Setting aside adoption (which has a somewhat different set of problems), TCS seemed at odds with how people actually become parents in reality.
Sure, it’s better to have lots of knowledge before becoming a parent. And it’s better to have lots of resources before becoming a parent. And it’s better to only parent one child at a time. And (maybe) it’s even better to be able to do it all as a single parent rather than a couple. I’m not convinced that last one is right, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong either.
Learning takes time. Accumulating resources takes time. And raising a child takes time (~18 years). But biology currently puts time restrictions on a person’s ability to become a parent.
I think convention recognizes there’s a balance to strike about when to have kid(s). Having a bunch of kids while you’re super young (and healthy and fertile, but also probably relatively ignorant and poor) is well known to be bad. But waiting until an age where it’s practical for most people to have developed a lot of high quality knowledge and have accumulated a bunch of resources before having a single kid is also well known as a recipe for having a probable lifetime maximum of 0-1 kids, increased medical risks both to the mother and child, and a high risk of regret.
I think that’s mainly driven by biology. It’s possible we’ll be able to address the biological time problems in the future with technology, but we haven’t done much about it yet and I think convention deals with that situation ~correctly. Whereas I don’t remember TCS dealing with it well or at all.
Tons of people become parents by some degree of accident, and I’m not excusing that nor expecting TCS to have solved that. I’m talking about people trying to responsibly plan when to become parents and how many kids to have based on the knowledge available to them.
TCS seemed like a recipe for biological extinction if taken seriously by people carefully planning to become parents. When do you know enough and have enough resources to be a good parent according to TCS? There was no clear answer, but it seemed like for most people it’d only be when they were too old to have kids anymore, if ever.
I think it’d be more reasonable in this regard if TCS sold itself as a coherent system currently suitable for aspiring parents with the backing of a billionaire who were also willing to undergo a rigorous pre-parenting study period.
Instead, TCS appealed mainly people of ordinary means who were already parents. I think the right message for that audience would’ve been focused on reasonable incremental improvements parents could make within a conventional framework and relatively limited resources.
For example, maybe it’d be better for parents raising multiple kids to wait 5 years between siblings rather than the conventional average of 2-3 years. Or not; I don’t know but it is at least feasible for lots of parents wanting to raise multiple children. I think it’s the sort of thing TCS could’ve discovered that would’ve been valuable to more actual parents than the idea of raising only one kid at a time.