No one wants to have kids anymore
torturechambersmalltalk.substack.com
torturechambersmalltalk.substack.com
Looks like I’m going to be a father!
I knew that this could happen sooner or later, but only as an abstract thought; something that will happen sometime way ahead in the future, like your own death.
At that moment it became something tangible. A few days later I’ve noticed that I’m driving much more carefully, respecting the speed limit and whatnot. A few weeks ago I was contemplating doing ketamine with a friend of mine - now it sounds absurd.
It’s frightening how fast your subconscious changes your perspective practically overnight.
Every time I visit family for the holidays, I see this in real-time and it reaffirms my decision to not have children. I have an incredibly comfortable lifestyle saving for retirement, traveling and buying real estate. The moment I become responsible for another human, that all goes away.
Saving for college? Yeah right, state schools are gonna cost $100k per year by the time my kid would going off to school. Retirement? Inflation is already killing my parents' retirement so I've got to bank that I'm still probably not saving enough right now anyway.
More power to people who want that in life, but I can't tell you how many coworkers or family members I've met that had kids and just seemed like shells of themselves afterwards.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/3608647-new-estimate-proj...
And I needed a flexible job that allows you to work from home or be off as necessary to take care of sick kids.
They will make every vacation more expensive in terms of lodging, travel, food, and activities.
You'll be paying not just for gifts for them, but for their friends' birthdays, and holiday gifts for their teachers. You'll pay for admission to parks, memberships, and other activities you take them to to keep them busy and help them develop.
Even if they go to public school, you'll be paying for before and after care, extra classes, activities, equipment, lessons, tutoring, and so on. Their various support systems will ask for donations. You'll have to pay for babysitters until they reach the age where they can be unattended.
The total cost is tremendous and hard to estimate.
(I say this all as someone who thinks it is worth it and who 100% supports having children for people who are in stable relationships and who can afford it!)
My marginal housing, food, etc. costs is for them (guesstimating what I'd spend without them at 60% of my current expenditures), that's $700/month per kid * ~200 month = 140k per kid.
Maybe another $20k each in one off expenses like furniture, medical, birthdays?
A car for the last two years might run another $20k?
Day care definitely drives up the price.
But I guess being able to amortize over 4 kids makes it seem less daunting.
Do you have a link to the actual study or the breakdown what went into this?
> A recent estimate conducted by the Brookings Institution projected the cost of raising a child for a middle-income, two-parent married family with two kids to be north of $310,000.
>The estimate assumes the youngest child would be born in 2015 and covers raising the child through the age of 17. It does not include the cost of sending the child to college.
This seems to be the source:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brookin...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/08/30/its-getti...
Edit: not only does the study exclude college costs, but it excludes daycare costs, which are relevant to pretty much all dual income couples.
Yep, it is. But when you ride that wave it will be the most amazing experience of your life. Even if it is hard.
it’s your choice, but you’re definitely missing out on something special. Something we were genetically created to do (which makes it even better than surfing)
I totally forgot to mention the patronizing attitude that so many people come to this conversation with. Thank for you for heads up.
You don’t. You have no idea of the emotional and practical side of having children, and how hard and how amazing it is, and how it’s the best and hardest part of your life up until then.
Patronising is thinking you know you don’t want kids without having them. You don’t. You have no idea what it’s like.
... what?
They can listen to third parties which had the same experience, have experiences which are similar but less intense, or just use their imagination and figure out whether the person they are - whose values and goals they hopefully know - could possibly enjoy whatever is being discussed.
I still have no idea how someone saying "I won't pursue that because that's not what I want for myself" could possibly be "patronizing", even assuming it could be false.
This sentence is the definition of patronizing. It's the same thing parents tell their kids: "oh you just don't understand what it's like, that's why you don't agree with me".
In this example, who exactly am I being patronizing toward? Myself?
You don't do it to be better off or more comfortable. You do it to have a meaningful relationship.
It's really the same as having a life partner. Why do it when going out costs money and you'll have to adjust your schedule to their needs?
It's a counter intuitive choice in the modern world. Its increasingly common to choose comfort over meaning. Especially when so many dont think meaning even exists.
I followed that path. When my first kid was born, I applied for a promotion into project management, and eventually people management. (I moved back out eventually). The vast majority of people I know who moved up into management did so coincidentally with the birth of their first kid.
Definitely in IT departments I've worked in, in the past, there were a lot of people in management who would have preferred to still be ICs but, for financial reasons, had moved upwards...
I have 3 kids 3 and under and probably got 4 hours of sleep last night. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. My kids are not treated like a drain on my potential investments.
Sure I can’t do my hobbies all the time but I can take my kids fishing and kayaking. The trips are shorter but fulfilling regardless.
Sounds like you desperately needed to have a legacy, and got kids as a substitute for that. And as an insurance for your old age.
But sure GP is the one who only care about themselves.
> My kids are not treated like a drain on my potential investments.
True they’re treated as an investment.
I don’t think your post makes you look like you’re the one who cares about others unlike who you’re responding to.
You realize that with the deflation that will hit most developed countries, all your savings will evaporate right ? It's a mathematical certainty given the way the economy works (coupled with fertility rates of < 1.5).
Immigration might work, but race is a big deal with a large section of the population esp. when it comes to low-end stuff.
Deflation would screw anyone with debt though.
It is unfortunate that unless you have children you can never know what it is like to have children. You see the external things, the effort and the cost. For most (i.e. non egocentric/narcissist personalities) having children is the most profound and meaningful experience of their lives. A normal parent loves their children more than they ever thought it possible to love someone.
You call your life comfortable. I as a parent would call it empty and sad. What you think of people as shells of themselves, I see as people focusing on what truly matters and brings happiness instead of momentary joy.
That's pretty judgemental of you. If your own children decide not to reproduce themselves, will you judge their own lives as empty and sad too, consider your own children hollow failures for not giving you grandchildren, and express your disappointment to them that they have failed to live up to your own expectations as a parent? Or will you love and support them for making their own decisions, like you refuse to extend to other people who decide not to become parents?
You are saying that anyone that doesn't have children automatically empty and sad.
- One of the statements is "in the people I've seen do x, an outcome of y seems common".
- The other is "in any person that does x, y is true"
Those are not the same thing.
Edit:
Then address my question instead of ignoring it. Why by your own judgemental attitude would your own children be any less empty and sad than anyone else if they chose not to reproduce themselves? And how are you not being a bad judgemental parent with that attitude? Don't have kids if you're not willing to let them make their own decisions.
I did not answer your question because it is absurd. There is a difference between having an opinion and forcing that opinion on others. My children are their own people and they are allowed to disagree and I will not hold it against them. Because I love them more than they can understand until they have children themselves. I however hope they will be confident and flexible in their opinions and change them if they prove a poor fit to reality and not resort to logical fallacies or grudges.
It's not my questions that are absurd, it's your condescending attitude and statements, and I specifically asked you those questions to point out the absurdity of what you said, and by refusing to answer you proved my point.
Your demeaning judgements could apply just as much to the lack of value and sadness and emptiness of your own children's lives if they decide not to breed as they do against everyone else, which is my point that you're unable to acknowledge because you delusionally believe your own children are somehow magically different than everyone else in the universe, and you unfairly exempt them from your harsh degrading criticism of other people.
They're not, and your condescending attitude applies as much to your own children as to anyone else.
It's judgemental condescending parents like you who kick their kids out onto the streets because they're disappointed in them and believe they're sad and worthless for not wanting to breed when they find out they're gay or lesbian, so their kids don't trust them, are afraid to come out to them, hide their true feelings from their own parents, and often commit suicide, because they understand how harsh and judgemental their parents are, from all the condescending hateful things they say about other people all their lives.
You only judge that other people's lives are sad and empty for not breeding because they're not your children, so you have a double standard, and don't want to admit that. But kids can see through that, and know you'll ultimately judge them just as harshly too.
Part of being a good parent is being mature enough to not think and speak in such a childish nasty way, and to not be so condescending and demeaning.
I'm merely pointing out that your own original ad hominem attacks could also apply just as well to your own children, which you don't want to admit.
And that you could drive your children to suicide with that kind of disrespectful attitude, judging your own children's lives as empty and sad, devoid of happiness, and incapable of truly experiencing love, just because they didn't deliver you grandchildren.
Are you really that homophobic and paternalistic, or do you more generally hate and demean and devalue the lives and love of everyone who doesn't breed "equally"?
So be careful, stop being so judgemental and demeaning, and try to be a better parent!
And stop complaining about ad hominem attacks, when you're the one who threw the first stone at the most number of people, possibly including your own children.
No I am saying that is what they seem to me. Just like people with children are shells of their former selves to him. You are splitting hairs and putting words in my mouth to make an obvious point. In the end you are just proving me right that one can not express any kind of negative about being childless without having people jump down their throats.
There are a lot of people very happy with the choice they made to have children. There are a lot of people very unhappy with the choice they made to have children. The same things are true of people who choose not to have children.
Just because something is right for you doesn't mean it's right for everyone. And treating them condescendingly because you believe is does makes you the bad one in the conversation.
That's the best analogy I can give to explain how parenthood changes you. Life is messier and more complex afterwards, just like sex, but immeasurably richer. And you develop parent-dar. It's like gaydar. Parenting changes you in a million tiny ways, and us parents can see that in others.
It's obviously a necessary and good thing for people to have children if humanity is going to continue. However, one thing that isn't discussed much by Team Parents is the prospect of there being too much of a good thing. The population explosion over the last 150ish years is a clear trade between more people and less everything else in the natural world. At some point (now, anyone?), that trade is not worth making. It's an irresponsible trade. Does not promote the maturity of society, even if it matures the individual.
What say ye to this line of reasoning? I grant you that city-living and domestication is 'naturally' reigning things in as far as population growth, hence the article. I'm asserting that perhaps there is a kind of virtue in foregoing the wonderful self sacrificial experience known as being a parent, in that the childless are helping the general state of affairs.
Remaining childfree avoids a lot of exhausting and messy complications. Just as remaining celibate avoids emotional entanglements and STDs, at the cost of loneliness. Historically, virtue has attached to celibacy in many religious traditions. Maybe a sufficiently strong and pervasive environmentalist worldview could impute virtue to the childfree. It is possible to change popular ethics in a decade or so: cf LGBTQ rights or attitudes to drink driving.
