Motherhood Is Not Rational

And some ideas to improve it.

Motherhood is sublime, motherhood is joyous, motherhood is an opportunity to transcend to another plane of existence, yes, yes, how profound, how lovely, how true.

But the inescapable fact we must contend with in the age of falling fertility is this: In addition to all those beautiful but ineffable things, motherhood is also an enormous gamble with one’s health and financial security. In other words, motherhood is not rational.

Given its risks, even for women who have reliable partners and financial security, delaying (when not outright rejecting) motherhood seems like the smart thing to do, so that one can maximize education, earnings, experiences — to accumulate as much human capital within oneself as possible, prior to inviting a child into one’s heart and the Mother into one’s personhood.

While fertility is declining across the board, many have noted that the problem is particularly acute among the most capable young women—and why wouldn’t it be? If we want to persuade more young women to take the leap to motherhood sooner (as delay is the same as reduction in total number of successful pregnancies), we have to center her and address this problem directly.

But first, let’s get a few common and aggravating misconceptions out of the way:

1. The fertility decline is not an affordability problem.

Nearly everyone can “afford” kids, period. However, hardly anyone can have them while maintaining the lifestyle of a dual-income, childless couple. As I (and many others) have pointed out for years, if the problem was affordability itself, it wouldn’t be the case that the poorest Americans can have so many more than the upper middle class, nor would it be possible for the poorest countries in the world to have a higher total fertility rate than the wealthiest.

The problem is opportunity cost, not cost, and if you cannot understand the difference you cannot understand the problem. Parents are poorer relative to their childless peers, relative to where they themselves would be had they not had kids.

If the problem was pure “cost,” then child grants would help immensely—they would make children more “affordable.” But we know from countless schemes the world over that they move the needle slightly, if at all.

What you actually have to account for is one parent’s (usually, the mother’s) current and potential future earnings. That’s a lot of money! (In fact, it is too much money for the government to afford to offset directly—so it should not even try.) This is why poor Americans can “afford” more kids—their earnings are lower and so are the opportunity costs of bearing and caring for children. The middle class strivers bear the brunt of the pain here: their time is money, and for the upper middle class, it is good money. These are the women who delay as long as possible, and have fewer children than they would like. Eventually, however, the line turns around again: at a certain point money begets money, and in any case, buying the time of others becomes cheap.

Which leads me to my next point:

2. “Childcare” is not a substitute for parents

We should stop using euphemisms because they cloud discussion rather than clarifying it, and sometimes words that are technically not euphemisms begin working in the same way: clouding a reality, which, when directly confronted, would make some things far more clear.

I am going to argue that “childcare” is one of those words. Before I became a mother, I believed that—for a few hours at least—one could “buy” their way out of being a parent: I had blithely assumed that daycare and nannies, while costly, would nevertheless work adequately enough, and I could have something like a normal work schedule with young children in the house. I have never been more wrong (and that is saying something).

We should be more clear about what we need, particularly for young babies: a substitute mother. What we need is someone to do the job of caretaking that a parent does, in the way a parent would do it, for most of the day so that the parent can go to work.

When stated this way, I believe the pain points of various “childcare” options become more obvious.

Daycare in particular, while being a godsend to families that need their second income, is not a wonderful parent substitute for very young kids. (As children grow older, daycare becomes less harmful—even healthy, I would argue–if kept limited.) But a baby? A baby has incredibly high needs, needs that even its own mother may struggle to meet. But even so, a mother will rock her colicky baby for hours, hold it while it sleeps, nurse to soothe it as often as required. What will the daycare worker—who is nowhere near sufficiently paid and is tasked with several children at a time—do with a colicky baby? She will put it in the crib, and let it cry. (It is because of this grim reality that I am sick of the assumption that “childcare” will solve parental problems. The idea of shoving your child in a state-run daycare at six weeks of age, as NYC’s Mayor Mamdani has benevolently offered, can only sound attractive to people who are childless, as I imagine is the case for much of his young staff. But as a mother, this sounds like a punishment that I would go to great lengths to avoid.)

What happens when the child is sick, which happens more frequently than one can possibly imagine? Either a working parent leaves the miserable child in daycare, or, if they are too sick for that, scrambles to find some other adult they can pay or cajole into watching their child, or failing that (as many do, in a time crunch), takes leave from work. And what happens when both parents run out of leave? It shouldn’t be surprising that nearly every parent I know approaches daycare with weary resignation—a necessary evil that allows for the family to get through the workweek.

