I'm baffled my peers, who absolutely could afford to, still have no interest. These are people making 150-200k (and at my prior job, 200-400k).
Raising kids is hard work. Ideally you have them young and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
But our society tells people to wait as long as possible to have kids, and to prioritize career over other things - so once people do have kids, if they ever do so, then often grandparents are too old or far away to fill that traditional role. So lots of people are stuck paying thousands a month for daycare.
Just one of many ways that our system finds innovative ways to extract money out of people for things that used to be free or part of being in a community.
I would bet this plays a large part - people today respect the difficulty in a way past parents previously did not. Birth rates are certainly declining but I would bet the rates of accidental infant/toddler death are down as well.
That said, I personally know parents that are just taunting SIDS with the way they ignore infant sleeping best practices even though they’ve read the books to know better.
Nowadays there's a widespread expectation that parents should organize activities, drive their kids' education, just be way more involved in their lives.
Issue with this now is how concentrated certain industries are. Here in the UK, if I want to work in software, you need to move to a handful of expensive cities. London, Oxford, Cambridge, maybe Bristol or Manchester. Maybe some others if you're happy in a non-software job. Certainly not the rural farming town I grew up in, or anywhere within hours of driving.
So people move away. And now I'm faced with either delaying kids so I can get reasonably set-up in a city where a 500sqft flat costs £300,000 or moving away from all my friends and maybe even further from my family to afford a house.
many families hire a live-in helper, who is typically a low-income migrant worker from a neighbouring country. due to space constraints only the most privileged can hire two or more. as it is with asian tradition, parents primarily involve themselves in the area of discipline and education, and everything else is left to the nannies. the low-income families who cannot afford a helper or the living space for a helper suffer from a lack of enforcing discipline or providing for a growing child and low-income children often grow up maladjusted to the modern working society.
singapore unfortunately, still suffers from a low replacement rate, so the foreign domestic worker (FDW, as it is known) policy while enough to move the dial away from the danger zone that is south korea, is still not enough to ensure singapore is growing comfortably. however, at this point i don't believe allowing
(the FDW policy is generous and broad-based enough to extend to working adults with elderly, which means that subsidies for domestic help pretty much extend to working adults through a significant part of their working life. families often qualify for significant subsidies taking care of multiple generations through several decades.)
However, some of the spaces created for the legal live-in helpers [I've seen in Hong Kong and Singapore] would be considered substandard in the US. I'm talking closet size rooms with no windows big enough for a single bed and a few shelves.
If the US would allow this domestic help and possibly the same rooms, child care would be much easier.
It's really not that hard. You just have to change expectations and lifestyle. I never thought of it as "work" per-se but rather an obligation and responsibility to people brought into the world. It's amazing really. It's probably not for everyone and if someone sees it the same way as doing actual work then maybe it isn't for them.
It’s work.
It isn't hard as in you don't have to be very qualified to do it.
It is hard in that it's physically (sometimes) and mentally (always) exhausting.
And yet you're expected to pay for it yourself and spent your free time for it. Parents should be paid to be parents.
A parent is wealthy beyond money. Besides, we get tax breaks and if you're not a decent earner you get free things for being a parent.
And I guess when I say it's not that hard - what I mean is that yeah there's effort involved, often time a lot. But it is made out to be this impossible thing. It's not. You figure it out and before you know it the really hard days are over.
So yeah it's work but that shouldn't dissuade anyone from having kids. Anything good takes effort.
What we did is mom pumped and put milk in bottles. She's go to be at like 7PM after a feeding off the tap and I'd take over and stay up until 2 or 3 to feed baby and change diapers every 2 or so hours. Then she'd be back at it in the early morning hours.
It only lasts a bit.
If I had a kid, I'm sure I'd love them, and derive joy from them, but I don't believe the trade off is worth it. Maybe I'll end up being wrong about that, but I'd rather grow old and regret not having kids than regret having them. I think people shouldn't have kids unless they are really sure they want to be a parent. Anything less sounds like a big mistake.