1 - It's likely going to cost more than 100k per year per kid to send them off to college in ~18 years, even to a very cheap state school. The financial picture gets really complex, so talk to an advisor and not some random internet commenter. That said, our own financial advisor has us planning for ~1M total per kid for college, but we're very much on the high end here.
2 - I've helped a lot of family members pass away in the last few years. It's been abnormally high, but the world has been abnormal too. I've helped somewhat poor family and very very wealthy family pass. The one thing I've learned is that the last few years/months are not something you can save for.
Not that you can't have so much cash as to not pass it along. But that the swanky retirement home is not very swanky at the end of the day. One family member was in a memory care place that was costing ~20k / mo. Yes, really. They had very good pensions. But the thing is that the retirement/hospice is still just a job to the people there.
They aren't getting out of bed at 3am to change you, to pick you up, to bathe you. They put you in an ambulance in lieu of putting you back in a chair, because of lawsuits. They are doing the bare minimum that they have to. Trying to plan for your retirement care via lawyer is just never going to cover all the bases and little things that come up.
The only people that are going to be taking care of you when the end is near (and that can be for years of time), are the people that love you. Sure, your kids may hate you, but that's mostly on you. But people that do not love you are not going to take very good care of you at all. That doesn't mean kids for sure, it can be other people. But you've got to have people that love you close by you near the end.
They will be the ones taking you to doctor for visits, the ones that will keep you from getting scammed from your retirement money, and in general they will help you navigate the future society that will be much different from the current. So even if you hate them, kids is an investment worth considering.
Anecdotally speaking, my grandfather was an abusive old bastard who drove away his children. He died alone. My own father is selfish, negligent, and arguably emotionally abusive. I’m the only one of his children who talks to him and I only do it a few times per year. I know for a fact none of us are going to take him in when he can’t live on his own anymore.
But there is a side of this conversation that I almost never see discussed:
What I want to add to this conversation is the following: it is a privilege (in the true sense that only a small group can afford to do this) for you to be able to decide not to have children and keep your conform. And this priviledge relies or borrows on the other people deciding to have children.
Because if nobody will have children then your retirement will be meaningless in the future. Nothing to invest in, no economical growth, no food, no products, no services.
Who will take care of you in the hospital when you will be old? As example? Who will pay for those (younger than you) doctors education?
Some parents, right?
So what you are exercising is a priviledge => available to a small group of people because the others are supporting the costs.
hot take: If the society will ever want to make this fair it should put higher taxes on people without children. As they need to spend money to buy good sleep and comfort in the future.
I even dare to say put a tax close to the estimated cost for having a children. Why? Just to make sure that the sleep is in the right balance when thinking about the future.
I repeat: this is not about the individual decision itself, everyone should do as they see it fit. But about the fact that we are part of a society and there are duties to that aswell.
Person A (no children) gives 60% of all income for 40 years.
Person B (with children) gives 60% of all income and a child which will work and generate income and give taxes
Are you saying they are equal when thinking who contributes more for the future of society?
And you're also not addressing the fact that maximizing the number of humans on the earth is too much of a good thing, and makes life much worse for an exponentially larger number of people in the long run. Fewer people will suffer the sooner we slow and even gradually reverse population growth.
And you're incorrectly assuming that the only alternative to exponential population growth is sudden extinction, when it's much more likely that sudden extinction is actually the most likely result of overpopulation, due to ecological and climactic collapse and war.
If parents really altruistically cared for the wellbeing of their children and their descendants in the long term, and they're not just self-servingly and short-sightedly breeding in order to make their old age and retirement easier, then they should have fewer children to reduce the destruction they inflict of the environment from overpopulation, and stop driving their children to and from school in gas guzzling SUV minivans, when they could just as well ride their bikes or take a bus or public transit.
I agree that we all have a duty to society but I disagree that I should have to pay absurd sums of money simply because you say so. I meet my duty how I choose and I already pay for your kids education through my taxes. Comments like that come across as envy that people without kids frequently have more disposable income than those with kids.
One good thing that surprised me is the immense inner joy I feel when I see them enjoying themselves. Whether it is watching them laugh uncontrollably, seeing them learn something, or watching them immersed in play.
These are things I used to enjoy, but with age, I either have fewer opportunities to do myself, or they became less enjoyable. Watching my kids go through these experiences stirs up all those same emotions once again.
I'd never think I would enjoy Santa's visits or the great feeling of learning to ride a bike again as an adult, but through my kids, I get to do it again.
Strangely, I don't get those feelings watching other kids doing these things. The chemistry of our minds and relationships is baffling.
Is that what you're panicking about? This means that for the next 50 years, we'll continue growing. Lack of offspring of current generations is clearly not the problem here.
I still remember how in the 1980s, people were panicking that the world population kept growing, and sooner or later we were going to hit 10 billion. And now 10 billion is not enough?
It's obvious that this population growth is not sustainable. Sure, the Earth may technically be able to feed 40 billion people if we all turn vegan, but so far, we don't exactly have a good track record of dividing our resources equally. That is a far bigger issue to worry about.
Should the population grow or shrink? I don't know, but whichever we end up doing, we should do so sustainably; make sure every kid is fed, cared for, received the best possible education, and can live a happy life. And if young people don't have the time or money for any of that, not having children is the responsible choice for them. If we don't like the results, we should change our economic balance to the point that they do have the time and money to raise children.
It think it can be and it might already be. The problem is the distribution of people in age groups. If you have a lot of old people and few young people, that creates pressure on the economy.
Sustainable would not just be about the number of people, but also the number of people in each age group.
There was a good paper in the Lancet covering some of the expected repercussions if population growth continues to decline throughout this century (as current trends indicate it will): https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/full...
Certainly society's economic balance is going to be drastically affected:
"Although good for the environment, population decline and associated shifts in age structure in many nations might have other profound and often negative consequences. In 23 countries, including Japan, Thailand, Spain, and Ukraine, populations are expected to decline by 50% or more. Another 34 countries will probably decline by 25–50%, including China, with a forecasted 48·0% decline (95% UI −6·1% to 68·4%). Population percentage declines do not immediately convey the associated profound shifts in age structure in these nations. Our findings suggest that the ratio of the population older than 80 years to the population younger than 15 years will increase in countries with more than 25% population decline, from 0·16 today to 1·50 (0·54–3·25) in 2100. These population shifts have economic and fiscal consequences that will be extremely challenging."
Got my wife pregnant, concluded I needed a raise, so I started to work really hard, go above and beyond, 5 months in a row of crunching overtime, got promised a raise during this.
Then just as my kid is about to be born, I get fired.
Still happy my wife is pregnant, but now I know why so many people give advice of the sort "do just the minimum necessary and never treat the company as family".
Sorry you had to learn that lesson the hard way, hope your financial situation improves soon. :)
Not for me it's not. I have a day job because it's a relatively low risk, stable way to acquire the money I need. I don't need to be rich. I need a way to pay the bills and buy the things I want to enjoy my life.
And yes, I know that every job has risks, and the only way you can't be fired is if you own the company. But, while the upsides of your own company are bigger, so too are the downsides. When I start a new job, my savings stay where they are. If I start a new company, odds are I'm investing/risking my savings. I'm not interested in doing that while I have a family I'm responsible for.
The overwhelming majority of small business starts fail.
People who come from wealthy families, or have other sources of finance, are able to be repeat offenders until possibly they succeed.
Almost everyone else fails.
Starting a business is primarily the best way to blow you life savings while working 60hour weeks.
Some exceptions exist...
Employer: "Employees spend too much time on raising child, my business will fail"
Didn't they see who cause the problem?
I'm over 50, I have kids (and now grandkids) - everyone of them was unplanned and at the time I could not afford them. But each time we struggled and either we made ends meet and it spurred me on to get more money (change jobs/ go contracting/ start my own business)
has it been stressful - yes, have I suffered lack of sleep - yes
would I do it again - absolutely yes, being a father has been one of the best things in life
Perhaps it is sarcasm, and I keep reading we do not have enough young people, but it sure seems ironic that the two headlines that keep cropping up are: Too many people and Not enough people.
We're now in the people living longer stage.
Hans Rosling did a simple demonstration of this with boxes over a decade ago.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...
edit: better illustration of the point, still Hans with Boxes here:
If the state is not providing "insurance" the family has to.
On the other hand, the taxi drivers I remember talking to about children, had all a certain (non-western) background, and they had (as far as I remember) 2, 4, 3, 8 children, respectively.
I just don't have the confidence, I don't have the friend network, and I'm just unable to deal with dating women with all the mixed messages and how women have internalized misogyny and sexism, which often makes relationships difficult. I support feminism, but I don't have the emotional intelligence to handle the problems women go through.
It's not that I don't want a family, it's mostly that I don't care.
Occasionally, someone asks the idiotic question, what if everybody made the same decision? Well, if they truly did, I would have made a different choice.
All these projections about (white) replacement are fundamentally flawed because they assume that the reasons for the decision won't change with the demographics.
Also, to clarify another thread which is no longer there, I am not anti-natalist, but "anatalist" - I believe in personal choice in this matter. I also don't think anatalism is hereditary, but acquired from intellectual reflection of the world.
When you're single, your happiness levels typically range on a scale from 0 to 10.
Once you get married, that range expands to run from -100 to +100.
Then when you have kids, all the limits are removed.
Didn't any of you study Calculus? Didn't you get the idea of "negative second derivative"?
Yes, population is still growing in poor 3rd world countries. But even there it does at a rate far bellow what was 40 years ago.
Yeah, another contentious issue.
It is not like United States having done immigrating foreign scientists and tradesmen during and after WWI, WWII, Korean, Iran, or Vietnam Wars thereby actually benefited from them, economically and culturally.
Government are typically desperate for more taxpayers due to extended shrinkages (puns intended).
It is a battle for being able to cherry-pick from the pool of global immigrants (which US usually does well through its 38 different types of visa).
Like military recruiting , government will often get hamfisted by attaching strange and unreasonable stipulations based on their own morality (and not on its nation's needs).
Again, government should be making it easier to have its own kids, but they have not as of lately.
It is as if most government have done the math and have deemed raising kids as a loss-leader over recent immigration. My point is the longer-term cost sink is tremendously worse by a magnitude if they choose poorly.
People are varied and have varying motivations, what's important to one is not necessarily important to another.
Life HAS NO MEANING
Who ever started this idea that growing out of the slime mould on some obscure planet implies "meaning".
WTF is "meaning' anyway?
