The window for great-grandmothers is closing
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
memoirsandrambles.substack.com
My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.
Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.
My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.
I don't really have a single point here, except that I worry we've ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30's.
When my were in school and had friends who were visiting great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm) once. One of those children lived behind us when I was growing up, and if I'd paid better attention when helping him with his garden would have taught me how to plant by the moon and stars --- he did teach me how to gut and skin a squirrel.
His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.
It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known" person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the person that one of them actually met who was born the earliest?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Incidence
Seems to be the rule used in Coco.
I really love this recording[0] from 1941 of a photographer born in 1843, talking about the American West. It's one of Youtube's many gems.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ab5nv4Suc (video)
My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.
(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)
* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.
And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.
EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?
I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable
> in the Mutzenbacher
Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.
I find the idea that people haven’t considered downsides of waiting to have kids to be grating personally
Why do you care about what other people do? It's not harming you.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502822...
I remember seeing a talk by Steve Jones[1] where someone asked a question like this and he said the human species has basically not evolved at all for I forget how long he said but it was at least hundreds of thousands of years. He said specifically if you took the children of someone like this dude[2] and put them in a modern school system they would not perform noticeably differently in any way from a modern child as long as they had decent food etc all the other benefits of modern society.
[1] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7056 (emeritus professor of human genetics and evolution at university college London and the author of a fantastic book on the subject called "In the Blood")
I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct connection to the past.
(in particular, I was never within 5 hours of gp or ggp until my teens, and born multiple TZ away. then again, I'm in the "come home before it gets dark" generation; ymmv)
We have cheap daycare, maternity leave etc etc here in Sweden but having some another dropoff for the kids is still nice for parents
Meanwhile my son, at 14, has only one living grandparent, and it does feel weird.
My mom's parents were gone by the time I was 24 - I didn't really ever get a chance to interact with them as an adult. My dad's father passed away when I was 39, but I had many visits with them as an adult while he and my grandmother were still pretty active. My grandmother is now 94 and not in great health, but still with us, still mentally there. When I was in 5th grade, they came to 'grandparents day' at my school, and she won 'youngest grandmother', but wouldn't come up on stage to accept the award! ;)
I think having family members of varying ages alive at the same time does help people feel connected, safe, and confident in having meaning and purpose. (Not that people can't have those things otherwise, it's just without that support)
Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be bleak if they do.
Things like remote work could’ve helped here, allowing couples to live near family instead of wherever the best employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push prevented that.
Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.
Or are they incapable of desiring power over their own lives, perhaps unlike men?
A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband than most working young people have today, even though they get fancy titles now.
Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
A greater proportion of women today have more financial independence than they have ever had in the past.
> A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband
This is financial dependence, not independence.
> Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
> Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family. They were and are literally married off because they were liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of daughters. And umpteen other examples.
This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms that provide women equal access to power as men, biology throws them a curveball every month with the effects of menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth.
Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
> Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is massive to convince the young generations that they want to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity and still not afford to own their homes to have families.
> Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family.
Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny this even if you read about it and find out. Just say "Nonsense!" and shut it out.
In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/real-reason-south-koreans...
>and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care.
>Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their own house outright and have supplementary income. Either in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work outside the home, or they were expected to do all the housework. There was no option to stop working (housework is work).
But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.
Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.
It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.
> Either in laws own it
Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.
> or they were expected to do all the housework.
If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.
Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning, idealistic one.
If you want absolute power over your own life, and your goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but maybe marriage and family is not for you.
This is a useless measure of independence in the context of this discussion since it applies to men and women. When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are discussing one gender being able to achieve more financial independence than the other due to laws/customs/discrimination.
> You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand.
Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.
Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the world for 99% of history have never had or been in families with enough wealth such that they did not have to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot at the decision making table.
But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is does my daughter have the same opportunities available to her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a high paying job?
Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.
The reality is that it is extremely stressful and for most people with no guarantee of how it will work out overtime.
And the fact is that it is much better to have one person focused on getting the ressource while the other runs the household, "making" other humans in the process.
It could be the man at home, but most woman don't actually want that even if they may say so to win an argument; and there is the added problem that only woman can make other human being.
Then you have people complaining that our society doesn't make babies anymore, well maybe if we didn't push the bullshit of independence on woman we wouldn't have this problem...
when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.
oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.
and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.
That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.
Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.
My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.
Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.
This is specious. If they are particularly awful, their kid probably won't want anything to do with them raising his/her kids.
for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.
my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.
but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids
Whole swaths of the US don't have enough good jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle for kids of middle class parents.
And parents are working longer as well, meaning that overlap is less likely to happen.
I went to my grandparents every Wednesday. My mom just retired, my kids are 12 and I didn't have kids until my 30s.
There's so much about life that has changed the fabric of families in the last few decades
Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.
Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.
But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.
The upper classes in India are a rounding error, maybe the population of Spain at most.
Edit: you are right that it's a trade-off. In Bangladesh keeping women at home may mean starvation, so they are grudgingly allowed to work.
At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.
1. https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/news/news/i...
2. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta...
That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.
I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.
Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.
Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.
it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out
I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.
There are no secrets these days.
I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.
We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.
and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.
this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)
Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done, though.
When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck with my friends yelling things at people walking by on the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.
Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and make less because it was easier.
So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to, and a kid has that effect.
This is my favorite of the lies parents tell, it's so obviously nonsensical
Probably the number one life experience that increases maturity is having kids. If you'd had kids younger, you would have grown up faster too and earned some of the maturity needed to raise them well earlier.
Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long improv scene and do your best.
I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no one should have children until they're perfectly prepared, but that's just an impossible bar.
I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an ancillary benefit to having children or from any other relationship for that matter. Yes, if it’s your primary goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one’s good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part of the equation of forming relationships and having children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human experience across cultures and times.
This is a really good observation.
Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It seems like there are a lot of people out there today who believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have kids or pets.
You see, in a proper early childrearing situation, you would be a) near your parents and inlaws ideally b) they would share in the burden of child-rearing.
We had kids later in life (33-ish) and I think if I were to do it again, I'd have moved quicker to having kids earlier (waited 2 years to marry and 3 years before having first kid).
More and more people are living closer to their parents - which opens up this possibility.
Even if I lived close to the family I was born into, I would never let them get near my children. The years of neglect and child abuse are reason enough that they should never see them - let alone be caregivers.
