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Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

I think all these studies skirt very gingerly around a big problem. Stressful work culture, lack of support for families (includes high real-estate costs, long commute times, lack of sick leave, etc.) and most importantly a path for women (and men - but its mostly women) who drop out of the workforce and want to get back in once the children are older and more independent.

Child rearing takes a group of people not just a nuclear family where both parents work long hours. Cost of living and work culture is forcing people to work long hours and women don't find a good enough reason to give up their freedom, and keep in mind it's what childbirth is in most Asian cultures, a woman giving up what she wants to do until the child is independent. I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice ?

All studies mention these, they just don't provide any concrete solutions. It's typically around creating some committee or forum that is looking to change this. Nothing will change, not until the corporations start running out of people to hire or the country runs out of soldiers for defense.

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I hope we one day see a radical new form of raising children. Historically it was truly a village that raised a child. I never understood how my parents raised 5 children. But looking into it more, there was always a community of people that raised me. Community and mutual aid was huge in the small town in Ethiopia where my parents came from. Coming to Canada, that didn't change. Uncles, aunts, older cousins, long time family friends. Communes have a similar structure but usually get a bad rep. Good podcast episode on the topic

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/ezra-klein-kriste...?

"We could be raising our children cooperatively in dwellings designed to enhance rather than inhibit social connection. We could be more sustainably sharing our resources and teaching our children to value collaboration over competition. We could be living in wider lateral networks of love, care, and support; fighting the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life. Most of us are not.”

> I never understood how my parents raised 5 children.

My 2*(grand)mother raised 11 children. From what I've heard from other family members, the key to success is not giving enough emotional and material support to each child.

What I'm trying to say is: the expectations on children quality of life are also much higher vs 100 yrs ago.

And I think that is the key to dropping fertility: Once you experience relative wealth, you increasingly want to give the same to your kids.

It's not that we can't afford more children, but that we can't afford to give more children and ourselves the level of comfort we've come to expect.

I could afford to give quite a few children the standard of living we had when I was a kid, but while it was fine for it's time, it's not what I'd want to go back to for either myself or my kids.

It's also why I don't think this is a crisis in the long term on a global basis, though it may become one for individual countries:

Once wealth catches up to a level where we have sufficient buffer, I think we can balance things out.

My grand-grand-parents solution was to make my grand-mother drop school at 13 to help take care of the other kids.

The problem with those types of communities is that they often have a high level of social control. We see a pattern where most of the social development first happens in the cities (sexuality, culture, new ideas) and then slowly spreads to smaller communities. The constraints of small communities leads to many "escaping" to the cities to improve their lives.

Israel experimented with communally raising children within the Kibbutz system, but as far as I know the results weren't super encouraging and few places still do it

Kibbutz's failed because there's no incentive to do any work, same with every other form of communism that's been tried. Reworking daycare to be a more holistic experience than it currently is is a very different idea.

Communal childcare in kibbutzim is not related to economic success - I know people who grew up like that, they gave up on it because the results for the kids were seen as negative. Even in rich kibbutzim with plenty of resources they've phased out communal childcare and children live with their parents.

With what legal authority? Even the Knesset back then couldn't pass more ambitious laws. Let alone in 2023 or in most other countries.

What about introverted subset of people who prefer to be left alone, to not participate in wider social networks, who want to have a family and a door that shuts?

>and most importantly a path for women (and men - but its mostly women) who drop out of the workforce and want to get back in once the children are older and more independent.

I don't think this is quite right, and your second paragraph is kind of alluding to the underlying issue. I think it's more that there isn't a pathway for women to drop out of the workforce permanently and revert to a single-income household. A lot of women in my wife's peer group want to do this, but can't make the finances work. Of course, they end up having to pay for child care anyway and maybe it comes out in the wash. Regardless, maybe some kind of UBI can be help here for women with children who simply don't want to go back to work.

Aside: you might be commenting specifically on Asian work culture, not sure, but the "give up freedom" thing I don't believe to be unique in that regard.

I agree. A large contingent of women want to be mothers without the stress and distraction of workplaces, but it is increasingly uneconomical to do so. So instead we resort to daycare, but with how expensive that is there is a natural cap on having more than 1-2 kids during your most fertile years. No surprise the fertility rate is less than 2.

Regarding benefits - I don't know about South Korea, but where I grew up in Hawaii some of my peers or their parents purposefully had kids out of wedlock to collect the additional welfare payments that single parents were eligible for, even though they otherwise were still partnered and even living together. However, with less practical need to maintain a family over the long run, parenting quality and outcomes suffered and atomization increased. A "Great Society" era benefit intended to help those caught in tragic edge cases ended up being a perverse incentive for those in the next generation who may have avoided that situation otherwise.

