Is Having Children Worth It? | No Stupid Questions | Episode 98

Key Takeaway

Treat the decision to have children—or another child—as a personal values-and-constraints exercise, not a search for a universally correct answer. Today, list the factors that would materially shape your choice: desired family life, caregiving capacity, housing, finances, career flexibility, health, and available support. Then distinguish daily caregiving burdens from the relationships and interactions you hope to build. Small frictions, such as inadequate space or transportation, can meaningfully influence major choices, so name them early rather than dismissing them.

Episode Overview

Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth explore why people choose to have children, how many to have, or whether to remain child-free. They examine declining fertility, the financial and logistical frictions of parenting, mixed evidence on parenthood and happiness, social pressure, public policy, and myths about only children and birth order.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Is Having Children Worth It? | No Stupid Questions | Episode 98 from Freakonomics Radio. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

all we do is we buy the ice cream and we play games and we make fart jokes I'm Stephen 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 15 25 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 would 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 Ian oh wait Stephen I just have to read you the PS we have one daughter almost three and are working on a second and ideally last child gotcha okay they're underway as for Ian saying I imagine there's a very complex algorithm that shapes the answer I guess I would say yeah there is I think what's most important about that algorithm are the components of it as opposed to just the answer that you're trying to derive from it because the answer may be right for others but not right for you in terms of those components I think Ian identified a few you know he talked about gone are the days of needing all those kids to work the Family Farm most of us know the biblical command be fruitful and multiply why was multiplication and fruitfulness necessary you needed a lot of bodies to do the work you wanted to extend your lineage you wanted someone to take care of you when you're old Plus in the old days a lot of kids did die from disease and accidents so it was nice to have more and so much has changed obviously and these changes I mean if you look at Global fertility rates especially in richer countries but even more and more in less rich countries you see those changes reflected unbelievably starkly so it's worth remembering that we didn't really populate the world very much for the first many many many many centuries you mean like the percentage of land mass that was inhabited by human beings was small is that what you mean the world population just didn't grow I'm reading here there was negligible net growth during the first 100 or so million years of human habitation to very low but persistent rate of growth to double the world's population during the period from about 200 BC to 1100 A.D so it doubled over those 1300 years but then a much faster population doubling during the next six centuries so that's amazing we got over 1 billion by 1850 but then it doubled again during the next hundred years wow and then even more I mean look we're at 7.7 billion now so the rate of growth has been astonishing that said the fertility rate has been falling fertility rate meaning essentially how many babies a given mother is expected to have over the course of her lifetime the story of the fertility rate in the U.S alone is really wild if you go back to the year 1800 in the U.S what would you guess the fertility rate of an American woman was 1800 so like right after the Revolutionary War um I'm gonna guess eight that is such a good guess seven it's a lot of kids the average woman of childbearing age would have had seven children over the course of her lifetime but by 1940 okay so this is 140 years later the fertility rate had fallen to two that is insane now keep in mind that's coming out of the Great Depression so that certainly had something to do with it we're also entering World War II so two good reasons for the fertility rate to have fallen what does war have to do with it just that they're not home to make babies is that what you're saying I think they're not home to make babies and recessions are not good for baby making and then after World War II the rate shot up we've heard of the baby boom but that was the modern Peak as of about 1960 or so then we began to drop and it dropped steeply until around 1980 it hit its lowest point yet it was 1.77 it's risen a bit over the past few decades but we're now back to around that all-time low 1.7 or 1.8 and covet has certainly played a role I mean this is getting to the complex calculus that Ian was saying and that doesn't really enter the more philosophical question of what are children for like is this just a cost-benefit thing or is there some deeper reason we haven't brought up Darwin yet by the way and the instinct to reproduce so what do you think children are for you have a couple why'd you do that I would have had more but I had this weird molar pregnancy thing where I wasn't really pregnant but my body thought I was pregnant at any rate I wasn't able to have a baby for another year while I cleared all that out of my system and I was a little older but honestly Stephen if you could have three wouldn't you have three instead of two I would have three if I could instead of two you know I hate to say it one of the reasons that we have two kids is the reason that a lot of New York City and other City families have two kids you just don't have space right in terms of the various reasons why Ian or anyone may be considering no more than two it is true that it's gotten a lot more expensive to have kids and two of the big drivers of that expense are education especially post-secondary education yeah College and real estate there is a paper from a few years back by Lisa detling who's with the Federal Reserve board and Melissa Carney who's one of my favorite economists she's at the University of Maryland she does a lot of work on fertility and family formation this is a paper called the impact of the real estate market on the decision to have a baby they write our results suggest that indeed short-term increases in house prices lead to a decline in births among non-owners