Isn't this just another way of asking "How does all of this affect me?"
The incredible level of a self centered view of the universe is one of the human primate's most distinguishing features...
BTW, I have one son, in his 20s. It's been both fulfilling and excruciating. I'm happy he was born, and I love him very much.
My father was a lot like you when it came to pushing the "giving everything to win" mindset. It fucked me up for life because it made it very difficult for me to relax and enjoy things for the sake of them.
What about having offspring gives life purpose?
Do you just beget children to... help them grow up to beget more children so they can... help their children to beget more children so...
That doesn't sound (or vibe) purposeful to me. That description is obviously missing something essential.
If life has a purpose (or feeling/vibe of one) there must be something else than merely having offspring to propagate the species for its own sake.
Whatever that something else is, it seems obvious to me that it is not conditional on your own offspring specifically.
For example if you love children in person, there are a lot of orphans who would like soneone to raise them. And plenty of teaching and medicine to do.
If you love children more generally, there's plenty of science, entertainment, ending hunger, looking after the planet etc which lots of children really appreciate. They find that stuff purposeful, and that feels to me like that counts for a lot.
You do you, but you see where I'm coming from.
Also, it's not just my feeling, it's proven by research: https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1ful....
The current expectations are based on many decades of data, when humanity did nothing to stop the climate change. Even starting to act right now will not have quick consequences, and even this is not really happening. Act of God could indeed change that, but I would not rely on it for my plans.
> climate change that won't happen anytime soon
For you it won't, but for your kids it will happen soon enough and may be devastating. Many other kids are already born and lack parental care. What forces you to care for your own kids only? Instincts? From the logic, all genes are already present in sufficient quantities, so it's not necessary to preserve your own ones.
> Nothing I do will change the fact that life will change and they'll need to adapt in various ways.
Do you believe that you actions do not affect the future? Sounds a bit like learned helplessness.
Each child is basically a project that you spend lots of time working on and care about deeply.
A self replicating machine doesn't have a purpose behind its actions, it just does them.
Maybe everyone should watch the Steve Martin movie "The Jerk".
He searches for his "purpose".
SPOILER: It turns out to be his dick 8-)
God forbid someone tried a sport to help get in shape or to enjoy themselves
Overpopulation is not an issue. The real issue is logistics. If someone says they won't have children because they "wouldn't want to miss sleeping" or "clean up after a baby", they clearly are using an excuse. For whatever reason, they deem themselves unfit to be parents. Let them be. People on the fence don't stay there very long, and people rarely switch sides. Better one pair of good parents than five negligent pairs.
The world natural increase map is most interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
50% of the population under 14 years old right now
Your mileage may vary, but kids are great, truly.
Yes, there will be a time when things are worse. Rise and decline is a pattern in pretty much every facet of every trend that I can think of. Nothing goes up forever. Just because Earth's population flatlines at 10m, doesn't mean humanity is heading straight for extinction. I mean, it's possible. But far more likely is that at some point, for some reason, things turn back around and the population starts growing again. In the meantime, overpopulation and underpopulation both come with their own problems, and I'm not sure which is worse. We're only ~300 years into the industrial revolution after all. Maybe it's time for a little pullback. That is healthy for the real long-haul.
Sure, none of us actually wants to be a part of the hard times. We would rather the great-great-great-grandchildren that we've never met and never will be the ones to bear that burden. But somebody's going to have to deal with it eventually, and yes, it could be you (and me). Meanwhile, having a smaller number of people on the planet (while creating some problems that we had forgotten about) will surely also make some things easier. If literally no one wanted to have kids anymore, it might be a real problem. This is just another urban perspective; I could believe that no one in a city wants to have kids anymore. At least some of us forest dwellers are still breeding like rabbits.
By the time the population flatlines (at 10B) it will be with a pretty old population already. Many countries have a birth rate < 1.3 and many more are headed that way. That means after every 30 years or so, the number of babies born every year will decrease by 35%. Every 30 years. This is already very noticeable in e.g. South Korea, which last year had a birthrate of 0.8 I believe, where schools are now closing in droves.
And the problem is, none of the mechanisms that are causing birthrates to plummet are showing any signs of slowing down or reversing. The countries with higher birthrates right now are just further back on the curve, they'll be where we are soon enough. It might be that the reasons for decreasing birthrates are things we're not willing to give up, like improved quality of life of singles, increased education and equality between the sexes. We'll see if natural selection will act quickly enough to produce people with a stronger instinct for having kids, but then the question is why hasn't this already happened, as birth rates have been declining for the past century while living standards have increased immensely. As the number of people choosing to have zero kids rather than just fewer increase, perhaps this will put the pressure on in a way it hasn't yet.
- Demography department: a) fertility, b) pension systems, the link between economic growth, population growth, and productivity growth (how can you have a safe pension system anyway without economic growth? will people have access to safe investments, if all safe investments simply track economic growth? can we have economic growth which is based solely on productivity growth if population is contracting?)
- Climate warming department: lifetime CO2 emissions per human being, and environmental impact.
- The perception of all the above. If most people believe than the above problems are more severe than they are, due to amplification (schooling, social media, institutions, etc), then they will want to have even less children.
I find the premise of infinite growth absurd: we'll hit some hard resource limits and fizzle out sooner or later. Perhaps the author thinks it's more fun that way than fizzle out out of caution/apathy?
Or maybe we'll keep growing, but will have to change something about being a human. Turn into a hive mind? Become microscopic? Either way, it's going to be more difficult than preventing the economic collapse due to oldster overflow.
Out of two ways to preserve population growth one is more ridiculous than the other. I get an impression that it's written by someone who wants to keep running while reality indicates to slow down.
Yes we are. Yes. We. Are.
Let it happen. I'll start panicking if the human population is still decreasing at 100 million. But for now, we are still growing.
- Immigration will alter the societal outcomes of a region, for “better” or “worse”, as the region chooses
- Destruction of productive and healthy societies by prolific but unhealthy ones will cause widespread harm.
- Failure to reproduce at replacement levels won’t show up as a disaster until many years after it is too late to correct it.
Wouldn’t it be better to aim to reduce harm and increase productivity, than to blanket reduce the overall population?
Birth rates below replacement means that the proportion of elderly increases every year, forever. This means an every increasing proportion of resources has to be transferred from the working to non-working population.
It will become harder and harder for young people to build wealth and support themselves and it means fewer resources to solve the other very big problems we have such as climate change.
I was just trying to say that as the proportion of retired people increases they will take more resources and that will mean fewer resources for /anything/ else.
Not when life expectancy decreases, as it is here in the United States.
>It will become harder and harder for young people to build wealth and support themselves and it means fewer resources to solve the other very big problems we have such as climate change.
"Big problems" like climate change because much less "big" when other problems grow more pressing and threatening to immediate survival. People who don't have a roof over their heads or a meal to eat aren't concerned with climate change.
That's scary! Do you think life expectancy to continue to decrease?
> People who don't have a roof over their heads or a meal to eat aren't concerned with climate change.
Sure that's what I was trying to communicate. Climate change won't be a priority when people are struggling but it doesn't go away...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-sh...
We are very frugal compared to the average people in Canada, so we are still able to save for college and retirement.
Having kids pushed to take ownership of my finances, plan ahead and so many benefits.
Yeah, I lost a lot of sleep too.
Overall, having a child helped me grow enormously, but I think owning a company with employees might end up with some overlap in what you learn (pure theory). So if the goal is growing, you could skip the child.
The affection a child gives you "for free" is invaluable though. You don't experience that without children. If you are a physical person be aware, children are the first time when all your hug needs will be satisfied!
One thing that I'm still processing is the following: my parents (one if them) fucked up their retirement even though they started life way ahead of me (millions ahead of me) and I will be faced with the question "should I help them". While the answer seems obvious, it's not now: it means that due to my parent failure, my children may need to do the same, because I would be wasting my retirement.
I'm still fighting with this,hard to process.
1) Have children early at risk of living life without wealth but at minimum risk of health for all parties.
2) Delay. This risks never having children for various biological reasons for the impractically increased chance of increased wealth.
As somebody who had children early, went through poverty, and now lives in a large house with a nice job I can't help but look at single people in their 30s or older. I always want to ask them why they cannot afford a Lamborghini or live in a giant mansion. They had no such restrictions on their time and/or finances to dedicate increased efforts in advancing their careers or founding new businesses.
Do you lack any critical thinking ability whatsoever? Or do you have a need to be in peoples’ business?
The slowdown is already here. Birth rates are still collapsing. But people worldwide are living longer so the actual number of people is still increasing.
By the time you get to 10bn in 50 years, it means you will have the majority of that pretty old. It will mean a completely unsustainable world demographic. And it will probably mean a massive collapse in population to 2-3bn within a few generations.
No idea what that will bring, but it will be a very different society to now.
Jesus. That language alone is part of why many women choose to remain child-free. Women aren't living incubators ffs.
> Maybe governments will wake up to the urgency of this issue and start implementing ways to encourage young people to take a look at Ikea's crib catalogue.
And that sentence hints at the problem. My parents could afford two kids on basically one income in the 90's Munich. Me today? Barely two cats on two incomes, and not that small incomes either.
When wages are so low that people struggle to live paycheck to paycheck - in America, almost a third of all [1] - they obviously won't have children if they can prevent having them.
We need significant wage increases, we need actual provisions for parents (i.e. paid parental leave for both parents for at least a year), we need lower rents and lower utility bills.
Oh, and we need lower working hours as well. 8 hours a day is already stretching it particularly with commuting involved, you need time and mental space not just for having sex, but also to actually care for a child.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/more-americans-live-paycheck...
Not to get subjective and fuzzy but children are a symbol of hope and promise. Any reasonable adult who is considering children has to ask themselve how to answer when the child asks, "Why? Why did you bring me into *this* world?"
Who has a good answer for that at this point?
Do I think the next generation will have a better life than I had?
That’s easier to answer yes to if you started with little because the baseline is low.
For the squeezed middle in countries that have stopped developing? Probably not given the current trajectory
I wonder how many of the "figure it out later" attitude people overlap the "absolute faith in higher power" people? Poorer people possibly have more subscribers to religious faith?
A decline in the religious population, that comforted themselves with wellbeing of their offspring being a matter of prayer and ritual and whatnot, has had some impact on peoples' outlook in this matter?
Atleast in India.
