Natal Conference Speech

Why the Natal Conference should be disbanded as soon as possible, why you need to care less about your kids, and why I am not a Pro-Natalist™

Here is my speech from last week’s Natal Conference in Austin. Thank you to all of the organizers and to everyone at @natalismorg. Despite the focus of my speech, I have a great deal of respect for everyone involved and I’m grateful for their efforts.

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[round of applause for the organizers]

[joke]

Now that I’ve softened you up, I’m going to explain why this conference should be disbanded as soon as possible.

This talk is going to consist of two overlapping and intentionally provocative points that by the end I hope to convince you are in fact just plain common sense and align with the interests of everyone in this room.

The first point is that most people need to care a lot less about their kids.

The second point is that I am not a Pro-Natalist and you shouldn’t be either.

Point one, you need to care less about kids: Relatively affluent, high-agency parents—precisely the kind of people in this room—are investing excessive resources, time, and attention into their children. This over-investment reduces the number of children parents feel comfortable having, diminishes parents’ own quality of life, and, counterintuitively inhibits the full maturation and independence of the children subjected to this intense and unnatural parental focus.

A useful model from biology are the concepts of K-selection species and R-selection species. Briefly, K-selected species—such as elephants—have relatively few offspring but invest substantial time, resources, and care into each child’s survival and development, expecting high individual success rates. In contrast, R-selected species—like insects, rabbits, or fish—produce many offspring but offer minimal parental intervention. These offspring are largely left to fend for themselves, with survival dependent on their individual adaptability, resilience, and ability to navigate unpredictable environments independently.

For all of the pedants out there, yes, I understand that humans are a K-selected species. I am not making a technical, biologically precise point. However, given this framework, I am suggesting that parents, again parents within this particular socio-economic milieu, should instead adopt more R-selected parenting strategies as a cultural norm.

Before getting into what a more R-selected parenting strategy would look like in practice and why it’s good, let me first describe what our current over-compensated K-selection strategy looks like and why it’s bad.

Firstly, is the premise true? Anecdotally, yes. Virtually every parent I know of school age children within the category, broadly speaking, of upper middle-class, college educated professionals either has a borderline pathological obsession with their kids’ activities and interests, to the point that it consumes everything they think and do as a family, or else have made an active effort to remove their families from these circumstances.

It is also empirically true. Study after study after study over the last couple decades has documented that parental time investment in child “activities” has doubled since the 1970s, that heightened competition for college admissions has drastically escalated parental resource investment, all premised on a broad cultural shift toward structured, intensive parenting practices with adverse effects on both parents and childrern. As far as I am aware, none of these trends are at all controversial or in dispute.

To illustrate precisely how distorted the incentives driving hyper-intensive K-selection parenting have become, I will draw your attention to a recent—and profoundly misguided—statement by Vivek Ramaswamy from a few months ago. For those who don’t remember, weighing into the Christmas H-1B dust-up on X, Vivek made the incendiary case that the reason top tech companies often prefer foreign-born engineers over native-born Americans is because American culture has supposedly “venerated mediocrity over excellence” for decades. His prescription was that we need to celebrate math Olympiads and Spelling Bee champs instead of athletes, and that American kids urgently need fewer sleepovers, and more math tutoring and weekend science competitions.

While a profound political blunder, Vivek’s statement nonetheless embodies precisely the perverse, anxiety-driven logic that has produced our runaway K-selection problem. Vivek’s diagnosis assumes that childhood itself should be structured as one long resume-building exercise—every waking moment dedicated to narrowly defined academic excellence or competitive STEM achievement. It assumes, disastrously, that obsessive micromanagement is the hallmark of effective parenting, and while parents and the American commentariat rightly criticized him for his presumptuous advice, Americans unfortunately, and increasingly, live according to its precepts.

My prescription instead: Don’t do this. Stay as far away from this as possible. Actively reject this. Your kids don’t want this. It will not help them. You don’t want this. It is completely and utterly the wrong approach to parenting.

So what then would a more r-selected parenting strategy look like in its place? In short it would mean radically scaling back structured activities, micromanaged schedules, and excessive parental oversight. Let your children encounter genuine boredom and require them to develop their own solutions to it. Allow them freedom to explore their own interests—even if those interests don’t seem immediately productive, academically rigorous, or likely to appear on a college resume (including video games and screen time, by the way, in moderation, of course). Encourage spontaneous, unsupervised play, real social interactions with peers without constant adult mediation, and trust them to navigate small risks independently. Your kids will learn “They can just do things.”

Adopting this parenting approach would make the prospect of having more children feel far more manageable and appealing precisely because it reduces both the perceived and actual cost—financial, emotional, and time—associated with each additional child. When parenting is redefined from an obsessive, resource-intensive exercise in micromanagement and resume-building to something much more hands-off and organic, each child no longer represents an exponential increase in parental workload and anxiety. Parents become free to allocate their attention to the things they want to do.

