141–150 of 211 posts
As of this post, three of the 20 comments on this story conjecture that obesity plays some role, and a full half of the comments are on subthreads discussing this hypothesis. Interesting because I've never heard this hypothesis before and other online discussion of this article does not mention obesity.
This article doesn't mention the religious communities where young people commonly marry and start having children before age 20. A friend of mine grew up in one such fundamentalist community in rural Iowa; she married at 20, but some of her peers were already moms by that age. I wonder whether they include this type of parent in the statistics, or are they only talking about unwed mothers here? There seem to be a lo…
I'm not so sure: I feel like I wouldn't have been mature enough to raise children correctly in my twenties.. IMHO the ideal age for raising children is your 30s: not only you're mature and young enough but if your parents had you in their 30s, they can also help raising the children especially if they just retired: win-win.
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Didn't freakonomics write about the reverse relationship? Contraceptives helped reduce unwanted pregnancies... unwanted pregnancies turn in to unwanted babies/children that eventually have a higher probability of turning into criminals.
Other studies later refuted it and attributed the drop in violent crime to phasing out of leaded gasoline.
"The first is the most important and may be obvious: Today's teens enjoy better access to contraception and more convenient contraception than their predecessors, and more of them are taking advantage of innovations like long-acting injectable and implantable methods that can last years over a daily birth control pill. But the second cause is something that goes against the conventional wisdom. It's that teens -- des…
How much actual evidence is there that this has anything to do with contraception? I'm getting old now, and from what I can tell contraception was just as available when I was a teen as it is now.
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I'm 33 and grew up in the Bible belt. Looking back, I'm shocked at how good my Sex Ed was. We were taught that abstinence was the only 100% effective choice, but also about condoms and birth control pills, as well as things like the sponge (which was not recommended, but still covered) and long term hormonal implants. The biggest misinformation we were given was stuff that was genuinely believed then (and still belie…
I'm 34, and was in a religious, conservative, school. They did one sex ed class (a single one hour, one off thing). In it they mentioned how condoms fail a majority of the time, that you could get pregnant from oral sex (that semen could leak from the digestive tract to reproductive), and that mutual masturbation could also cause pregnancy (as in a guy could ejaculate in just the right way). It's like they went out o…
I'm not as on top of modern psychology as I'd like to be, so I'd love to see a formal study on the subject, but I'm pretty confident that most people's decisions are guided by the belief (subconscious or otherwise) that the end justifies the means.
Of course there are also some really stupid people out there. One of my earliest memories is of debating my elementary science teacher, who insisted that NASA had a room with perfect vacuum for gravity free training (her position being that air pressure and gravity were the same thing).
The thing that will save the world from overpopulation- the internet. Both as a source of information, and perhaps as a way of abstracting social interactions that otherwise would have more opportunity to be acted out in sweatier ways.
A while back I saw some study said that said women who grow up with a TV in the house have on average, 1 less child than their mother. And this was holding even as we go into the 3rd generation of kids with TVs at home. The Internet, and especially mobile Internet, are like TV * 5. So maybe this is right.
> But the second cause is something that goes against the conventional wisdom. It's that teens -- despite their portrayal in popular TV and movies as uninhibited and acting only on hormones -- are having less sex . Could rising childhood obesity be contributing to this as well?
Plausible. The recent advent of ready, instant, and varied access to video simulation of sex is also plausible. Both are unpopular hypotheses, however, because all bodies are beautiful and sex positive porn has zero externalities.
Who claims porn has zero externalities?
Conservatives claim it somehow has negative externalities while I'll happily claim it has positive externalities (happiness, less rape, less pregnancy, etc.).
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> now you buy condoms online Mail order condoms was common long before the web was popularized.
Yes, but you still had to get them shipped home, where parents would ask you what you've ordered. Now with amazon it takes 3 clicks, and you can get them delivered to a drop-off location anywhere(at least here in UK I can get amazon parcels delivered to a nearby corner shop for example).
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> now you buy condoms online Mail order condoms was common long before the web was popularized.
Yes, but you still had to get them shipped home, where parents would ask you what you've ordered. Now with amazon it takes 3 clicks, and you can get them delivered to a drop-off location anywhere(at least here in UK I can get amazon parcels delivered to a nearby corner shop for example).
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> now you buy condoms online Mail order condoms was common long before the web was popularized.
Yes, but you still had to get them shipped home, where parents would ask you what you've ordered. Now with amazon it takes 3 clicks, and you can get them delivered to a drop-off location anywhere(at least here in UK I can get amazon parcels delivered to a nearby corner shop for example).