While doing payments for married mothers instead may have been a net-outcome better design in retrospect, there is an opposite possibility of perverse incentives for toxic families to stay intact. I don't know if marriage-agnostic UBI for parents is the best answer, though it would at least balance the currently misplaced incentives. In an ideal world it would be better to first resolve current inflated costs by making it easier and cheaper on the supply side to provide housing, healthcare, and education.

My sister is in that boat of not making finances work. Her job pays too well for her to leave the work force.

As a man, I’m looking for an independent woman with a good income, because I don’t want to get gutted in a divorce. I’d love to be a SAHD, but it’s difficult for me to find single women with comparable income.

> My sister is in that boat of not making finances work. Her job pays too well for her to leave the work force.

But her finances arent the problem here. Its how high expenses are. Her job could pay 150k/yr or 20k/yr but the situation is the same when she quits. Its good that she at least makes enough money that it justifies working if she wants to.

Yes, she could quit her job, move to Appalachia, her husband earn $20k/yr, and grow her own food. But that’s a huge lifestyle reduction. What does retirement and end-of-life healthcare look like if she and her husband make $20k/yr?

I think what’s more important is income vs local population income. In SF, she probably earns 3-4x everyone in SF or 10x nationally. In a low cost of area place, her husband’s income might only be 1.5x more, leaving less money for retirement and child care.

I make a bit over 100k after taxes and spend 30k a year. I've saved enough to quit, but the golden handcuffs feeling is real. I'd just be giving up so much money.

My wife dropped out of the workforce for our kids in the US and then wanted to go back to work once they were more independent. It's not that we couldn't make it work financially.

Anecdotally, I was against us having the second child. I wanted my wife to head back to work once my elder child was 3. There were a bunch of reasons she had dropped out but she had liked her job.

She was lucky but not everyone is.

May I ask why you didn’t want a second kid, and why you wanted your wife to go back to work before your child was kinder age (4/5)?

1. Gap between the two kids. We've generally observed that the best gap for siblings to bond is when they're within 4 yrs of each other. This isn't some great research but we just observed it in our friend circle.

2. We had excellent childcare close by, as in 5 minutes from home. I had flexible and remote work and would have been able to drop and pick my child up. I also had a provision where I could write the child care off my taxes.

She finally went back to work when my little one was 8. She did go back when the little one was 3 but had to drop out again because of a health issue with the little one.

Women being expected to stop their own careers and stay home as a housewife used to be quite normal and even expected in South Korea, but this has been changing quite quickly. Nowadays, many women return to work after giving birth - even quite quickly in many cases, and not by choice. Because the couples can't afford the kids otherwise.

Anecdotally: Most of my wife's circle of friends are in their early 30s to mid-30s with first children (and we're on the way to fitting this description as well) and back to work, while their mothers stopped working once they had children.

This is to say, the previous system was bad, but the new reality is in some sense worse: No, women bearing the brunt of child-bearing alone is not great, but now both parents work very hard in family-hostile work conditions to even make ends meet. Both parents working full-time is very difficult if neither employer is flexible enough not to handle "I have to pick my kid up today" or "my kid is sick".

Agreed completely, but I’ll add another point. About 50% of my friends are university+ educated women of different ethnicities, but all living in first world countries. We’re also all in our late 20s or 30s, so it’s becoming a “now or never” kind of dilemma for some of them.

We used to make “oh it’s expensive!” excuse until we started making decent money. Now that excuse doesn’t work, but there has been a significant precedence showing you can have a fulfilling life without having a child. You can have even a better one unless you have psychological attachment to it. I’ve heard my friends getting baby fever here and there, but then quick reality check of how much work it would be reminds them it’s not worth it.

And I completely agree, what’s the point? If you have some sort of spiritual or religious beliefs about life, maybe you can excuse it. But my circles don’t buy into those. We’ve also discussed global depopulation issues on different occasions, and consensus was “well, we didn’t cause this awful environment, so it’s not our problem”. Some sort of game theory problem where if you participate you’re more likely to be screwed unless majority participates. But if you don’t participate, you’re definitely on the winning side.

And another note, my friends in their late 30s/40s who always wanted to have a child have exactly one child for myriad of reasons. And obviously that’s not enough.

Sorry for the rant, but maybe the older generations were a bit more conscious rather than kicking the can down the road.