and a net increase among owners the estimates imply that a ten thousand dollar increase leads to a five percent increase in fertility rates among owners and a 2.4 percent decrease among non-owners so plainly a factor there's also a paper from a couple years back that we made a free economics radio episode about which argues you may laugh off this result but I promise you it's empirical it argues that the laws in the U.S that require parents to keep their children in car seats until a certain age has actually decreased the fertility rate as well wait what yep how did they make that argument oh they do it with the introduction of the legislation and then they say that fertility rates declined after that The Sweet Spot that they're looking at is families who already had two children and whether they would have been likely to have had a third and it turns out that it's really hard to fit three car seats in a car without getting at least a minute van that is so true and then the minivan costs more etc etc so they argued that it did have a small but noticeable downward effect on fertility rates are you the one who told me that Elon Musk design the Tesla to be able to fit three car seats in the back because he has triplets I didn't is that true I don't know I feel like there's at least a 60 chance that that's true you know I had this postdoc who's coming to work with me next year named Assaf Missouri and he did his PhD with Wendy wood who's the reigning queen of habit research he is interested in friction and the idea that even little tiny amounts of friction can actually have a surprisingly large effect on decision making and maybe the kind of like well then we'd have to get a new car gosh I don't even want to think about that you know shifting a fertility decision is kind of ridiculous but also in this post-talk way believable now what do you say to someone who says come on there's no way that something is small and trivial as a third car seat or having to get a bigger car could have an impact on a decision as large and long-term as that do you think they're being irrational to not believe it I think we discount these friction factors when Vietnam Vets came back from Vietnam I think something like one out of three of them was pretty addicted to opioids and by the way there's a lot of other drug use that was going on in Vietnam but when you came back to the this country at that time it was very difficult to get opioids but it was pretty easy to get marijuana what's interesting is that the rate of addiction went precipitously down in heroin and opioid use but not for other drugs just think about how addictive opioids are so the fact that the friction of like where would I get it I don't know anyone who's actually dealing you know I think friction can make an enormous difference an outsized impact on our decision making so Ian and his wife he writes have one daughter almost three and they're working on a second and ideally last child I don't know why they're bothering us because they've already made their decision right yeah I was gonna say Ian you should have emailed us three years ago you know we would have told him read Danny kahneman's research on this question of whether childless women are happier or less happy than women with children do you know that data I believe he did one of his early day reconstruction studies this is where you reconstruct 24 hours in your life usually the last 24 hours in your life and you divide it into episodes you rate those episodes on what you were feeling at the time famously commuting is rated really low but also quite low on the list of well-being or happiness is taking care of your kids it's not just Danny Kahneman there's been a lot of research in the last eight years on happiness and when you ask the question what are children for I'm not sure every parent would say Well they're there to make me happy that's why I'm having children just to be happy but I do think it's relevant it's got to be an input into the calculus here and the happiness research on parenting is very mixed there were papers that came out over the last decade that said did you know that parents are less happy than non-parents matched on all these variables then there were other papers that came out did you know that parents are more happy than non-parents and I think the very latest research says that some of the conflicting findings is that for women there's not a reliable huge benefit for having children but fathers do appear to be happier than men who don't have children I have seen that research and I have to say it really surprised me the fathers versus mothers thing yeah this is a paper called Parenthood is associated with greater well-being for fathers and mothers that one stopped me in my tracks did it not you oh it was not intuitive to you that fathers would get more happiness out of having children absolutely not why is that I guess because in our family but also in the family I grew up in and in my wife's family and in many many many other families I know while the fathers are loving around etc etc et cetera the bond between child and mother seems so much stronger now on the other hand a lot of the home care and a lot of the hard stuff does fall to the mothers all we do is we buy the ice cream and we play games and we make fart jokes that's fatherhood but it still surprised me very much it does not seem intuitive to me so you understand that women have to do more child care and so that might be kind of a buzz kill but I think you're saying that because mothers seem so much closer to their children that's why you kind of expect them to get more happiness out of being a parent is that right I guess if I were to be really reductive I would have to say that the investment in a child is probably deeper for a mother than a father on average and that therefore the investment probably pays off greater which is to say that there's more deep satisfaction in that relationship I think I think what might be useful here is to think about two kinds of things that we do with our children one is caregiving you know and a kid's little you're like cutting food up into little pieces and running the dishwasher and buckling them into car seats and changing diapers and walking them to places and then there's also just interacting with them like having a nice conversation with them and there's probably some things that kind of fall in between like reading a book you know to your young child if we think about those two ends of the Continuum or two kinds of experiences