In other news, Lalu Prasad Yadav's daughter gave her one kidney to him yesterday. Where point 1 literally panned out.
Consider a much more reasonable alternative - Having children can be seen as a path to traditional success by those who have very limited financial options.
By having a child - they gain a sense of purpose that is just utterly absent in most of our menial jobs. Further - Most people enjoy many aspects of their childhood, and having a child is a chance to pass on that joy and relive it.
Finally - additional children can bring additional revenue and help on the long term. If you know you have no job security, no money for savings, no pension, no 401k, and a low social security payout due to low earnings - children can be a way to have some semblance of retirement, and a safety net in old age.
---
Is there some overlap where it's also a consequence on not thinking through your decisions? Sure - probably. But that answer is simplistic.
For every complex question there's an answer that's short, simple, and wrong.
There likely isn't a satisfactory answer for everyone but I consider our job (as a whole) to move the human civilization forward. Every person can help take the one small step they can and it may not even be in the direction we intended it to be. My job as a parent is to provide the nurturing environment for my son to develop that sense of self and direction so he can find his purpose.
So while I work to make the better place for my son to live in, I can't solve all the problems we face. It is up to people collectively to overcome those burdens and the trip we make along the way is part of it.
For all the grief, hardship and depression we see in the world, Joy, Love and Happiness still exists to be found and I'm doing my best to let my son find the latter while trying to shelter him from much of the former.
"This world as in the safest and wealthiest world we've ever known? Son, for as long as humanity has existed, we've mastered all the challenges that have been thrown at us. Challenges much worse than the ones we are currently facing, be they environmental, societal or other. You'll find your place in this world and make the best of it."
Of course he'd be an angsty teenager asking that question, so I don't think it'd get through to him for the time being. I'd get him Marcus Aurelius' Meditations for his birthday.
We are human. By definition, we are not rational. We are emotional beings. That's the way it is. That's The Science.
Furthermore, we all know the saying: Past performance is no indication of future returns.
As for the wealth of the world. Much like the future, it's unevenly distributed; and getting more and more imbalanced. Yes, extreme poverty has been reduced. But in The West, so has the middle class.
We can pitch the "we're all better off" all we want. But we're all selfish. It's ultimately about us. And if I don't feel secure about the future then in my world that future isn't secure.
The world has a lot of issues for sure, but it used to be much much worse, and despite many issues left and appearing constantly, I think we're still going in the right general direction.
There are challenges and obstacles today, there surely will be some in the future, but I'm sure we will prevail, and I for one am happy to be there and want to give this opportunity to someone else.
I raised three kids. They're now starting to think about having kids of their own. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. But I don't judge anybody who doesn't have kids, I know many couples my age who don't. Which tells you this isn't a recent trend because I'm not exactly a young man!
We shouldn't be forcing people to have kids. The world needs fewer people, not more, and if people are naturally selecting themselves out of the gene pool and not being forced by government to do so then I guess so much the better.
It really is a Brave New World!
As many people as he annoyed, RMS had a point.
http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
If you read the entire thread, you will see that I made fun of him 29 years ago by feeding his own words into his own psychiatric diagnosis program (Emacs Doctor), which recognized his name, and criticized him for having hangups and inhibitions.
My point was that in spite of his acerbic but hilarious biting sense of humor, he has a valid point about natalism, despite being annoying and confrontational on purpose to make a point, not that he's a great role model.
>You people just have no sense of humor. I thought the original message was pretty funny and made a few good points (if it didn't, nobody would have been offended). I guess it's a shock for smug self-righteous breeders to learn that not everybody in the world thinks babies are cute and special. -Wayne A. Christopher
>Finally, someone read the message as it was intended to be read. -RMS
RMS has nothing good to say about children.
Anyways, here is a fun tip for parents with kids at home -- give them your ChatGPT account and let them have fun. My elder daughter pretty much spent the whole night awake creating a whole bunch of rap songs. She has already sang quite a few to us at the dinner table. Topic ranges from toes to everything the kid talk about these days. Her teachers might ban her access to it if she keeps up with making fun of discussion topics in her class.
OK. Raising kids is a really bad experience 50% of the time. However, there is a slight deviation towards fulfillment and fun, say 1% -- tilting the fun and excitement part to be 51% and that 1% makes all the difference.
This is not a problem. This is a brief hiccough that will literally evolve out in a generation or two. That "trend" is measurable in decades, against millions of years of history. And it's not universal, either.
We would be INCREDIBLY LUCKY if it lasted long enough to cut the human population in half, because we are likely already over long-term sustainable carrying capacity. In fact we might be over sustainable capacity at 4 billion. But we are very unlikely to get that lucky.
It's very fashionable right now to hand-wring over "population collapse", but it's dumb.
Great argument. About as great as the rest of the article which misses any nuance.
In developing countries, the purpose as i see is mostly to have a child to take care of them when they get old, which seems wrong!
Got fixed in my early 20s with no regrets.
I wouldn't worry about humanity fading out - I mean, reaching a stable plateau would be great! The worry is that we'll overshoot that by too big a margin and suffer a big collapse.
Take those motivators away - and replace them with demotivators such as very high child rearing costs - and the birthrate drops. Low sperm counts? If they aren't zero, people will find a way to have kids if they really want them.
It's a great self-regulating mechanism. The planet's population is getting uncomfortably high, so the birthrate drops. Great.
While the city I live in hardly looks like, say, Shanghai, there has been nonstop residential construction here in all the decades I've lived here. Does this have to be normal? Do cities have to expand until they fill the planet completely? Obviously not. Of course it's going to suck when "peak infrastructure" exceeds the population but not as much as an infinitely growing population would.
If the birthrate drops, neither you nor I nor the kids alive today will get a "retirement". It'll become a quaint little thing we once could afford.
Not so bad if all your work is tapping into a laptop. It's bloody murder for anyone that has to stand and lift and DO for a living.
So long we keep enough skilled tradesmen and farmers, which is not that many with increases in automation, we'll still have enough food, shelter and clothing. Being able to spread that work out amongst more people because bullshit jobs aren't a thing anymore will also probably help, as will changes in lifestyle that enable people to stay healthy longer.
We really don't need a new H&M collection every two weeks, or a new sport jersey every two seconds, or to keep making more and more cars/washing machines/TVs... most manufactured goods (including clothing) can last a while, especially in a world where planned obselence is no longer the norm. If population stabilizes, need for construction drops as well. Food/agriculture is already very automated, I'm sure we can continue to find 3% of the population to keep us fed.
I believe most of the work currently done on earth contributes very little to human happiness, and I hope/want to believe that as our ability to do work diminishes with an aging population, the useless stuff will be the first to go.
silly example, but with GPT-3/ChatGPT, we can now fire all the influencers and have them go toil as construction workers :P
I'm assuming that by the time I reach retirement, we will only need 5-10% of today's labor force due to advances in automation
- Back work from home
- Universal child care
- Universal health care
- Universal college
- Stop calling child support for nothing
The easier you made it to be parents, the more parents you'll get. The existing "the beatings will continue until the morale improves" approaches will get you more people making rational decisions to skip having kids.
Against this back drop a choice emerges: To take what little is left and use that to eke out some semblance of life, some work/life balance... that first they delay having children from their 20s to their 30s. Then when they arrived in their 30s they're still very much behind where they had planned to be (wars, Brexit, COVID, financial crashes, inflation, etc)... and they're either delaying to their 40s or just accepting now that this was not for them. They wanted a decent life, it included children... but in reality the economic reality and pace of life has precluded it.
I'm late 40s, that was my reality (further delayed start due to being homeless when younger and having an even worse starting point)... and I get it, it's hard.
Having children feels like something that has become the preserve of the wealthy or the poor, and if one wishes to achieve a betterment in your own lifetime - a social mobility, then you're likely choosing against having children. I've long accepted this, but once in a rare moon I get to just write it down like this as there's definitely shame involved at making those choices (and it's way worse for women who are constantly asked when they're going to have children, whereas men are mostly left alone on the subject).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn3oXHSUdKY
Personally I don't really care about world population or planet too much.
Ah, the good old reduction of women to walking wombs.
I love these new people.
Yes, being a parent involves a period of reduced sleep (as this author points out). No, it does not mean your world ends and you’re never sleeping again. The low-sleep phase is temporary. It’s such a short duration relative to the rest of your life as a parent that it really doesn’t matter much in the long run. Same goes for changing diapers and dealing with baby vomit. If you’re focused on these experiences as the defining characteristics of being a parent, you’ll completely miss the big picture.
This article also has a big strawman at the center:
> I don't see how babies could possibly come back as the preferred lifestyle choice for couples in their 20s
Most of the parents I know in my area had kids in their 30s. And it’s fine! Obviously you don’t want to be too old, but having kids in your 30s is basically the norm among working professionals. The fact that this author is focused on having kids in your 20s makes me wonder if they’re living in a childfree peer bubble or if they’re simply too young to see their friends and peers grow up, have children, and enjoy it.
amen
Then the older ones get envious and hop in. It is an entire football team chasing each other.
There is distinct difference in the fun of raising children in a village where there are tons of other kids with low risk of cars so they can play outside freely, and raising children 24/7 because they cannot be left without supervision and there are few other kids on the street and the adults do not trust each other enough.
Just having functional grandparents or aunts/uncles to take them off your hands once in a while would probably make a big difference.
Our typical Saturday involves me and my son spending 7A-nap time together outside the house while my wife sleeps in, lounges around and does her hobbies.
When we get home, she’s totally refreshed.
Another thing we do sometimes is drop him at daycare and we take an afternoon off to do something together.
Works great for us. We don’t have any family within 3000 miles of us, so solutions were needed.
Unless both parents come from a really dysfunctional family, this should never be the case.
Why? Many people immigrate away from their families for a variety of reasons other than them being “dysfunctional”. For example, economic opportunities.
I know a quite a few couples that moved from places with low economic opportunities to places with better opportunities, and one of the downsides is that they have to navigate parenting by themselves. It is a cost they are incurring to give their kids a higher probability of success when they grow up.
Yet:
> one of the downsides is that they have to navigate parenting by themselves.
That's not true. Our families may be away most of the time, but we have a constant rotation of our parents (and my wife's Giagia) coming to stay with us. When our second kid was born, I don't think we were by ourselves for the first six months. Even today, we get someone visiting us at least every other month.
> kids a higher probability of success when they grow up.
