The great cousin decline
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
One cousin who I hadn’t seen for, shit, 31 years, surprised me by arriving in London from Canada one day with her daughter and texting me from a UK number to triply-confuse me. We had an absolutely awesome week, two only children reconnecting after so long, and junior got to meet - even if do say so myself - a very cool uncle who knew all the best places to go.
So my mission for the last five or six years has been to try and connect all my cousins’ kids to my own, so they can hopefully maintain a casual connection and come up with their own relationship. Maybe before I die I can organize a big family get-together of just the kids hanging out.
Siblings are usually too close in age (or younger), parents are many many steps ahead and experienced your current phase in a different world. But if you're entering high school it's useful to have a connection with people entering college, or getting their first job. That rarely happens outside of the family.
Sure that’s an unusually wide range today, but if you trace family trees you can find many examples of aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews.
It’s wild to me. I try to be thoughtful in building deep family-like connections outside of actual families to hopefully help compensate. My grandpa was an huge formative influence on me and that’s the part that saddens me the most (he doesn’t even know what having a grandpa is like).
Also our holiday gatherings aren’t huge, usually 10-20, but the family that comes is pretty far removed from nuclear just because there’s not a lot of us.
Teddy Roosevelt & FDR were even more distant than that:
https://criticsrant.com/franklin-roosevelt-biography/
Marriage to cousins of degree > 1 used to be very common.
(My mom has a Brady Bunch family that combined two large Irish Catholic households; I count 13 on my dad's (Slovak) side).
Family events are not a thing for us.
Obviously didn't happen intentionally that so many of them died so relatively young, but it was a weird thing to notice.
that is one of the reasons I hope to have many children as I get older so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with.
That is a very weird reason to have lots of children, unless you were speaking in jest. If you do decide to have many children, I hope it'll be for more than the mirth of your nephews.
Also my mom was the first of her cousins to get married and have a child (me) so I always felt like I was in a gray area when hanging out with her cousins because there was too little of an age gap between us for them to not take me seriously (and not treat me as a child) but also I wasn't old enough to connect with them and live through their family lore.
few that was hard to write
more fun context: The age gap between me and my mother's youngest cousin is only 3 years so I hope you can see how I am considered like the true youngest cousin between all the cousins.
You know how kids go through phases of what job they want when they grow up? Every time I switched, my dad would say "Oh! My cousin so-and-so does/did that!" To the point where when I said "fighter pilot," I was, perhaps, less surprised than I should be when he said "My cousin flies an F-16 in the Thunderbirds. We should go to one of his air-shows"
Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people relating to their cousins.
Let's start with me. My paternal grandfather had nearly 20 kids with two different women. Those kids then got scattered all over the world, and thus the grandchildren as well. My other grandfather had five and adopted another, and the same thing happened to them, war spread them all over.
So I have two cousin networks that are massive and spread all over. I'm able to compare things like the French and Danish education systems by getting a first-hand impression. I can ask a Bay Area doctor how his experience is, or a Toronto accountant. I can compare humor across the Atlantic. Growing up, I could see cousins starting to date and get married, having kids. The younger ones are still observing, but are young enough to give an insight into what kids are like nowadays.
In terms of studying people, it's hard to get better access.
The emotional angle from the article is right, too. Cousins occupy this nice middle between seeing you all the time like your siblings, and not having to care about you, like strangers. When your parents die, the cousins are sad. But they are also not falling apart and are able to help out. They know common stories like what your grandparents did, how your parents met, and so on. But you also don't have to do much to maintain this, like you might with certain friends. With a large enough network you don't even need to talk to any particular cousin to get all the stories about them, whichever cousin is passing through will tell you news from his part of the network and you give them yours.
In terms of other people, what is most striking to me is where on the near-far scale different cultures seem to put the cousins. Some societies seem to see cousins as basically friends: a relationship that's nice if it's good but if things so sour, no big deal. Others will think of cousins as basically siblings who live in another house: your aunt and uncle can tell you off just like your parents and nobody bats an eye. It seems to be common that birth/wedding/death news goes to all cousins though, regardless of what distance your society places on the cousin relation, and regardless of whether things have soured.