See, the thing is that I cannot entirely shake the feeling that part of this stance is a certain laziness/complacency, essentially a lack of interest in any challenging activities.

What I mean is: A lot of the people who come down against child-rearing for lifestyle reasons assign a lot of value to things they'd rather do instead because they provide "great experiences I'd miss out on because I won't have time or money anymore" like "traveling".

Which is of course true, having kids is a trade-of. But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?

Sure, you can prefer one or the other at will, and it could absolutely be true that your pick is best for you. But I'll say that my friends who are into activities/experiences that provide challenge (e.g. sports, adventuring, what have you) also are often into having kids.

That makes me wonder if there's not something to cultivating the kind of experiences you seek to have.

Raising a child is a whole lifestyle change. It's a long term commitment and a whole shift in almost every priority in your life. Viewing child care as some challenge that only non-lazy people do is quite a stretch.

You have to see it in context: I'm wondering what leads specifically people who feel that generally speaking they could afford to have children and direction change if they wanted to, to prefer one set of priorities and experiences over another.

Keep in mind I'm responded to a comment that speculated on which choices lead to a "more fulfilling" life, which means it's a decision couched in a certain amount of safety and freedom. IMHO that set direction a bit and begged the question.

If you make it specifically about "more fulfilling", other branches of discussion (e.g. whether having children is a good idea for them or the planet) are at least partially taken off the table already. If you decide against children for one of those reasons, you don't even need to feel addressed.

You're right, framing the discussion around a "more fulfilling" life can limit other important aspects. People are highly complex. Ultimately I think the choice to raise a child comes down to an alignment with a huge set values and circumstances which are the result of countless factors.

> But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?

Isn't this just FOMO? Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not. Is it not better to regret not having kids than to have them and regret having them?

https://www.today.com/health/child-free-adults-are-happy-par...

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I care for my children because they need it and are mine, not because they are my preferred hobby.

I don't doubt that, but speaking as someone building a non profit in stealth that covers the cost of permanent birth control for folks who can't get it completely covered by health insurance (or who have to rely on medical tourism to obtain it), I've spoken to many folks who adamantly don't want children and not because they are lazy or don't want a challenge.

Kids are a choice, not a mandatory checkbox. That is the thesis.

You misunderstand my point.

> Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not.

Thats not why people have kids. Even people that have kids (and dont regret it) would like to spend their time on other things if they could. People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.

> People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.

I'm not sure I agree, at least universally. How do you decide for children without thinking about the changes it'll make to your daily life and whether that's something you want to be doing?

Of course there's plenty of people who have children because they feel it's expected of them, or economic necessity, or other external reasons.

Its called sacrifice. Enduring inconvenience or discomfort in favor of some greater cause.

That’s not to say everyone should have kids or feel this way. But it’s ridiculous to suggest some people just like video games, or traveling, and others like missing work deadlines to care for their sick child (or everything else that goes with raising kids).

Sacrifice is a choice in this scenario. I think, I agree with the OP above, that one chooses to not to make that sacrifice (e.g. lifestyle change). Just the value of the sacrifice has been getting lower and lower every year for younger people.

My point is people are choosing kids because of a deeper responsibility and meaning. Not because the experience of raising kids is more fun than hanging out with friends or other alternatives. The parent in this scenario is not maximizing their enjoyment or personal satisfaction in the way someone choosing their hobbies is. That distinction did not seem observed when comparing the choice to raise children with the choice to spend free time other ways.

I won't talk for my entire generation, but I (40 years old) have 2 kids for absolutely selfish reasons - I feel love for them and having my kids makes me deeply happy[0] in a way that nothing else really did (not my career nor my hobbies or friends). The only thing that comparably increased my happiness is having a long term romantic partner.

[0] even if there are plenty instances where they also annoy me

That's not the comparison I was originally making, though. I was specifically not talking about moment-to-moment sensations of pleasure.

What I meant to capture originally is that some people at least somewhat more habitually choose to spend their time in ways that involve sacrifice and delayed gratification, or are OK with activities that are e.g. (time-wise) 90% build-up for 10% release, or however you want to put it. For example, a long climb for a quick descent. Or a long march to see something first-hand.

Some people treat those activities as aspirational. And in my experience - which is of course anecdotal - that seems to correlate with whether they can get onboard with the idea of child-rearing. It's something about the effort-pleasure ratio and where your cut-off is, or your idea of how much hardship something special is worth, and perhaps whether you value cultivating an attitude about it.

I think your entire thesis is wrong.

