i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
You must have had a very boring time when you were young. It is very sad.
The personal attack is immature. Grow up champ, you'll be happier!
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
[edit to add this: I am talking from experience, it seems you are talking from hearsay]
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
And according to your article, this is almost exclusively a problem with the elderly:
> Those aged 85 and older die from malnutrition at a rate about 60 times higher than the rest of the American population, with deaths in that group increasing about twice as fast.
(Of course, I'd expect those aged over 85 to be dying at a much higher rate from _most_ causes.)
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.
When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
I agree with you.
Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!
Super happy I had so much life experience, not wanting to go out and party etc.
Trying to keep up with her snowboarding and biking and climbing and hiking and all the rest through her teen years is going to be a great motivator to stay fit and strong.