This is increasingly becoming something we are asking ourselves. I think our kids would benefit more from being able to grow up close to their families than in a place with a culture and values that we don't really share. For us (and me specially) living in Germany has been more of a "tolerable" than a "desirable" situation. With remote work becoming a reality, I think we can have our cake and eat it too.
That is not possible for many others.
None of those qualify as dysfunction in my book.
- "Older grandparents" is a sign that people are waiting too much to have their own kids.
- "Other family obligations", like what... Work? Perhaps we should rethink our globalized, modern economy that makes dual-income families a necessity. I really hope that by the time my kids get to have their kids, my wife and I are in condition to dedicate ourselves to help them as much as our own parents helped us.
- "Visa issues" is mostly an American thing, which unfortunately I also I am very familiar with (lived in the US before coming to Germany). The US is only going to sort this out after it solves the Milton Friedman dilemma: it can be either a country of Open Borders, or it can be a Welfare State. Until it tries to be both, it is doomed to these catastrophic policies.
- Does either side of the family have enough money to fund cross-country travel more than once a year for a week at a time?
My parents are retired/semi-retired. When they come, it's usually during the summer (here)
- go to beach, play in sand & swim in ocean, find other kids to play with
- go to woods, walk around and spot wildlife
- go to farmer’s market, try various foods/drinks, play with other kids
- go out for ice cream
- go to playground, play with other kids
- go out for some (light) off-roading, he loves the bumps
My son will be 3 next week.
- go to the library and pick out books
- go grocery shopping, discuss what foods we like/don't like, practice remembering something I'm supposed to get
- play with model trains and make up Thomas stories
- go to the aquarium store and talk about the fish
- go to the park (One time we stopped on the way for fast food and ate it at the park, which was fun, but it created an expectation for a while that there would always be chicken and fries at the park.)
I would prefer hanging out with my children over doing most anything else. That comes down to who I am and who my children are, and probably other circumstances.
It's also worth recognizing that the early childhood years (0-3) can be difficult and super isolating. We had fun during that time, but it got way more fun as they got out of that age and became fully interactive.
Its like in discussions about exercise, if you just read discussions online you'd think that everyone loves to exercise, but most people really hate it or at least don't like it.
I'm over it, and I'm over the PMC signaling in general. The happiest people I know enjoy things without irony, love their kids, and aren't afraid to look stupid. The most miserable detest children and only care about trends.
Happy people ought to have kids, since likely they will have happy kids. Unhappy kids ought to not have kids, since they will likely have unhappy kids, and would make themselves unhappier for it. How is this strange? Do you think that miserable people shouldn't be able to express their misery? do you think that hating those miserable people will help in any way?
I hope this is your toddler.
> I hope this is your toddler.
I hope it's your toddler who wrote this comment.
My wife feels the same way.
I'm just the opposite: the toddler stage is far and away my favorite stage of my kids' development. They are old enough to communicate with, but young enough that they discover something new and amazing in the world every single day. Getting to see the world through the eyes of a toddler really clarifies your world view.
I wanted to say—these two lifestyles you describe (raves and toddlers) are not incompatible. I’ve had to get better at scheduling and communication, that’s all.
For me, it was really helpful to develop concrete agreements with my partner. (E.g., I get to travel 8 weeks a year, I have to schedule 1 month in advance, and it can be for any reason). I don’t like the view that having kids means giving up on what you love to do in life.
4th kid is on the way. Seems nutso to me, but because my wife really wanted another. And if that is her dream, I am not going to stand in her way.
Is there anyone other than you and your spouse helping raise the children? Does your spouse work?
Lots of people do not have support from friends or family. Being able to take off while spouse is pregnant and taking care of 3 other kids is surely an abnormal situation.
She took a weekend recently and left me with the 3 kids. It was fun and honestly more relaxed than most weekends. Maybe importantly is our spacing — 13, 10 and 3. Not saying 3 toddlers.
It's simply half an hour of "Where's Daddy?... oh oh... There's Daddy... " peek-a-bo with laughter all around.
That was an insanely happy time. There's been lots of other fun, but that was peak pure bliss.
Right. Because that’s the easy part, when they’re babies.
At first I didn’t believe my friend’s dad when he told me it actually gets more difficult when they get older.
My sons are 8 and 6 now and that's much more difficult on some ways. They're 'people' enough that you can reason with them sometimes, but also sometimes they get trapped in completely ridiculous loops of illogic and emotion and you just have to ride it out while trying to remain calm. There's all kinds of dramas, illnesses, places to go, one thing after another.
Mostly though, being a dad is great, and I recommend it. I meet lots of folks my age who seem kinda directionless, like they can't figure out what's missing, and I think for many of them, family is that missing piece.
I've also met many DINKs who seem like they're having the time of their lives, so YMMV. I don't want to tell anyone how to live their life.
But there does seem to me to be a cultural knee-jerk ruling out of family among my generation that puzzles and saddens me. Everyone seems to think there are a million qualifications they have to meet before becoming a parent. "We need to have a house, and 100k in savings, etc etc etc." And yes, it's good to be prepared. But also, as long as you're a semi functional human, you'll make it work.
If you think you want to have children, you should!
Very true. I didn’t have my own place to live or any money when the first one was on the way. In fact, my kids are the reason I started a new career, worked my way up, bought a house.
It doesn’t all have to happen in a specific order. Like the parent post says, you make it work.
What does make it work mean? Most people I know will not accept the child “surviving” as making it work.
Maybe you are living paycheck to paycheck so you don't buy the new game this week. You play an old game that you already had.
Maybe some mornings you have to give them a bowl of cereal instead of making eggs, because you don't have enough time.
Maybe some afternoon when everyone is exhausted from working, you let the kids play the tablets for 2 hours instead of 30 minutes like they're supposed to.
Maybe instead of renting out the trampoline park for the birthday party, you get a pavilion at your local nature park.
Maybe your kid might get a "cheese sandwich" in their lunch because you were out of turkey and didn't realize it until 11pm.
Maybe your kid desperately wants a dog, but your current living situation doesn't allow it and he has to go without.
Obviously we all want what's best for our children all the time, but life is full of compromises. I'm not saying that parents shouldn't do everything within their power to provide the best life possible for their kids - in fact, I think that's exactly the moral duty of parenthood. But there are many degrees of happiness between "pure utopian bliss" and "mere survival." And so many potential parents these days seem to think that if they can't do it absolutely perfectly then it's not worth doing.
Maybe this is just my own background, but I can't think of a single person I know whose childhood was perfectly ideal.
Where does being able to afford routine healthcare land? And I do not mean waiting in the few overcrowded clinics that take Medicaid because Medicaid reimbursed very poorly so providers do not accept it.
The only difference between now and before is that now we have very effective birth control. I think it is perfectly reasonable for people to say, for example, I am not likely to be able to pay for a child’s healthcare, and so it is not worth it for me to have children (yet). Or a home in a decent school, where the other kids are not likely to be in gangs. And so on and so forth.
My parents were poor, and I never received any healthcare as a child. My dad told me to play carefully, otherwise any injuries I incurred could derail the family. I also went to a different school in different states every year until high school. So I was fed and sheltered. But would I have kids if I predicted that is what their life would be? Hell no.
I agree.
What I'm arguing against is what seems to be a fairly modern conception: "oh, we can't possibly consider children until we own a home with 4 bedrooms and a pool and we've gone on a backpacking trip through Europe and we've unpacked all our own childhood trauma and come to terms with it and gone to therapy and etc, etc etc".
I'm not saying "yeah, fuck it, you live in a box, get all your money from hooking, and nurse a heroin addiction, but you should still have kids, it'll work out."
I'm just saying that nearly every human in history has been born into a situation that was non-optimal in some way. It's OK to have a kid when the house is too small. It's OK to not have a fully baked plan to finance every activity the child might ever want to do. A fulfilling and happy life can be found in less-than-ideal circumstances.
My parents didn't have much money. We were fortunate in many other ways. Some folks were born with more money and less parental kindness. Some sadly lacked in both.
As an adult, I can say that I am happy to have been born in spite of the many challenges that I faced growing up. I believe (hope) that most people on Earth can honestly say the same.
Sorry you had a bad experience with that growing up. Really.
As a parent I can’t say I shared that worry with only having medicaid. That was our best option before I had a job with healthcare benefits, which took me years to get to.
But I would still say it was pretty far from just “survival”.
Babies cry for every reason and figuring out what’s wrong (if anything) was stressful. I felt that once my kids were able to communicate, everything got easier and waaaaaay more fun.
My kids are in college now and I’m so happy and proud of them but at the same time I realize that my parenting job is wrapping up. When I think about the past 20 years I’m a little sad because I should have been a much better parent. The deserved better. It’s also astonishing how quickly two decades passed.
Yep, but it's important for would-be parents to know that that's normal and doesn't take all that long IF you are being an attentive parent. Some parents can tell by the "kind" of cry what their baby wanted. I could never do that, so I always just went through a mental checklist every time: Poopy diaper? (Usually you can smell one before it upsets the baby, though.) Hungry? Tired? Wants to play? Wants to sit down? Wants to get up? Etc.
When they’re a young teenager, and they’re trying to kill themselves, and you have to lock up all the sharp objects, including the knives you cook with every day, constantly watch them, which means working from home before everyone was doing that, keep them out of school because the school isn’t committed to keeping an eye on suicidal people, yet still informs you that they will call the authorities if you continue to keep them out of school, AND you’re also keeping them from being institutionalized, because that’s how the system is if you don’t do all this yourself to protect your children while they are in this window of time where you could lose them.
I wouldn’t say babies are the worst. They are simple beings.
Babies are dead easy. They are incapable of expressing their will. You put them in a stroller, that baby is in the stroller. Yes, you have to feed and clean the baby and it will sometimes be hard to wrangle into whatever situation you want. But it doesn't have a choice ultimately.
Adults are also relatively easy. You don't have to do any of the cleaning or feeding, and you also don't have to tolerate anything you don't want to. Bob is being a jerk? Fuck him. Sally doesn't come to your birthday party? Well, now she's not invited to Friendsgiving. Etc.
Toddlers who grow into children who grow into teenagers are a whole category unto themselves. You slowly divest yourself of the cleaning and direct feeding duties. But you also can't just abandon them. When little Billy is pitching a fit, you have to deal with that. And as they get older and get savvier themselves, you're going to have to navigate that. You are going to have a lot of responsibility with decreasing levels of authority.