People are not having kids because they have good alternatives now. International travel is affordable for more and more people, regularly going to fine dining establishments is something accessible to most American software engineers, and the people left having kids are the ones either too poor to afford those good things anyways, or people who are knowingly giving them up in exchange for expected joy from raising a child.

International travel and fine dining is absolutely not comparable to having kids in terms of the returns you get on these activities. I don't mean quantitatively, but qualitatively - you don't get the same kind of satisfaction from both.

The only thing I'd say is somewhat qualitatively comparable is being a in a loving relationship.

You are assuming everyone gets joy out of children, or that everyone is a capable parent. These are demonstrably false.

> International travel and fine dining is absolutely not comparable to having kids in terms of the returns you get on these activities.

The returns are guaranteed, whereas a child can end up having negative returns at an almost endless scale. The potential downsides to having a child are endless, the upside is limited and finite.

Also w/o children retiring early is doable for the financially responsible, whereas having even a single child makes that difficult.

Being financially independent at 40 or so allows for a lot of options for self fulfillment. An almost endless array of meaningful causes around the world are in dire need of help.

The tl;dr is that for a lot of people the choice comes down to "travel the world and have sex on beaches while eating fine food" or "unknown baby that might bring joy or potentially ruin your life."

Is it any wonder rational people are choosing the path that allows them to travel, eat well, be financially stable, and find meaningful hobbies and activities?

Again, I believe what it comes down to now is that people have a choice. It isn't "get married -> have kids" but rather "find partner, figure out what to do next".

Heck marriage rates are also plummeting (which IMHO is bad news for social stability).

The lack of social support certainly makes the choice of having kids harder, but my #1 ask isn't government funded daycare, it would be a world where having a large familial support structure is the norm.

Honestly the hardest part of having a kid is that without family nearby, there is no down time.

Government programs can't help that capitalism spread families to the winds.

I'm ok with people choosing not having children & it's good that there's a choice.

I'm just pointing out (from personal experience, an experience someone who doesn't have kids doesn't have) that it's not a float happiness with traveling the world adding +1.5f and a child +4.3f. It's not comparable, not in the colloquial sense that one is a much bigger value than the other but literally in the sense that it's not the same quality/feeling/satisfaction.

It's true that you don't know what you're going to get (e.g. children with disabilities are a lot more challenging that healthy kids) but I think the materialistic approach ("should I take 4 vacation or raise 1 child?") is not conductive to finding happiness in life.

I agree regarding the challenges in our current system & government/societal support.

The value of the sacrifice hasn’t changed, just the perceived value.

The amount one must sacrifice is rising, regardless of the pay off. Everyone has their own threshold, yet the minimum needed to birth and raise kids is going up while buying power is decreasing.

> People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.

I did, I made a conscious thoughtful decision that I'd be trading off stuff I wanted to do and taking care of a child instead.

> Kids are a choice, not a mandatory checkbox. That is the thesis.

One I certainly agree with.

> Isn't this just FOMO?

I'd say plenty of people do things because they can envision it might be great, not because they feel FOMO. Do you never look forward to things without FOMO being the cause?

It also depends on how much of a reasonable idea you have about what you'd be getting yourself into, e.g. from participating in siblings raising children or other opportunities.

> But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?

Maybe for you, but the value proposition isn’t there for me. There’s no indication that the world is willing to fix its global problems (climate change, housing problems and etc.), why would I also subscribe my child to this “fun”? It is weird to write that sentence, as I am generally a fairly optimistic person. But “let me sacrifice a ton, for a decent chance of misery of myself and my offspring” doesn’t sound right to me.

I was about to write a paragraph how my friends also like challenging activities, except having a child. But I couldn’t make my brain to compare “having a child” to a “challenging” activity. At the end, it’s one of the things, where you either want it or not. If you want people to want it, get the older generations to make a sacrifice for us and somehow fix the current socio-economic problems that’s discouraging the women.

>Maybe for you, but the value proposition isn’t there for me. There’s no indication that the world is willing to fix its global problems (climate change, housing problems and etc.), why would I also subscribe my child to this “fun”? It is weird to write that sentence, as I am generally a fairly optimistic person. But “let me sacrifice a ton, for a decent chance of misery of myself and my offspring” doesn’t sound right to me.

Let me offer a different perspective. Whenever I see your sentiment - that you are choosing to not have kids because the world sucks and you don't see us solving anything - my immediate reaction is that you deserve no voice whatsoever in how the rest of us decide to solve those problems. No voting, no representation, nothing. Having kids, in a sense, is a bet that we'll figure things out one way or another. You've made your bet, and are exiting the conversation because you don't have skin in the game (literally).

