Doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones’ in South Korea
cnn.com
cnn.com
It really strange how american kids are so I'll behaved compared to most places here in Europe. Definitely systemic factors at play.
It is not. You are giving a wider scope to something very trivial, such as feeling upset by sudden and very high noises, and the annoyance of little kids running around unsupervised. There is no higher meaning here, just the need for education.
That's where these rules come from. The staff has to make a choice: tolerate the unpleasant behavior, or risk ratcheting it up to even worse behavior by intervening. It was bad for business, so they made rules. They knew it would cost something; they believed that the benefit was worth the cost.
I do believe that it's incumbent on adults without children to tolerate children to a considerable degree -- more than seems fair to them. But I've also found that a lot of parents consider "I'm raising the next generation and therefore justified in demanding infinite tolerance" to be valid, and that's just not right. When we can't negotiate a middle ground, extremes get set.
That, and also the glomy future our kids would have had. The biggest culprits of climate change and pollution aren't giving signs of stopping anytime soon (even more with the recent demagogic resurgence), and while we'll be dead in a few more decades, the younger generations will live in harder times than we did. Not having kids is also an abstentionist stament, because people who want more kids overlap significantly with people who don't care about the world they'll be leaving to those kids.
But no, let’s talk about the cafes, those are clearly the problem.
Now, the dogs greatly outnumber the children. And the monthly rent (with no real physical improvements) is nearly 3x higher.
(Location - south-east Michigan, USA.)
(And that rent, woof)
Another opinion is that children are a luxury good, not a necessity.
If you have the resources, the support network, and the emotional aptitude, by all means, invest in having children. Even if you don’t enjoy the experience (the data shows a significant percentage of parents do not), society gets them as taxpayers eventually. But if you don’t, don’t. The data shows that if unintended pregnancies are avoided (about 40% globally annually, per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN) [2], the fertility rate will settle someone between 50-75% of replacement rate (2.1).
TLDR Optimize for your own happiness (“do no harm but take no shit”). Ignore peer and societal pressure. If that means not having kids, and that causes society challenges, that’s a society problem to solve, versus dumping that externality and reduction of agency, freedom, and options on individuals.
> If child free, you’re only vested in whatever it takes to get you to the grave comfortably
Aren't you saying the same thing as parent post? When someone's 60 to 80 years old, which generation is going to "to get them to the grave comfortably"?
Basic necessities like food, etc, no matter the current amount of automation to multiply outputs, you still need a baseline of working people.
Maybe, with regard to living in an area with/without kids around.
But for those who want to have children of their own...what I've heard from younger folks around here, that really does not look like an option anymore, unless you're in the 1%.
I don’t know if I’m parsing this correctly. Are you saying that the only reason people get dogs in your particular apartment building in Austin is because everyone else has one?
Or are you saying that, in general, the only reason that people get dogs is because everyone else has one? The latter just isn’t correct. And I can’t speak to your particular apartment building, but I’d expect it’s not true for everyone there either.
And I know the stats on dog attacks. Something like 10 a year from pitbulls could easily be down to owners buying them specifically to use them as weapons and training them as such.
I don’t think so… given breeds have different reputations, there’s no reason to expect that anything about their owners distributions to be random.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the subject, but in my life, Doberman Pinchers and German Shepherds have gone through phases of being seen as dangerous breeds as well. My suspicion is that owners who desire aggressive dogs also tune into this and train their dogs accordingly.
Also, FWIW, the only dogs I have been bitten by were a Chihuahua and a Pomeranian.
But once you know the range of social settings where you can expect your kids to behave, you can opt out of certain situations. I have two kids, both are now college age. We rarely took them to restaurants. It was unpleasant for us, unpleasant for them, and expensive. In fact I live in a town that's known for being a place to raise kids, and most people don't take their kids to restaurants that are not overtly kid friendly.
At the same time, people being more tolerant of the normal range of behaviors exhibited by children, could also be a matter of parents doing their job.
Just note that "noisy kid" may mean "parents are not doing their job" or "kid with ADHD" or "autistic kid" or "kid having emotional difficulties while parents undergoing divorce", etc.
I haven't lived in SK but I'm surprised there are many people who would let their kids be disruptive.
