No Sex Please We’re Chinese
bitterwinter.org
bitterwinter.org
Also interesting: despite all these policies the birthrate is still as low as 1.7, meaning there must be other factors why people are not having kids globally.
Who is “you”? Is it a woman that has no financial independence in a society where she may have to fend for herself if she does not have unprotected sex without access to birth control?
Because, until very recently, that probably describes most women’s circumstances when planning to have kids.
I am betting it is not a coincidence that the timeline for women’s financial independence and access to cheap and convenient birth control lines up with declining birth rates.
> until very recently
how about now? Fact of the matter is even in the developed countries where work isn't stressful and people do have sex, birth rate is still low. So simply encouraging people to have sex isn't the solution if you want more kids. I believe that's the point they are making.
this I cannot agree with since it doesn't align with reality
"whatever" being not in a cohabitate relationship
Again you bring up inequality while the discussion is around how to increase birth rate. You didn't even try to link inequality with birth rate. I guess it's cool to raise awareness by hijacking discussion of other issues?
So we're in agreement? Women are not having fewer kids because couples have less sex, it's because of things like financial independence and birth control that allows (and essentially requires) couples to plan for kids. And when you have to actively chose to have kids in this kind of environment you'll postpone it as long as you can, perhaps limiting yourself to one child, or none at all.
It's super hard because you want your child to have a better life than you, and from the get go.
Parents nowadays want the trajectory of their child to be transposed upwards from the get go, and then be an up& to the right chart for their whole life.
This was never the case in human history, people never really put much thought into reproduction, matter of fact people never really put much thought into anything.
Very little time to wonder and price odds when you gotta go out and hunt to keep yourself alive.
People aren't having children because they think too much about outcomes for themselves, for their potential children and so forth.
Nature wanted reproduction to be impulsive, the whole planning for is humans shooting themselves in the foot.
At least on the more conservative side, perhaps one reason this works economically is the culture of the wife staying home, and the husband working. Although the overall income is much lower, this makes the dollar cost of each additional child small - kids don't eat that much, and there are no child care costs. By having kids young, both your parents are still healthy and active.
I’d argue with a stay at home parent full-time until they are teens it’s still a massive undertaking. One well worth it (in my opinion), but if your life goal is money and career advancement kids don’t help in that regard.
Most of them were ambivalent about having a kid (or more kids) so the unexpected pregnancy was taken in stride but I was surprised how many were unplanned.
I know for certain that my wife and I both want to have another child because we both grew up with siblings and can see the lifelong benefits. Children are pretty hard work though, and there's been a lot of moments when we've thought "do I really want to go through all this again".
Take away the normalisation of multi child families and I bet a lot of people would just stick with one.
Which is of course a fairly hard problem to solve - if you aren't having 2.2 children per couple then your population is shrinking.
You can increase throughput with parallelization or speedups of single threaded performance.
But procreation age is trending upwards, too so I guess this is rather theoretical.
I don't think the "i'm too tired to have sex" is the problem... I know it's anecdotal, but during that time, the bigger problem was trying to find someone to have sex with (actually going out there and meeting new people). The second problem, with so much work, adding aditional work (a child + extra cost + extra work for childcare + extra time needed) was not a pleasant thought.
And working all those extra 996 unpaid hours would really grate on my nerves. Especially if the government's official position is not enforced by the government. I'd do the "laying down" version of repopulating the country - i.e. not doing it.
What a proactive approach. I wish Western governments emulated it.