Similarly, you’re assuming that your marriage would have gone smoothly still and so would the childbearing if you hadn’t waited. I was with someone for five years and we never got legally married. We talked a lot about kids and marriage. I still felt like we had years to go before we were ready for marriage and kids. We separated over financial differences once it became clear they were never going to resolve. Imagine we had ignored our intuitions and married and had kids based on arbitrary deadlines? It would have been terrible. The differences wouldn’t have solved themselves with marriage or kids - we would’ve gone separate ways and both would experience truly insane hardship due to such poor decisions.
Living near people who can take care of your kids sounds lovely if you grew up where all the jobs are. Not uncommon for many SV types here who grew up in Palo Alto and such but it’s farfetched for so many more.
We need better regulations to give better paid leave and lower the cost of housing so I’m not homeless when my spouse decides to stop working to take care of the kids.
Clearly your circumstances dictated your options. Nowadays, in this truly oligarchic economy, most young people simply don't feel they'll ever be able to afford a home or family either (which is a massive regression). Perhaps the future means - you raise your family in your parents house (with their help)... if you trust your parents.
Agreed about better support for families and housing.
You don’t have to be “UMC” to take those things for granted. All those things are normal in the third world village where my dad grew up.
She is an adult now and I couldn’t be any prouder of all she has achieved in life so far.
I also had two more kids in my 30s. It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s. I do have more work responsibilities but it’s balanced by working from home so I get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school, here when they get home, etc.
There are benefits either way, but I think if you are committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more of lives too.
the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.
> It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s.
I'm a second child with after a large age-gap. My brother was born when my mother was 16, I was born twenty years later. My parents routinely told me how much harder it was with my brother -- lack of cash and profession, the party lifestyle that comes with youth and college-life, constant moving for opportunity and cheaper housing, and an overall lack of time to dedicate to the kid due to the instability and struggle to keep afloat financially.
I was born at a time of great stability for them. They had professions, they could make their own schedules. They had time to participate in my schooling and extracurricular stuff. I had good food, good toys, good clothing, and a stable house. They let me voice my decisions because they had the time and freedom to consider options other than pure survival. I was told that I was the 'easy' one -- not because of my personality but because "The 70s sucked.", which is code for "We were young, poor, un-established and struggling."
So, after the anecdote I feel compelled to ask : Why do you think it is harder when you're older? You have more money, you have the power of flexibility within your scheduling that allows for participation in your childrens' growth and development -- is it simply a 'strength of youth' kind of thing?
I have no kids, I have no plans for them, so I ask just as a curiosity. The opinion varies wildly from person to person, and I think it's fascinating what kind of 'diversity of parenting' exists.
My family brings me great joy.
The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's not drastic, but I notice it.
The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still had two.
The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids. We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or medically, or whatnot.
Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time with them while they're still young. There's no clear answer on the balance other than doing one's best.
This bothers me a lot, too (although I had my kids a couple of years earlier than you). Not just the physical presence, but also being physically and mentally fit when they're adults. I'd like to do sports, travel with them, help them move between apartments. I'd like to be mentally on the same page, not an old grumpy fart not understanding what they're thinking about. All of that can be done, but it simply gets more difficult with a larger age difference.
Before I had children I thought it would be relatively easy - that's why you use birth control after all. But when you actually have children you learn things like at best you're looking at, at best, a 10-30% probability per month if you hit the ~48 hour ovulation window just perfectly. That doesn't sound so bad - because a month isn't such a long time, and ovulation is pretty predictable. But when you start late each month matters, and then if you want to actually have multiple children, then you're already looking at a years long process.
And then add in that as you age, all sorts of birth defects and disorders like Down Syndrome become much more likely, and you can't effectively test for them until about halfway through the pregnancy. It's just not a great idea to start late. I'd also add that for us to have a sustainable population, everybody needs to be having more than 2 children on average. This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.
It won't. You can't extrapolate the short-term recent trend to centuries. In the past, social/cultural/religious norms forced you to have children even if you didn't really have a great desire for them. This changed and now there will be selection pressure on personality traits which desire children.
You've just made me think it would be a bad idea anyway at this point :(.
Oh well, at least I have many nieces.
The worst thing that happens is the woman or the child suffers complications that result in short term or even life long sacrifices.
Not that it might be 51% or even 11% likely, but the odds certainly go up for a woman, and will likely influence her decision.
I also would emphasize that it's not like not having a child is without issues. Much of the West, including the US, is already suffering with from increasing isolation, depression, and other such issues. And aging, especially without family, is likely to only exasperate these issues. Friends that will last forever, don't. And it becomes more and more difficult to meet new people as you age. Places like Japan and South Korea may be a foreshadowing of where we're headed, and it's not pretty. See things like kodukushi - lonely deaths. [1]
I live across the country from my nephew, but if I end up not having kids, he can look forward to notably more visits and funtime with the uncle.
I’ll add that we waited longer than we should have, and while it’s hard to conclusively say we would have had an easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of thousands in fertility treatments.
You always think you have more time, but as they say “it’s later than you think.”
For some it is really never.
I will say though, I think there's a chicken and egg element in this line of thinking.
A part of my thinks that being childless in twenties provides space that facilitates being a basket-case.
I think that having a child immediately makes most people at least 50% more responsible, and 85%+ within a year.
Again, there's a huge range here for people who: - Never get better - Their 85%+ still isn't really responsible enough.
Unsolicited 2 cents from a guy who had a kid in his twenties
However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure - but it's not an overwhelming factor...
People don't have extended families and villages to be nannies-on-demand anymore, so older parents have a lot more financial resources to raise kids and more likely to give the kid a comfortable life.
Especially when housing prices have gone up much faster than salaries in the past 30 years, and that is reflected not only in one's own mortgage/rent but also that you have to indirectly pay the rent increases of every Chipotle worker you interact with.
It’s not politically correct, but we all know a few little hellions, and they are obviously difficult to parent.
How common is it that people are incompetent to raise kids in their 20s, versus people who may not presently have everything together because nobody expects anything from or depends on them?
The whole idea that population must grow and keep growing is silly. It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
> It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
The first idea is way more extreme than the second idea.
Ideally, we as a society should support people who choose to have one or two children, prioritizing these families over people who have half a dozen or more children. But that's because in my opinion people who have dozens of children have something wrong in their heads. If you choose to have a dozen children, you better be able to afford to raise them all on your own dime.