Being a parent today is substantially more demanding than it was in the past and this has very wide-raning consequences:
1. While the monetary demands have increased, they are not a huge factor. That's why in places with generous subsidies and cash transfers, the impact on fertility has been positive, but pretty limited.
2. There's a backlash against "wokeness" and women's rights. being a father was easy and spending your nights at the bar with your buddies was perfectly socially acceptable. The demands on being a "good" father today have risen substantially, more so than for women, and some men cannot bear this new burden. But rather than admit weakness they try to point the blame on women who demand the burden be spread equally.
3. People have pets instead of kids. The money, care and attention your average tech worker's dog or cat receives today is probably the same as the average person devoted to their kids in the 50s. That is to say, people's preference for taking care of living being and companionship has not changed much, but many people have been "priced out" because of the new demands. In other words, many of the people you see with pets but no kids today (or pets and one kid) would have been perfectly capable and happy with kids in the past.
If you believe this, as I do, than it's bad news because there's nothing easy on the horizon that can fix this. Cash transfers and subsidies help a little. Support from companies for parental leave help a little. Humanoid house robots could help a lot (imagine a $30k TeslaBot that can do all your housework, no more cleaning, garbage, cooking, tidying, laundry or yardwork), but then the demands for childcare could just take this into account and keep increasing.
A better starting point is to take down artificial costs imposed on childrearing, like https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
2. From my experience of public school it's more of a cost than a benefit. Many thousands of hours wasted, bullying incurred, etc. (That its value was negative does not reduce the other point about cost in taxes.)
Seriously recommending his work betrays a serious lack of knowledge of the field.
On one hand is taking responsibility for your kid and ensuring they are not a nuisance for other people. You should not outsource your responsibilities.
On the other hand understanding that kids are not full grown adults and that raising one is hard. It's also about understanding that if everyone stops having kids society will collapse in a couple of decades.
I certainly was too vague in my opening post. Not wanting to be around someone is, all told, fine. When I say "can't handle kids being around," I'm largely talking about the ones that have adult tantrums.
My main concern is we seem to have taken the view that parents are "outsourcing their responsibilities." But, so has society, as a whole. It isn't any individual's responsibility to make sure kids have a safe place to be kids. Both loudly and quietly. It is, ultimately, everyone's. As such, if you build a place that you don't let kids in, don't be surprised when the kids don't know how to behave in that place.
So much "public space" has been reduced to isolated pseudo private islands where people want to be out, but also want everyone else to not be there. I'm not saying we should all be one communal table, but I do hate that we all seem to always want the private booths, if you will.
The easy push back is it isn't your responsibility. I'm rather uninterested in apportioning who should do what. It is in your interest to help, though. However you can.
The harder pushback will be that some parents won't like you engaging with their kids. That is an education that we somehow seriously perverted in our culture. Letting the village raise the kids takes education and engagement all around.
Now. I also fully grant that I may be speaking from privilege. Mayhap something about me looks more approachable for whatever reason. I lament that I don't know how to spread whatever that is.
It used to be if a kid was misbehaving or damaging property, you could, as a random adult, tell them to stop. Now, you can't dare speak without the potential of an ugly confrontation because you dared talk to their little price or princess.
If that's the norm, I'd rather not have stranger's kids around in public spaces.
Similarly, it used to be that a village raised the kids. We somehow shifted that so that the liability and work is to be borne by the immediate parents, and them alone.
Sadly, this isn't as easy as "support local bookstores." They are also value extracted, at large, by the publishing mechanisms at play.
That is to say, it is easy to blame the parents for neglecting their kids. But... it is far more complicated.
I will assert that places which don't teach the younger generations to interact in them, and instead forbid them from being there, are doing themselves a disservice.
But if there are "quiet hours" or "adult swim" times, that makes sense. All the more so when there are kids around to see how that operates. :D
The real issue is the shunning, misery, suffering, starvation, and suicides of the elderly.
There is something funny about this sentence. Ageism, bikeshedding and nothingburger all sound like relatively new and currently popular words. Using them all at once kind of turns it into a caricature, but maybe that was the point.
???
The current elderly have it by far the best out of any elderly generation that has lived during human civilization so far. Including the best possible health care and using up so much resources that it is likely siphoning it unsustainably from the younger generations, in the form of insolvent Social Security and other means.
In what conceivable universe are elderly a concern?