To Breed or Not to Breed?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The modern world, especially in the US, is quite unfriendly to having kids. Both parents have lots of other opportunities that having children may conflict with, and having children can be horrendously expensive depending on your child rearing style. Given that, if you're subconsciously thinking "I don't want to have kids, it's just too hard", it comes across as "more virtuous" if, instead of giving the reason as you want to be more selfish with your time and money, that you want to protect a potential child from having to go through a future hellish environment.
Or maybe the argument is about the relative impact, and not having kids allows you to take the plane and still feel good about your actions because your total carbon impact is less than other people? I'm honestly not sure how the reasoning works.
For example, I believe it’s good to go to protests for causes I care about. However, I don’t go to even a fraction of the protests near me. Does this mean I don’t actually believe protests are a good thing?
If you think children are a massive pain and your rationalization for that is that it's for the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. That may be also a thing people say so they won't get asked too much questions. I've heard that people can put a lot of pressure on other people to make children, the planet argument might be a good justification/counter to avoid being constantly questioned.
> We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief.
I think my point here is that there's a notion of "intensity" or "importence". Having children is a strong belief in many people, and to counter it, you often seem to need a strong belief of the type "climate change is very important", instead of a less strong believe in the type of "I just don't want to".
From my experience parents are often great for their children but the trade off is they often become worse members of society, switching to focusing time and resources on their family (to give their genetic material an advantage) rather than any wider potentially more utilitarian outlets or considerations.
To my point, a society is made up of people. They must be born before they can be useful to society.
What sort of activities do non-parent adults engage in that is lost in this trade-off?
"Never feel sorry for raising dragon-slayers in a time when there are actual dragons," unknown.
We are on the brink from numerous existential threats including, but not limited to: climate change (i.e., more extreme weather damage and deaths, desertification, regional famines, resource wars, and billions/hundreds of millions of CC refugees), asteroids, GRBs, pandemics (viral, bacteriological, and mycotic), epidemics of diabetes, CHD, and cancer, nuclear terrorism, US vs. China over Taiwan, NATO vs. Russia, mega-tsunami.
I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the modern world. The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype. That's just a scientific fact and no argument will change it.
"dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.
People like to start with a fresh slate. If they didn’t - they’d run a foster care.
The more I think about it the more sense this makes to me: there is no innate urge to breed, only to mate. It's what tricks you into breeding.
It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates.
The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. That could be a bad thing or a a good thing depending on how you see yourself.
I'd be curious to see some of the demography here. My intuition is that in the U.S., these subgroups are growing their share of religiously identified persons (e.g. a larger fraction of Catholics are traditionalists today than in 1970) but they are not growing as a share of the general population.
Also, at what rate do apostates produce other apostates?
Living a happy life outside the mold of what you grew up with sets an example for others. Making babies is not a surefire way of producing like-minded people, nor is it the only way.
The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.
How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah, you'll have slightly better odds with kids, because in the beginning you have full control over their environment, until school starts.
So brainwashing doesn't work?
People will do what they want, but most people end up with values fairly similar to those of their family. We tend to focus all of our attention on the differences because those are more interesting and gossip worthy. But most of us are products of our genetics and our environment to a greater extent than we'd like to admit.
We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.
To think that fertility -- one of the key issues in evolution -- would not be influenced by genetics requires a massive detachment from reality as well as lack of awareness of current knowledge about genetics and human behavior.
Note that we have data on this, and a good rule of thumb is that most everything is about half genetic. This includes likelihood to have kids. Why? well, things like sperm counts, and personality traits are influenced by genetics, as are things like tendency to be religious[4]. Values are also strongly influenced by genetics, as is income and intelligence[5], all of which is correlated with decisions to have or delay having children. Similarly the duration of the reproductive lifespan of females is influenced by genetics[2] - something very important as women delay childbirth:
The most recent GWAS conducted in ∼370,000 women of European ancestry identified 389 independent signals explaining ∼7.4% of the population variance in age at menarche (Fig. 1), corresponding to ∼25% of the estimated heritability[2]
And even the decision to delay childbirth is influenced by many factors that have a genetic component.
