Chapter 6

Subtraction by Multiplication

Imagine a startup car company invents an engine that runs on a special fuel. It could be anything, but since I’m hungry, let’s say it’s cereal. That would be revolutionary. Current fuel tanks don’t do well if you add Lucky Charms.

Since there are no other cars on the market powered by sugary breakfast foods, this company—which I’ll call Tasty Fuel-Os since it’s my imaginary company and I can do whatever I want—starts from scratch.

First, Tasty Fuel-Os does extensive research and development to answer key questions. Can the same engine handle hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, AND blue moons? Does horsepower suffer if there’s a prize in the box? Do pistons run better before or after you add the milk? Tasty Fuel-Os’s scientists resolve these queries through experiments that are as painstaking as they are magically delicious.

After that, Tasty Fuel-Os erects a special one-of-a-kind factory. No other facility can build a car like this, mostly because it’s a terrible idea. They’re paying full retail price for cereal. A road trip would cost more than you make in a year. Though it’d still be cheaper than a Tesla.

To support those trips, the company builds a network of refueling stations across the country. There are silos of marshmallows to burn as fuel and silos of hard pieces to throw away as garbage. Even cars don’t like the crunchy parts.

Amount of Sense Metaphors Make by Length

Finally, after years of preparation, the factory builds a car. Yes, a car. As in one. Then Tasty Fuel-Os shuts down production and levels the factory so it can never, ever build one again. The only explanation the company gives is, “One was enough.”

The decision doesn’t make sense. After years of research and grocery shopping, why would the company suddenly call it quits after just one car?

I don’t know. Ask a parent who had just one kid.

The Numbers Game

Kids and cars have a lot in common. They’re expensive, bad for the environment, and powered mostly by cereal. But above all else, children and automobiles are both easier to produce and maintain after you get set up for the first one. No sane company would build all that infrastructure for just one car; no sane parent would upend their life for just one kid. Although if you ever meet a sane parent, let me know.

As a parent, you finished the research and development phase when you had your first child. You read the pregnancy books, bought all the baby stuff, and learned firsthand what really happens in the delivery room—although you wish you could unlearn it. Or maybe you went through the alternate but equally arduous process of adoption. If you think having your own kid is tough, try having somebody else’s. Either way, you paid the costs in terms of time, money, and lost sleep. You might as well get more bang for your buck by building in bulk.

The biggest adjustment in any parent’s life is going from zero kids to one. At that point, you switch from only being responsible for yourself to being responsible for another person. And, no, getting a pet isn’t the same thing. You can’t lock a child in the laundry room while you go out for drinks. Well, you could, but only till your feral laundry child escapes and terrorizes the neighbors.

Going from one kid to two isn’t a big deal. It won’t disrupt your social calendar. You already spend 99 percent of your free time at home. Plus all your clothes are already stained by various baby fluids, so there’s nothing left to ruin. And thanks to your previously crushed spirit, it already seems normal for a tiny human to scream at you. Just sit back and expect more of the same. You’ll barely even notice the next kid is there.

But if you do notice them, you’ll know what to do. You worked out the kinks on the prototype. If your oldest child is still alive, you were successful at childproofing your house. Whatever’s left isn’t fatal. It’s always the stuff you least expect, anyway. Your kid will be fine around steak knives but cut themselves on a pillowcase. The true curse of the pharaohs is Egyptian cotton.

If you have another kid, you won’t waste time sanitizing things. Before the age of five, half of a child’s diet is dirt. But you’ll no longer cringe by the time kid number two eats food off the floor. You’ll just be grateful they didn’t get a plate dirty.

Adding another child also won’t force you to change vehicles. Anything that can hold one car seat can hold two. Unless you drive your kid around on the back of a motorcycle. Then you won’t have time for another child. You’ll be too busy collecting trophies for being the coolest parent ever.

As for supplies, you’ll still have all the baby gear from your first kid: the fancy pushchair that cost as much as your car but was too big to fit inside it; the baby sling you only used a few times because your kid is a tiny space heater and you kept dripping sweat on them; and all the clothes your kid wore for thirty seconds before they outgrew them. Now all that high-end stuff costs half as much because, by having a second kid, you’ll use it twice. Your first kid was full retail price. Your second one is on sale. By kid number three, someone might as well be paying you. If you get to four, you’ve basically won the lottery. As a rich parent of four, I promise this is a real thing and not a lie at all.