Nannies are a much better option, and service the “substitute mother” position much more closely. But beyond the enormous cost, at the end of the day, most go home. Sometimes they are sick and do not come in to work, a luxury the actual mother does not have, who must now both work and find her replacement. The good ones also want leave themselves, and of course, how can you deny them their time with their own family? But then you need someone else to cover those hours.

I won’t even touch the impossibility of nursing while working—every working mother I know gave it up due to the added hassle and stress. They didn’t want to deprive their children of the best nutrition available to them, but they had no choice. They had to work to maintain their lifestyle, which meant accepting the compromise of an institution or a stranger taking on the work of the mother, and hoping their baby received a minimum amount of attention.

But mothers who work are thinking of the future and making a pragmatic and fundamentally rational calculation. Many are doing it because it is difficult or impossible to rearrange their lifestyles, and for others, it is not feasible at all. Even in the best case scenario (one in which her spouse’s income can cover their necessary expenses) a mother who gives up her work gives up her independence. Her ability to jump back into work will be hampered every year she is out of the scene. The possibility of divorce looms in the back of her head, or worse, the death of her spouse (on whom her life now depends). It is reasonable for mothers to opt out of this; it is reasonable for them to choose a barely-adequate, but temporary, substitute mother over the possibility of future impoverishment, which she may suffer for the rest of her (and her children’s) lives.

I think some readers will begin to chafe at my consistent assumption of what used to be called “gender roles”—why I insist on using “mother” rather than “parent.” I do this because…

3. Biology is not equitable; the parental roles of the sexes cannot be easily swapped.

Do stay-at-home dads exist? Yes. Are some of them better at childcare, or even infant care, or enjoy it more, than their wives? Indubitably. Are some parents same-sex? Of course, etc. Outliers are real, and their Lives Matter.

Now that we’ve acknowledged this, let’s get back to the point: Here I want to talk about the situations more (if not most) people are likely to find themselves in. Here are some sex differences relevant to the discussion:

• Some pregnancies are incredibly difficult; working through them is grueling or downright impossible (my case).

• Breastmilk is the best source of nourishment, advisable for up to two years, and nursing is very difficult to keep up when a woman returns to work.

• Mothers are hardwired to better care for young infants.

• The vast majority of the time, the mothers want to be with their children more often than fathers.

These differences cannot be socialized away, because the “social world” did not create them. We should be wary of brute-forcing equality in the reproductive arena, as doing so can easily place more stress and work on everyone—especially the mother. Sometimes, for some families, it does work. But I do not think this is the usual case.

Feminists tend to bristle when I adopt such language, but I believe that in the attempt to make women mold themselves into the working lives of men, working women risk losing their chance to be mothers. Fathers do not have to choose, and their investment in their income only increases their chance to be dads¹. The reverse is not true. Women are not reaching their reproductive goals, and improving their lives means helping them achieve these goals.

Lastly, misconception #4: We are not the Amish, and you cannot separate status from money

Many thinkers (especially those on the Right) are now floating the idea that the fertility decline has everything to do with status. I believe they are right in this respect, and this is partially why ideas about child credits or various payment schemes often fall flat (and would even if the payments were high): they are essentially handouts, and handouts are low-status.

The status people believe that this problem should be solved through culture—that we should morph into the kind of society that values procreation and grants it status. On the whole, they don’t seem to have any clue as to how to do this. I’ve seen some earnestly claim that we should “give mothers awards,” which evidently is the practice in…Mongolia. I hope the absurdity here is clear, but in case it is not obvious I will state plainly: This is not how status works. (At least, not in the West, and from the looks of their birthrates, perhaps not even in Mongolia.)

In addition, modifying culture at the drop of a hat is only a tiny bit easier than modifying biological constraints. We should instead search for options that do not require us to first become more like the Amish, or Mormons, or the indefatigable Collins’. Changing values is harder than changing behavior. The smarter tack is to alter the environment so that parenthood can become more attractive in the culture as it is, aligning with the values we already have. That means turning parenthood into an opportunity to get ahead.

Make Motherhood Rational Again

How to do this?

First, I propose a mental shift: we should think about a woman’s life in phases, schooling being one of those phases, having and raising children being another, and working being one more. Sometimes those phases overlap harmoniously, but we should accept that for children under two, a full-time career is very much not the ideal. Crucially, children are not “add-ons” to a working life, but that the business of having/rearing children is a distinct kind of work that requires more than haphazard attention. The lifestyle that worked well for two adults will not work for two adults with children.

