have met a non-deadbeat man, and had a happier child with him; if so, then the non-counterfactual dad’s actions didn’t increase the number of children in the world, only replaced one of them with a less happy one.

But putting all that aside, isn’t the child still better off being born?

Hmmmmmm. I think they are. But then what does that say about the legal obligations we try to impose on the dad?

Let’s ask another question: why do child support laws exist at all? It seems intuitive that one should be responsible for the human life one creates, but is that really true on a fundamental level? Surely a child is entitled to have their basic resource needs met, but why should that burden fall on their biological parents, and not on some other person?

As I understand it, the pragmatic justification for mandatory child support is that it discourages people from “wanton” procreation. The idea is that if you are able to take responsibility for your children, that’s great, but if you aren’t, then you’re better off not making any. But if life is good and we need more people, then is that actually true?

Abolishing child support laws as they exist would probably be a disaster for many children and single parents, so I wouldn’t support that. But in a hypothetical society where every child is entitled to some sort of unconditional UBI-like benefit that is adequate for meeting their basic needs¹⁰ (ESTD!) then I think I would be okay with not forcing deadbeat parents to have to give their child extra money on top of that.¹¹

What about abuse?

At the beginning of this essay, I made the claim that most lives of people in developed countries, including all of the ones we discussed above, are worth living. But most isn’t all. What are the exceptions?

This is a deeply uncomfortable question. Thinking about it makes me feel like a hypothetical executioner, deciding who should be euthanized out of mercy. I will not even try asserting where the line should be drawn; at most, I will speculate about the vague area where the line might be (or, rather, the area where it almost definitely isn’t).

One area that gives me doubt is abuse. Many people are stuck in absolutely horrible families with little hope of escaping them. Are the lives of abuse victims worth living?

I don’t feel confident saying this about children who have been abused in exceptionally severe ways, like those whose parents severely beat them or locked them in a basement for years. I can only hope that they can find value even in lives such as those.

But people who experienced “moderate” types of parental abuse (e.g. being constantly berated, insulted and made to feel worthless) seem to generally be able to overcome their (significant and not to be understated) trauma, and go on to live worthwhile lives. In other words, they are ultimately better off being born to an abusive household than never being born at all.

So suppose we have an alternative version of Alice and Bob from the beginning of this essay, but instead of considering being mediocre parents, they consider being abusive ones:

All in all, we’d like to have children. But we refuse to treat them with any kindness. Either we’ll “moderately” abuse them (constant yelling and berating, but no hitting or basement imprisonment) or else we won’t have kids at all.

If we believe, as before, that producing a life worth living is not morally worse than producing no life at all, should we therefore tolerate the abusive tendencies of this version of Alice and Bob?

My intuition says “no way in hell”. But this feels difficult to reconcile with most of my previous conclusions.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

One way out of this is to declare a desire to abuse your child an invalid preference. That is, you’re not supposed to enjoy doing this kind of thing; if you do, you must be sick in the head. Once we cure what’s wrong with you, you’ll be happier, whether as a childfree person or as a non-abusive parent.

This is an appealing explanation and I’ll be using it for the time being. While it is not obvious whether invalid preferences are actually a philosophically coherent concept, this is, perhaps, a question for another day.

So no, I don’t think we should normalize abuse in the slightest. Still, I will say that thinking about this dilemma gives me another reason to oppose the occasional (admittedly politically unviable) call for the forcible sterilization of child abusers. Besides the usual concerns about human rights and the limits on state power, it is also unclear to me whether such sterilization would help any potential victims (after all, it would only do so by preventing them from being born).

What about rape, incest, and other horrible things that sometimes result in children?

I think most of these are analogous to the situations described in one or both of the subsections above. To be completely unambiguous: no, I don’t think we should normalize these things.

Isn’t mediocre parenting also an invalid preference?

I don’t think it is. Generally we think of not wanting to put effort into something as a legitimate kind of preference. But even if it’s not, it should be pretty low on our to-cure list. Priorities!

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To recap: I started this essay off arguing that if life is good, and if we need more people, and if there’s nothing wrong with choosing to not have children, then there must also be nothing wrong with choosing to have children in a low-effort way. My thesis was: we should normalize mediocre parenting.

I then reviewed some potential counterarguments against the thesis, such as objections to the NWC and concerns that the thesis’ logic might prove too much. Some of them I found easy to dismiss, while others gave me a lot of pause.

This post ended up being longer than expected (I initially thought it’d mostly just be the first section). I tried to make it more serious by reviewing some scholarly literature on related topics, but, as you might have noticed, I really only scratched the surface of said literature.

Perhaps I should have kept digging, and not written this essay until I read 4 more books and 15 more papers¹². But instead, I am making the bold choice to do an act of philosophical satisficing and stop here. While some doubts remain, I am generally confident in thinking that the thesis is true, and I’m willing to leave it at that for the time being.

I’ll end with the following question: is this insight important? Does it matter whether we normalize mediocre parenting?

On a global level: it might be a cultural factor impacting population growth. The internet is full of stories about bad parents whom the audience loves to hate. Could the fear of failing to meet high social standards for parenting be contributing to the population decline? I’m not sure, but I think it’s plausible that it is at least a minor contributor.

I’m more certain of what it means on an individual level.

My own mom and dad are far above mediocre in terms of parenting. But this used to make me pessimistic about raising any children of my own. I used to think that, being kind of a lazy guy, I could never reach the high standard they set for me, or else be totally miserable from all the effort required to do so. So, I used to think, I shouldn’t bother.

I’ve since changed my mind on this. Yes, my own hypothetical children might not receive as much care as I did, but even so they’ll be fine. They’ll get over it. That’s still better than never being born.

Having realized this, I’ve become more open to the idea of having children, and, if you’re concerned about this sort of thing, I think so should you.

1. I personally think the same is probably also true about developing countries, but I’m pretty ignorant about them (I don’t really have a baseline for just how bad life can get in North Korea), and so I am leaving them out for the sake of argument.

2. Same as Footnote 1.

3. See the natalism vs. antinatalism debate.

4. I wouldn’t exactly call mediocre or bad parenting a form of exploitation, but I think the moral reasoning here is generally transferable.

5. Libertarians specifically will bite the bullet on price gouging and claim that it provides a net good for society.

6. To be fair, when talking about third party intervention the article mostly means state intervention, but I don’t see how, for the purposes of this argument, it is different from other forms of intervention like ostracism.

7. Could we argue that taking advantage of someone’s ignorance is immoral because it is a kind of fraud? Hmm.

8. You might notice that I only overviewed a subsection of an encyclopedia article, and didn’t delve any deeper into any of its primary sources. Here I will pull a “normalize mediocre blogging” and say that this post is already about 4x as long as I originally intended, so I’ll stop at that.

9. Perhaps it was already illegal in Lithuania at the time, but nobody cared back then.

10. Such as Kurt Vonnegut’s proposed 28th Amendment (h/t J.J. McCullough)

11. We may compare this to the adoption relinquishment example above.

12. If I did, I would probably start with Derek Parfit’s work on the repugnant conclusion and the nonidentity problem.