For a small subscription, we will implant good memories into your brain. You will have common shared memories with our other gold tier subscribers. Your corporate family will be just like cousins, people with whom you share a bond, a common history, memories, and subscription fees. You can always ask them for advice and they will know you. If you're travelling to an unfamiliar place, we'll hook you up with a new cousin.
That type of tight relationship is hard to form outside of family.
Getting richer is correlated to not having children, but most of these dog whistlers assume a monotonically increasing number of births, not realizing that most populations are sigmoidal, not linear; eventually, even those races these people are against will slow down having kids, that is what happens everywhere.
Families are unique social structures, and as much as fast and furious want people to believe a random grouping of people can be a family, the reality is that the probability of an equivalent social bond being built between people who do not share a history is low.
I tried searching for what you’re talking about but couldn’t find anything other than stuff like “white nuclear family hegemony” vis-à-vis the tax code.
Maybe I’m just a dumb redneck who grew up around too many white supremacists. Who knows anymore. I feel like if somebody thinks white people are going extinct due to small family units they can just say it on the Internet.
Personally I’d love more cousins.
The reason was family and it turned out to be much more worth it than we expected. For us, family proved to be a much tighter bond than our best of friends when we were away from family.
Our kids are the happiest they’ve been being around family who love them so much.
Maybe my kids will themselves want a family, or maybe they won't. I have no nieces or nephews on my side but do on my wife's side. At least as far as this subject goes, I don't ruminate on what might have been. Que sera, sera.
But then I read sites like reddit r/antiwork or whatever and see all the salt, with people making sweeping generalized statements about how the entire millenial generation has been screwed over by boomers and will never move out of their mom's basement.
In fact, this reminds me of Slate Star Codex's I can tolerate anything except the outgroup [0], where the author talks about how he doesn't interact with conservatives even though he's aware that half of the US is composed of them.
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
> That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.
> Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose “patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People. > Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.
> On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word for a member of the Red Tribe.
Fascinating. I think "white people" operates the same way today.
> > Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy
> And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”
> (The girl in question was white as snow)
> Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of which says:
> > Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you […]
> > No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming from. You focused on the looting….”
> And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these articles was written by a white person.
> White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace? White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why Americans Suck #1: White People? White.
> We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.
> But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with “American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red Tribe.
> (except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)
> I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of relations to the actual concept.
> And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012 he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being humble and self-critical.
I think some of them probably are pretty salty in private - at least about some things - but they wouldn't show that saltiness to their coworkers.
Choices have consequences, but humans have the right to make their choices, hopefully fully informed. Who are we to tell someone their reproductive choice was wrong? That’s their decision. You can do everything right and still lose. That’s life.
A good example of this is Israel - the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), roughly 13% of Israel's population, prioritise large families over individual choice, and are booming; secular Jews, (by and large) do the opposite, and while currently around 40% of Israel's population, are slowly shrinking; it is predicted that in 2065, close to 50% of all Israeli children will be from Haredi families, only 35% from non-Haredi Jewish families (secular or moderately religious).
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-05-22/ty-article-opinio...
In fact, I see this attitude so often online that I believe it's some sort of logical fallacy akin to the Malthusian trap, that "they" (for some definition of "they" as chosen by the doomer) will eventually take over lest we reprioritize having kids, when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
It isn't universally true. There is no evidence the Haredim are becoming atheistic, nor the Old Order Amish. Yes, there are defectors from both (mostly not to atheism, mostly to more moderate versions of the respective religion), but not enough to counteract the high birth rates.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
The Exclusive Brethren [0] are notoriously well-off, yet they continue to have large families, and there's no evidence of a high defection rate of their children.
> when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
According to OECD data, [1] in 2005, Israel's TFR was 2.84. By 2017, it had grown to 3.11. From there, it declined to a low of 2.90 in 2020 (probably in part COVID-related), but by 2021 had rebounded to 3.00, and I expect it will probably be above 3.00 when the 2022 data is released. Israel's TFR in 2017 (3.11) was higher than its TFR in 1981 (3.06). So Israel is at least one counterexample to the narrative of a uniform global population decline.