That being said, I really dislike means testing of any kind so I'd be ok with a social safety net for the wackos and their unfortunate children.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing (why not spend your 20s exploring?) but it’s also easily explained by financial burdens that didn’t used to exist. Housing is now very expensive, can you blame people waiting until they have the right size home before they have kids?
Today can recognize when they'd bee a pie parent and choose not to do it anyway.
My childhood was all about spending the whole day outside roaming the streets with very little involvement from my parents. I didn't have any after-school (organized) activities, and I don't remember a single time that my father would drive me anywhere just because I needed it. That was all just normal, but today might get social services called on you.
Although, I think going through that learning process + raising a baby + recently newly wed is a contributing factor to divorce.
This is exactly why I don't think anyone should have children until they're at least 50 years old, and better yet 75-100. We just need to solve this "aging" disease problem first. 20-somethings just aren't emotionally mature enough to be good parents.
> just need to solve this "aging" disease.
Oh, please stop. This is the rhetoric of stunted men with Peter Pan syndrome. If you are too scared to face this type of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion just fine.
According to the most recent fertility statistics, they're not.
Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and have them at a age where your parents can still help you."
The fact that people are forgetting these "old values" is what is bringing to this unsustainable state, and instead of accepting the reality of our limited lifespans and that people have managed to start having kids in the early 20's (or before that) for centuries just fine, you want to double down on the idea that "no one should have kids before their 50s"?
Who is "not living in the real world"?
If people wanted to do that, they would. They obviously don't want to do that, for various reasons. What's your solution now, genius?
>Who is "not living in the real world"?
You, because you're the one telling people to go back to the "good old days" and then shaking his fist because they aren't.
If people had listened to people like you throughout human history, we'd still be living in caves.
People can totally freeze relevant body parts, and have child in their 70ties. Saying anything else would be sexist! Natural selection in action...
My parents were factory workers and they encouraged me to study a university degree as a sure way to a successful career. I finished my degree well into my 20s, but then the economic collapse of 2008 happened and I spent several years living paycheck to paycheck, lucky me who at least had a job.
In my late 20s I finally broke from economic stagnation by moving abroad. Then I spent the next 12 years moving countries every 2-3 years, which isn't good for stability. In fact I didn't meet who would become my wife until my mid 30s.
Now I approach 40 and have a good paying job in tech. However I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa and my company has done waves of layoffs that I luckily survived. We are seriously considering having a child, but the prospects don't look great. Everything else aside, we don't really know anyone or have a support network here.
I know most of this is moaning and if we "really wanted" we could make it work. But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network.
Good luck! Funny enough my wife and I are from the US and we waited until we knew our kids would have EU citizenship before having them. And raising kids without a support network sucks, I can't pretend otherwise.
Definitely. Still, sometimes you have to take risks, as you are not getting younger. Maybe moving again somewhere, where you could have a support network, even though pay is lower, might be an option?
We had grandparents around, that definitely helped. No idea, what other people do without that. If both parents get sick, the child still needs lots of care .. and you don't want some stranger to take care of your baby.
It is easier, but people have been having kids in all sorts of various situations for, well, as long as the human race has been around.
Kids are way more resilient than we think.
I had a perfectly decent living standard growing up, but I also remember very clearly in retrospect the economic uncertainty and the things my parents did to save money, and no uncertainty I've faced has been anywhere near that. Of course it's not like that for everyone, but overall, living standards are up massively, yet fertility rates are down, and the two are firmly correlated.
If I were to budget like my parents did, I could afford many kids. But I don't want to budget like that. Not because I resent how we had it, but because I don't want to go back to that just for the sake of having lots of kids.
We see affordability and population growth in places that allow housing.
While I agree it's a bad combo and could be better, there's nothing to support any notion that cheaper housing will be enough to increase fertility rates.
I still have two living grandparents as well, both grandmothers, one I won't talk to, and one that I like a lot. My oldest sister had a kid almost three years ago, and he got to meet his great grandmother last October for her 90th birthday.
That grandmother is still in pretty good health for her age, so I certainly hope she lives a lot longer, but realistically she probably doesn't have that much time left. I'm not having kids, but my other sisters are planning on it and it seems unlikely that they'll get to meet their great grandmother.
Mom had me at 21 (dad was 30). I knew both my grandmothers and neither of my grandfathers. One was left behind when my mom's family immigrated. The other died not too long after my dad's family immigrated - just before my dad was born
I had my son (now 4) when I was 41. Both his grandmothers are around, and neither of his grandfathers. My dad died last year and my son barely remembers him. My wife's dad died when she was two.
I'm glad to say my son and my mother are very close - they spend every other weekend together. His other grandmother and my wife aren't close and so my son doesn't know her very well.
Not sure if there's much here - except to say that having kids in our thirties should still be young enough that healthy grandparents can be around for the formative years. And regardless of age, life happens, and a multi-generational family unit isn't guaranteed.
It really depends.
When I was born my youngest grandma was 50. She already had three grandchildren.
I already had only 3 grandparents, one had died when my father was young, having survived two world wars, ironic ain't it?
At the age of 10 only one grandma was still alive, but she lived to the age of 95 and managed to meet 4 great grand-children.
My cousins had children late in their lives, their parents were average for their times.
I would say that meeting your grand parents is a benefit that has become a given only for the past 2-3 generations, when life and work conditions improved so much that it became the norm.
Parents who don't have a plan and need help shouldn't have had kids. The grandparents and great grandparents would just get in the way of these goals. There shouldn't be anything magical about getting to know your family. If you got to meet them, great, but you're your own person and developing that is so much more important.
The ultimate goal of my parenting is for my kids to realize they're part of a community that gave them tremendous advantages, and to which they have a duty to give back.
I'm not saying the kids should grow up to be selfish, but that the more they can do for themselves the more they can also do for others. That is a leader. We really don't need another generation of guilt ridden cogs.
Starting having kids in our 20s is the best decision my wife and I ever made. When my daughter was born, my parents (then in their early 60s) got a decade younger overnight. I wish we hadn’t spaced them out so much (27-37) because indeed my parents are not able to keep up with the littlest one like they could with the first two.
My mother had me when she was 20. I am not yet in my forties, but I lost my last grandparent many years ago.
:(
What "responsibly" means in any case might also be influenced by your priorities. For instance, a lot of people say "We're not financially ready to have kids" but they really mean "We can't keep up the fancy holiday trips if we add a kid". If your priority is to have a family, you might cut on holidays and have the kid.
That applies to some, even plenty, of cases, but I acknowledge that not for all. At least where I'm from, it often feels everything is set up to make it difficult for people to build a family.
