98. Is Having Children Worth It?

All we do is we buy the ice cream and we play games and we make fart jokes. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Steven Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show. How do you decide whether or not to have children?

How many kids? One, two, three Fifteen, twenty five, how about zero? Steven, I'm going to read you an email from a listener whose first name is Ian. Are you ready for it? I am. And hello, Ian. Ian writes, before we married, my wife and I easily decided we want to have kids, whether by birth or adoption. The much more difficult decision was how many kids to have.

She was an only child. I had siblings. Both of us work and we're not gung-ho about being full-time stay-at-home parents, which the pandemic forced upon us anyways, at least for a short time. Gone are the days of needing to create workers for the family farm, and at least in many countries, there's a relatively high likelihood that each child will make it to adulthood. I imagine there's a very complex algorithm that shapes what the answer is to how many Do you have any insights on this? Gracias. Yeah.

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