the research suggests that happiness basically is when you're interacting with your kid and they're talking to you and it's maybe not exactly the most fun thing to actually take care of them so this happiness unhappiness thing is I think partly because women are doing a lot more of the caretaking parenting is work and during those hours and hours and hours when we're doing caregiving we may not be especially especially happy that makes a lot of sense and again this goes back to the conversation we had last week about happiness generally and how reliably can we measure it and so on so I guess it shouldn't be any surprise that there's a lot of nuance around this conversation as well and a lot of conflict like you said the findings are really mixed for instance despite that happy father research we talked about earlier which stated explicitly that men with children are happier than men without children and I'm assuming they're controlling for selection there they're trying to control for what they can control with you can't control for everything it's not random assignment but that said there's other research which finds that childless people are happier than people with children and that includes men as well so I'm looking at something called the geography of Parenthood and well-being do children make us happy where and why this is part of the world happiness report and the author Lucas stanka writes using a large sample of individuals more than a hundred countries we find that life satisfaction is higher all else equal among those without children the negative Parenthood premium is stronger for females and it turns positive for older age groups and for widowers I will say this if you look at happiness levels of people with and without children I'm looking here from something that Paul Bloom wrote you know Paul Bloom obviously yeah I just saw him last week the psychologist at Yale correct he's moved to University of Toronto so his most recent book is called The Sweet Spot he wrote about a 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of people with and without children in 22 countries and gosh this just makes a lot of sense when you see it written down it found that the extent to which children make you happy is influenced by whether your country has Child Care policies such as paid parental leave parents from Norway and Hungary for instance are happier than childless couples in those countries but parents from Australia and Great Britain are less happy than their childless peers the country with the greatest happiness drop after you have children the United States so what's interesting about that to me is it's a bit surprising then that Republicans in the U.S who generally are in favor of higher fertility rates than Democrats aren't more enthusiastic about those child-friendly policies Mitt Romney for one is he's talked about extending child tax credits and so on it makes a lot of sense that it's a lot easier to be a parent when you've got structure and support that goes beyond your immediate family the doctor and researcher Dana suskin at the University of Chicago has just published a book called parent nation which makes a larger similar argument that the US just does not support parents very well from the governmental level at least and so I think that probably has a lot to do with how difficult it can be to be a parent and why probably more and more people are choosing to have either zero or one instead of two three or you know eight right if you really want people to have children then you do have to think about those two things that parents do like they interact with their children and research shows that generally people are happy when they're interacting with their children but they're caring for their children they're doing the work of parenting and when they are being asked to do that work but also hold a job and also do all the other things that's stressful and not something that people necessarily find happiness producing so this public policy question is very related to the psychology still to come on no stupid questions Stephen and Angela discuss how birth order affects a child's personality and future you're like worn into this family and the other two humans they're pretty sophisticated thinkers but then it's kind of deluded by this idiot your sister or brother and stick around till the end of the episode for a preview of the newest show from the Freakonomics radio network for hundreds and hunts to years until the 18th century probably dogs really weren't even legal things they weren't even property but first more on the decision to become a parent right after this she was before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about modern fertility let's hear some of your thoughts on the subject we asked listeners to let us know the factors that affected their decisions to have kids here's what you said hi my name is Darcy from Australia you can probably hear my baby in the background I was filling in the baby book for my seven month old recently and it had a prompt that said having you felt important to us because with room for a paragraph and I couldn't come up with any good answer I asked my husband and he couldn't either so maybe it just wasn't a well thought through decision I think it was partly selfish partly biology partly social norms what do you think baby well she's glad to be here hey nsq team as of now my husband and I are leaning towards remaining Child free mainly because there's other life experiences we'd like to prioritize what I found really interesting is the very different experiences that we've had in sharing this news when asked I get asked very frequently when are you having kids it's just assumed and if I tell someone whether it's a close friend or a complete stranger which is very frequent that we don't plan to have kids I get really strong reactions and they've really made me question the value that I'd bring to society as a woman if I'm not a mother and that's something that I've embraced as a challenge to Define what my legacy can be outside of a small human Meanwhile my husband gets asked about once or twice a year and his manhood and value is never brought into question hi Stephen Angela so for context I'm a single meal residing here in Malaysia and when it comes to the question about children I ask myself whether I can give them a better life than the one that I had lived and looking at the state of the world and the economy maybe it's because I'm reading too much news or listening too much about the