That might sound harsh, but it's essentially just the inverse of your sentiment justifying not having kids in the first place because of overwhelming pessimism about the future.

> Whenever I see your sentiment - that you are choosing to not have kids because the world sucks and you don't see us solving anything - my immediate reaction is that you deserve no voice whatsoever in how the rest of us decide to solve those problems. No voting, no representation, nothing. Having kids, in a sense, is a bet that we'll figure things out one way or another.

What an odd perspective. Are children the only way to have skin in the game when it comes to the future?

One consequence of doing something like this would be an almost complete removal of people who through no fault of their own cannot have children as well as some religious practitioners from public life.

Having just read the FDA announcement on artificial wombs, how would those fit into this?

>What an odd perspective. Are children the only way to have skin in the game when it comes to the future?

What, specifically, is odd about it? I think the stranger position is the one that allows people to inform policy that affects future generations when they themselves are intentionally not making themselves a part of that future. Put simply: why do you get a voice in what will affect my kids when you think the future is all for naught anyway?

Think of it like this: why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)? Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.

>One consequence...

I've stated twice now that intentionality matters. If you're referring to things like Monasteries, where people take vows of chastity (which would obviously preclude children), the idea of political participation is already complicated. I've known a Priest or two who don't believe Clergy should vote.

>Having just read...

I'm radically opposed to AWT for other not-unrelated reasons.

> What, specifically, is odd about it? I think the stranger position is the one that allows people to inform policy that affects future generations when they themselves are intentionally not making themselves a part of that future.

It's arbitrary and dogmatic to require having kids in order to have a say in the future, for starters?

> why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)?

That's not true in Western Europe and increasingly untrue in the US too.

> Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.

As an example I can think of many US politicians who had kids that supported the 2017 tax cuts and opposed measures to decarbonize the US economy. Kids or no kids, they don't care about the future.

Good for you. I’d even go further, force us to have kids. That’ll show us!

Glad that my attitude is in somewhat majority, otherwise we wouldn’t have potential depopulation problems. Don’t have to worry about these type of takes.

Have a good day!

I'm not really trying to "show" you anything, in that sense.

I'm pointing out the absurdity of your position. Look, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim you care about the future and what happens to the planet and then intentionally make yourself not a part of it. I simply tune out and don't consider the opinions of folks who fall into that camp. Why would I?

I dunno, maybe you should, because unless our opinions are considered, the problems will only get worse?

It’s not like we’re some bunch of people who would never change our minds, but actions speak louder or something. If older people want us to take these bets, give us better odds.

People have lived through plague, famine, mass deaths caused by invasion, etc and still manage to raise and pass the torch to the next generation.

Get over yourself.

Arguably many suffered and died young or lost young children. Some likely regretted having, or skipped having kids. It's completely legitimate to consider the societal costs and not only the benefits to birthing children.

Yeah and arguably, many survived to see the light on the other side of the tunnel.

It's completely legitimate in the same way as this argument is: "since there's a risk of me being hit by a car, or having an unpleasant day when I go outside, I better stay inside."

Overly focusing on the negative outcome to the point of inaction is often a thinly veiled excuse for some other often internal/personal reasons.

Doomerism doesn't have legitimacy because it's just a decaying idea. If ideas had an evolutionary tree, it is a recurring branch(leaf) that always died off while legitimately calling itself legitimate, every single time.

I have never seen this sort of extreme existential pessimism in real life (not online). Altering major life decisions like having children based on fears of a negative future. Im not sure if its just more commonly expressed online or if its more common in other place (Europe maybe?) or different age groups (teens or young adults?) but if I asserted this to people locally they would think im nuts.

Another possibility is this isn’t actually the difference between you wanting kids or not. Perhaps this is an oversimplified reason, but Im taking you at your word.

Not sure what to say, but do you have friends in their 20s? It’s not exact doomerism, but more of a “if I am struggling, why should I burden someone that I will love even more”.

And again, for a lot of people life can be more fulfilling without having a child as well. The general economy want these people to have children for its own benefit, not for the benefit of the parents.

> The general economy want these people to have children for its own benefit, not for the benefit of the parents.

Well maybe the parents aren’t supposed to be the beneficiary in the parent-child relationship.

Is anyone?