What do you think are the chief obstacles that make it difficult to build a family?
On the plus side, in the early 60s, my recently windowed grandmother put herself through night school while raising 4 teenage kids, one of whom eventually worked on the national security council and traveled the world; all these years later, I still wonder how she managed it all without having a nervous breakdown. Life is strange like that, sometimes.
If you have kids at 15, it tends to be generational.
Same way as having kids in your 30s+ is generational.
If people want earlier parenting, then create a society that supports it. One with living wages, universal health care, and programs to provide childcare for working people. Because those are reasons people hesitate to have kids, and those situations are not improving.
South Sudan, the poorest country in the world, is 4.54
My first kid(late 20s) didn't get my parents watching the kid because they were working.
My next 3 kids (early 30s) got grandparents attention because they were retired.
Although I feel like the baby/kid thing has lost its magic on the grandparents. But on the flip side, the kids are basically old enough to take care of themselves(4+ yr old).
I’m curious how many children you have.
I have two step-children. Having children of my own (biologically) was never something I wanted to do for a lot of reasons. Without getting into TMI territory, I'll just say it was apparent (no pun intended) that one of my parents never wanted the responsibility + resented it, and the other wanted to "be a parent" without actually doing the work. So I did not have the desire or background that lends itself to being a good parent early on -- whether I've made a good showing or a mess of it later in life is something that my kids would have to answer...
I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much.
Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parents were too. It would be a huge difference in our energy levels and that's so important when you're hanging out with young kids. And it's 15 years less time that we will be able to spend together with our kids.
Obviously there have been huge changes in family size, parental age at first birth, etc. over the last few decades. I'd argue the lack of great-grandmothers is going to be the least consequential of these changes.
Not even the next word. I'm gone.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
All people over 30 with they were 15 years younger. Age, miles, diseases and injuries gradually makes the body worser.
Accepting that, I'd offer that more is a value somewhere above 50%. That leaves a lot of modern people who aren't dying in their 20s-50s.
I look at a lot of death certs (genealogy) and and realize we've had a lot of advances in treatment (pneumonia), regulation (black lung) and health practices (tuberculosis, dysentery). Many routine killers from 80+ years ago are less common/less deadly now.
Last night I ran across a death from Tuberculous Meningitis and my take was - What even the frak? How did our ancestors survive millennia where life just sprayed death at us?
I was raised by my grandmother - let's just say my parents were not ready. And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. What if it would become the norm for Grandparents to raise the children? That way the second generation can focus on their careers, etc and the first generation could raise the third. That wouldn't mean the second generation wouldn't have a role and be a part of the process. Of course, there would have to be consent on each level - and if it was part of the culture maybe there would be. Also, technology may have a role in this also - if no one has to actually carry the children, the second generation could be more willing.
The whole point is that this happens all the time, but it's always seen as a break from the norm, not the norm. What if we just embraced it?
The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason.
Again, I know this doesn't really work out, but it's a thought I've always had.
Instead of being about career development, it's been about specializing in hunter/gatherer stuff while still able bodied.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/grandmothers-a...
Iirc that's at least partly due to estrogen & other female hormones. They have I think anti-infection or anti-cancer properties. (Though if your comment was from an evolutionary perspective that would make sense.)
Parents want to become grandparents after having the experience of being parents. If you cut the "being parents" out of that cycle, why would you even want grand kids? And having been parents prepares grandparents to step in if needed. If you skip the parenting step, why would they be any better at it just because they're 20 years older?
Also, frankly, infants are hard. They're great when you can give them back. But the loss of sleep and everything is something that does not go well with being in your 40s and beyond. It's hard at any age, but doubly so later in life.
All that said, it'd be great if society placed more emphasis on extended family involvement and if we start to really embrace remote work that might be more possible. (e.g., stop making people move thousands of miles away from their families just for jobs...) But accelerating child-having just for the sake of great-grandparents... bad idea, even leaving aside the ethics.
Honestly, they are as difficult as you want them to be. Some parents stress way to much about them hurting themselves in the process.
If you take everything in moderation, they are not that bad at all. There will be a few bad days ofc, but at large my kids are the best thing that happened to me, and I have two at the same age.
If they're just not well off financially I'd see your idea happen (but then, we already see grand parents giving a hand financially in these kind of circumstances)
But if they're not ready mentally, there would be mountains of issues with their relationship with their child. For instance, do they even fully understand it's their child under their responsibility ? Can they continue raising their child when the grand parents can't anymore ? How well will they take it if suddenly they have to give up important things to completely focus on the kid(s) ? On the other hand will they be able to step in if the grand parents aren't fit for that ? etc.
I think it would work better if parents give it a fair try, but end up being inept and have the grandparents step in. Giving up from the start would be a worse path IMHO.
I don't know if I'm a suitable person, but having a kid sure pushed me out of my boundaries pretty far, in every possible direction.
I mean, putting aside the other good comments this has received, why are the kids not ready? Because if I look around at myself and my peers, I see a lot of people who absolutely want kids but feel they can't have them, for a number of reasons, but not unimportant reasons:
- A lot of people are delaying because they don't feel financially stable enough, because of the increasing costs of lifes essentials, not the least of which is housing, and/or student loan debt which was foisted on them by the selfish decisions of the aforementioned grandparents.
- Tons of people are avoiding kids because they don't want to bring them into a world as unstable as ours, that instability expressed as some combination of: our ever worsening biosphere and the long-term threats of climate change, the aforementioned everything-getting-more-expensive-all-the-time while wages continue stagnating, the political instability with micro-wars playing out all over the place, the economic precarity as our system continues enabling bad actors, the social instability caused by deepening political divides and extremisms literally everywhere over what would otherwise be such benign things, and for flavor, a few things that absolutely deserve extremist responses...
Like, one of the first things that goes away when an animal population is stressed on a macro-scale is reproduction. It seems to me if we want to promote reproduction again, we need to make our world less... awful? Like by and large, my life is great, but I'm child-free and that decision was informed partly by the fact that I have to meter my intake of global news lest I become so depressed I can't function, and aside of that, I started making six figures 2 years ago which is legitimately a thing I never thought would happen, and yet in those subsequent 2 years I have never felt poorer because every last thing costs more now than it ever has, even asking my mother.
I think it's impossible to divorce a discussion like this from the fact that there are absolutely pages upon pages of good, rational, logical reasons one can write to not have children and commensurate with that fact, we see birth rates plummeting all over the place.
