There is a story that appears on social media every now and then about car seats for children that goes like this. When the most modern kind of car seats were made mandatory for children under a certain age (or weight) in the US, this saved lives: hundreds of lives, even. But it also made it significantly more expensive to have children. Not only were the individual seats quite pricey, but it became impossible to get three children into the back of an ordinary car. Having a third child required a family not just to get a new booster seat, but a new and much more expensive car. The effect of this measure on birth rates is measurable, and it seems that 70,000 American children have not been born as a result of it.
This story is actually true, and the study is cited in a book by Timothy Carney, Family Unfriendly: A Critical Examination of Overparenting and Its Consequences. It is one of many examples of what he calls “overparenting”: excessive investment of time and money into a child. It is difficult to write, or even read, those words – how could anyone invest too much care and resources into a child? – but the car-seat issue illustrates a real problem. If it becomes a social expectation, for example, for parents to ensure that each child has his own bedroom, then this places a hard limit to how many children you can have in a given house. If every child in your circle has violin lessons and is learning Mandarin, then if the number of your children goes beyond your ability to get them expensive tuition, that can mean losing social cachet.
The problem is not limited to the wealthier tiers of society. In his autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, the US Vice President, JD Vance, wrote of his own background in which families would go into debt to buy their children a huge pile of the latest toys at Christmas. It wasn’t so much the children who wanted to have them; it was the parents who wanted to give them – it was an assertion of social status.
As my first example illustrates, however, social expectations are only one source of the problem. State regulation is another, and this often derives from, and contributes to, a wider social attitude of what we might call “safetyism”. If young children can only venture out of the house under supervision, or can’t be left alone (or with younger siblings) in the house, and if the definition of “young child” for these purposes starts to creep up through the teenage years, then life can become pretty complicated for parents, especially with more than two children. Then again, if one parent is supervising three children, perhaps while working or doing some cooking, it is simply impossible to be watching what they are all doing. Are you going to let them venture into the garden? Are all the sharp tools locked away? Is that bookcase screwed to the wall? What if something goes wrong?
The third child has a special significance in family life. Supposing you have children at a typical rate, of about every two years, the third will arrive when the oldest is four. When the youngest starts walking, the oldest will still only be five. And for now – perhaps genetic engineering will come to the rescue one day – parents have only two hands. If you, on your own, have taken three children into a shop which has created a fragile tower of Easter eggs, or gone for a walk past a pond, a cliff, a bonfire, a firework, an alarming dog or a reversing car, you can come to a sudden realisation: if you can’t control your toddler with your voice, then you could be in serious trouble.
I would like to reassure those contemplating parenthood that, in reality, this generally works out fine. Human beings have been having children for hundreds of thousands of years in environments far more dangerous than our own. Small children not only have a special ear for the tone of concern in a parent’s voice, but look out for each other, and take pride in doing so. The problem with modern life is not that it is more difficult to keep our children safe than in past centuries: it is actually easier than ever before. The problem is that parents are expected to take part in a self-defeating, theatrical display of over-caution.
It is well known that some risks have exaggerated prominence in the public imagination, and other risks are not taken as seriously as they should be. Thus, the chance of children being abducted while playing in a park is minuscule, but for historical and psychological reasons it is difficult to behave accordingly. By contrast, the ill effects on children’s mental health of not being allowed to run around outside have not entered public consciousness in the same way. When weighing the two risks, one tends to be given too much weight, and the other not enough: not so much by parents (who are usually sensitive to their children’s mental state), but by onlookers.
Then again, children in a school that is suffering from disciplinary problems are at a quantifiable risk of being psychologically or physically bullied, or even sexually assaulted. When bad things happen, the school authorities are, in an obvious sense, to blame: certainly not the parents who entrusted their children to an institution funded, regulated and regularly inspected by the state. Children on holiday with their parents, or who are home-educated, could also have bad experiences of various kinds. The risks are far lower. But if something bad does happen, it is the parents’ fault. There is no one else to blame. If parents considered only the risk to their own reputations, then it would always be preferable to get an institution to take over responsibility for their children, even if that imposed greater risks.
Parents are not, in general, concerned more about themselves than about their children, and my point here is certainly not to blame them. I would like, rather, to appeal to everyone else in communities where parents and children exist to try to think more rationally about how parenting works, and the trade-offs involved, and to cut parents a bit of slack. And here I’m not talking about abuse or neglect, of course, but parents who take the kinds of risks that would have been taken for granted a generation ago, because they were necessary to the children’s healthy development.
Being a parent always involves a risk or cost. In former times parents might more often have had to contemplate confronting a hungry bear in order to defend their children; today, the price one has to pay is more subtle. Parents might lose social status; they may be confronted by neighbours or even agents of the state who wish to question their decisions. An American mother was arrested in 2024 for allowing her 11-year-old to walk less than a mile from home into the local town.
One thing that is missing from the various calculations being made is the value of children themselves. If we take seriously the idea that children, new human beings, have intrinsic value, we would be appalled by the sacrifice of 70,000 potential children to gain some footling road-safety goal. And we would, as a society, be more supportive of parents who make the sacrifices necessary to bring new human beings into existence.