So now you have to get your kid to do what you would like for them to do without physical coercion. Ideally without much coercion if you want to preserve a relationship with them. You are going to have to convince them. And you aren't allowed to quit.
The childless among us hear every complaint and lament about how terrible it is. Why would we do that to ourselves?
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-25189-001
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2003...
When fathers in Spain were given more parental leave, they have less kids, for example. The revealed preference is clear.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-UN
https://qz.com/work/1614893/after-men-in-spain-got-paternity...
The study doesnt mention any effect on career progression or any other type of opportunity cost either. You’re entitled to your opinion but this article does not support it.
I'm reminded of societies in which families have more children than they want because there is no social safety net. Children are the safety net. Talk about harvesting human beings. Children suffer immense pressure and even abuse in such places.
Which will lead to a more stable society: social safety net, or no social safety net?
In my experience and observation, societies that have protections from poverty seem to be far more stable as compared to societies that do not have them.
My wife and I are done with the one. I think we got lucky - she is a sweet, fun and fairly easy (for now) two year old, but the decrease in life quality is significant. I didn't want to further extend the monotony of our current life by having a second.
Overall my advice to anyone would be if you are not missing anything in your life and are happy, you don't have to have children. Other people might tell you how great it is (after complaining a bunch, and then complaining some more later) but that's their life, not yours.
Experience is what we get what when we don’t get what we expected.
This isn't a judgment or to say parents are in any way superior! Having children is a very personal choice which everyone has to confront, and there's no wrong answer. The feeling of being a parent is just incredibly difficult to put into words.
The interesting thing is I care more about others kids as well now. Before kids I didn't have many interactions with them, not really a kids person, but now I feel more paternal for all kids. While there's an obvious confounding variable here, my friends with kids care about mine and want to meet them while those without pretend like they don't exist.
. . .
What world do you live in? I have 4 (soon to be 5) kids myself and I’m happy with my choices. I know many families with kids, and only a small percentage seem unhappy, similar to most other life choices.
"Seem" is the keyword. People successfully hide suicidal depression from close friends and family, so I'm not sure why you think people can't hide mild unhappiness.
The analogy I made to depression was intentional because it exhibits exactly this pattern: every depressed person consistently reports how terrible it is, and yet they often make a show of appearing happy in public.
If they "seem" happy in all my interactions, I don't see how they can be "consistently mak[ing] clear how terrible having kids is."
I also don't see how some secret only-tell-the-therapist-and-pollsters views could qualify as "consistently mak[ing] clear" their supposed negative feelings.
Just yesterday, in my team of five, three work colleagues were counseling each other about how go get help for their kids. The two children of one colleague suffer from anxiety and attention deficit, which is the same problem another colleague has. The third colleague needed to leave yesterday mid-afternoon because his daughter had a breakdown at school. Today he is taking her to therapy, and that's a regular occurrence.
I've started to suspect that there is a silent pandemic of mental health issues between kids these days. Maybe it's the cell phones, maybe it's over-diagnosis, maybe it's because it's too much. Maybe the entire way we do families and child-rearing is broken. I remember feeling lonely and sad as a kid, then I went to boarding school and made some amazing friends and life was so much better and easier. Kids shouldn't grow alone.
Having a son anchored me to the (land and planet)* in a very unexpected way. Formerly, there was always an option to chuck things and go somewhere else, but now whatever is in front of me I must deal with and make happen. It's not about what I want to do any more, but the first underlying thought behind everything I do is how it will affect my son and family.
Lots of former options are closed. I can no longer start a relationship with a fun and beautiful but legitimately insane woman. I can no longer splurge my life savings on some risky venture. I can no longer spontaneously digital nomad. Heck, I can't really hit the local pub or have a night out without negotiation.
Is that terrible? I don't think so. It doesn't feel so. More, like, I do whatever I want within the bounds determined by my responsibility to someone who cannot care for himself yet.
I have a fatherly and calm personality, though, and I know it's not suited for everyone.
So, TL;DR: Not terrible. Anchoring. Limiting, but not oppressive.
* There's no really good word for this.
Yeah, there are lots of things I can't do now. But that's ok with me. It doesn't even feel like a sacrifice really. Being a dad is just part of who I am and I want to do it well just like any other thing I do.
My kids won't need me anchored forever. And I still get to go fishing, see concerts, play video games, and do other stuff I enjoy. It's not the total loss of all freedom some make it out to be.
Nobody wants to be the one who speaks out, everyone is saying its amazing because the others say it is amazing.
I’m sure they’d still say it was worth it.
Mind you they are getting divorced now so who knows.
I think it’s fair to say YMMV on the sleep front.
It may not have anything to do with the greater fool theory as we aren't constantly buying or selling children or doing child swaps like banks do with money but it is worth bringing up as we are humans in both places and I suspect the underlying human psychology is the same.
> In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
> In this context, one "fool" might pay for an overpriced asset, hoping that he can sell it to an even "greater fool" and make a profit. This only works as long as there are enough new "greater fools" willing to pay higher and higher prices for the asset. Eventually, investors can no longer deny that the price is out of touch with reality, at which point a sell-off can cause the price to drop significantly until it is closer to its fair value, which in some cases could be zero.[1][2][3][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
tl;Dr NEVER EVER trust a parent to tell you the truth about the "wonders" of being a parent, not because they are malicious but because they are likely incapable of being objective.
edit: disclaimer, if it wasn't obvious, i made this all up. i don't have any children
Life is so fundamentally different before and after you have children you must care for. There is no amount of theorizing or philosophizing that will prepare you for the reality of the thing. You absolutely cannot trust the opinion of anyone who does not have children. They simply do not have the necessary experience.
People with children however, have had life without children and life with children. So at least they have a basis of comparison. However, every experience is different. Being a single teen mom is a different situation than even being a teen mom with a supportive family. And different again than a "typical" mid-20s couple having a child.
And everyone reacts differently. I can only say how experiences affected me. Bob can only say how experiences affected him. So you really can't base your decision on other people's experiences either. Not because of "greater fools" but because of self-selection bias. Most people who you will talk to about being parents enjoy parenthood and love their children.
So while you don't know whether or not you'd be a good parent or if you'd like your children until you actually have children, it's still a decent reason to avoid having them. Not wanting to confront the question is a valid reason to avoid the question.
Would I love to sit around and play video games in the large amounts of free time I would have if I didn't have a family? Sure. But that instantaneous gratification does not compare to the more "overall" happiness of having a family. For me. Clearly, it's different for everyone.
It makes a lot of assumptions about all parents having the same experience. It’s not. A lot of this assumes kids without any health issues.
“The low-sleep phase is temporary.” Nope. “Same goes for changing diapers” Nope.
There are lots of good things when it comes to children, and I love mine, but if you aren’t mentally prepared for the possibility that your entire life will have to change, you might want to think harder.
It might not happen to you, but it could also happen. Do not let someone pretend that it’s all temporary.
No.
It’s literally for the rest of your life.
Huh? Does your child have an issue where they never grow out of diapers?
For the vast majority of people, the diaper phase is temporary.
Sure, but it is far from a guarantee. And you should at least be aware of that.
You guess what? That potential parents should be prepared to take care of their children for their entire life? I think that's reasonable. Things happen all the time, too, where tragedies happen and people suffer medical issues that require lifetime care.
Being a parent is committing to that.
And if your thought is "I'm going to gamble that it doesn't happen to me" is really telling.
Regardless, being informed is important. Maybe you got lucky in your ignorance, but not everyone will be so lucky.
> “The low-sleep phase is temporary.” Nope. “Same goes for changing diapers” Nope.
Someone made the point that, in some small fraction of cases, a child might be in diapers their whole life.
What would you call the diaper-changing phase, if not "temporary"? "Temporary in 99.999% of cases"? It's certainly not "permanent."
If you want children, do not wait. It will never be 'better situation'. There will be always some reason, mostly financial not to have them.
I disagree that there will never be a better situation. A couple with secure cash flows and in demand talents can optimize when they have kids to accommodate goals (for example, their preferred living situation, career goals, etc).
Things like moving, and working strenuous roles while having kids seems less than ideal. Of course, if you want 5 kids then waiting is not an option, but if you want 2, then there is some room for maneuvering.
I would say that the major factor isn't age, it's situation. If you are in a stable relationship with someone who can help financially and emotionally support an additional human, having a child could be an option.
If you are in a precarious situation, do not bring another human into it.
Yes, it's possible to put it off long enough thinking you'll find that perfect time, and either it getting to be too late, or perhaps running into the reality that with age comes higher likelihood of birth defects, in many cases. But the flat advice to just do it seems like it's missing a bit of at least a basic foundation advised.
I worked with folks who had kids in high school. They made it work, and had a different cultural background, but nothing about it seemed like the best idea -- at LEAST they had multigenerational households to cover some of the otherwise likely insurmountable difficulties particularly on the budgets they had working service industry jobs.
Only in the last 100 (maybe even less, say 60) or so years we've started to say fk that, when I retire I want to be on a beach and not taking care of my grandkids.
Our forefathers changed this dynamic by making this arrangement somewhat invisible, in that we pay social security tax instead. We still take care of our parents, but not directly, and it's by the gun of the tax man rather than by a family arrangement. There is little incentive for this kind of unspoken bargaining of the past where you may take care of shelter and the grandparents take care of a kid. There's an IRS agent waiting with a gun if you don't pay social security, so any unspoken bargaining power is gone and the working age parent basically gets the squeeze from both sides.
Oh and that I'll have a partner who will stay healthy (and loyal) for the 15 ~ 25 years it takes to turn a child into a self-sustaining responsible adult.
But as it stands that's a game of Russian Roulette that I'm not willing to play.
The LVB (lowest viable bar) is "will I be able to have a civil conversation with this person about our child whenever needed, for at least 20 years?"
People get so bitterly disappointed when "unconditional love" doesn't happen, they can't even meet the LVB. Keep LVB front and center when evaluating a potential mate. If the answer is "yes, no matter what happens, we can always be civil about the children", then no matter what, it should be okay.
I agree with you, although that's necessary but not sufficient.
Having children isn't so wonderful that I'd put up for decades with a miserable relationship with my partner in the endeavor.
With children in the mix, especially unhealthy children who require special support, you can't just say "looks like we've grown apart and can't communicate well anymore about even the basics, so cya".
It's a lifelong commitment to a cofounder, no matter what.