As someone with kids I can tell that you I often wonder if it was the right thing to do. Have I brought them into a world which will deliver them misery? Are the opportunities that were available to me, and even more so my parents, gone now? The evidence is looking grim. The prognosis is not good. This world is going to shit and the billionaires in charge don’t give a single fuck.

I'm from Europe so maybe you're right about that part, but almost every girl in college had that opinion or at least partially agreed to it, age being around 18-25.

You shouldn't take OP at his word though. The glaring observation I had that was shared by many, many, is that this is a very age-group specific thing.

Even the most vocal ones of this existential pessimists stopped it at around 28-30 years old, when the question stopped being idealization but very personal.

Existential pessimism leading to life decisions are usually just an rationalized excuse for other, often more personal, situational and emotional, reasons.

"are humans rational or irrational? It's a trick question, humans are ratioanalizers. We make up our mind and then come up with a plausible reason and believe in it"

Existential dread is a catchy, relatable idea without any consequences.

Holding that idea when you're under 30 doesn't mean much because most people don't have any important life decision they can't postpone while holding it. As soon as the reality offers the consequence of said belief, people will actually have a serious thought about it.

Very few people I know that in the end decided to live child free at later age, claimed existential dread as the reason. Most people grew up enough to realize that it is ultimately a decision based on personal/ego reasons/preferences, a gut feeling, and trying to justify it with some limited scope "rationalization" is just kidding themselves

The "challenging activity" stuff comes from the fact that my brain just can't compute the "I'd rather have all these great experiences than having kids"-type statements and not seeing any potential for great experiences in child-rearing, especially when those experiences often seem to be a lot more copy-paste.

"Challenging" also maybe doesn't quite capture what I meant. Do you know how you sometimes have to bike somewhere two hours on a slow, heavy MTB that makes it a slog for a 15min downhill descent? It's more that kind of challenge.

> See, the thing is that I cannot entirely shake the feeling that part of this stance is a certain laziness/complacency, essentially a lack of interest in any challenging activities.

This mentality of "I'm a mom, what's your superpower?" really irritates me. For what you know, I could be fitter, smarter, more interesting that you and embrace challenge every day of my life. But having a child would always put you a step above, because it's oh, so challenging.

I see it being more about risk than anything.

Couples take on all sorts of challenging hobbies and endeavors on a regular basis, some requiring years to build up and master. The difference is that with most of those things, they're not walking a tightrope and putting the wellbeing of another person in the balance by doing so. Many couples would be putting themselves at much higher risk of financial ruin by having kids and making sure they're properly cared for.

I agree with this. There's sadly too many places where society & co don't help mitigate and minimize the risk, either, and I absolutely respect people who feel the risk to themselves or the children is undue.

Beehiveourall hacked to go against most basic instinct as proof of concept. Social engineering progress,but to offer no api for the hacker is selected for. Those with api go into the catcentration camp. The final conflict emerges abstract organisms (companies) vs unhackable societys trying to dislodge lifeblood (workforce) from these societies whole contributing nothing back.

There are lots of things people prefer doing that arent the best for them.

> I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice?

What do you think your future holds? If we are entirely realistic, I think in 50-60 years, and perhaps much sooner, we'll almost certainly be dead. On our way out everyone and everything we've ever known will also be dying. Best friends we'd thought would last to the end will fade and disappear long before.

And that's just the start. Because well before the end our bodies will begin to fail, with our minds often enough not far behind. And, without family, a very likely scenario is that we simply end up alone. In Japan there are so many people dying completely alone, often unnoticed until a neighbor or service worker smells the rot, that they have a term for it: kodokushi - lonely deaths. [1] South Korea has followed suit with godoksa. By raising a family we not only get to fulfill our ultimate responsibility in the continuance of the species, but also you in many ways provide some continuance of ourselves. And as you age we will always have family, such that we will never truly be alone in this world.

It seems to me that the masses of people not having children today is vaguely familiar to the masses of people taking out 6 figure loans to pursue random degrees, unlikely to benefit their ability to provide a living for themselves. They certainly know what everybody is saying about such decisions, but somehow think it won't apply to them. And in any case the consequences are so far removed from the present that it can sometimes be difficult to take them seriously, but that doesn't mean those consequences don't exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

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Edit: As some odd coincidence, this just popped up on the frontpage of HN. It feels relevant enough to link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327432

That's basically my point. There's probably half of humanity today (the women) who can help with this. And no one is making life easier for them if they decide to go through with it. In fact the men most of the time make it harder.

Why should women help here? Why acquiesce to the needs of a society that doesn't care about their mental, physical and professional needs?

The above scenario is not just describing men.