Anyhow, have you actually talked to your childless peers about this? Hopefully there are at least some with whom you feel comfortable bringing up this kind of topic, with people who will give you a thoughtful, non-judgmental answer. I think you might find that they all have a variety of reasons for not having kids, and money may not be a big factor.
The - natural - way - of - being - a - human!!!
Natural, like sleeping. Eating. Sure, sometimes kids stress you. But then, nature has made sure that you'll mostly remember the good moments. You don't have to be overly perfect to have kids. Just don't be an overly bad person and talk to them often. Whatever environment they get born in: they will be ok with it. You don't need to be grandiose. Do what you naturally can, what you enjoy. And they'll enjoy it.
Humans are made to adapt to having kids. Kids are made to adapt to non-perfect parents. Just avoid the obviously bad stuff and all is good. Your life is good. You looking back on your life will be good.
What if they prefer Instagram, Cycling and Reading Books rather than raising children? Why are you so concerned about other people's lifestyles? Are you going to pay their rent or help them with their chores?
I decided to have a child, and it was a conscious decision I made with my partner, fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more. Deciding not to have a child would have been equally as valid.
I find it funny that this discussion elicits so much passion from people that decided to have children. Do you need validation from other people to justify your own decisions?
Whenever I am asked about it, I say that you should not have children unless you are absolutely certain that you want a child in your life, and that your life is stable enough to accommodate one. The world sucks even in the best of times. To condemn someone to existence when their lives will be made more difficult is selfish and cruel.
What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round. What we currently see is an outgrow of pure hedonism. It kills societies (literally, at least in the sense of "no new life").
Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem. So our casual life choices are in such a way that it is completely uncompatible with having a family? Sure - when you're 20, you might not be ready. But do we, as a society, promote lifestyles that even when you're 30 are impossible to combine with having kids? Then maybe our lifestyle as a society is wrong, what we tell ourselves to be "good life" is wrong.
And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear". We went out for dinner together two weeks after our first one was born (together with the baby). And we repeated, until today. We went on those 10 hour flights. We explored foreign countries. We visit museums with modern art. We spent months abroad. Is it always easy? Nope. But it was, overall, not too different from the life before. Kids get used to stuff, parents get used to stuff. Most of us can do it if we let go of the instagrammy thought of having to be perfect. And this is how society always was and always will be.
EDIT: In the current medical climate where child mortality is very, very low, of course, as a society we CAN afford to have less kids overall. And as long there are a few people who LIKE to have 3 or more kids, we can afford to have some more people having no kids as all. I don't promote growing society ad infinitum. But having sub-replacement birth rates will NOT make our countries better for sure (and the economy is my very LAST concern). France 10-15 years ago can lead as an example with a healthy rate of births, wealth and personal freedom.
As someone without children, I find it strange that I'm perceived as living some hedonistic lifestyle. There are indeed material concerns when it comes to the idea of children, but they tend more towards maintaining housing and especially for me who has some medical needs, health insurance. I'm certainly not traveling all the time or living it up with a fancy brunch every weekend; I'm actually quite happy with a modest living arrangement and diet, but even that seems to get more expensive as time goes on, and my job tenures get shorter as the layoffs come quicker.
You don't feel like you've missed out on much since having children and I think that's a great attitude; I don't feel like I've missed out on much since not having children. We can both be correct in this because we are each our own people with our own wants.
Much of what you write are modernity made problems. When we are really getting deep into what is going on, then YOU/ME/WE should not be living on our own alone anyway. YOU/ME/WE, in a healthy society, should be living in a multigenerational home where close to NOTHING changes if there is one more kid running around. OF COURSE having kids is a much more difficult choice when we all have to live on our own, only together with our partner (with which we also have to maintain a PERFECT relationship because there is no other person around or to go to to cool down a bit anyway), we all have to pay for our housing ALONE, plus taxes, plus (in many countries) health insurance, childcare etc. . A more humanly organized society would have much more of us simply live together, share more stuff. But most of us have to start at zero. Which some say is "fair". But in reality, it is making us poorer. Financially, emotionally.
