Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles by Dan Ariely

Author:Dan Ariely [Ariely, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw, pdf
Tags: Nonfiction, Psychology, Retail, Science
ISBN: 9780062380012
Google: v3SdBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

ON PLAYING PARENTS

“We planned on having you but you’re not the children we planned on having.”

{Illustrations © 2015 William Haefeli}

Dear Dan,

My wife and I are in our late thirties, and we are debating whether or not to have kids. Any advice?

—HENRY

The decision on whether or not to have kids is very complex. It depends on many factors, including your financial situation, your preferences, and the quality and stability of your relationship. So, sadly, without knowing much more about your situation I can’t provide a direct answer to your question.

At the same time, given that this is one of the most important decisions you will ever make, I feel some obligation to point out some general lessons that apply to large and substantial decisions.

Like many other decisions, here too the question is all about what you might get from this experience and what you might have to give up. The problem is that before you have kids, it is hard to estimate both the costs and the benefits. So what should you do? You need to try to simulate the kid-having experience in order to have a better understanding of what it means and how it would fit your preferences and life.

To get more insight into this question, why don’t you, for example, move in for a week with some of your friends who have kids and observe them up close? Next, why don’t you offer to take care of some other friends’ kids for a week? Then try to expand this exercise and take care of kids from different age groups (don’t skip very young kids and teenagers). After ten weeks of these types of experiments, you should be in a much better position to figure out if this particular activity is right for you or not.

If this exercise seems too daunting for you, you probably fall into one of two categories: 1) You’re not really that interested in an empirical answer to this question. Perhaps you’ve already made up your mind and it is just that you’re not yet ready to admit it. 2) You’re too lazy to put the effort into figuring this out. And if that is the case, you probably should not have kids.

Experimenting, Family, Happiness

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