Agreed, but that's not what I said nor even implied. If you're insisting on staying together for decades, and happily so to boot, that is a very high bar indeed. Such a high bar that only very few couples manage it. Few couples even manage the LVB.
No. If you want to have kids, you have to know that even if you divorce, even horribly, even catastrophically, that you can have a civil conversation as needed about the child for at least 20 years. If you're not sure, don't do it. Do not have a child. Spare the children and the world your children.
I am the father of a three-year-old girl. I would go through my marriage a thousand times, complete with abuse and emotional trauma, if it meant I could get my daughter in the end.
I’ve found that happiness has never been found by endeavoring to avoid any and all potential suffering. I cannot control how my wife behaves. I can only control my reaction.
Find a partner that is emotionally resilient, calm under pressure, and has a desire to continually better themselves, then go for it. It may still end in divorce, but I promise you it will be worth it.
It sounds like you're blessed (whether in the religious or random probability sense) with a daughter who is your joy. The worst partner and the ugliest divorce in the world can't offset that.
I have no assurance that I'll be similarly blessed, and I don't want to roll those dice, because I have no idea to what degree the game is rigged against me, genetically, environmentally and circumstantially speaking.
Adults can marry, get along, fight with, or divorce adults. But once there's a child in the mix one's hands are tied.
If it's a healthy, loving and developing child, it might all be worth it. The odds of that are not only unknowable, they're relatively risky.
Yeah.. I am a new dad to a 21 week old baby girl (our first) and I would say that the sleep deprivation stopped after about 8 weeks. The last few weeks have been absolutely amazing. I play with my daughter every day, I cuddle her, her giggles warm my heart and make me dream and get excited about the future. So many amazing things to look forward to. I can't wait to build a snowman with her. I can't wait to go snorkelling, skiing, ice skating, surfing, etc. with her. I can't wait to take her to places and answer all her questions and tell her stories and spend time together. Until now my best friend was my wife, but now we have an additional best friend in our life. It's someone to play a board game with in the evening when all our other friends are too busy watching Netflix. It's an extra person to have dinner with and have interesting conversations with. An extra person who will challenge me in my thinking, will educate me on issues I would be unaware of as an older person now. An extra person to argue with, love, hug, miss and root for in her own accomplishments.
Who doesn't want an additional best friend in their life? Someone who you love so much that you know everything that you accumulate in your life you can happily pass down to?
What I find interesting is that the same people who argue that having children is such a churn and piece of work because of the nappy changes, short lived lack of sleep, etc. are the same people who end up having 2 cats and a dog. That doesn't make sense to me. If you don't like to change nappies for a few months then why did you pick a pet which you'll have to walk to the park at 5am in the morning for many years to come just so it can have a piss and shit every morning. My friends with pets are much more limited in visiting restaurants or going on holiday than my friends with kids. Kids go everywhere, pets don't.
Later I had kids and that did not change my opinion!
The weird thing is that I miss this phase. They're little for such a short amount of time and there's just nothing else like this pre-toddler phase. Maybe it's the oxytocin that just wipes your memory clean of all the fatigue and sleep deprivation.
> Articles like this one, which are written by someone who apparently has chosen not to have children, are almost universally terrible at representing the true experience of being a parent.
There's an interesting wrinkle into the answer you get, however. If you ask parents in one environment (say, at the workplace) about their thoughts on children they will often be different than asking about them in the act of raising those children. There is often an irreconcilable difference between our experience in the moment and how we later remember that experience. It's possible to be quite miserable raising children and still think back on it fondly.
I'm not sure what that implies on the advice of consulting actual parents unless you know which you would prefer optimizing for.
Honestly the biggest impact on my life so far is having to keep in mind that there is a developing person following me (both literally and figuratively) and copying exactly what I do and say.
It's not so bad blabla.
Imagine someone doing the opposite to those who want them.
Some men and women just aren't interested.
An entire generation bled dry by student loans for useless degrees, unable to buy homes that their elders view as retirement funds. A thousand and one more entertaining things to do online which don't risk creating 18-year bundles of debt. And absolutely no idea how to break the cycle for your offspring.
Pick one thing to fix and spend your life addressing it and maybe you'll have it solved in time for when the population reaches 9 billion.
Meanwhile landlords are reaping in INSANE rents from anyone who didn’t manage to buy back when that was at least a realistic dream.
People are people. The urge to have kids is incredibly strong. But if you are living in a tiny flat earning no money then it’s going to at the least be strongly suppressed.
Parents are getting _older_ as well as fewer so that should give an indication of what’s going on here.
No-one is in a financial position to have a baby in their 20s anymore, and by the time you’re in your 30s it’s biologically already harder to have a baby.
For people who have certainty of access to future resources and plenty of living space I'm pretty sure the urge to reproduce isnt repressed.
London reminds me of this rat experiment: https://gizmodo.com/how-rats-turned-their-private-paradise-i...
The US has wide open country areas for cheap.
I think too often people clamor to a lifestyle they can't afford and make believe it will magically workout.
This just isn’t the root of the issue. It’s pretty common knowledge that mostly the richer a country is the less babies it has.
So, maybe research what the actual problem is, before projecting your own views of society on this issue
So instead I critique the author's views on society. It's not women having careers, prevalence of safe sex, or tinder usage to blame. Has anyone tried blaming the avocado toast yet?
This is true for a lot of people so children when the start earning, "there is no rent to pay" which is a big savings considering.
On the other hand, you have "american dream" of kicking your kids out at 18 so the roof over heads analogy falls out the window.
I get it. Its fun, its freedom but at what cost? Apparently running your ass off to stay afloat.
Then there is this argument about "no opportunities in home town" but does this apply to 100% of 18 year olds in USA that they have to necessarily move out?
This was the case for me. I had no choice but to leave home at 18 or I would have been working in food service or lawn care for the rest of my life.
Could this change with the growing use of remote work? It could. Whether it does or not though remains to be seen.
Otherwise theyre a victim of their own decision making. Of course they have a tough decision and probably received bad information like "education is priceless". So dont ever mislead kids with that crap. Ultimately We can distribute blame and repercussions across society l, which preserves the problem, or we could hold individuals responsible.
My university degree is not in tech at all, but it sure has managed to open enough doors to make my self-learned skillset profitable.
Pretending that people were making bad decisions with going to college is victim-blaming - there isn't a job market out there which doesn't demand a degree, pretty much any degree if you want to be in the middle class.
Some just-so story of how people should've picked the obvious degree of some sort when they're 18, have no life experience and the entire job market can pivot around in 4 years is so much junk to defend an overpriced education system which can't deliver on it's promises and is protected by a debt-issuance structure no other financial instrument gets. Undischargeable loans! Give money away and just don't bother ever analyzing the risk. Imagine a student loan system where the issuers might lose their hat if they don't know what the job market would be like for their investments.
Obvious exceptions exist; we don't typically see presidential candidates who came from a community college. But most of the time, the degree is there more to show you could commit to a more self-directed educational experience than high school, and follow through with it while not usually under your parent's roof. Executive functioning, basically. Show some engagement in clubs, sports, or other activities for a bonus.
In many fields, if anything beyond this is expected, they want a graduate degree anyway, and this is where it can pay to splurge on the name, depending on your field.
That said, I think we are all victims of the horrible free-financial-aid policies that have pumped overwhelming amounts of seemingly-but-not-at-all-free money into the system and driven college tuitions to absolutely insane heights.
That's only ~2037, 15 years or so from now. Less than half a career.
I mean WTF? Really! OMG there will only be 10B people! OMG!! OMG!!!
Seriously, if 98% of the human species vanished, it can't be anything but a good thing.
The only people "worried" about this reduction are extractive capitalists who are afraid there aren't going to be enough idiot herd to pilfer.
OMG!!!!!
It makes sense that DINKs and childless single people are simply reacting to the same economic incentives and now pricing out dual income families.
I think high-rents is a major driver of this decision. The USDA puts the cost of your first kid at $14.4k annually edited. That is primarily due to housing.
Those who think the city is good place to be, explore a little outside your urban bubble.
In addition to this, we have lots of kids and there are plenty of ways to have kids affordably. You don’t have to send your kids Ivy League schools and if they do, they can get their student loans to pay for it.
Lastly, yes, kids can a source of frustration and pain but they are by the one of the largest sources of joy, pride and happiness in our life. Watching them grow and develop is amazing.
And for those that thing “small towns” are some homogenous idyllic 50s family fantasy, be careful. Last one I lived in was a pit of unemployment, methamphetamine and heroin.
I hate to breka it to you but capitalism is doing the exact same thing to people.
Financial security and independence is bad for capitalism because it needs people to show up to work. It needs people to need those jobs and (even better) live paycheck-to[aycheck. That's the recipe for a compliant workforce. Increasing real wages is bad because it decreases dependence and profits, which is why there has been almost no increase in overall real wages in 40+ years.
Student debt, housing debt and medical debt are by design. Your labor is extracted to very few. Centuries ago, nobles were at the top of that pyramid and we called that serfdom. What we have now is basically the same thing but we've just replaced nobles with the capital-owning class.
People once had children because of high infant mortality (and mortality in general) and to look after them when they got old. Now we need a certain amount of security to provide for those children. And the short-term exploitation of labor has the completely understandable effect of people waiting to have children, not having children at all and/or having less children.
We produce enough such that everyone could live comfortably. We produce enough food such that everyone could be fed. We, as a society, have allowed people to starve and be homeless and instead of sharing the wealth letting it concentrate in the hands of a few hundred individuals.
Oh sod off with this. The primal prerogative of reproduction is predicated on the primal need for safe and secure territory. The wealthiest oligarchs of the boomer generation have done everything they can to ensure the consequent generations are unable to attain that one entirely reasonable primal need. Women's rights have had an affect on birth rates, yes, but I'd rather take away the oligarch's right to own all the single family homes than my girlfriend's right to decide what to do with her life.
>> Never heard of that.
Even today, the people still making kids are largely those in the poorest deciles of the population, with no stable home, etc.
Wealthy or not, white or not, you're going to feel it sooner or later in most countries. The whole system is built on a strong working class, once the balance shift to an older population it's going suck for a few generations
Not many white peeps in Japan or China btw, yet they'll suffer the same thing, India will be next, albeit a bit later
But yeah, "white man bad", that's good enough !
Japan is suffering identically.
Fertility rates are close to or below 2 pretty much everywhere except subsaharian africa, and dropping significantly on a world wide level.