I'd commend you for that. Not helicopter parenting is the way to go.
Also not my problem. I'll be dead.
> What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round.
Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
> Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem.
You sound oddly interested in how I make life changing decisions that don't affect you in any way.
This is another example of a thought pattern often encountered. The thought of "being free to do what ever I feel like" and not caring.... is a meme.
> Human nature was to live out as a hunter-gatherer in some African savannah. Why would this hold any power over how people choose to live their lives in the Year of our Lord 2024?
You are taking a thing where Humans have proven to be quite flexible (the style of living) and bring it to a discussion that is, at its base, biological (no babies: no society). Sure, we can now say that it all doesn't matter if our more and more babyless societies go to die.... but is this really the way to go on?
So why do you want to live now?
There's nothing to be sad or happy about it. It is just a fact of life. Like gravity.
If there was no economic problem due to the decline in population, there was no problem, period.
The same is with countries and their societies.
I will not be that defeatist to say "my country/my region/my continent can go down because there are others". And to say that is not racist.
In the current order, I sort of do, but that whole Westphalian order of "countries" is artificial (and also relatively new in its specifics, though of course kingdoms and empires go back far longer): we're all related and share one biosphere, and more recently we share one globalized economy. The truth is that we will sink or swim together -- if we have abandoned houses in Peoria because American-born people aren't having their own children, that is an opportunity to house people who come from somewhere without enough housing or infrastructure. The only barrier to this happening is our suicidal apartheid regime of borders and passports that's even newer than the Westphalian system!
Borders are not erected to help you, an ordinary citizen. They are there to divide you against the ordinary citizens on the other side of them.
Do not over-think it. Just be careful to pick a partner who shares the same values and then get on with it.
The natural way of being a human for thousands of years was to hunt and gather, and then die before 40. But that didn't stop us from progressing past that point.
If kids stay one year olds forever no one would have kids, you'd go insane. But that's not the case.
And these are all pretty weak reasons — people with kids do all of the things you’ve mentioned.
The true cost of end of life care
1. Is already socialized in many western countries
2. Impacts human capital allocation in countries
3. Requires other people’s children to take care of you. If there are no kids, society stops functioning.
4. Will continue to rise in price as there are fewer young people
When you consider that most old people do not fully fund their retirement even with existing subsidies, you can see that this is an odd proposition.
Some people’s work will be valuable enough to offset their end of life care. It will be an increasingly smaller number over time given trends.
We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
The problem of elder care isn't purely financial. It's not the model of paying that's the problem. At the end of the day, (kinda oversimplified) money represents a fractional value of the work output of a population. The output of the population depends on the number of people working in productive roles. The value of the currency is related to the consistent output of services and confidence in the existence of your country.
Shifting over an increasing fraction of your population to elder-care is non productive. It has a tension with both stability of currency and value of currency.
It’s a normal and perfectly healthy reason to have children if you also love and cherish them. I would bet the number of parents having children for the sole and totally disinterested benefit of the children is approximately zero. The OP not caring about humanity tells me they’re profoundly selfish and therefore probably not capable of the love and cherish part though.
Certainly people have children for a variety of reasons, but if a big one is "who else will take care of me when I get old?", that's incredibly selfish, and not healthy at all. Loving and cherishing your children regardless doesn't change that.
I love how you've somehow twisted the person upthread's words into the idea that they don't care about humanity. This entire subthread is bizarre.
I respect my father more for telling me he actively doesn't place care expectations on me in his old age. "I made you, you are not responsible for me but I am responsible for you".
Does that mean I won't care for him? Of course not, but it's good to know I haven't come into existence just for that.
Why are we acting like everyone's lifestyle preferences are of paramount importance to everyone else's existence? OP is not taking from any other parents here, and there are still plenty more humans to make more humans.
Is there a hidden fear here that having an enjoyable childless life will somehow spread everywhere and we all die in a generation?
Presumably OP is in US and is not planning to have any kind of state pension or socialized healthcare when they are old?
