I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs.
If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now.
Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation.
Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats.
Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later.
Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it.
Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt.
I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state.
Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually.
In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
To make matters worse, we now have instability in the wrong direction: population is predicted to grow for 50-100 years still, peaking at 11 billion.
The other variable is resource consumption per capita, both will need to go down after the current spurt to counter severe overpopulation problems globally.
> I also approach this problem as a regional economist specializing in migration, so I also think of the American population issue through the lens of population density comparisons.
Here’s the same view from Matt Yglesias, solidly left-wing journalist: https://wdet.org/posts/2020/09/24/90064-vox-matthew-yglesias...
Also Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-malthus-is-st...
Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer.
The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents.
I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?
kinda depends on what you're looking for in a relationship. all relationships take some level of effort and compromise to maintain. however you measure the "value" of a relationship, it has to at least be better than being single to be worth the trouble. I'd say a relationship is worth saving if a) both partners agree it is better than being single and b) both are willing to take on a roughly symmetrical share of the effort and compromise.
There used to be pro-familly policies in USA that basically assumed that is male is in the house, the male is responsible to be breadwinner. That meant that if there was make, woman would not get social support money on her nor on kid.
They were even quicker to kick unemployed male out due to that - his presence meant they risk support. It sucked, imo.
The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands.
Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was:
* Legal to rape your spouse
* Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives
* Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have)
* Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children
* Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent
This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then.
EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage.
https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/
> 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15.
> Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000.
> 4% of boys are married before the age of 18.
So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things?
More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good.
There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.)
As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other.
But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
And that’s exactly what we see in places like Chicago, but nobody who is allowed to speak can put 2 and 2 together. Except when Barack Obama mentioned it that one time, which was promptly forgotten.
He eviscerated your actual argument that Bangladeshi marriage norms are something to aspire, considering how they treat 60% of their under age 18 girls (but 4% of their boys).
As of Bangladeshi, look up their domestic violence reports and juvenile deliquency reports. The domestic violence is basically normal and accepted part of life. And we are taking about pretty severe stuff - murders, acid attacks, serious beatings. Juvenile deliquency is huge problem.
Death and calamity are Bangladeshi life pretty often, in particular if you are woman. And kids get to watch all that and are affected by all of that, creating cycle of trauma and violence.
It is not better for children to be with violent parent nor is ot good for them to see one parent attack the other. Yes, out of wedlock or divorce is better for them then domestic violence situation.
American crime rates went down considerably. So did juvenile violence rates, drug taking and alcoholism. And teenage pregnancies went down too. All the while divorces went up. Stop demonizing kids of single parents and for that matter Americans.
Also, American domestic violence rates went down. While the reporting of it went up as women can get actual help nowdays, so there is a point in doing it. These would not even count as crimes in many of "harmonious" families with taboo around divorce.
Also, in Americans crime statistics, murders are higher relative to other crimes, because of prevalence of guns. America is not perfect, but it's youth is way better then you make them be due to your strong bias against kids who had divorced parents.
The U.S. leads the world in the percentage of children raised in single parent families: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre.... Over 30% of kids don't live with both parents. There are a raft of statistically established negative consequences arising from the absence of both parents, ranging from trouble at school to criminal conduct, to obesity and depression: https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_dailyplanet....
(As to “bias against Americans.” On the issues of marriage and family, a lot of the things that are “normal” in America are deemed at best highly regrettable where I’m from. Now I’m as much of a flag waver as the next immigrant. But in this particular area I’m not convinced that Americans are on the right track.)
The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't.
I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
Though the females are regarded as assets, they're not allowed agency, freedom and inherent value. This is the history and hurt that is behind most of feminism of today, and there are still remnants in Western societies. Not because the laws and rules today are inherently discriminatory, but the cultural expression still inhibits life for half the population in many cases.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what this may mean for BLM.
Ideally, you forecast these shifts and make preparations, rather than being dragged into the future, as seems to be what happens with institutions responding to these civil rights social movements.
But I agree that support systems, rather than "grit" or "personal agency", are almost always the most important aspect of healthy development, in pretty much any arena. Teaching, job training, child rearing, legislation development, entrepreneurship, on an on, the failures happen when people decide or are expected to go it alone.
Raising kids IS hard in modern America. Agreed that it doesn't have to be, and that the disintegration of societal structures is a huge part of why. Unfortunately, all signs point to it getting worse, not better.