That's an interesting choice of worlds, I'd just call them wars, maybe proxy wars. Some of them look like candidates for what future historians might call the early conflicts of WW3. There's also lot of noise about declaring war on China too, which honestly sounds like a bad idea, and the grievances I've seen range from fake to you're-doing-the-same-thing and what's left is not really worth fighting a war over.
From what I've seen, the loudest proponents demanding everyone have more kids are also the worst offenders in making the world a worse place to be a new kid or a new parent.
But yeah, this feels distinctly like the period of history right before maps get covered in flags and arrows and it's not a good vibe.
I remember thinking about that in the street, and then be overtaken by a rom family, the father pushing the kids in a shopping cart and the mother walking alongside.
What happens all the time is an adult raising their our children and then later on raising their grandchildren. But what you’re suggesting is having old people with zero experience raising anyone taking care of their grandchildren. I don’t quite see that as a clearcut case of success.
Now... 20 years later, those children have kids and hand them off to their biological parents who ... have no experience raising children. Also, which grandparents? Mom's or dad's?
My understanding is that OP is proposing that since the grandparents would be raising the kids, this would incentivize people to have kids much younger, e.g. in their early 20s, or even teens.
So the “grandparents” would be in their early/mid 40s, or even late 30s.
Definitely not “old people”.
And zero experience parenting, yes (just like any new parent today), but definitely more life experience, and likely more mature.
Not saying I’d advocate for this — I think there are still some flaws with this — but an interesting hypothetical that’s fun to discuss.
That way, embryos would only be created after the death of both biological parents, which would give you whole lives to look at to decide if you wanted these persons to reproduce.
That would open the way to some interesting possibilities in directing human evolution while opening a whole new world of horrific abuse and creative eugenics.
https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/18/your-real-biological-clock-i...
> If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
Obviously you don’t have forever to do this.
The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their life. It's something you have to experience firsthand to understand. That's why social norms and defaults are so important here.
> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
I'm sure it is meaningful, but not everyone is willing or able to take on the stress of raising children. Seemingly less and less are as fertility declines across developed (and even developing) world. And you can say they don't need much, but without rigorous education, their future looks pretty grim to me. Won't you encourage your kids to attend the best college they can?
And despite what they may say to surveys like this, it's pretty difficult to find parents who are willing to admit they wish they hadn't had kids. Most consider their family the most important aspect of their lives.
More importantly, "happiness" is a poor metric to optimize one's life around, and hardly anyone does. Most people search for purpose and meaning, which children supply in spades.
I think that happiness probably includes meaning for a lot of people and furthermore it’s a hard sell telling them that they shouldn’t want to be happy.
I’d also turn around the statement about parents who wish they hadn’t had kids (though I did at one point accidentally date a woman who was married with children who clearly didn’t want any of that) to say that I also suspect that those who avoided having children on purpose also rarely regret that decision; some people are just different ultimately I suppose.
I doubt you would say woah woah there people are sleeping on Guatemala, does being childfree get the same treatment?
But… you can give them an even better quality of life if you have wealth.
Yes I’m aware that spoiled rich brats are a thing.
There are plenty of people out there who can't afford to live in anything larger than a one-bedroom apartment, who can't afford to clothe their children, or who can't even afford to feed them. Telling them to have kids because they are "resilient" and parenthood is "meaningful" isn't very helpful - it's far better to wait a few years until they're financially stable. A parent's love can't fully compensate for childhood poverty trauma.
And really, it's not the actual poor who are delaying having kids into their mid-30s: it's the college educated who make way, way more money than them!
I 100% accept this idea. Most of my ancestors lived the miserable, short lives of impoverished alcoholics. They and their children absolutely experienced trauma from their miserable hunger and disease-ridden lives.
If I can’t see myself giving my child a good life I’m more than happy to wait until I’m able to. Bringing a child into the world isn’t an intrinsic moral good.
In contrast, you go back 150 years, and class mobility was for the cut-throated, extremely ambitious entrepreneurs. The idea of "get a better paying job working for someone else and fundamentally change my social standing" was laughable. Go back any much further than that, and socioeconomic class was basically immutable.
The even more wealthy one marry and have kids right out of college. Delegate child-caring to grand-parent, and only then start working for their career.
For most of the human population, this has genuinely been the case. Most of South/East Asian and African adults are barely 1-2 generations of separation from living in poverty. Most of them are very familiar with the struggle of giving kids a good life in much worse poverty than that experienced in much of the West, and would very much rather their grandkids not go through the same thing.
Parenthood is very obviously not meaningful to every parent's life. There are plenty of people that just don't make good parents (and who may never make good parents). Saying "you should have kids because of how meaningful it will be!" is a bad thing to say to a narcissist or someone that's overly self involved. Kids need time, attention, and love. Not everyone can or wants to give that. Yes it's sad, yes it's wrong, but it's also a fact.
I have family members in this boat, the kids greatly suffer as a result.
Social norms and defaults have a tendency to shame people into bad positions. Sure, some may benefit, but others will flounder and take their kids/family down with them.
It is also hard to convey, how hard it can be, making the transition from only taking care of yourself, to also being 100% responsible for someone else. Combine that with little sleep and relationships that were not working very good before and it is no wonder so many children end up in foster homes, or with traumatic experiences of neverending fights of their parents.
So no, the conditions don't need to be perfect, they never will be. But you have to have some stable base. And consensus with the partner on how to raise a child. Otherwise parenting won't be meaningful, but hell on earth for everyone involved.
I think that would be a more constructive conversation than the one people in my cohort of people with kids wants to have.
Yup. And it takes 2 to feel ready and to be sure, to do it together. At least for some time, even though a divorce is not the end of the world, if done right (very rare), but it can be for the children, if it means war between the parents and using the children as a weapon to hurt the other side. That is way too common.
So yes, having kids can be awesome and meaningful. But it is a very serious commitment, maybe the most serious there is, where my advice would be, don't do it, if you don't feel ready.
(I felt ready, but it was and still is very very tough at times)
And yes, parenthood is hard, it's tough, you can focus on that, but you could also focus on how meaningful it is.
I would never push parenthood on anyone, I understand it's a personal choice. Honestly though, I just feel sad about people missing out, so very often due to misconceptions.