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/the-great-brethren-migr...
This is a misconception based on recent experience in the west. In the Muslim world, the trend has been the exact opposite. Neither of my grandmothers (one from a well-to-do urban family, another from a village) wore hijab. In their old age, they covered part of their hair with their sari, as is the south Asian custom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheikh_Hasina_Darshana_.... None of my aunts wore hijab. But several of my cousins do. There’s a video of the President of Egypt laughing at the prospect of a hijab law in 1958: https://youtu.be/brlFxRYCggE?si=jBZ97TCpz3P7LASC. Today, 90% of Egyptian women wear a headscarf.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
Affluence allows individual independence, which tends to weaken religiosity. But it’s the religiosity (and social policy—in most societies, the two are closely connected) that then drives reproductive choices. Religious Pakistan has almost double the fertility rate of secular Bangladesh, despite similar GDP per capita. Muslim Americans have more affluence and more education, but also much higher birth rates than both white Americans generally, and non-college educated white Americans in places where that group is secular and not evangelical. West Virginia has a comparable fertility rate to Washington State or Colorado. Oregon has one of the lowest fertility rates, despite being relatively poor and rural. (In red states, you can see a stark contrast between places that are populated by descendants of Germans, or British planters, and those that are populated by Scots-Irish.)
I agree with your overall conclusion, but nowadays Bangladesh's GDP per capita is significantly higher than Pakistan's, so that part of your argument no longer holds. And, Bangladesh's economy is now growing significantly faster than Pakistan's (in 2022, 7.1% vs 4.7%), so it seems likely that Bangladesh will keep on pulling ahead.
This is another instance of that type of argument: if, in the long-run, collectivist cultures grow and individualist cultures shrink, that would be evidence that collectivism is more correct than individualism.
Of course, an individual need not care about such arguments. An individual might be happy to be communist, non-communist, religious, non-religious, individualist, non-individualist, whatever, even if that was in some objective sense wrong. They might just not care if it was.
Who said they are "living the life they want"? And who said they feel"empowered"?
And even if they said those thing, who said it might not just be a cope?
Because polls and research says people report feeling (and being) lonelier and more depressed than ever - with clear increasing trend.
Which I think we should take into account before rejoicing about people living their best life, and everything being great.
A lot of people don't have kids because they simply can't afford it. My mom stayed at home while my dad worked (unskilled job), and we still lived okay financially wise, good luck doing that today. A lot of people have fertility issues, and it's growing due to our ever more polluted environment
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...
Most people are going to be old for decades to come.
People had many kids before and yet many died from disease, childbirth, accidents, war, etc. Inbreeding and limited resources also meant it wasn't a party for much of human existence. After antibiotics, before birth control, and before moving far away were practical, there was a glut for a few generations. Now things are correcting.
When looking at countries like Japan you're talking about rapid depopulation after the older generations die. Even in the US population growth is mostly caused by migrants within 2 generations.
And before industrialization population gains from agriculture were limited; albeit significantly more than the hunter-gatherers. Yet it was the that lifestyle which dominated most of hominids' existence. So I'd argue population is reaching a peak, and that's not a bad thing.
Regardless, doubtful we'll go back to hunting-gathering or to women without equal rights, education, or contraception.
If you have acquaintances that you call friends, quite subconsciously you'll have less regard for them than for family. And that might actually color how you'd regard true friends.
I've only ever had a handful of friends in my entire half-century life. An exceptional person might have 8 or 10 or something like that. I doubt that most people have had any at all. The modern world isn't very good at cultivating real friendships.
Which of your friends would stick with you if things got tough? Which would let their lives go off the rails for a chance to put yours back on them? What norms would they flout to protect you, in other words, which of them could you call certain they'd help you get rid of the body?
I'm guessing none.
