Mostly if you have a good home, your kids are going to be quality kids.  Jumping through our society’s hoops won’t help much, may hurt.  The things you do with your kids that will help the most are the things you enjoy or that are meaningful.  Time, family meals, family walks, talking about what is noble and true in life.

I said that parents should spend less per child. And that’s true.

When I say that, you’re assuming that the relevant tradeoff is “take the money you were going to spend on maths tutoring, and spend it on a fancy new car for yourself”. In other words, you make the choice between altruism and selfishness, and then declare yourself righteous by advocating on the side of altruism.

But spending-per-child has both a numerator and a denominator.

People only seem to think of the numerator, to spend less in total. Of course, there’s another way to reduce spending per child. Namely, hold total spending constant, and have more children.

And it’s bizarre that this is almost never the tradeoff that people think of, even though they should. The real tradeoff should be “skip the maths tutoring and have one more child”.

When phrased this way, the choice is much harder to feel righteous about, because now altruism is stacked on both sides of the ledger. And the altruism is actually quite jarring when considered explicitly.

“I’m saving for my child to have a debt-free college experience at the best university possible! What could be more noble than that?”, asks John Q. GenXer. Well, let’s phrase it differently. Suppose that you have two children, and you want to pay for both of their college. You’re setting aside, what, $400K or so? In practical terms, that would go an awfully long way towards funding the entire existence of child #3. Suppose you had to confront the actual child #3, in some hypothetical universe. You have to tell him, “Sorry, son, I chose for you not to exist so that your older brother wouldn’t have to have college debt.”

Put that way, it doesn’t sound nearly so noble, does it? In fact, it sounds downright disturbing and shallow.

And yet that’s the actual alternative being faced. It doesn’t feel that way, because the children you don’t have aren’t salient, or even fully real. But if they were, they’d be much harder to treat so callously.

-from here.

We are bad at safety trade-offs in the same way.