current happenings in the world but I'm not sure whether I can even provide a better life than the one that I had lived in terms of the environment in terms of my social economic status and that really worries me that was respectively Darcy Sarah Schroeder and Reuben Liu thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts now back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about Parenthood so we've been talking Angie about how many kids one two three 15 25 how about zero let's talk about zero for a minute do you feel that having children in many or most cultures is a sort of societal habit that one is encouraged toward and made to feel lesser than if one doesn't go that route do you feel that women let's just say in this country at this time do feel social pressure to have children or do you think that's fading well just the fact that you stated these pretty astonishing fertility changes over the last couple centuries suggests that it can't be purely biological right we wouldn't be having like one-fourth the number of children as we had in our great great grandparents generation if it were all biology so there has to be a cultural piece of the story and maybe a much bigger cultural piece and would be intuitive now is culture telling us that we should be having babies but it was telling us even more that we should be having babies 100 or 200 years ago you know there was a pretty strong cultural norm of having children having a lot of them or you know not having one woman at home raising the children the guy at work I think things are different today there might be some cultural pressure to have children but dramatically less even though I have friends friends who don't have children I don't feel like there's a cultural stigma at least in our social ecosystem but I could be wrong what do you think you mentioned that you and I both have friends who don't have children I will say I don't think I have that many other than gay couple friends who don't have children yeah I have so many friends who don't have children I think in our friendship Circle most of them do but I think that's not coincidental either in that once you have kids and you start doing those things like sending them to school and having them play sports well then your friends circle changes to include people who also have kids but I do think it's interesting that it's so natural to talk about how many kids is this couple going to have as opposed to are they going to have children I will say if you want to think about it from the economic perspective not just saving the money that comes with not raising a kid because I think the average cost now is about a quarter of a million dollars until you get your kid to adulthood but an opportunity cost I'm looking at data here which says that 42 percent of charitable foundations are created by people without children like Milton Hershey like who do you know the Milton Hershey Story like you know Hershey bars oh and it was a big charity for children or like a children's school or home or something yeah Milton Hershey and his wife I'm sorry I don't know her name probably Mrs Hershey Milton Hershey and Mrs Hershey wanted to have children they could not for whatever reason and they gave all of their money like their entire inheritance to a philanthropic trust it's not hard to make the connection here literally to create a school for orphaned children they're all these pictures of Milton Hershey and Mrs Hershey with these orphan boys at the time it's since become co-ed and you don't have to be an orphan but you come from essentially a place where you can't safely live where you are so you come to live at the Hershey School just a boarding school because Hershey has done so well as a company and because this trust was basically built on Hershey's stock this school I think has the highest per capita endowment of any institution in the world including Harvard Stanford MIT and Princeton so anyway that would just be an example I guess of people people who don't have children so who are you going to pass your money down to so we've talked a little bit about having zero children we've talked about having two or more children let's talk for a minute about having one child there has been a pretty strong bias against the only child idea if you go back in history I'm looking at something here from a Scientific American piece from Recently but this was describing something published in the 19th century by an ew Bohannon from Clark University Massachusetts this was called a study of peculiar and exceptional children and this was based on a survey that Bohannon did at the time a questionnaire asking 200 test subjects and the survey method was still considered pretty new and wild at that time Cutting Edge he asked respondents about the peculiarities of any only children that they knew so again 200 people he asked in 196 cases of those 200 participants describe children without siblings as excessively spoiled and the article further notes that according to data compiled in the 21st century these Notions are a quote nonsense and the only children show no serious deficit but tell me what you know about the only child concept does it necessarily result in a sense of entitlement or spoiledness does that child miss out on things from not having siblings or you could imagine there are more resources devoted to that child and maybe they'd be better off you know I think there might be some research on this in China sometimes they say like the little Emperor because like if you have an only child and if that's a son there could be this excessive doting and by the way unhappy footnote to that which is that at least for periods of History the male female ratio in children and China was not 50 50 and you're like what how could it be well it's because if you don't get a boy you can kind of get rid of your girl selective abortion yeah yes exactly or you know adoption or abandonment and not just China we should say in India it's been a big issue The Economist amartia sen wrote years ago about these millions of missing women and girls in India and elsewhere so obviously that survey done all the way back then was just basically about stereotypes because it's like hey what do you think of only children yeah I know the birth order research includes the only child research because the birth order research in Psychology asks like what about if you're born first what about if you're a middle child what about if you're the last born and interestingly in a lot of that research children