Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jobs.
Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"?
Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them.
Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.
Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
Global fertility rate is dropping so depending on other countries sending new immigrants is risky.
US below replament rate: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-birt...
Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975.
PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.
No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
You can't be sure if you'll be okay, but if you already know that you definitely won't be okay - well, then you probably can't afford to have kids.
This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things.
The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
I assume you mean poverty? The parent having money is associated with kids having less money later in life, but it's not the cause of it.
If you want them to do things they enjoy give them skills and confidence. If you give them money instead you do them harm.
> I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
You can't. It's a reality of humanity that giving people things too easily leads to misery. People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them. If you are willing to learn from the replies you got then you'll do fine.
I would guess this is not true on average. If anything, I would guess the opposite: the Waltons, Kochs, Kennedys, etc., who inherited their money and are able to do whatever kind of bullshit they want with it, are happier.
When you have money, you can pursue anything you want indefinitely. Even if it takes you 20 years to become a great painter or writer or bass guitarist, there's no pressure along the way to quit and get a job as a barrista to pay rent.
>I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them.
You have good perception, that's definitely part of it :)
Honestly, I never remember caring whatsoever as a child whether or not my parents spent time with me. I didn't have anything in common with them anyways. A credit card and a new Benz on my 16th birthday, however, would have completely changed my memories of what could have been the best years of my life but which were instead wasted indoors on the internet because I couldn't afford to do anything else.
Other people having children is actually a vital service to the rest of society. Or at least those of us hoping to live for at least another 30-40 years, which will require a younger generation to provide the goods and services we will need to stay alive.
This point seems to be missed by a lot of libertarians (who are frequently childless single young men) in their anger about parents getting support from the government.
People really need to start getting married earlier. If you marry in your early twenties having a child at that time is not a problem, even if you don't have tons of savings yet.
And aside from the biology of having a child late, simply raising a child is much harder when you are older (late thirties), because your energy level really starts diverging from theirs. (Obviously you can make it work, I'm only saying it gets harder.)
My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
Sometimes, but sperm quality declines, leading to more birth defects and it takes longer to succeed. And a 70 year old is simply not a suitable father.
I assume you were planning a may/cecember marriage? Which is pretty cruel to the wife, and to the kids who will loose their father MUCH too early.
Kids need their father very much in their 30's. If you are waiting long enough that you are dead, or even just declined you are not doing well by them.
> I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
You don't even have kids and already you hate them?
> My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
OK, now you REALLY make no sense. A sentence before you want to give them a horrible childhood (using nannies too much leads to attachment issues, and various disorders).
And now you want to do better?
I have a feeling you have no idea whatsoever about what children actually need out of childhood. It's not money. It's love, attention, and approval. Having lots of money is detrimental to all of them.
And your standard is ridiculous anyway - if every generation refused to have kids until they could do it "better" no one at all would have kids.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?
No, it's inflicted by a broken society. In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living. This allows both a flexible economic system (entrepreneurship, job-changing, etc.) and family life to coexist: your company going bankrupt does not mean your kid can't attend school or eat. The American solution seems to be that people should have a corporate job for life with the old IBM or Amoco, which provides both ultra-stable employment and benefits (company-provided childcare, parental leave, health insurance, etc.) and only those people are "deserving" of having kids.
No, it's not. The broken society didn't make the woman pregnant and give birth. Also, 'broken' sounds really melodramatic.
"In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living."
Is having and maintaining a Ferrari a basic standard of living? No? Well, that's how expensive kids are, no, they're even more expensive. That is a very ambitious basic standard you're setting here. Obviously, this is going to cost uninvolved people heaps of money just because everyone thinks they are entitled to make as many children as they want regardless of their ability to support them. It's a huge burden on everyone else's back. The pinnacle of selfishness.
I didn't have children until my 40's (admittedly, that's probably kind of too late). Why? Because I wanted to have a stable marital and financial situation in place for them. If you have no husband and no job, you shouldn't be having children just barely out of your teenage years. Children don't happen by "accident".
And you're very right, nowadays people feel that they're entitled to a Ferrari just for being alive. Our society sure has changed in recent decades.
Bah. Watch me get voted down along with you. I don't care. It needs to be said.
If so, you grew up with enormous privilege. Lots of people are born into situations where none of that is true. Some truly exceptional folks are born without any of that privilege, make what we consider to be mistakes in family planning, before learning any of that, and still strive to make their lives better. I for one would like there to be resources available to help them escape that brutal cycle.
Saying that it is self-inflicted shows a gross myopia about how much of the world lives and implying that the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us can coerce us into doing anything is laughable.
Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job.
This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants.
Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care.
So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.
Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).
And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
Modern US society expects you to study, work and save until you are 30 to 40 before having kids (internet boy moguls aside).
Soo... Why is autism on the rise?
I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right.
What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
I actually believe as a society we should be okay supporting them. But there's a caveat. The preventative measures in place we currently have in society are not working because, IMHO, we waste too much money in WarOnDrugs and questionable wars. If we could stop doing that and ramp up the education & availabilty of birthcontrol in lower income areas, I bet there wouldn't be that many of them falling through the cracks(canyons really) in the system and ending up appearing to us as being irresponsible burdens. It would be a nice small number of people that we could handle.
If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.
But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
It is indeed very tricky, better men than me have argued back and forth:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/
It seems that I'll have to agree with you and smtddr, then, that it is a right.
Once the child is born, it should be accorded all the human rights... and that's where we run into trouble.
Some interpretations of the "right to life" include the "right to survival",
http://www.hrea.org/index.php?base_id=159
I'm probably missing the right bibliography, if someone can point me to which books I should read, I would be very grateful :)
The endless debate cycle between disaffected and disenfranchised libertarians covers the topic of human rights quite often. Most of us agree that the UN declaration is not a viable framework, because some of the enumerated rights imply that someone, somewhere, would necessarily be impressed into compulsory service to enforce them. For example, a right to adequate medical care implies that someone must become a physician and supply that care, possibly without pay. The right to food implies that someone must farm it, possibly without pay.
Even the experts can make mistakes.
So rather than read what others have said on the topic, it may be better for you to simply think it out for yourself and see what you come up with. Ideally, you will come up with a set of principles that are unambiguous, self-consistent, and able to serve as the foundation for a civilized society. It's much harder than it sounds. Good luck.
The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff.
And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.
Life is unpredictable.
You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse).
In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)
Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.