> We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.
An international research team, including the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, has found twelve genes that may help determine why some people have children at an early age, while others remain childless.[3]
See also [1] for an overview and discussion.
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[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-018-0068-1
[3] https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2016/twelve-genes-influence-ferti...
Anybody could cherry-pick articles in the same way to make any claim. E.g. that norwegians make better programmers because of some obscure genes potentially related to hand dexterity that might potentially help typing...
No, I'm not. Please re-read the sources I mentioned, as well as the text I wrote. I listed both factors and focused on the second - indeed I emphasized this point repeatedly.
> Then you cherry-pick some random articles
None of the points I raised are controversial in the literature, and the journals and textbooks I cited are quite mainstread -- e.g. Nature, NIH, etc. You are welcome to cite even a single paper. I'll wait.
> Anybody could cherry-pick articles in the same way to make any claim.
You know what is even easier that "cherry picking" articles? Not being able to provide even a single scientific paper for any of your claims, because they have no scientific basis.
Who cares? I'll be dead!
Our reasons were mostly personal, and it ultimately wasn't a responsibility we felt equipped to take on. There's some personal traumas that we experienced as kids and didn't want to pass along. There were some "selfish" reasons and things that we gave a higher priority in life than raising children. We had enough executive dysfunction between the two of us that we didn't think we'd be able to give kids enough attention while also juggling our other priorities. There is also nothing so special about our genes that compelled us to procreate--we could have adopted if parenthood called to us later in life. The usual reason we give is "we can barely take care of our pets, we're not bringing kids into this." That's the most concise way I can put it without opening up an argument.
A couple of years after the vasectomy, my wife ended up getting diagnosed with multiple chronic (but not terminal) illnesses, so that became a contributing factor after we had already made our decision. Economic concerns have also always been a factor--not something that I viewed as completely unsolvable, but it obviously requires a huge sacrifice to raise kids today. Climate change and overpopulation eventually became extra reasons to be thankful that we're not bringing kids into this mess, but if we ever felt a strong drive to have kids in the first place, I don't think that alone would be enough to deter us.
The article frames the whole discussion around climate change and current events, and I suppose my personal outlook for humanity has become darker over the years, but the decision to have (or not to have) kids is largely driven by personal circumstances. Some of our closest friends are fabulous loving parents, and the world needs more parents like them. Some of us, IMO, made the right choice by opting out. People love to make value judgements about this decision, as if there should be a default choice, but one thing we don't need more of is parents who don't want to be parents.
maybe we could try to not see the future of the human race through a financial prism at all.
I already have enough responsibilities in my life, with my work etc and I don’t want to worry further by having kids
Even before having kids you have to take care of your pregnant wife, after delivering you have to take care of the kids, when they are old you have to worry about their education marriage and so on
It’s just too much. I don’t have any kids at the moment but the thought just makes me feel like I’m better off getting a divorce
The fact is there has never been a better time in human history to raise children. People talk about climate change, but back in the 50's it wasn't any better -- we were in the midst of a nuclear standoff that could have gone apocalyptic at any second. Before that, there was a world war, and another one before that, and so on.
In prior centuries anywhere from one quarter to one half of all kids born wouldn't make it to the first birthday.
Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been.
People are free to have children or not have children, but let's be honest about why.
there were many more poor, having lots of kids.
OP didn't say that only rich people can afford to have kids, but that only rich and very poor people can.
Now that people are not as poor as in prior centuries, they can afford to not have kids to survive when they get older.
I think the amount of two income households and longer work hours says otherwise. It's still a great time to have kids but there is a lot of time and financial pressure that we did not have in the 60s and 70s. In addition, kids commonly walked to school, went out to play without supervision, etc. I think children cost more and require more time than in the past.
I see the anxiety, but I just didn’t anticipate this from the title.
I actually prefer to have boundaries at work. The whole "family" thing is often a way of saying "you'd better work you ass off to serve this business"
Children are allowed to have very different ideas than their parents, one doesn't have to criticize what has been done and is irreversible, to think and act differently.