Looking around, it really isn't with many of the parents I know. There are just so many things one can disagree about. Food choices alone are very hard for some. Sugar or not, how much, and vegan diet or not, .. (We try to be as pragmatic as possible, as healthy as possible, but not dogmatic). Then, is it ok to play with toy weapons, what movies to watch at what age, how much screen time at all, ...
With my partner we were quite clear how to do it in theory before. But in reality there are many things we disagree - and then it is an art, to find a consensus about it, while the kids are watching. Otherwise it is an invitation for them for learning how to manipulate.
So good for you, if it was quite easy for you. For many it isn't for various reasons. So some probably just should have the courage to go with it, before they are too old. For others it might be better to wait.
But then again, the points you bring up, I'd argue it's quite difficult to figure all that out before having a kid. Everything I said I meant as having in common some general guidelines and a direction, not every specific detail.
Having a shared, defined direction will also help you in settling all the "smaller" disagreements, but I guess my reaction comes from seeing many couples that don't have that general direction figured out yet, i.e. getting married and suddenly husband finds out wife is not that keen about having kids.
Yes, stuff like this. It seems many people avoid topics that could be uncomfortable, so rather smile and go along and hope for the best ... until reality hits them hard. And then some decide to do stupid scheming how to still have babies. And this is then a really bad foundation.
I 100% believe you, but at the same time there are a lot of us out there that don't feel like we're missing anything of that sort from our lives.
On the contrary, if I was to have children, I would have to put a whole lot of faith in my biological wiring for parental love and fulfilment overcoming the stresses, worries, and relationship strains any parent will tell you is the norm.
As I said in other comments, I'd never push anyone on such a personal topic, but I'll never forget how, right after my first was born, I simply wished parenthood on everyone.
I know I would not be a good parent. I know I would resent the kid. It is bizarre to me too when someone who is married says this. Marriage isn't happening either for me so I 100% would be paying child support to a woman I absolutely resent too.
On the contrary, I think people who have children can not imagine the freedom that you have with never having children after 40. Children cost a fortune in currency and opportunity cost. I don't have to help with home work, pay for someone's college, pretend to have fun at some boring kids baseball game. Most of all though I have to live my dreams myself because there is no kid to live them through instead.
There is simply no way I would have lived the life I have if I had children. The valuation between the two situations isn't even close in my mind. I suspect there is a huge amount of coping and denial on the part of parents because once the kid is on its way, what else are you going to do?
Why does that even need to be conveyed? Whether you have kids or not is none of my business, and vice versa. If anything, the more I hear some variant of "maek keedz und haev famili" like some broken record the more I find the notion preposterous.
Just leave everyone to their devices. Those who want or are interested in kids will have them and those who don't won't, regardless what anyone feels obliged to tell them.
As for me personally? I consider the notion of romantic love a mental illness. I find the concept of marriage to be fundamental violations of an individual's human rights. I find the proposal of continuing my bloodline, and more broadly the human race, without value. I am happy to be single and without issue until my dying breath and I certainly couldn't care less what others do in their bedroom, so kindly take your high horse and please leave for greener pastures.
I've seen how my sibling changed upon starting a family, I've seen how my PhD advisor proudly talks about every little thing his kids do.
The value it gives them is obvious, but that's just more reason not to irresponsibly pop put a baby when I barely make enough to support myself, when I don't know if I'll stay in the country I'm in, when I've had very little time being mature enough to know if my partner is someone with whom I can expect to provide a good environment for at least 18 years.
Having a child may be meaningful to a parent, but it is not at all true that applies to all childless people. Continuing to insist on that anyway is just showing sheer disregard for the well-being of a child born to parents who turn out to not actually be all that concerned about parenthood.
But you do need material wealth to launch them smoothly (a.k.a. minimize their college debt, so they aren't as financially disincentivized to make you grandchildren). A different metric from happy childhood or not.
So, in reality, nothing’s ever just sitting still, everything’s always moving at speed c. You can't just "stop". We just have to choose how we’re moving that speed around—through the x, y, z, or t direction.
It's obviously both?
I agree sentimentally that people tend to overly avoid commitment and don’t really think about these things, but for me I don’t think it was an unfair trade.
My wife's ancestors had kids at younger ages, and my ancestors had kids at later ages. Her grandparents are all still alive, mine have all been gone for more than ten years.
My spouse and I are on track to have kids in our mid/late 30s. My wife's parents are both in their mid 50s, and realistically they'll probably have 20 years of overlap with our children.
My parents, though, are in their mid 70s. I have to hope they have at least another 10 years of good health so that they can forge a bond with our children. Even with good health, though, the way a 75-year old interacts with a young kid is going to be very different from the way a 55-year old does.
I made the same choice as my parents and will likely face the same future, where I may have little or no overlap with my grandchildren. Since my generation has delayed childbearing for so long, I think this is something we'll see largely as a mistake in about 20-30 years.
My wife was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, we were able to travel the world and do things she wouldn’t be able to do had we had kids right away and tried to do when we were 40. Is that worth having 15 years less with our kids? I guess time will tell but I know either way we enjoy them every day as a home maker and work from home dad they get to enjoy us as young kids and we take them on all kinds of adventures since I work in the late afternoon evening.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
> It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It's gotta be up there with, like, writing and fire, in terms of shaping the destiny of our species.
2. Consistent effectiveness.
3. Able to be unilaterally adopted by women without consent of men (aside from systemic legal prohibition).
The pill, to a greater degree than any other contraceptive, enables the people who are most responsible for the consequences of pregnancy to have the most control over pregnancy.
But farming is an incredibly long series of incremental improvements since prehistoric times: agriculture, selective breeding, crop rotation, etc.
The pill was like a technological and societal step function.
[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
For example, for Ancient Rome it says “ while the ~50% reaching age 10 could expect another 40 years of life”.
But if 50% reaches an average age of, say 2, assuming it’s right skewed for those who died before 10; then an average life expectancy of 50 for the remainder means the average life expectancy overall just 26. That squares with the numbers stated I suppose.
Before the divorce, I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea... but I am a lot more open minded and less critical. Life is so unique and never goes according to plan. I wouldn't recommend my exact life to anyone as it has its own unique and undesirable difficulties. When my own children grow up, I will strongly recommend against rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in place.
My kids know and love their grandparents. They know their great grandparents. I am prepared physically and mentally for 2 more kids (yes I know, but I think I know better than I did at 19), but I cannot imagine doing the whole baby thing in my mid 30s or early 40s... I think my current age is a good time to just get it all out of the way. I like to think of it as delayed gratification and that having adult children at a relatively young age is a huge blessing. Let's see how it goes.