How did we end up at a point where creating life (literally) is a „not good enough reason“?

We've allowed everything in life to be assigned a monetary value and it turns out that kids have a very low RoI

This really defines the problem. (1) we approach child rearing as an economic proposition, and (2) it doesn’t make sense to as an economic proposition.

But the more we fight the second proposition, the more we reinforce the first.

Trying to make kids less expensive still treats this as a financial calculation.

When you ask “why have kids?” there needs to be a real answer, and I don’t think “the economic public good” is going to convince people.

That's why religions tend to assign child rearing a extentential "Go straight to hell" punishment if you don't do it. It turns out it's a great way to keep your religion around.

Although many religions encourage the raising of families more than secular culture does, I have not really seen this "have kids or go to hell" thing you're describing.

They don't want you to sleep around, and in some religions they don't want you to use birth control, but there's not a lot actively saying you need to have kids.

Sometimes having children is strongly implied for those who follow the path of marriage (and may officially even be the purpose of that), but there are typically also paths where people are expected to remain celibate.

Arguably, say in the Catholic church, there is too much emphasis on the latter, what with celibate clergy and everything. In LDS I would say family is more of an ideal. This extends even into the theology. Catholics say "'til death do us part", but LDS say husband and wife go to heaven together and stay married there forever. Hinduism overall seems less obsessed with correct behavior (it has dharma, of course, but no simple hell thing), but it also provides both householder and ascetic paths.

I think religions sort of take it for granted that enough people will want to get married, and that if you get married you'll have kids. Instead they're worried about self control.

Little did they anticipate that the superego would maintain its iron grip without help, that the rationally-planning ego would have the means and motive to skip kids entirely, and that the id would get so distracted with hatred of other people that it wouldn't even try to bring them together, even in unwise or destructive ways. But that's where we are.

Only in the short-term, which is exactly the problem. Squeeze more now and don't worry about the long-term consequences. "Après nous, le déluge"

Well more concretely, it's that the people paying the cost do not directly reap the benefits of the investment.

A child has extremely high long-term ROI for the economy. But (for good reasons) you can't take out a loan in the name of a future child for a larger house now. Someone (aka) the government needs to be future-sighted enough to make the investment. Unfortunately, governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.

> governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.

Study proposal: Are there more family-friendly policies in hereditary monarchies (which have longer incentive horizon than democratically elected politicians do)? Are birthrates higher in kingdoms?

I don't agree that an incremental human is a big benefit for The Economy. In a steady state it should be mostly neutral in terms of the per capita GDP (of course there are non-linearities with things like scientific discoveries scaling to all of humanity). Even considering taxes an incremental average human should have no impact on the total welfare of society. In a changing demographic pyramid (inverting) I can agree to your point though because the child will be forced to pay an even higher amount towards the wealth distribution towards the care of (child-less) older people.

I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.

> I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.

Yeah this is the only serious fix, but once childless people become a large % of the electorate (aka it's a real problem), they can vote against assuming responsibility for the problem they created... and your country is basically in an inescapable doom loop.

That'd be an extremely complicated fix though. Are sterile people automatically excluded from old age benefits? What about someone who suffered from assault and finds reproduction traumatic? What about someone who simply finds reproduction repulsive? What about conscientious objectors who think that over population is a serious issue and refuse on moral grounds? What about people with disorders or genetic aberrations that they don't wish to pass on? What about women with physical defects that make pregnancy extremely dangerous? (some heart conditions for instance)

That road is extremely grey and has a lot of really difficult edge cases you'll need to sort out.

Also - if we just need a next generation in the workforce immigration is an excellent option for the time being.

First of all there is still adoption for many of the points you raise. Secondly, is it justified to risk societal collapse to right these naturally occurring wrongs/unjustnesses? It‘s a hard question especially because we don‘t/can‘t have a sound theory that predicts the future. I believe only society/country scale evolution can figure this out.

IMO thats btw. one of the downsides of the EU, eliminating the differences/competition between countries stalling this kind of evolutionary truth seeking process

yeah children used to be the best investment, nowadays in developed countries it seems a lot of young people think the opposite, and they have good reasons to.

it's going to be a sad, empty and quiet world in the west a few decades in the future.

How did we end up at a point where creating life turns midlife into a grueling thankless slog?

It doesn't.

How did we end up at a point where the popular perception of parenting among the younger generaron is that it's a grueling thankless slog?

Birth control making the decision a choice instead of a natural consequence.