But, more practically:

We should institute social programs which make parenthood and especially motherhood align with strategies to get ahead of one’s peers.

Policy oriented towards that end should ask itself this question: “What would make an intelligent, capable, 23-year-old feel as if motherhood is a risk worth taking–a possible advantage?”

Another way to think about the same question: What could we offer women so that you might recommend young motherhood to your own daughter or sister?

My primary goal in writing this piece is not to sell you on my answers to these questions. I am writing so that you will ask this question, and not another one.

However, I do have some ideas:

1. Tie childbearing/raising to “getting ahead” schemes—to future high status: education, training, a leg up in jobs.

An example of this might be the parent version of the GI Bill, which offers educational benefits to those who served in the armed forces. The motherhood version would tie young childbirth with future education: except here (as we are thinking about striving women) the focus would be on post-secondary education—assistance with graduate school. I will leave fussing about the exact details for others—but the point here should be this: we offer young women who leave the workforce (or incur the “motherhood penalty”) a leg up when they re-enter by helping them boost their credentials.

A second tactic is to make mothers more competitive upon re-entry into the workforce. We offer federal programs to hire felons—why not offer enticing benefits and credits to companies who hire mothers? A few years of the employer’s payroll tax waived for the mom employee, or some such temporary benefit—designed to provide monetary incentives to companies who take chances on mothers with large gaps in their employment.

In other words: Instead of taking mothers away from their children (or attempting to find substitute mothers/“childcare”), we should focus on assisting mothers in getting back on the horse when they are done. Tie a carrot at the end of the motherhood phase.

If done right, some young, striving women would recognize the advantage of choosing this track: They would not lose their fertile years; they could still achieve their educational and career goals. Some of these goals might even become more achievable, if the woman comes from limited financial means.

Even for women who never utilize any of these possibilities—perhaps they have many kids, financial means, and enjoy staying home—these options would still help quell the fears of losing independence in the case of divorce, death, or disability of the spouse.

Why is this better than a simple cash handout? Because opportunities are games, and “winning” allows for you to differentiate yourself from the rest. A cash handout is equally accessible to idiots, a neuroscience PhD is not.

I’m happy to think about ways to include fathers in some of these schemes, if they are the primary caregiver and the roles are reversed—but those are details, let’s first agree on the premise. Speaking of fathers, an indirect side effect: If a mom is taking time off to bear and raise kids, that means the father must step up. Far from being a problem, I am of the opinion that this kind of challenge is good and even necessary for men. They are not left behind; they are not “nice to haves.” They are doing work as irreplaceable as their wife’s—this grants them a sense of meaning and purpose (without actually forcing their wife into a permanently weak position, as might have happened a generation ago).

2. Tie parenthood to retirement benefits, especially Social Security.

An under-discussed economic reality: Fertility rates begin dropping when pension schemes begin cropping up². Although I’ll leave the analysis to the economists, this accords with my understanding of why my own parents had kids: they grew up in the developing world and we are their retirement fund.

But in a world of pension schemes, children can easily seem like a liability, not an asset. My childless friends don’t just have bigger homes and better vacations than me: they have much more saved towards retirement.

Here, families get screwed in two ways: Even though they provide the workers necessary to keep the logic of the social welfare schemes going, they have less money to put towards their own retirements. For a stay-at-home parent the reality is even worse: they have no income for many years, so less Social Security benefit when the time comes.

If the children die, or are disabled, or otherwise incapable or unwilling to help their parents—well, that’s just too bad!

The invisible labor of childbearing and raising is never accounted for in our social welfare system, and the injustice is vicious. If all else fails, most working Americans will have their Social Security or other pension benefits to reap. But a mother who took time off, or otherwise suffered workplace setbacks due to her divided attention, gets a terrible deal. She faces a greater likelihood of impoverishment in old age if her children or husband do not provide for her—all the while the wages of her children are cut to finance the retirements of others.

One solution to make this whole deal a tad more fair: Entitle parents to greater Social Security benefits, with a special provision for parents who stayed at home to off-set their low-earning years.

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So that’s it, my humble offering on the fertility crisis. There are, of course, important caveats and considerations I haven’t addressed. But I hope to convince others of the fundamental reframe more so than the particularities of any solution I provide. Please share!

1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118084

2. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demographic-economics/article/fertility-and-social-security/4FA674742794BC43650452A21CBD1C0D and https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1734.pdf