"Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar."
No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.