Two of my mom’s sisters lived with us between college and when they got married. How many people do you know that are say 5 years older who would let you move in with them for years? How many would watch your kids every day for months? How many of your friends are going to attend your parents’ funeral?
I'd also say that though friendships tend to be very homogenous by age when we're young, that can change considerably as we get older. But because longevity is one of the key factors in any relationship, most of my closest friends are +/- 3 years of me. And in support of your point, it's often when we're young and mostly have young friends that we need support, and those friends are not likely to be in a great position to help.
EDIT: I actually did get help from friends' parents as a kid! As well as an adult "family friend". Those types of connections shouldn't be overlooked.
> Traditionally, many factors were important in arranging royal marriages. One such factor was the amount of territory that the other royal family governed or controlled.[4] Another, related factor was the stability of the control exerted over that territory: when there was territorial instability in a royal family, other royalty would be less inclined to marry into that family.[4] Another factor was political alliance: marriage was an important way to bind together royal families and their countries during peace and war and could justify many important political decisions.[4][116]
So your last statements only true if you restrict the 'we' you're talking about.
Arrested Development aside, I had a crush on a cousin as a little kid and as an adult, I would absolutely date and/or have sex with a cousin. I really don't see the issue as long as procreation is firmly off the table.
I saw most of my cousins at least once a week growing up, and even went to the same middle and high school as some of them—meaning I spent more time with them than I did my siblings.
As an adult, the idea of being romantic with one of them is as off-putting as the idea of doing it with a sibling. I wonder how much of that is from growing up together.
I did not! Only occasionally as a young child and a handful of times as an adult. That is probably key.
> In India, consanguineous marriage is seen mostly among first-cousins, and mostly practised in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka except Kerala. The National Family Health Survey found that consanguineous marriage was most common among Hindus (26.9%) followed by Sikhs (13.9%) and Muslims (12.7%), but only 2.3% for Christians.[39]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_...
But forming a family is hella expensive and constraining, so that kind of entanglement is declining.
Are they?
Because in the US for example, research, polls, and even the Surgeon General advisories, says people are connecting less than ever.
And it's not like they're connecting, just without the marriage and kids part: they're not connecting, period.
Of course some always are. Even the majority. But a huge number (not just something like 10%), reports not, and even reports (and is registered) as suffering mental health consequences from this.
As a divorced person, I'll say from firsthand experience that being single can be very lonely at times, but it's 100 times better than being in an unhappy relationship with the wrong person. And my marriage wasn't even that bad, objectively speaking; I can only imagine the misery some married people have put up with.
Though I'm not saying people are worse off today in comparison to the fifties or some past where people "suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out" and "mental health" wasn't a thing.
I'm saying that within recent decades, and even within the current decade (not some past where they "couldn't get out"), the trends are worsening. It's no great consolation being "better than the 50s or the 80s" when you're worse than the 00s and 10s and getting worser year by year.
It's also not people being alone because they're getting out of abusive relationships more. It's increasingly that people don't even get into a relationship to begin with. Heck, the statistics show that young people (18-30) even have way less sex.
And they're not happy about it, as if they made a winning choice: they're reporting being more depressed and bitter.
And, of course, you mainly hear about all the people who got tired of their shitty relatives and cut them out of their lives, while you rarely hear about the people who love and value their wonderful relatives, because the latter people don't go on social media to complain about their lives or ask "am I the asshole for cutting contact with my narcissistic mother who said she wished I had never been born?".
As for romantic partners, here again it's higher expectations. 100 years ago, people were ostracized if they didn't get married by a certain age, so they settled for the best they could get, which in many cases was a shitty and possibly abusive partner. These days, it's mostly acceptable to just stay single if you can't find someone that you really enjoy having in your life.
I'd say, overall, it's a big improvement.
Yes, between a spike in depression rates and a whole generation where a huge percentage lives alone, reports being lonely and miserable, and will die alone, it's working out great.
>Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.
