Children and Opportunity Costs

In our ongoing debate on whether IQ is an anti-survival trait, my good friend Mike opines that having children might enhance career prospects.

I have no idea if having children actually reduces someone’s future earnings and career prospects. You *can* make a case in the opposite direction — that having children gives greater work motivation, forces better time management and has a positive social impact leading to better career prospects.

In my experience, based on numerous examples in both industry and academe, having children seems to reduce workers' willingness to travel or work long hours, both of which are potentially career limiting, at least for some kinds of jobs. Moreover, for women the taking maternity leave can have additional deleterious effects on their careers. A woman's job may be held open until she returns, but whatever project she was working on will generally march on, meaning that she will have to relinquish any leadership position she might have held. When she comes back to work she must either rejoin the project in a non-leadership role or find a new project. The final result is often a significant career setback.

On the empirical side, Phillip Longman (PDF, audio) cites some data that might shed some light on the situation. He summarizes:

Today, in the United States, only four percent of adults say
they will be satisfied if they never have children, according to a
recent Gallup poll. And among those who have reached middle
age without producing children, the vast majority express regret.

So, evidently people think that having children is costly enough that they can't have as many as they would like, which is evidence enough for me.

Finally, I spoke of opportunity costs. Foregone career opportunities are one sort of opportunity cost, but there are others. The direct costs of child rearing and the indirect costs of lost leisure time are significant, and they cause people to put off starting a family "until they can afford it," and it's distressingly common for that to turn out to be "never."

Editor's note: This post was actually by Robert, but a SNAFU has caused it to display as a post by Jennifer, and we can't figure out how to fix it. Can you tell we're new at this?