> I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea... ... Life is so unique and never goes according to plan ... rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in place
Among other reasons, social media can suddenly change a person in very unexpected ways at an unexpected pace.
Ppl are more connected to the infinite-scroll than ever before, more than to other ppl around them. It is no longer even our friends we watch and envy - its all "influencer" content.
But why can't we focus on the enormous positive effect of girls having the option to fully mature into women before bearing their children?
Maybe instead of focusing what we lose with the absence of great-grandmothers, we should focus on what we gain with the decline of girl-mothers.
It’s talked about a lot. Not as much as it used to be, but that’s because it’s become common sense. People don’t talk about common sense consensus positions.
But good things can have bad side effects, and people can be so happy about the good thing, they don’t see the bad thing.
Talk about the advantages of delayed child bearing all you want, but it won’t be a particularly original conversation.
But why? If we’re serious about extending lifespans the average age of parents should be going up. People should be using their younger years to establish themselves in society and build a sustainable lifestyle. By the time you are 40, the costs and demands of a small child should be effortless, easily solved with the riches you’ve accumulated. By the time you hit 60s, your child is graduating college and getting on with life. If you’re lucky maybe you live to 90 and even see them reach well into middle age. This doesn’t sound like a bad timeline.
When you're born and you have parents that are 20 versus 40, that is a dramatically different situation. Likewise if you have grandparents that are 50-60 versus 70 or already dead. Sure, more lifespan means you'll have more years together but you're completely dismissing the quality of those years.
I feel the same way about relationships. Some people willingly only seriously settle in their mid 30s or even later. That means you did not share the other person's most energetic, adventurous, and exciting life phase. You're 40 and have zero shared history together, no stories, nothing. But hey, you're finally "comfortable".
Fuck comfortable. The clock is ticking, hurry the hell up. You're wasting the defining and most valuable years of your life.
A great grandmother to my children died last year. Her oldest great grandchild at the time was 13. She missed meeting the youngest by a couple of months.
This same oldest great grandchild also has a living great grandmother still, and one that died in 2003 and one that died in 2005. So even within the same family, and even for the same person, the experience of having a great grandmother can be quite different.
In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shrinking-family-...
Another thing to keep in mind: there is a lot of variability depending on the community and social standards. People in Utah will have a different experience than folks in the Bay Area. In rural northern New York and Ohio, the Amish population has exploded with couples marrying in their early 20s and families typically having at least 5 or 6 kids, sometimes more than 10.
My spouse had our kids in her late 30s, but they have no first cousins on either of the side of the family (of the 6 people in our generation, we're the only two who had kids). Of all of our kids' dozens of friends growing up, only one had more than two siblings and they were an immigrant family.
OTOH, my wife works with people who had kids in their late teens and early 20s and are grandparents by the age of 40, and that's typical in the community.
In my case, my grandfather did become a great grandfather, even though he, my parents and my sister all had children pretty late. He just lived a very long time.
Thinking about it even more, the women on that side of my family also had no problem having kids into their 40's.
If my kids have kids the same time I did, as do those kids, then within the expected Asian male lifespan I should see at least one and hopefully two great grands.
I agree, today's society in many places can make it very hard for young people to start a family.
my grandparents were in the generation that had lots of kids, which leads to lots of grandkids. that meant that family gatherings were huge crowds where they served as a figureheads and i didn't really develop a one-on-one relationship with them.
but when i look just one generation removed, i see smaller family sizes so grandparents have far fewer grandkids. and they're developing actual relationships with their grandchildren in a completely different way.
Apparently two or more independent variables create a paradox.
All the more, great-grandmothers always had far less chance to die early by being turned into a cannon fodder or driven to suicide through toxic masculinity social pressure (though it’s not like having more chance to be raped by invaders or beaten/abused/repudiated by your own relatives was much more fun). Still to this days, on the average women have generally a higher life expectancy in most countries.
I didn't have my first child until I was almost 40, and my grandmother on my father's side died the week we were going to tell everyone that we were having a kid. My other three grandparents all died in the 1990's.
Also, many of my cousins had kids before they were 20, some of them became grandparents before I even became a parent. And likewise, I ended up with aunts/uncles that became great-grandparents before my dad became a grandparent.
My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's parents died when I was around 10 years old. With the exception of my great-grandfather, my other great-grandparents died in the 1940s and '50s. They barely got to know their own grandchildren before they passed.
My parents were unusual for their generation in that they waited until their mid 30s to start having kids (despite having been married for 9 years already). On my dad's side, he was the final child of my grandmother's third marriage; she was 42 when my dad was born (again, unusual for the time).
No real point to this post, I guess. I just think it's interesting that people's experiences can differ so much. I only knew half of my grandparents, and even then only as a child; the idea of people being able to meet their great-grandparents wasn't even something I ever considered when I was younger. I don't recall for sure, but I don't think many if any of my grade-school friends had great-grandparents around either. I've always had a very small extended family, and hearing stories from friends as a kid about family gatherings always made me feel like I was missing out.
Can you give a few examples? I only see upsides.
Yes, correlation is not causation, but that correlation is interesting.
There’s a 2017 study that older parents produce kids with a higher Geek Index —
https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2017125
Seems “truthy” to me.
Yes.
> This seems to be driving us to extinction as a species
No.
There are more people alive now than there ever has been. Ever.
This will continue until at least 2100 when numbers may finally peak and then fall.
When human populations numbers fall there is no sane reason to think that they will plummet to zero.
It is far more likely numbers will decrease to the mid 10 billions and more or less stabilise.
That's due to the higher fertility rate of countries like Niger, Angola etc which far outpace the declining rates of most of the rest of the world like China, Russia, Europe, Japan, South Corea, USA, etc.
Choice?
I was adopted by older parents, in their mid-40s when I was adopted around 2 years old. They were the "youngsters" in their families, so it meant I was exceedingly young compared to my cousins and other relatives.
Fast forward a few decades and my adoptive parents are deceased, and we have lost touch with the few relatives I have. My wife is in a similar situation.
We adopted two older children, 7 and 3 at the time, when I was in my mid 40's. It has been great for us and for the kids, a challenge and an adventure, but the biggest miss is lack of family. We have no grand parents to fall back on, let alone great grand parents. It is incredibly difficult to raise kids without an extended family to help out. We manage, but boy do I envy those who have bigger families to lean into. Not to mention the network of cousins, etc that the kids can relate to.