who are separated by a gap of about five years which is the case for me are considered only children you kind of start over again and I think the logic is that you're effectively growing up as an only child which felt like how I was growing up actually my sister was five grade levels above me my brother was eight before Middle School my brother had left for a lot of my childhood I was just hanging out with my parents I think the research on birth order generally suggests that like we have these really strong intuitions about oldest children about youngest children about middle children I mean really strong intuitions and it's all Bs you're gonna tell me is that right well here's the thing I think that there's very little that holds up to scrutiny when you actually survey not people about what their intuitions or stereotypes are but actually children and if you ask people for example to fill out a survey of their extroversion and you don't tell them secretly I'm doing a birth order study the prediction is that the youngest children like me and like you the babies of the family were going to be wildly more extroverted than the firstborn children or maybe than only children and you do not find big birth order effects I mean some studies would argue that there are no birth order effects for personality with minor exceptions but as I'm sure you know there is a lot of research showing that the oldest child gets more resources from parents including cognitive resources and so oldest children in families tend to do better academically then you just kind of have less either time or money I would argue however that if you look at a pretty big family like mine coming in last bringing up the rear I think there are all sorts of cognitive benefits that are pretty hard to account for including sitting around the dinner table with a bunch of students in the school you're going to go to talking about their schoolwork so by the time I got to like seventh grade yeah I know all that stuff thank you very much Mr Davis so I do think the way that knowledge transfer Works in a family is potentially complicated and interesting every family is obviously different I don't think that the benefits and the costs are as clear-cut as we might think I am also grateful that my family had eight kids because if not I wouldn't be having this conversation with you you'd be having it with maybe my oldest brother Joe he was an Air Force fighter pilot he was very competent but you know you can fly a fighter jet but he can't make a podcast damn it let me just annotate a bit your observation or your understanding my screed my rant on firstborn children it is now well established that there is a slight IQ difference I mean it's very small but it is reliable favoring firstborn and only children it's not only and maybe even not primarily because the parents buy all the workbooks and like all their time with the firstborn compared to like the second one who gets less one of the theories of why it is that firstborn children could have higher IQs is because when you are a little baby you're kind of dumb in a sense you're like born into this family and the other two humans they've got great vocabularies they're pretty sophisticated thinkers now if you are second born you get born into a family with those parents but then it's kind of deluded by this idiot your sister or brother who's just like babbling it doesn't really know how to talk but I don't think there's a lot of evidence for firstborn or only children being higher or lower in any kind of dramatic way on any personality trait or unhappiness either so I don't know if we gave Ian anything even remotely useful I mean you and I both have two kids I told you I wanted to have three though so two and a half would be the optimal number then well let's say this Ian has a daughter who's almost three I'm sure she is wonderful sounds like number two is on the way didn't say on the way said working on it I think there's a little bit of a gap between working on it and on the way yeah I don't know how graphic we want to be and I'm not sure exactly what Ian means about like what stage they are on working on it should we call them right now and see if they're actually trying to procreate as we record I kind of feel like Ian wouldn't answer the phone if he were really actively that's a great point you know what I mean that's why you're a professor and I'm just a journalist that's why they feed me the big bucks but I will say this child of care is really hard and if you ask me in the moment I might not say that I'm like 10 out of 10 on happiness but I feel like when I wake wake up in the morning and I do my three good things exercise I think of three things that I'm grateful for I almost always think of Lucy and Amanda do they count as one or two usually I try to do one at a time and I try to think of something recently that I am grateful for like Lucy sent me a photo of her skiing with her boyfriend that made me really happy you know Amanda's buying this dress I got to have three or four text messages with her about which dress did she like and I was like yeah those are two of the biggest blessings in my life so you're saying really the reason you would have liked to have had a third child would be to make it much easier to do the three things you're grateful for exercise that's exactly what I mean the complex algorithm that Ian asks about it's just that no stupid questions is produced by me Rebecca Lee Douglas and now here's a fact check of today's conversation in the first half of the show Angela says that she thinks that Elon Musk designed the Tesla to be able to fit three car seats because of his triplets Tesla models X and Y do indeed fit three car seats however I can't find anything that confirms that musk's triplets inspired the car's design in fact the three car seats wouldn't have been very helpful for the billionaire CEO because when his triplets were born in 2006 he already had two-year-old twins he would have needed a large SUV in order to safely seat his three infants and two toddlers later Angela says that one out of three Vietnam vets were addicted to opioids this estimate was a little too high it's true that almost half of the men serving in Vietnam tried either heroin or opium but only 20 became addicted while there in the first year back home five percent relapsed then Angela can't recall the name of chocolatier and philanthropist Milton Hershey's spouse Catherine Sweeney Hershey or Kitty created the Hershey industrial school with her husband in 1909.

