So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
The incentives just aren't there.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
An early form of birth control in my home country was naming your baby Enough (Dosta). Not very efficient, obviously.
edit: it seems this was mostly used for breaking a streak of female babies (the name is feminine). but also in general.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
Usually disappeared. Once DNA tests were invented, it became straighforward to go after them. Underrated breakthrough to support children and single mothers.
my point is to support couples who actually want to be together to build a family. getting pregnant from a guy you messed around with is not a family. the goal is to prevent unwanted pregnancies by making it easier to have wanted ones in a supportive environment. hunting down a guy who didn't mean to get you pregnant after it happens unintentionally doesn't accomplish that.
Is it possible this is actually a better model than the nuclear family?
To a limited extent, the school system itself is how we collectively care for the next generation. How far can it be pushed in the direction you ask about?
the two main benefits are that parents get to know each other better, just like they would in a village, instead of being anonymous like we are most of the time, barely knowing who our neighbors are. and the sharing of resources. my dad loved books and music. i basically grew up in a library. it was nice when i had to make a school report that required some research, but it would not have hurt if those books would have been shared with a lot more people. ok, we have public libraries too, but you get the idea. by sharing resources you are able to get a lot more things that you would not be able to get if you lived alone.
Not saying it can't be done, only that this is harder than the Nike slogan (just do it).
can you share more about the spaces where you lived?
saluton... ;-)
The first few places were all at university: shared kitchen, shared laundry facilities, etc. and most had shared showers.
After I graduated, one of my partners was living in a HMO, I can't find any pics, but if you imagine a dozen big private rooms surrounding a central living area, a bunch of normal sized shower rooms also attached to it, and also a big communal kitchen with enough cupboard space for everyone to have their own.
More recently, though still 8 years ago, an older family member got Alzheimer's and both I and my brother wanted to help look after her, which ended up overcrowding the place with a normal UK semi-detached home having me, them, and my brother's whole family living in it while the builders slowly converted the garage into a granny annex for her, with its own min-kitchen and bathroom; by the time the annex was ready, we were all too stressed out and I made the move to Germany that I'd delayed in order to help look after her.
> saluton... ;-)
Ankaŭ Saluton! Mi ĝojas, ke iu legas mian uzantoprofilon ^_^;
In the US, there is ~$115 billion worth of child support debt outstanding. Even with DNA testing, we’re not going after the folks who aren’t supporting their offspring, mostly because they are low income and have nothing to take to satisfy these debts.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-support-statistics
> Yet, 2020–2022 data in the KIDS COUNT® Data Center reveal that just 23% of U.S. female-headed families reported receiving any amount of child support during the previous year (down from 26% in 2018–2020). Female-headed families refer to unmarried women living with one or more of their own children under age 18, which may include stepchildren and adopted children.
> One in three kids — nearly 24 million kids total — lives with a single parent, mostly single moms. In fact, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, of the 10.9 million one-parent families with children under age 18, 80% were headed by a mother. This makes women the more frequent custodial parent and the majority of those who need child support.
While fertility rates are down, roughly 40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute). There is still much work to do to drive down the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
Don't read me wrong, I'm not stating that the current economic/social pressure is good at producing healthy/happy parents/families, it just doesn't seem good either to turn teenagers into parents. The "sweet spot" probably lies in between, and what you say is very much an appeal to extremes.
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
which is another approach. how about for each child you get automatically accounted a number of years of payments as if you had earned money. if it takes 30 years of work to earn enough for a decent pension, and every child counts for 5 years then 3 children would allow you to get the same pension with only 15 years of work. how is that?
btw, the global infertility rate is 5%. the global disability rate is 10%. those people are also affected by not being able to work. in other words, 15% of the population are unable to fully contribute to pension funds. where a full contribution means work and having children. but making children a pension contribution actually helps a number of disabled who are still able to have children. so now they are able to contribute more than they would if we ignored children as a contribution.
seriously, this constant shooting down of ideas just because it appears that one group is disadvantaged is tiring. try thinking a bit more creatively and help come up with a solution.
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.