I bring up his research a lot it seems, but Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, which is about the utter collapse of American Civil Society and social ties, in 2000. The statistics were daunting then, and I doubt many people would disagree that we're worse off today than we were 20 years ago.
I'm old enough that I remember living in a US that still had plentiful communities. I worry about the children being raised in our modern transactional society. I take comfort in knowing old men have worried about these things since the dawn of civilization though.
non-parent typing detected. :)
Now we're running around tearing down Chesterton's fence every time we see it, without bothering to ask why it was erected in the first place.
As an atheist, it's becoming increasingly evident that atheism has done great damage to society at large. We're foolish to think that social technology that has worked for thousands of years was only built (and replicated independently across hundreds of disparate societies) because we were too stupid/evil/backward to see real enlightenment.
You may want to look at the long history of severe abuse perpetrated by the Church in their pursuit to "combat this".
We've just seen the Irish Laundry report released and it's fucking horrific.
https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylu...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-seco...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-...
Looking at the past with rose colored glasses is dangerous.
It can and should be improved, but that does not mean we have to pretend that part was all that better.
Genuinely asking, because it never struck me that the foster care system was ever not horrible in America.
There isn't a good answer to the problem of kids when the parents don't care for them.
It was horrible match and there was huge amount of abuse going on.
Or some of these customs, traditions and institutions evolved to combat it through unconscious group selection. The tribes/towns/cities/countries/groups that had superior civic norms (superior defined as those norms which promote harmony, prosperity, in-group cooperation, etc) tended to attract immigrants, be capable of dominating geo-politically, etc, and thus those cultural values become dominant through this process of selection.
Also, while I think that explains things to a certain extent, it's just part of the picture. Culture also come from (i) self-interest, (ii) power asymmetries, and (iii) an unintended by-product of our evolutionary psychology/emotions/personalty traits such as jealousy/disgust sensitivity among others. For example jealousy mediating a desire for taxation (this has been studied by psychologists, it is one of the three common motives), or disgust sensitivity mediating a desire for borders and authoritarian leaders.
Add to the fact, often the most impoverished countries tend to be more religious. You're not finding a strong correlation to your point.
Poverty and education is a foremost problem.
Which way does that correlation run? Maybe impoverished countries are especially in need of the social organization provided by religion because, unlike rich countries, they can't afford to "f--k around?" They can't just spend government funds to deal with the negative social consequences of out-of-wedlock births, divorces, etc.
It's like being overweight. Everyone knows what they should do. Most people can't do it, however, and there isn't much social support for it. In Asian culture, we have all of this social reinforcement about our weight and eating habits. (Though south asians differ quite dramatically from east asians with respect to what they consider fat.) In the U.S., you're left to fend for yourself. Some people go to the gym regularly and eat healthy despite all of the cultural forces working against those good decisions. But most people don't. They just get fat.
I think we have to be careful when we say "be financially stable before having kids" though. Not that we shouldn't be, but we can't just let certain classes of people have kids. Also, those who are stable now are one accident or emergency or job loss, etc. away from being unstable.
Edit: I think what I said might be unclear. IOW, having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.
Even the professional classes have instability issues. E.g. just look at how stable a high flying banking executive was in 2008. Or tech workers in the 2000s.
We should make it cheaper to have kids, rather than expecting people to wait until they're millionaires.
Why not? Choosing to have kids one can't feed and making decisions that will require taking resources from others by force is the definition of neglect.
I'm gona walk right past the 'taxation is theft' dog whistle.
You can talk about 'personal responsibility' all you want, but at the end of the day, the urge to have kids is probably our second strongest drive as a species. Babies are gona happen. When they do, they should be fully supported as much as necessary to make sure parents and children get what they need at a base level. I don't mind my taxes paying for baby formula and diapers. We should probably fund daycare too. This is that 'equality of opportunity' conservatives are so fond of in place of 'equality of outcomes'. Well, if that's true, at the very least we need to make sure that everyone gets the bare essentials to properly raise a child.
There is a huge difference between fait accompli past events and future planning. Feeding and supporting and loving children who exist does not at all preclude planning to reduce the percentage of future children born into unfavorable circumstances.
There are ample means to avoid having kids until one is ready, at every stage of the process. We kind of know what causes childbirth by now. It is wantonly irresponsible for a couple to choose to have children, or for people to engage in activities that produce them, without taking measures to prevent the creation of more children before they are ready to support them.
If everyone just decides to sleep around without availing themselves of the means to avoid pregnancy and thus have unfed children, where is the food going to come from? Has society completely given up on the ideas of family planning and personal responsibility?