This especially crystallized my thoughts. My aunt had 5 kids, and their family experienced a major traumatic event when I was too young to understand. They were all older than me, and the ripple effects of that event are still occurring ~ 40 years later. They all indeed had a completely different upbringing and class background than I. For a stretch of time into my adulthood it was hard to be around them, and we drifted apart, with apathy filling the space. We would avoid or ignore invitations and justify it by not wanting to experience the generally chaotic and haphazard experience of being in their company.
Largely by the efforts of one persistent sibling, we finally attended one family event with low expectations. I left that gathering with a completely revised perspective, and a heaping pile of shame. We hit it off right away, as if no time had passed, with the deep rooted familiarity of growing up together, with the same patriarchal/matriarchal role models and propagated personality characteristics. My thoughts while leaving that night were "these are my people". They implicitly understand. Their roughness is endearing, with absolutely no pretension whatsoever. Being older than me, they knew my recently deceased father for longer than I had, and it was very therapeutic to talk about him with people who knew him so deeply.
Now I'll actually read the rest of the article.
Not sure why this is surprising. You have many more potential for cousins if mom or dad was one of six, than if they were one of two. If they're only children, there's no potential there at all.
So as the fertility rate drops, cousin count drops as a power of that decrease.
Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!?
Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.
That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
But yes, thanks for the correction.
It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case.
That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing.
It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
I would need proof to believe it, and am interested in what kind of pampered existence these kids have at school considering TN’s average CoL, and even if such a daycare exists, it is surely not representative of 99% of daycares.
One thing would be to try to look at the wait lists of various daycares. My buddies in TN are at ~3 years. We were at ~1.5 years. And yes, it's quite common in the US for the waitlist for a daycare to be longer than 40 weeks of human gestation.
Daycare in the US in general is really not very well tied to the local CoL. Many factors influence the cost and CoL is but one. Things like the quality of churches really affect things in ways that other services are not affected by normally.
In general, if there is a waitlist, then capitalism has failed. You'd just raise prices until there is no more waitlist. But with daycare, you can't really do that without knocking out a large percentage of the workforce. Hence waitlists.
NPR has a good PlanetMoney episode from a while back on the issues with daycare in the US. It's worth checking out.
At least in the US and UK school starts at 5.
That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.
Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
/s
I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals.
Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
It's also affecting Bangladesh.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertili....
You can see this clearly by looking over at Pakistan, which has almost double the fertility rate despite being at a similar level of economic development. If it was dictated by economics rather than culture and policy, you wouldn’t see that.
But stay at home parent isn’t a thing nowadays.
If you look at the numbers, around 1/3 of families have one stay at home parent.
If you just look at families with kids too young to stay at home by themselves after school, it’s even higher.
The number of stay at home parents of both genders has been growing since the late 90s.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
This is what you get for living in a car-bound society. In a walkable society, the kids can just walk home if they're 6 years old or so.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co... [2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/06/childcare-puzzle-wh...
I can't comment on Iceland.
However, South Korea has one of the most crushing work cultures in the world, with insane work hours. Most people are not even in a relationship yet alone with kids.
In Portugal you have a huge problem of disposable income. Median salaries are insanely low and stagnant when adjusted to COL. To the point that by now most former 'Iron Curtain' EU members have surpassed Portugal in workers income both adjusted and absolute.
Now, I am not having children either, but I will not deny that even in the best of countries, when controlling for all of these factors, people still aren't having children simply because they have no want or need of having them. That's it, that's the reality. Now it is an uncomfortable truth for many, but many people nowadays, me included, just don't want them, for no particular reason at all.
Apparently, married people are having kids at roughly the same rate as they did decades ago. However, fewer people are getting married and far fewer kids are being born outside of wedlock.
These are not necessarily negative developments, at least at the individual level, but they do point towards a significant change in human culture and society: increasingly, only people with a strong intrinsic drive to have kids will do so.
I don't think that we can predict the effect of this trend a few generations from now.
Yes, this is ideal for children.
>...just, without the gender imbalance.
But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance.
In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married.
There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband.
When someone wrote:
>> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance
I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up.
I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...
Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank?
The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors.
That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1].
> I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal.
https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-res...