Beyond inducing more fertility, this approach, despite what Vivek would tell you, helps revitalize precisely those cultural values that historically underpinned America’s success. America’s true historical advantage never stemmed from obsessively groomed spelling bee champions (quick, name the most successful Spelling Bee champion—exactly). Our culture of success came from generations raised to experiment boldly, to pursue unorthodox ideas, and to thrive in uncertain environments at the risk of death and destitution.

Finally, teach your children how to live rewarding, successful lives by visibly engaging in rewarding and successful adult lives yourself—write the book you’ve always wanted to write, build the company you’ve always wanted to build, pursue excellence in whatever domain you are best equipped to do so. Include your kids in these endeavors when practical, and let them fend for themselves when not.

The economists in the room will tell you there is very little you can do to improve your children's fortunes beyond the genes you’ve bequeathed to them anyway. Biology remains undefeated. But you can demonstrate for them the possibilities of that inheritance by modeling it yourself. The truth is that most parents who give up on their ambitions once they have a family, do so not because they have to but because they want to. They may not tell themselves this, but it’s true. Do not use your kids as an excuse to give up on the things you want to do with your life. This, more than anything, is the best lesson you can teach them.

Part 2: Why I am not a Pro Natalist™

The first part of this talk was about reducing the pressure of having children, by relaxing the expectations for what it means to be a good parent. I want to apply this same approach to the idea of natalism itself.

So why am I not a Pro-natalist™? I am not a pro-natalist because describing oneself as a pro-natalist admits to the perversion of casting “natalism” into the realm of politics.

Our most basic biological functions and drives are NOT POLITICAL. They are not socially negotiated. They do not depend on, nor are they improved from making them political.

I do not want to participate in their politicization. I do not want to engage in that framing. That framing is itself anti-natalist, since it implies the political legitimacy of anti-natalism. One assumes the other. It suggests there is some way of being that is not natalist, and that it requires whole conferences and policies and political labels to contend against this other way of being.

This is, of course, absurd. I refuse to acknowledge the political legitimacy of anti-natalism by defining myself against it.

Politics has an inherently destructive nature. At bottom, it is a contest of power. Everything politics touches therefore turns into a means of acquiring more power for further political contestation. Having children—or not having children—becomes instrumentalized toward some other goal. And what goal is that exactly? Keeping social security solvent? To outbreed the libs? This is insane.

This has also been tried and does not–because it cannot–achieve its aims. Soviet “pro-natalist” campaigns for example turned reproduction and motherhood into patriotic duty. There were slogans, and incentives, and art created to glorify motherhood, and even “maternity capital” programs to properly incentive would-be parents. The results weren’t increased family flourishing, but cynicism, resentment, and ultimately demographic stagnation. Why? Because Soviet life was miserable, and when politics colonizes biology, it corrupts biology’s essential spontaneity, its intuitive, often irrational authenticity. People feel this, and they rightly reject it. They feel they are being manipulated and they do not like it. It indicates something is “wrong,” and they respond accordingly.

Now, all of that said, I understand why this conference exists and I understand that we are here because–at least at the most fundamental level–we all believe in the goodness of the ongoing existence of the human race. I believe that. Let me state for the record that I believe in the goodness of the ongoing existence of the human race.

I love humans. I love children.

Given that preference I would urge us not to raise the political salience of having kids. I think there may be some short term value in pointing out what is at stake and encouraging some amount of reflection on macro demographic trends (we should be paying attention to these things, and it is perfectly fair for those of you who study this as a matter of niche academic interest to continue doing so) but to the extent we want to see more children in the world it must be an embrace of parenthood as an end unto itself, for reasons that are pre-political, and even pre-social. We are dealing with forces beyond our understanding, and ultimately beyond our reach.

The best things in the world, in life––and there is no question that having kids is one such thing––should be approached only with awe, only with total humility. The miracle of having kids belongs to God, not to Caesar.

If we are still holding this conference in ten years we will have failed. Our goal should be to never have to talk about this. Our goal should be that no one is even aware of the word natalist and that no journalist (let alone several of them) would ever find it compelling enough to travel to a conference in Austin to report on.

Just as being an effective parent means stepping back from anxiety-driven control of our children, and embracing a healthier, more natural relationship with them, addressing the demographic future of humanity requires stepping back from anxiety-driven politics and embracing a healthier, more natural relationship with parenthood itself.

Our aim is not to “win” a political contest, but to step out of politics entirely. None of what we want is sustainable so long as the term “pro-natalist” has any more meaning than a nonsense word like “pro-breatheist,” or “pro-sunlightest.”

I have great respect for Kevin and all of the organizers of this conference. I have great respect for my fellow speakers, and for all of you in attendance. I love you all dearly. I really do. But I am praying, and I hope you would all pray with me, for the day that we are never asked to gather for a Natal Conference again.