Trying to make this issue 'white vs other' is unwarranted and simply does not fit actual data.
I'm sure people have caught onto this, esp. with the breakdown of the family system (a big cause is the memetic disconnect). It's not even like you'll be looked after later on in life - there's zero justification for having kids (other than things like 'companionship', which let's admit it, a dog would do a better job of).
If you're a guy esp. in insanely misandric countries like India (where you and your family can be thrown in jail at the mere word of the bride; where the culture/languages of the land are increasingly banned by the colonial state) it's even less so.
Western society has been breaking down the autonomy and independence of the family. More and more policies are aimed at treating parents as temporary caregivers of a state asset. Public education is probably the biggest one of all time, but there are a lot of little policies as well. If you let little Timmy roam free the state could very well decide to swoop in and assign new caregivers. Genetics are de-emphasized in this whole system to be made irrelevant.
People are fighting back against this state interference with things like “free range parenting” and homeschooling.
There's high correlation, at minimum, between the 'paradox' of women unhappiness and the lack of babies. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
Though obviously the authors of said article incorrectly see it as a paradox. Seemingly didn't understand what's happening to cause male happiness and female unhappiness.
Then you have sex ed which teaches men they are oppressive sexual deviants which cant be trusted, and sex for women is nothing but pain and misery. Funnily nobody seems to care why women have painful periods... they shouldnt...
Then politicians pushed and succeeded at breaking the social contract between men and women. There's tremendous evidence showing the abusive nature of divorce court or childrens court toward men. It's practically impossible for men to have kids due to the risk involved. Quite a number of men have simply decided not to get into that societal trap. All sex shall now be anonymous on some app, can't trap someone anonymous.
So it's interesting. Men seemingly are happier than ever before. Women are unhappier than ever before. Who is arguing to fix any of this? Certainly not women. Why would men want to change something which is making them happier? I guess Jordan Peterson is arguing to try to fix this but women call him a nazi for trying to help solve their problem. Crazy.
> Babies are a huge opportunity cost. Financially speaking, they are like winning the lottery but backwards.
I can only assume OP is talking about people who work here? Here in the UK if you don't work you're fast-tracked a home for having a kid and if you have a few you're generally given a very nice 3 bed house so I'm not sure this applies generally. Typically you're very poor you're much better off for having a kid here.
I'd personally love a kid or two or three. My girlfriend too. And it upsets me deeply that I'll probably never be able to afford to have one. It's just so hard to afford a home, taxes, bills, student loans and all the costs of a kid on top of that. I've considered just giving up and going on benefits more times than I care to admit, but I think we both agree that wouldn't be the life we want either.
I don't want support, but the one thing that annoys me is how I know pensioners living in 5 bed homes who are receiving state pensions which unlike my salary goes up in line with inflation, while receiving help for energy bills and getting a host of other perks like discounted bus tickets, etc.
The fact the only people I know with homes are 60+ or on benefits seems weird and deeply immoral to me. Literally all my friends who work are in their 30s and living with there parents while my sister is a single mum in her 20s and somehow has her own house and a BMW (also partly given to her by the government). If we care to solve the birth rate problem it seems to me prioritising homes and resources for working families instead of the unemployed and pensioners would be the way to go.
Sorry for ranting, and I know I've brought this up before. But I feel this is the most important issue of my generation and no one is seriously discussing it. Happy to receive insults about how I don't care about the elderly and poor people now.
Obviously we don't want to leave though because at the end of the day this is our home and it will always be where the people we love are. But I think we both agree we're getting to the point where we really have no choice if we want the live the life we want.
Honestly the main blocker is just that the kids in my family have really crappy parents (most are prostitutes, drug dealers, or drug addicts) so we kind of act as parents. They're my family and I love them, but they're honestly the worst parents anyone could possibly have. In recent years we've had kids get falsely diagnosed with various illnesses, get expelled from school, have various dental issues, get trouble with the law, drug abuse, etc. We basically have act as the adults and be there for them because no one else is. If they have parent teacher days, it's not the parents who go, it's us. If they're suck on homework we're the ones who help them. If they're being drugged, we're the ones who step in to stop it. And it's the smaller things that I think are important, like when they're boasting about their dad stealing them a bike for their birthday, explain why that's wrong, just dumb stuff like that.
But still, I think we both know we shouldn't be this involved, but if we don't we know we'll fail them. So you know, it's hard...
Recently though my girlfriend suggested it could work if she could come home once month just to keep an eye on things, but I think that might turn out more difficult that it sounds. If we're needed, we're needed. We can't wait until the end of the month to catch a flight.
Btw this article neglects to mention a very important feedback loop: less babies equals less economic growth, which equals less babies because it’s too expensive, which in turn leads to less economic growth and so on.
Collapsing birth rates are a serious problem! You won’t notice until the country becomes a depopulated wasteland and then it will be too late to do anything about it - at least for 30 years.
People who don’t have kids don’t pass down their culture, which seems like an obvious feedback loop to keep things going. On top of this population declines have generally resulted in increased individual prosperity for hopefully obvious reasons.
What confuses things is local areas tend to lose population due to economic decline and prosperous areas attract people. However, when the decline is on much larger scale things flip.
Fewer people from war, disease, or birth control still just means fewer people. You need to look at economics after population decline not causes of population decline to suggest why today might be different.
Sometimes “this time is different” is actually true. What’s different about now is that you have this feedback loop of less kids -> less growth -> less kids. That’s never happened in history because people have never had so much control over their reproductive rights. Most of your ancestors were “surprise” children - you certainly would not be born today if your ancestors could have just used a piece of plastic to avoid the trouble.
There is a reason sex feels good. People for the most part don’t have sex to have kids. Birth control hacks this process and turns sex from a necessary condition for human survival to a drug people take to feel good.
Like I said this is unprecedented.
You need to also justify why a world with 4 billion people would be worse for those living in it than today.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=C...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/gdp-growth-r...
Looking at per capita growth rates it even goes in the other way with higher average economic growth as the birth rate declines thus their infamous one child policy. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat...
It's strangely difficult to get intelligent people to understand the basic concept of more people -> bigger economy. Intelligent people a lot of times think that if the logic for something is too obvious and simple it must be false, because if it was true, their favorite intellectual / institution would be saying it.
That's why a lot of times, lower status people actually have more accurate perception of politics than higher status people, because all they have is common sense and their wits, and not some status driven perspective on "the truth", because by definition lower class people aren't winning status games so all they are left with is the truth.
It might solve the "problem" that the article discusses. But it will create many many more worse problems.
What worth is it to have a population who don't feel they're valued?
Forcing others to have children just because you're concerned about population ignores the truly human element. You should instead focus on wanting to help people be happy and feel secure in their economy and self such that they want to have children. Abolishing contraceptives is not the right way to do that. It is utterly disrespectful to the people.
I personally do not like children. I know a lot of unnatural humans then; a lot of humans who neither like kids nor ever want kids of their own. And there's many (!!!) anecdotes of people who had children they do not like or want.
And that's on top of the responsible adults who realize that they can't afford to give a child a healthy loving home when they can't even afford to properly take care of themselves.
You say you don’t like children because you don’t have any. It’s that simple.
No, they are not.
> A lot of the best people I know didn’t grow up in such environments.
Cool. Same here.
> ALL of the worst people I know grew up in “healthy loving homes” where parents made lots of money.
Remember that correlation is not causation.
> For example Jeff Bezos’ mom had him when she was still in high school and struggled quite a bit.
I know not Jeff Bezos and I am not so egotistic to judge him one of the "worst" people I know as such. I only know he's rich on paper and has built a large and profitable business empire. Good for him. I don't agree with how he uses that empire, and I believe that it's used for bad purposes at many layers. But I'm not a part of that empire and I also believe that any large empire falls into similar categories. Is that the fault of Jeff Bezos though? I can recognize an argument for it but that doesn't make it true. There are many (!) confounding situations such that he's could simply be a product of the people and circumstances around him. That doesn't make him one of the worst people.
Have you actually met Jeff Bezos?
> You say you don’t like children because you don’t have any. It’s that simple.
I think it's extremely presumptuous of you to assume why I do or do not like something. Your comments here so far come across as extremely, almost dangerously, naive and bigoted.
I've spent a lot of time introspecting myself to learn why I do or do not like things. I can tell you right now that it's not because I don't have any. It's the opposite. I don't have any children because I know I would not be good to them. I don't enjoy dealing with children. I enjoy typing, video games, building things, burning things, and being alone.
I know that because I grew up in a poor and abusive family. I grew up in a large family as the second-oldest of nine children. I raised my siblings myself. I saw early on how neglectful parents cause problems, how cruel children can intentionally be, and how people who could help but don't are even worse.
I've had many opportunities to work with children, forcefully and voluntarily. I have never ever enjoyed the experiences. So, frankly, your comment here is disrespectful and sociopathic. Not everyone enjoys children and you are wrong to assume that everyone must enjoy the things that you enjoy.
I hope one day you find a woman you love and have kids and a happy family, perhaps even giving them a more loving home than the one you grew up in yourself.
Is that a serious comment, or sarcasm? Because banning condoms will not solve any problems, it will create more.
If you want people to have more kids, make sure they can afford more kids: pay young families more, give them the ability to buy a house big enough to raise children in, provide affordable childcare, and offer better healthcare to pregnant women, instead of worse.
You’ll know I am right if you live long enough - another 30 to 40 years and it will be obvious to anyone how catastrophic low birth rates can be.
A big part why people are so lonely in USA these days is because of birth rate collapse, people have less siblings and young people are heavily outnumbered by the old, which means that after college they are a minority wherever they go.
Japan, even more so than the US, is an extremely work-centric country. People there live for work, rather than for their family. Work is their family. If you don't give people time with their actual families and children, why would they have any? People need to work less, and be financially secure enough to raise a family.
It's a catch 22, because people can't afford to have kids if there isn't enough economic growth, and not enough optimism for the future. Why would you be optimistic about your country's future if it's going to look like a depopulated geriatric wasteland? Of course people don't want to have kids under such circumstances!
This is why the low birth rate -> low economic growth feedback is so vicious. Smart countries - eg Indonesia - are currently attempting radical social policies to escape this catch 22.
Economic growth isn't going to help them if all that money is going only to the rich, and if you divide society's wealth right, you can still make sure they have enough during low or no economic growth. The problem is in political economic decisions.