There are already 8 billion people, we don’t need more. There are plenty of people still who do want children: I’m happy to let them do it

Feel free to read through the thread and note the numerous reasons why people do not feel prepared to do this "one weird trick"

Was it ever considered such a great joy or just another of life's many tasks?

The idea that having children is a joyless burden is very modern, and very specific to certain subcultures. "Great joy" is the default position.

This is perpetually self correcting. The societies which don't take joy in having children die out and are replaced by those that do. Surely this has been happening for millennia, and the reason that we see most societies as being pro-natal is survivorship bias.

Yep. Western secular society is dying and we are just reading the tea leaves as it tries to find out where it went wrong.

In old literature, being "barren" was seen as a heart breaking tragedy for women. And countless references to children as a treasure and a blessing.

This may be a bit of a depressing point but, for a long time in western society, a women's role was accepted to purely be a mother and caregiver. When you say "was seen" I think it's important to clarify that it was seen that way from the point of view of society - society certainly impressed this view on women raised within it but I don't think we can disentangle the taught behaviors from natural behaviors.

Some of these beliefs still stretch into the modern day in really toxic ways - my sister-in-law (a tenure track professor) got a lot of flack from tenured professors who had deferred having a family until the window had closed when she had to duck out of a semester for maternity leave.

maybe when easy to use birth control gave women the power to choose whether they wanted to bear more (or any) children?

It looks like for the issues listed above, corporate capitalism, or more specific in this chase, chaebol capitalism is the main driver.

Not sure where you are but it feels that this is exactly what it's like in America. I am not sure why nobody really cares and I suspect by the time people try to do something about it, it won't be too late, but it's going to take a Herculean effort to fix. Mindset and structural support.

It is. The only difference is that the US (and Canada) are way more welcoming of immigrants than South Korea or Japan. That's basically what's keeping them competitive. I'm also pretty sure that high birth rate from illegal south american immigrants keeps US population going. The legal immigrants have children but at a subsistence level, generally <= 2.

TFR for the United States is 1.84, while South American countries rage from 1.75 (Uruguay) to 2.26 (Bolivia)[1]. It's tricky to find data on how the US TFR breaks out demographically. It would be very interesting, to your point, to see if immigrant TFR just echos the origin country or if there's a debuff applied for living in the United States. Anecdotally, this feels true to me less more Traditional Catholic immigrant families from Mexico or El Salvador but I've no idea if the data backs it up.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...

My understanding is that Japan requires dual Japan/US citizens to choose one citizenship when they turn 18. If Japan allowed dual citizenship, they could see dual citizens return and raise families. These dual citizens would enable Japan to maintain more homogeneity via immigration while also increasing population growth.

Singapore solved most of those problems decades ago. Essentially: 1. Force children to take care their aged parents. 2. Entice children to buy housing close to their parents. 3. Ensure priority of children living within close of a school to get into that school. 4. Massive subsidies for childcare. Bigger subsidies for working parents and little for those stay home mum dad. This is to avoid situation in the west where you get free money the more unemployed and children you have. 5. Baby bonus tied to the more children you have. Bonus is locked in a special account with very special and limited use for children needs (hospitals, childcare, school fees). Unlike the western countries baby bonus which parents can redirect to buy TV for themselves. 6. Build clusters of community close to each others with facilities to promote society integration. 7. Allowing low cost domestic helpers from neighboring countries with low wages or unemployed. Unlike western countries asking for equal living minimum wages to wrongly think on citizen would rather be domestic helpers or laborer. Use market force to ensure workers able to change jobs as they like to force employers to increase salary to retain workers. 8. Improve low cost healthcare access (though Korean doing this better). 9. Tightly control property market which dont contribute to national productivity. Ensuring everyone has a home and not hoarding homes to bid up prices (one of the downfall of Japan in 80s because allowing overinflated property....Korean and China seems to following Japanese route which can tie up monthly child support money for servicing debts). 10. Superb public transport and highly subsidies transports to ensure the poor can be as mobile as those rich within country. 11. Encouraging more willing to give-birth-foreigners as citizens to damp down arrogant locals of just want to enjoy being singles. 12. Actively tie subsidies with willingness to start family and having more babies throughout every facet of available subsidies. For example subsidies depends on number of households in a home rather than per individual citizen.

This is largely governance issue and not corporate. Korean officials largely undereducated and lack integrity as those in Singapore where they sack officials if even involved in marital affairs NATIONALLY.

> they just don't provide any concrete solutions

Childcare subsidies.

There is an inconvenient truth about women leaving the house and entering the workforce.

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