Sure .. although some of those children will be older than the people they look after.
This morning my father delivered "Meals on Wheels" to 20 other elderly locals.
He was born in 1935 and will be 90 next year.
There are many older people, not all of whom immediately become bed and wheel chair bound at 60.
I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation.
Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
The thing is that an elderly person in care can never compensate those who take care of them, because they do not work and do not produce anything. They can only scam their caretakers by paying with fake fiat money that was allocated to the elderly before their care takers were even born.
I interpreted this as not "I will have children so my children can look after me", but rather "I will have children so there will be younger people around, who can (amongst other things) look after older people and do other important things".
Based on that way of looking at it, I think that not having children but still benefiting from younger people is more selfish than not having children and benefitting from younger people (if either of these is indeed selfish).
Basically, I was questioning why it is more selfish to use a resource while contributing to that resource, rather than not contributing but still using.
Put another way, who is more selfish - a farmer who buys some vegetables, or a software developer who buys some vegetables? Yes, they are both paying for them, so they are not directly exploiting anyone. But if no-one wanted to be a farmer, then there would be no vegetables.
Yes, I know this analogy is a stretch, but hopefully you get what I mean. Anyway, I don't think that either having or not having children is inherently "selfish", but there are almost certainly selfish motivations for each.
If we are paying the fair market cost of hiring someone to be a carer, the cost of having them not do something else has to be realized. This will mean that cost of carers will skyrocket, meaning that people's care becomes more expensive. If we start to pay the true cost -- and have it paid directly -- then when population collapse happens, a ton of the elderly will die on the street.
Except for a few relics, nothing remains today of what the elderly made. The exception being real estate, and that's why the elderly demand to each become a millionaire to let go of any of their real estate.
It's not like today's elderly worked to build something for future generations. They worked to benefit themselves at the moment.
In general when somebody comes to you selling guilt and murky reasons to why you are indebted to them, that's an enemy and a scammer, seeking to leech from honest people. Whether that's an employer, a generation of elderly, the government, a guild or whoever.
You need to either give it to someone all in cash, or transfer all the money in whatever bank accounts you have into someone else's account. Until then, you are a hypocrite.
Your hackernews comment just happens to be some text in a database that has a value which is NOT agreed upon by the majority of the population.
So my point was, since you don't seem to also agree that your money is valuable, please give all your cash to someone who does. And please transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account that does value those numbers.
Until then you are a hypocrite.
> Cash is just paper, that happens to have an agreed upon value by the majority of the population.
There really is no such agreement, it is a belief system. And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it. There is no democracy involved and has never been. Billions of dollars, euros and etc are conjured out of thin air and into the hands of the chosen ones as we speak.
Before cash started to rule everything around us, people would carry letters from kings, princes or other nobles, that would instruct subjects to provide the bearer with horses, lodging and hospitality. For example if they were travelling. Or if they were to lead a project. People had to work by decree, people received their benefits and etc by decree.
Just as the rulers today create an endless amount of money out of thin air, monarchs of the past would create noble titles out of thin air. With rights to estates and the servitude of the people who were born there and etc. People defending that oppressive and invented aristocracy system would say "it is the will and decree of God", just like you're now saying that today's oppressive and invented monetary system "is the will of the majority". Because most will always defend the status quo, no matter what.
If the money value is the will of the people, then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation? I don't remember any such vote in any country, do you?
If everyone believes it, do they not agree on the same thing?
> And you know that "the majority of the population" has had no say in monetary policy, nor do they understand it.....
I never said they did. It doesn't change the fact that most people still value $1 the same amount.
> If the money value is the will of the people
I never said it was their will, I said they mutually agree to it's value.
> then when did the majority decide they wanted to have high inflation and even hyper inflation?
They didn't. The value of money (or anything) may go up and down over time, for any reason. But in a single moment most people will agree to the value of $1.
But anyway, back to my only point, since you think money is worthless, why don't you give all your money away? Why are you keeping it?
So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
If that's what you're stuck on, I'll gladly let you stay mentally stuck there.
