How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ratchet Effect
In the life of a family, there are peaks of responsibility and valleys of relief. You get used to the cycle.
By Meghan Cox Gurdon
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There is a concept in behavioral economics known as the “ratchet effect” and boy have I noticed it lately. The concept relates to the ease with which a person adapts to greater comforts and conveniences (also known as lifestyle inflation), the pleasant plateau of becoming habituated to a new higher level (the so-called endowment effect), and the enhanced difficulty of giving any of it up (loss aversion).
Typically these ideas relate to money—the pleasure of spending it, the pain of running out—but they also apply to children and grandchildren. When you are raising a family, you become more adept at meeting domestic demands with each additional child. There comes a time, peak familial scrum, when there’s a mad blur between the morning alarm and the bedtime tuck-in: meals to be made, eaten and cleared away; clothes to be laundered; car seat restraints to be buckled; books to read; and, of course, depending on where everyone is in life, paid work to be done and schools to be attended.
For parents, this is the ratchet effect operating in reverse, as they adapt to higher levels of responsibility (not always a comfy thing) and achieve maxxed-out, plateau-like competence.
Then comes the ebb. One day you will strap a son into his car seat for the last time, because he’s outgrown it. One morning will be the last that you will brush a daughter’s teeth. She’s old enough now to brush them herself. One night you are no longer needed to read at bedtime; they’d rather read by themselves. Often—and this is the bittersweet part—you have no idea in the moment that you and your child have reached a milestone. A thing that you had to do every day no longer needs doing by you. There’s an element of relief in relinquishing tasks, but also of wistfulness. Aw, they’re getting so big.
As the years spool past, the real ratchet effect takes hold. Children mature and embark on independent lives and their parents find that the little home comforts multiply. The house stays tidier. The fridge contents are bespoke. There’s no need to set an alarm. At this stage, many mothers and fathers find that they worry less; or, to put it more finely, that they worry in the old way only when their adult children are visiting.
Was that a car I heard outside? Did we leave the door unlocked for her? What time is it?
Then—hurrah!—grandchildren come to stay, bringing joy, noise, smears of ice cream and naptime truculence to those complacent ones who have undergone the long double ratchet and are now endowed with what behavioral economists call “status quo bias,” which is a preference for things as they are. When sticky hands rummage in their possessions, these status-quo folks may experience loss aversion. They have become accustomed to cleanliness and tranquility, things they must now relinquish. When their own babies came into the world, they had plenty of time to accommodate themselves, by degrees, as the babies got bigger. Things that could get knocked over were stowed in cupboards or placed on high shelves, and white upholstery was out of the question. Don’t be absurd.
But with grandchildren? Now the escalation is running at high speed. A house occupied solely by adults—even adults who have done the double-rachet and ought to know better—becomes in the presence of small children a minefield, a Normandy Beach of objects that can be knocked over and decoration that can be glazed with maple syrup. The double-ratcheters now go through a third ratchet, as they adapt again to the vigorous presence of beloved small children.
And this is the bittersweet part: Once they get used to it, once having children in the house again becomes the status quo, they face the certainty of forfeit when the visit ends. And, as Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on these ideas knew, the pain of a loss is sharper than the pleasure of a gain.
Mrs. Gurdon is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
My mother has 38 grandchildren, including the greats. My adult sons don't seem interested in becoming parents, however. I ache for little ones running amuck in my house again.
I'm a big proponent of the last time your child needs you for something, a story, supervision in the bathtub, etc., and you don't know it's the last time. Not with the oldest child. But with the second and third you can almost see it coming.