Financial Impact of Your Life Choices

Smarter, Not Harder

Two children aren’t twice as much work as one. If you’re already yelling at the first kid, just add the name of the second kid at the end. In fact, it’s always a good idea to include both names, even if only one kid is in trouble. The other one was probably up to something, too. You’ll seem omniscient. In reality, you’re just too lazy to separate the innocent from the guilty.

Having a second kid won’t double your obligations, either. If the kids are close enough in age, you can drop them off together at the same school and embarrass them both at the same time. Help them beat peer pressure by scaring away all their friends.

To save time, you can double up their doctors’ appointments, too. And use the opportunity to find out their blood types. Before you stop having kids, verify that you’ve secured yourself a reasonable stockpile of replacement kidneys.

Supermarket runs won’t take any longer. Just adjust the quantities of the foods you were already buying. If your kids are ages five and under, you won’t need to purchase much of anything. They subsist entirely on old Cheerios they find under the couch. If you have teenagers, on the other hand, expect to buy food by the pallet. But time-wise, it’s the same stop with the same shopping list and the same coupons. The only difference is, with teenagers you’ll need a truck.

Activities That Are Better with Two Kids Than One

Activity	Advantage of Two Kids
Visiting Grandparents	Kids can evenly divide the awkward small talk.
Swimming Lessons	They’ll learn to swim better by trying to drown each other.
Learning to Read	Stolen sibling diaries won’t read themselves.
Picking Up	No one cleans faster than two kids hiding the evidence.
Sports	Pointless sibling rivalries promote equally pointless athletic excellence.
Professional Wrestling	You can’t have a tag team of one.
Dueling	A sibling makes the perfect second.
Piggyback Rides	Good luck giving one to yourself.

Deceptive Minimum

You’re probably very confused right now, and not just because, as a parent, that’s your natural state. Shouldn’t a bare minimum parent want one kid, the lowest possible number of children after zero? Kids don’t come in fractions.

In reality, one kid is more work than any other number of children. With an only child, you’ll be their sole source of entertainment. True, there are electronic gadgets and other distractions, but you’ll be your kid’s only human contact at home. Every time they’re bored—which, no matter how many toys they have, will be all the time—they’ll come straight to you. You’ll have a bull’s-eye on your back. Hide somewhere with food and booze.

If you have more than one kid, you can make them entertain each other. They might spend every waking second fighting, but it still keeps them busy. Just send them into the garden or a corner of the second floor where you can’t hear them. If you notice blood leaking through the ceiling, maybe go check.

Even if you have just one kid yourself, you won’t really have just one kid. You’ll have somebody else’s kid, too. Irritating you might entertain your kid for a while, but eventually they’ll want a friend to come over to double the annoyance factor.

And a friend is worse than your own kid. While the visiting child is at your house, you’ll have to be on your best behavior. Worse, you’ll need to keep your abode reasonably clean and wear pants. Regret feels like tight jeans in the middle of the afternoon.

You’ll have to make other special exceptions for the visiting child, too. You can’t discipline someone else’s kid like you discipline your own. Your kid’s friend will have diplomatic immunity. That will embolden your own child, who for the duration of the visit you won’t be able to discipline the way you want, either. If the visiting kid goes home and reports that your child spent the entire time in time-out, someone might come over for a well-being check. That’s one more time you’d have to clean the house.

This pressure to invite other kids over will be constant. Your child will want to have a friend over on weekends and holidays and the weeknights when they’re bored, which will be all of them. Your gut reaction will be to say no, but the word that leaves your mouth will be “yes.” Your will is strong, but your guilt is stronger. Your child’s loneliness, like everything else in their life, will be your fault.

You’ll also feel pressure to have activities planned because somebody else’s kid is involved. Your own child already knows you’re a disappointment, but when their friend is over, you’ll have someone to impress. Going places and doing things flies in the face of everything bare minimum parents stand for. Plus it’s expensive. You’ll have to pay for yourself, your kid, and your kid’s friend everywhere you go. You didn’t save money by not having a second kid. You just wasted it on somebody else.