> So until you give all your cash away, and transfer all the money in your bank accounts to someone else's bank account, you will remain a hypocrite.
Except for short-term liquidity you can be damn sure that I don't keep any fiat money in my possession, and neither should anybody else. That's why the stock market keeps going up, everybody wants to get rid off inflation currency as quick as they can.
I guess my incredible hypocrisy is much worse than the geriatric rulers completely destroying the wealth of their nations in less than a generation by enslaving young workers with their fake monetary system.
I don't talk to my parents and have no interest in taking care of them, because, like you said, they are horrendous people. I think you're right that the entitlement to your kids time is something that comes with poor parenting.
That doesn't mean that on-net people's kids won't take care of them. Like everything with your kids, it's a two way street.
I’d settle for a much higher tax rate for the voluntarily childless to very inadequately offset the lack of contributing to the next generation. Probably the best way to implement this is that the child tax credit should be much bigger.
Maybe that is what to do, give tax credits on the order of an income. That way you are basically tax free while having young children, but you'll still want a job when they are a little bit older.
Think if it this way: in the childlessness-tax scenario, the parents would be paying society in-kind by raising kid(s), and you'd paying society with money instead. You're both paying, just in different ways.
Taxes also aren't some kind of payment-in-exchange for services thing. It's foolish to complain about programs because you don't personally benefit from them.
Can’t they care for others that aren’t their children? What about people without children who work for the betterment of entire communities?
There are many people with kids who have revealed the value they place on the sustainability of the environment, democratic society, or the economy through the lifetime of their children, let alone their children's children, to be zero. Why would you assume that the childless are any more selfish, as a group? Why can one not care about the continuance and betterment of humanity without one's own direct descendents being involved?
Likewise it would be easy to exclude rapist fathers from any scheme of this sort.
GP didn't write a moral judgement, but a practical one. People who don't have/care for kids don't have long-term skin in the game, therefore their influence on the shape of future society should be downweighed. There is a logic to that.
> some guy who's condom broke
Yes, this is how a lot of families are made. Unplanned != unwanted != unloved.
> or a rapist are more moral than someone who is infertile
Again, not about morality. GP's logic isn't about whether one's good or bad, but whether one has skin in the game of continued improvement of society and civilization.
But I guess a better way of scoping it is whether or not the person is a parent (EDIT: or in legal terms, caregiver?). Infertile people can become parents too (and that could be an indication of extra special caring about the future generation). And then people can be biological parents, but not actual parents, e.g. if they give their child away.
FWIW, I don't exactly agree with the poster on this. I feel that parents are biased towards near-term almost by definition: caring and nurturing children is an immediate job. Whether or not a typical non-parent is likely to be a "fuck you, got mine" kind of person, I find that parents tend to become more of a "fuck you, my kids got theirs" kind of people. Not out of ill intent - just more of "concrete needs of my kids today trump abstract speculative needs of their generation a few decades from now".
Maybe that person doesn't really believe that, but if so, should probably be clearer about their position and not resort to veiled personal attacks.
Particularly with people who are old with no kids, I don't think they are totally cynical, but they do seem to have an incentive to vote society into schemes where they are taken care of by younger people, at no cost to themselves or their descendants. For instance they could decide the government needs to take out a massive 30 year loan to pay for care homes to be built.
But I also think that just because you have kids, that doesn't mean you're completely aligned with a longer term future. There's going to be a lot of desperate older people needing help from the few young people who are left, and that goes regardless of whether they made any of those young people. I mean sure, if you have kids you are less likely to be as short-termist as a childless old person.
I think it's a major issue that doesn't get talked about enough. People are happy to say "oh but plenty of old people care about society" which is true, but there's also plenty of foreigners who care about society, who can't vote. And it ignores the actual problem that we will be facing, which is that there will be fewer working people supporting older, non-working people. We need a system for equitable power sharing between generations.
Like a sibling poster, it reminds me of all the religious people who claim that atheists can't be moral because we don't have a god to guide us.