However, once we say, as a society, that someone is not allowed to have a child because they don't make <threshold> amount of money, that will lead us down a slope I don't think we want to be on.
What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. The problem is everyone says it's a problem but not enough people want to do it because it would be an inconvenience to their daily lives or some other excuse.
It is easily doable for all the worlds orphans to be adopted by good families, if only we could get people to see the good they could be doing
Money does not help, people help!
We do need this, but we also need loving, caring people to foster. We've been fostering for over 6 years and every one of our kids have gone home to family. That should be the goal. People like to think, "oh I'd be able to provide for this kid much better than their family." Maybe that's true financially. But family is family and if there's ANY way to reunite the family, that should be the way forward.
I admire your pragmatic embrace of working on this problem; I also think chalking up the cost of adoption as "an inconvenience to...daily lives" is...underselling it?
I don't know what there is to regret about having kids, yep its difficult but everything worth doing is difficult! Adoption is definitely very difficult, especially the kind I did, international adoption of special needs children. My family didn't understand, many people in the public don't understand, and if they somewhat do they ask why I didn't adopt an american child, to me a child is a child.
I will say any ounce of love you can give these kids is better than what they have, seriously, the things I've seen.. picture your life from age 1 - 16, tied to a crib, malnourished, not educated, treated like a feral animal weighing under 100 lbs now, and all kinds of spine issues because you were not ever allowed to walk! Or if you are lucky enough to be in a place you can develop a bit, but then you are molested and abused but still have the intellect of a feral animal.
Many of these kids don't know what bonds of love are, but they can still form even tiny bits of it, and there will be times you think ..why the hell did i do this, but there are times when you think i am so happy i did this, you push through those hard times, get support from friends etc and the life of that kid will be a million times better than the life they would have had.
I think people don't give themselves enough credit, and somewhere inside i know they could do it, I never thought I could do it. One thing I do know is, if we all sit around questioning what we can't do we never will know what we could do and in the meantime children are suffering. I'm actually internally battling the want to adopt a third child vs being at limit!
Oh also adopting is an expensive venture, i went into debts to do this so i recommend to anyone get familiar with the community of adoptive parents and let them help fund raise.
But yes overall I think it's a huge problem that gets little attention, and once and awhile you will see a super sad advertisement on TV and hear everyone whine about how bad it made them feel and how they shouldn't show those kinds of ads. Big disappointment to me when i hear that, I feel like its more rug sweeping under
ah well
Something is wrong with the system in America when I've got a child who can now write their name and that took less time from beginning to present than getting a single adoption from the foster system accomplished. Those matches that failed? Those kids are still in foster care.
That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive. However, what is possible, is having the government rethink social support, making sure that each member of society has a safety net, and doesnt need to worry about getting his basic needs met (food, water, shelter etc). Basic income seems to be the best fit here.
This won't completely solve the problem, because food, shelter will not heal the attachment problems of some people (people also need companionship), but it will provide a stable base, that is a radical improvement on today's status quo.
What about this sentiment isn't ethical?
The realistic question is - what is the considerate, prepared, and loving response of a financially stable society when these things inevitably happen?
but dont read this too negative, kids are the best there is!
and while a lot of the hn audience may think like:
> I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
if you wait til everyting is "perfect", you loose to the despicable retards that dont care.
I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
There's never time unless we prioritize. Plenty of people are great parents despite being busy.
My rabbi has ten kids. Ten. And he is still able to run the congregation which is probably not less demanding than whatever you do (statistically speaking). This kind of thing is common in certain communities.
So it's possible just a question of what's important to you. If kids fall behind brunch and posting on HN then yes we are too busy :)
But I bet his wife is the one who does overwhelming majority of leading kids and care. Because with standard 40 hours and 6 kids he would already be impossibly stretched.
I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to spend months travelling every year, or a week cutoff from the rest of the world, doing my own projects, every couple of months, if I had children.
I'm also sure the rabbi has a massive support circle. I, on the other hand, am alone with my partner.
I know what my parents sacrificed having me and my siblings. The world today is not build for nuclear families and the world before was nothing close to nuclear families. My parents had to relocate and had no support. They really cared about us and had no life outside of their children. I couldn't do that.
There is a significant loss of freedom and time when one has children today.
Yes, I know that a significant number of parents are horrible people or have children in horrible conditions but I do not think that should require me to have children.
I've never viewed having a child as a competition. What am I losing?