Planned Activities for When Someone Else’s Kid Visits

Activity	Pro	Con
Circus	Cheap entertainment.	They won’t take your kid, no matter how much you beg.
Professional Sporting Event	Kills three hours.	Kills your budget for three months.
Ice Cream Shop	Ice cream.	You’ll watch two cones get dropped instead of one.
A Walk	Exercise.	Exercise.
Water Park	You won’t have to worry about toilet breaks.	Neither will anyone else.
Cinema	You won’t hear either kid over the surround sound.	Popcorn for three will cost a second mortgage.
Campfire	Smoke will drive away bugs.	It won’t drive away kids.

Limited Appeal

There might not always be a friend available for your only child. Their pal might have siblings to play with instead. Or they might simply be tired of your kid. You love your child unconditionally, and even you get sick of them.

Making new friends can be hard for an only child. Without siblings to interact with, they’ll learn all their early social skills from you. But by the time you become a parent, you’ll be done making friends. On most days, the only people you’ll see will be colleagues and other parents, neither of which make great additions to your empty social circle. Colleagues are in your life simply because you’re paid to coexist in the same unpleasant place, while other parents invite unwanted comparisons to yourself. And you’re the one who’s supposed to socialize your kid. Good luck.

I’m about to make some sweeping generalizations—as opposed to the rest of this book, which is nothing but sweeping generalizations. Okay, fine. Brace yourself for more of the same. Many only children are great at getting along with adults because that’s who they interact with at home. But only children sometimes find interacting with other kids challenging. In their own home, an only child is the center of the universe. They never have to share toys or compete for attention. But other kids won’t treat your child that way. Narcissism isn’t a team sport.

The great thing about siblings in a multi-child home is your kid can’t get rid of them. No matter how awful your children are to each other, they have to stick around and work it out. Through sheer force of proximity, your kids will resolve their issues with each other—and then develop a whole new set of issues to replace them. As a result, your children will be normal, if only in the sense that they’ll be just as messed up as everybody else.

But friends have no obligation to stick around when the going gets tough. They can simply cut off all contact with your child before your kid learns how to get along. The only consolation you can give your kid is telling them that eventually their friends would have drifted away anyway. That’s sure to make them feel better.

Reasons Friendships Fall Apart

Pressure Cooker

Having only one kid puts more pressure on everyone, including your child. They are the entire next generation of your family. Whether your bloodline continues or dies out forever is all up to them. If they decide not to have kids, they’ll voluntarily drive your family name to extinction. Or maybe they’ll want kids but can’t have them. Either way, if you only have one kid, you’ll be overly concerned with the status of your child’s reproductive system. That should make for a healthy parent-child relationship.

As a bare minimum parent, you want a return on your investment. Otherwise, why bother raising a kid at all? If your one and only child turns out to be a bust, you wasted eighteen years of your life. Every family has at least one black sheep. If you only have one kid, your odds aren’t looking good.

Division of Labor

There are times when having multiple kids can make life harder. When several children team up, there’s no limit to the destruction they can cause. That’s what happened at Chernobyl.

But there are also times when kids work together to make your life easier. If you have enough children, they’ll raise themselves. Like any pack animal, siblings form a hierarchy. Your children will know which kid is in charge and which kid they would eat if it really came down to it. It pays not to be the youngest or the chubbiest.

But there’s a trade-off for the power the top sibling enjoys. They’re expected to offer their younger brothers and sisters some degree of nurturing and protection, at least when they’re not making their lives a living hell. Every group of siblings has one mother hen or, well, I’m not sure what the male equivalent is. “Father cock” sounds wrong. But you get the idea. Siblings step up and look out for each other when necessary. If you’re doing the bare minimum amount of parenting, it’ll be necessary a lot.

Adding It All Up

Having multiple kids makes it simpler to hit the benchmarks of successful parenting. In a large family, your kids will be used to fending for themselves, so supporting themselves as adults will be an easy transition. Your children will have a hard time being deviants with other kids around to teach them social skills—and to tell on them when they step out of line. Never underestimate the value of a telltale. Best of all, your kids will never blame you for anything. They’ll be too busy blaming each other. Congratulations—you raised an entire herd of scapegoats.

If you wanted more kids and couldn’t have them, that’s fine. Your child will probably still turn out as average as everybody else’s. Just know that raising one kid isn’t any easier than raising several. Parenting is hard no matter how many children you have. Adding a few more won’t make your life any worse when the first kid has already ruined it.