now the Milton Hershey School the institution is a cost-free private residential school and Home for lower-income Children located in Hershey Pennsylvania with 17.4 billion dollars in assets it's currently the wealthiest K-12 school in the United States it spends roughly ninety thousand dollars a year on each of its 2100 students finally Stephen and Angela were responding to Ian's question about the decision to have children and how many I should note that the number of children a given couple has is affected by many factors outside of their control including physiological elements like age and fertility and social ones like availability of contraception and reproductive health care that's it for the fact check don't forget to stick around until after the credits to hear a preview of the newest podcast from the Freakonomics radio network it's a show about dogs called off leash and the first episode features Stephen Angela and a scratch and sniff smell test coming up next week on no stupid questions is being a copycat really so bad why not plagiarize someone else's personality if they're features of that personality that you like more that's next week on no stupid questions for that episode we want to know what aspects of other people's lives have you copied and how has it worked out for you to share your thoughts send a voice memo to nsq freakonomics.com with the subject line copycat make sure to record someplace quiet and please keep your thoughts to under a minute no stupid questions is part of the Freakonomics radio network which also includes Freakonomics radio people I mostly admire and Freakonomics MD all our shows are produced by Stitcher and renbud radio this show was mixed by Eleanor Osborne our staff also includes Allison preglo Greg Ripon Gabriel Roth Morgan Levy Zach Lipinski Julie canfer Mary de Duke Ryan Kelly Jasmine Klinger Emma Terrell lyric bowditch Jacob Clementi and Alina Coleman our theme song is and she was by Talking Heads special thanks to David Byrne and Horner Chapel Music if you'd like to listen to the show ad free subscribe to Stitcher premium you can follow us on Twitter at nsq underscore show and on Facebook at nsq show if you have a question for a future episode please email it to nsq freakonomics.com to learn more or to read episode transcripts visit freakonomics.com nsq thanks for listening she was so check this out Angela the average parent will display almost a thousand images of their child online before they reach the age of five oh my God 200 pictures per year so these days more than farmhands or Legacy Builders kids are just social media props but that's important the Freakonomics radio network the Hidden Side of Everything Stitcher come on big girl you ready to go my name is Alexandra Horowitz I'm a scientist and a writer and my subject is dogs I run a lab studying dog cognition in New York City where we observe the behavior of the local dogs and their persons and I've written several books about what it's like to be a dog and the oomveld of dogs how they perceive the world around them now I invite you to join me on my new show off leash where we dive deeper into the dog's world for each episode I've invited an interesting person and their dog on a walk and then we'll see where the walk takes us because in my experience things happen on walks especially on a walk with a dog okay we've somehow ended up at a dumpster in a parking lot this is kind of like walking a dog kind of like water skiing I'm mostly being pulled here oh no there goes the ball oh but each episode we'll explore questions about the nature of living with dogs like what does it mean to own a dog for hundreds and hundreds of years until the 18th century probably dogs really weren't even legal things they weren't even property are the names we give our dogs meaningful to them pop-tart's a pitbull she was enthralled by the sound of her own name it was one of those things that really stuck in my brain just how much she enjoyed listening and what is it like to experience reality Prime merely through a sense of smell its little nostrils would be twitching from side to side and when the wind blew and carried the odor of the scat on it he would just snap into action I interview other dog scientists from around the world about their research I began to think about how could we turn this into a scientific study without actually demolishing anybody's house and doing them anywhere and you'll hear from some of my sharpest friends including a few familiar voices from the Freakonomics radio network he has big long legs kind of reminds me of Scooby-Doo a little bit I'm all about dogs and I never run out of questions about these joyful mysterious animals but all fleece is also about the people at the other end of the leash and the nature of the relationship between us and the dogs who walk by our sides it's about living with and among all animals and the Curiosity and reverence that they can Inspire in US if I'm willing and patient enough to slow down and watch that it's like I'm piggybacking on his superpower off leash is part of the Freakonomics radio network and coming soon you can subscribe now on Apple podcasts Spotify Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts you're such a good girl come on come on we're walking come on you're too heavy for me to carry you Coco I can't do it I cannot do it