Additionally, it's easy for better educated women to do that same. Find qualified women in various industries and review the educational qualifications of their male peers who are making more than them and... same outcome.
So yes, I find the source to be problematic. I have not read the cited study itself but I did see that fun Q&A.
Here's a few excerpts from the article you linked:
> On one hand, women’s advantage in education may enable them to be more economically independent and thus put less emphasis on economic traits when evaluating potential spouses (Press, 2004). On the other hand, evidence suggests that men may still feel uncomfortable forming relationships in which they have lower status than their female partners (Bertrand, Kamenica, & Pan, 2015; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson, 2006).
> From men’s perspective, although men have placed more importance on the financial prospects of a potential spouse over time (Buss et al., 2001), they may value women’s high status only up to the point when women’s status exceeds their own status (Bertrand et al., 2015; England, 2011; Graf & Schwartz, 2011). For example, a speed dating study found that men did not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeded their own (Fisman et al., 2006). Psychology experiments showed that men’s self-esteem was lower when their partners succeeded than when their partners failed, whereas women’s self-esteem was not affected by their partners’ performance (Ratliff & Oishi, 2013). Although these studies did not directly test men’s reaction to their partners’ education or income, they suggest that men may avoid a potential spouse who has both higher education and higher income than themselves.
> Given a shortage of more-educated men, women may seek to maximize gains from marriage by evaluating potential spouses more on the basis of income. Because mate selection is a two-sided process, it is equally possible that men hesitate to form marital relationships with women who have both more education and higher incomes than they do.
{{citation needed}}
There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please.
I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
I feel that I've voted my entire life for more collective solutions to problems (what else is government for?) though imperfect the purveyors of such solutions may be (let's be real, as fashionable as it is to say that both sides are bad, the Democratic party are the only ones trying to actually improve things). But it seems that enough voters go the other direction that we have decided against such solutions. I am truly sorry for the state of things and that children today will inherit these problems.
Seriously though I don't know anyone who has kids as status symbols. That seems quite weird.
Also I suppose living in a desirable neighborhood indicates status to outsiders maybe? I'm not sure what, if any, benefits that perception confers on me.
I may be a little broken in that I don't see the value of status signalling. If I'm nice to people, they're nice to me. That system has suited me increasingly well for decades. I dress for practical comfort, don't have high-ranking frequent flyer membership tier, and routinely get upgrades at the airport because I am sympathetic to the agents' pressures. People recommend me for jobs because I didn't make them feel shitty at work and make a point of boosting other people's contributions.
Between that, and trying to signal something with expensive sneakers or a sports car, I much prefer the approach that makes me feel happy inside, and builds people up rather than trying to make them jealous.
It's tragedy of the commons, race to the bottom, etc.
If everyone else has one income and I have 2, I am suddenly way ahead in the social dominance hierarchy. I liiike.
Before you know it, everyone has followed suit and now nobody's happy.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods.
On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people.
If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
Everything, including housing, healthcare, and education is so expensive now, we couldn't afford for one of us to stay home anymore.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...
>[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one.
I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population.
I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
This seems to be a huge shift from the previous generation. My father and most of his peers worked long hours and contributed little to childrearing.
I'd guess men don't volunteer to be primary child rearers because stay-at-home jobs have been relatively rare, prior to the past 4 years, men tend overwhelmingly to want to support a spouse than to be supported (which is probably why gay couples have greater household incomes and lower divorce rates than all other categories), and women tend to be hypergamous in mate selection. It's not that there's no incentive to stay home (if you like your children, at least, which I hope is true), it's that there's a strong incentive to go to work.
In my particular situation, tax and childcare would eat most of my wife's income, so she'd be spending 40+ hrs/wk working with other people's children in exchange for less time with hers. She'd rather work with our children and be able to take an afternoon nap.
Would we both prefer to be independently wealthy and not have to work, sure! Might one or both of us work anyway? I probably would. She probably wouldn't.
The remainder of your message appears to be uninformed condescension. My wife is not a chattel slave. Her primary focus is child rearing and home making, but it's not her sole occupation nor solely her responsibility.