I do have skin in the game, even without kids. On a basic level, I care about the rest of my life, which hopefully will last another 50 years. I care about the planet and about future generations because that's the right thing to do, because short-termism and excessive consumption is a cancer.
And even if I won't have kids, I have nieces and nephews, and I have dear friends who have children. I want them to be able to grow up and live in a good, safe, comfortable world.
Frankly I find your point of view profoundly condescending and insulting. You don't need to have children to care about the future.
Hell, I would bet that childfree people are more likely to support "future-preserving" plans than parents, on average. I'm thinking climate change, Fridays For Future.
Anecdotally, of the 4 sets of parents I know well enough to know their political opinions, none of them are really concerned about preserving the world for their children. I'm vegan, car-free, childfree and vote for the "green" options.
This exact same sentence could be used to describe parents who bring children into a world rapidly becoming less hospitable due to climate change, the full extent of which they won't be alive to suffer.
Also, instincts are nothing to be proud of, they're just dumped on us by nature.
But instincts are something to be proud of. They're a product of extremely complex processes that occur over incredible timescales. At a minimum that's remarkable and interesting.
You're misunderstanding him. I think it's more on the line of "freeloaders shouldn't have a say on what work gets done."
The GGP literally said "I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?" If someone has that attitude, and explicitly rejects responsibility to go all-in on selfishness, they've pretty clearly given up the moral right to be part of decision-making for the future.
I think there's two aspects where you misunderstand:
1. The original comment is ambiguous about whether they think their "voice...in what happens in government and politics" should be formally removed, voluntarily given up, or just passively ignored.
2. I think simplistically framing this as mere "disagreement" fails to capture what's actually being discussed, and ignores important aspects of governance. It's sort of (but not exactly) like the question if insurrectionists should keep their places in the government they're subverting (e.g. should the Confederate States have kept their seats in Congress, ability to vote for the presidency, have it's members hold important positions in the US government, etc. while they were rebelling)?
Glory to our future!
Come on, that's just idiotic sarcasm that doesn't even understand the GP's point, let alone actually skewer it. It's as stupid as trying to mock childfree people by sarcastically advocating a total ban on having children, like in ZPG (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069530/).
>I don't really care about the preservation of the human species. I'm going to be dead in the next 40 years or so, why should I care?
and I took it to it's logical conclusion. That's not "fascist", it's just a reaction to a trite but increasingly common belief amongst techies.
And you said we should deny political rights to people without children, a pretty mundane life choice all things considered. You're a straight up fascist plain and simple. Good job.
I weep for your offspring as they're probably poisoned by your brand of cruel morality.
You already admitted that you don't.
Equating not wanting to have children with not caring about society is absurd. While we're throwing around ridiculous ideas: if anyone should have no say in politics of society, it's people who make these kinds of blanket judgments.
This argument cuts both ways.
After reading your post, I’ve reached the same conclusion regarding your opinions.
That said, while they do require some sacrifice, at least for myself -- it has been by far the most enjoyable part of my life so far.
If most Homo sapiens had the same attitude, the species would have gone extinct since forever lol.
You can have any personal goal you'd like, but from the evolution perspective, the purpose of any living organism is to survive and to reproduce, hence preserving its own species. That's why.
And maybe Earth would be a better place.
Obviously someone making that much could afford to have kids, but assuming tech hub (e.g. SF) cost of living, it’ll take a few years of salary like that to accrue enough financial padding to be certain that a chain of unfortunate events won’t put them out on the street once the cost of raising a family is added in.
This is why you see a lot of high earners waiting until the last second to have kids, if they do. Financial security like you have while making good money without kids is hard to let go of.
That's an underappreciated point. Kids in daycares and kindergartens get sick a lot. Those places are pathogen swapping grounds. Especially early on, you may have your kid 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out on average. And the "on average" is a killer, too - you can't schedule when your kid will get sick, so you're effectively on-call all the time anyway, and have to have a job compatible with you just taking off in the middle of the day and getting a day or two of leave, on the spot, at random.