I don't think that's the case: the shorter average life expectancy is due to infant and youth mortality. As long as you didn't die from what would nowadays be a preventable disease, people still got old: that's where the term "three score years and ten" comes from.
So I think there were probably many 70yo great grandparents.
Most of my (37) friends in Italy does not have children. Some of us are late children so the parents are between 70 and 80.
That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue such that you're lifting up those people and not punching down.
I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people.
There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and power.
And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone and everything.
There are of course altruistic people who are extremely wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-level, who's willing to do anything.
I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class while they exploit the lower class.
children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly.
on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.
The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents probably aren't going online to rant about it.
the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.
Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.
Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
I think this is a very important world view conflict.
Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out.
Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing.
Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.
Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal."
Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity.
For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.
Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem.
The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.
While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.
Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.
In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?
Of course it will continue to accelerate. There's a mechanism that causes this. Some conspiracy theorists mistake this for an active, purposeful goal, but it may be as simple as children growing up in environments where childlessness has become a norm, internalizing that same norm. Since there are fewer children with each successive generation, the norm is amplified for the next.
> In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.
There are some who seem to want to kill humanity. They don't come right out and say it, of course, that would sound weird and awkward. If you're oblivious to that widespread sentiment, they're perfectly ok with that. The curricula they design for your children in school will slowly be modified so that they aren't quite so fond of your Star Trek visions for the future.
How can anyone prove your intents if you fully conceal them?
That said, I do find your argument here pretty compelling. Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason, at the end of the day.
So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the same breath.
There is a desire that humanity go extinct. But this isn't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not actively working towards it, and they don't like to say it out loud.
They do design curricula (they're in positions where that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday, instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why, and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100 answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and there is no actual conspiracy.
If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out, rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple coordination can take place, they're all innocent. There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister mastermind.
Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it. People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak. Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple negation of that idea.
> the invention of fertilizer
Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.
While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....
Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing microbes are an emerging technology [4].
I am not convinced that we're all going to die.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2023/04/17/climate-tech-to-wat... [2] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/09/fertilizer-prices-... [3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/07/nutrient-challeng... [4] pivotbio.com
So that's not really a problem worth refuting.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying, 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive migration causing chaos in our current understanding of "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment and destruction of many of the world's great cities ... these are actual likely problems. The human race will still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?
Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to be underwater within their lifetime, if true?
Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of their own country above those of non-citizens.
According to the US Republican Party, the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone" ?
Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
You're losing credibility quickly
>the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
Okay, A. What's happening at the southern border isn't any more of an "invasion" than the J6 riots. If only 1/500 people in your "invasion" even has a firearm, let alone training with it, it ain't much of an invasion.
B. What's happening at the southern border has absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change, it's strictly economic.
>What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone"?
What if there were some kind of relatively safe, yet impassable barrier? The kind that doesn't exercise force against anyone, ever. One that's so safe that the only people who get injured by it are those stupid enough to delibarately decide to try to scale it, while being incompetent enough to be incapable of doing so safely. Perhaps one that was tall enough that it couldn't be scaled by 20 or 40 foot ladders? Besides, this is a ridiculous question. Even under the president with the highest amount of illegal immigration in US history, Joe Biden (10,000,000 and counting!), we barely hit a tenth of that figure across 3.5 years.
Sadly, there's just no way we're gonna be able to afford such a barrier. That would have to cost what, $10bn? $50bn? Except that's still less than we've spent securing the border of a country on the other side of the planet that almost no Americans have any real, significant, substantial interests in (besides Hunter Biden, of course, who made millions of dollars per year as a Ukrainian energy executive thanks to his deep expertise and demonstrated thought leadership in the hydrocarbon exploration and extraction business... /s)
>Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
No, what I'm asserting is that the people screeching about the oceans rising and the sky falling are the same ones buying up all the properties being sold by the people who are afraid of oceans rising. It's a racket.
The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO it.
Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong ones.
Just a sidenote, I know.
All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to say.
Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds are overfished.
(1) these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill
My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?
Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?
The thing with statistics, is that you have to gather data which have some consistency before you apply any statistics tool and try to draw some conclusions.
We can agree that any individual is more than the indefinitely various number of categories under which we can label this individual, but at the end of the day there only a limited amount of data we actually really have on any person that ever existed, and even less consistent set of data other many people under any category we can think of.
The industrial revolution shook things up.
I'm not sure you're paying much attention to politics, but there are massive movements that want exactly that, if not to drag us back to the past kicking and screaming.
I think the premise of we are like our parents is actually incorrect.... Our parents are like our culture would be the more correct assessment. In conservative more hierarchy based cultures you're much more likely to be like your parents, because if you are not you'll be shunned or worse.
Western culture in general has more of a "make your own path" ideology that increases the chances you'll be different from your parents.
Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of their sins solely from their decision to not have kids?
Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding among us?
“Classist” is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by definition classist.
There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30.
Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this figure.
It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir....
The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either.
So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the future, though of course there still will be some.
However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries.
On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago.
That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population.
This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
- Jesus
We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me. It was funny and well made, but negligently validates emotional ignorance.
So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win.
In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.
On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...
Yep, that's 5 generations at once. That particular sub-branch has children later so they are a full generation ahead of my own branch, so I've told.
My great-grandfather is still alive and turned 100 last year. Since I'm already much older than any of my progenitors when they had their children, even if I live to his age it is unlikely I'll get to spend time with my own great-great-grandchildren.
One of the problems with capitalism is that the highest achieving people (somewhat likely the actual "fittest" people in terms of genetic selection) don't have kids until they are much later, if at all. I don't want this to get too elitist, but this country (actually the entire first world aside from France) needs to figure out how to incentivize productive people to have kids.
I always thought what we should do with the people in retirement for longer and longer periods of time is encourage them to provide some child care, even if it isn't their own. Especially in some countries (Japan, holy shit South Korea) that really are imbalanced.
Although, tangentially, I think South Korea will solve its demographic bomb by toppling North Korea's government and immigrating a massive number of shellshocked North Koreans.
* May you live to see seven generations *
Which I took as mean grandparents to grandkids (with one "great" on either side)
Good luck all
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.
I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.
Much clearer!
0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.
You must be joking, right?
my grandmother became a grandma to my cousin at 45
I kind of enjoyed the riddle.
I'd just move the parenthetical to a separate sentence, or leave it out.
But this comment is exactly what I expected from HN.