There are parts of being single we miss, and parts of being childless we miss. That doesn't change the fact that we've worked very hard for the life we have, find it very rewarding, and wouldn't give it up easily.
If men are handing 60-75% of their money over to their wives/partners to spend, I'd assert that those women are getting paid better than men are.
Setting that aside, once you have a family, nobody is going to have much discretionary money and they’ll have even less with just one income earner.
Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.
Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.
The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.
It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.
Would be nice.
To be honest, I'm not even sure who you expect respect from and why that'd be of terrible importance.
Some people, believe it or not, find their jobs fulfilling. They go to school to learn something so they can do it for the rest of their lives. Having a child jeopardizes the role you planned for yourself for the future. The goals you wanted to accomplish often never get accomplished because having a child takes up an insane amount of your time.
Yes, being a parent is a very important job in society, but often it means that your personal horizons become a lot more narrow. Rather than aspiring to climb to the top of your field, create art, invent something, discover new things, or whatever else you'd hoped to do when you were a teenager, your focus becomes almost entirely on keeping a single human being alive and then raising them.
It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.
> Why do they need to go to different schools?
Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.
It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.
Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children.
Median income in my area is ~$40k per year.
There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual.
Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue.
Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think.
But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow.
Like, you know the 80/20 rule?
Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance.
(Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment)
Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have.
From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same.
That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing.
3) Health insurance goes up. Kids are cheap but it’s still a couple thousands more per year. Plus hundreds to low-thousands per year in other healthcare spending per year (averaged—we’ve had $5k years and $1k years)
4) … Except having kids is a reverse lottery ticket for each one, and the healthcare & related costs could end up being “most of your money, forever”, if you’re unlucky.
5) Childcare costs are either $500-$thousands per kid per month (unless you’ve got relatives who are cool doing that all the time) or the entirety of one parent’s foregone compensation for the same span (five to six figures a year for most folks)
6) Housing. Unless you can’t afford it, you’re gonna find it very hard to settle for cheap housing in a bad school district. The premium in our area for a good vs. mediocre (not even the awful, horribly dangerous ones!) district is about 35-40% for a similar house. That’s… a fuckton of money, and the difference is likely to be 100% financed for folks around having-kids ages.
Everything else is basically negligible compared to healthcare, daycare, and housing, or can be made very cheap with minimal sacrifice.
Child related expenses were often over 50% of everything leaving our bank account, for months on end, when our kids were younger.
It will soak up the the full take home pay of one parent on an average wage or around that.
There are government funded childcare hours (that are increasing finally) which help, but it's still a tough choice unless both parents have earnings well above average.
Families get spread out because children are priced out of where their parents live, and can only afford a small home. So the grandparent support is often hard to make work too.
I find it curious that the type of people that moan about low birth rates and the loss of "family values" are also the ones voting for politicians that block house building and impose spending cuts on government services like childcare.
Not having children in the current political climate is a rational choice.
If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.
There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)?
When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care!
And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
Some of my fondest memories are with cousins. And for many, cousins serve as drop in brothers/sisters. It's sad especially for only children.
My kids live 2 doors from 3 of their cousins. We architected it because of all the benefits. It's good for the kids and for my wife and her sis. It's awesome.
Both families always have someone to count on at any time when needed.
Obviously the means to reach out and connect are now available, but we’re still just too far apart. Plus now that we’re all grown up, mostly married, and some with kids, there’s less time for everything.
my siblings' kids had 2 cousins each, and I doubt any of them will have kids at this point - if they do it will be a dimisishing return.
no real shock at this point: as the need for child workers has decreased, so has the birthrate.
Suddenly they were all jumping and screaming on the couch by the christmas tree.
Cousins are fun!!
My story isn't unique. Geography isn't the only thing preventing interaction with extended family, some of it is the deterioration of family because the world has gone dumb.
Source?
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/anti-vaxxers-politi...
Yes, in situations like this I prefer to keep things androgenous. I don't talk much about the gender of my kid or spouse.