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We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

nytimes.com

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Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#111

Post by [deleted] »

a_brawling_boo wrote: post #13
Scandiravian wrote: post #3

I'm surprised by this, as I had expected the opposite. Couples are spending a lot of time together being confined to their home without much entertainment, so I'd expected that to result in more baby making I guess the stress from the uncertainty of the future and lack of personal space more than countered that Time for me to adjust my assumptions about the world... And probably check my privilege, since I'm massivel…

My wife and I had decided to start trying for a second child around the beginning of 2020, after the outbreak we put those plans hold because we didn't want to have to make repeated trips to the doctor/pediatrician/hospital where all the covid was. What was our employment/financial situation going to look like? In the spring of last year a million people were loosing their jobs a day at one point. Also, friend of our…

[deleted]

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#112

Post by Scandiravian »

beaconstudios wrote: post #78
Scandiravian wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts > try to back leaders who want what's best for all. I'm confused how you can know what's best f…

> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow. What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences. > Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what…

> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals.

I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions

Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a focus point is that assumptions arising from social class differences causes more harm in the world than any other cognitive bias

When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about other humans and their experiences", you're describing half of what "checking ones privilege" is about

The second part is to find out how and why those privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and equal access to those privileges regardless of social class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#113

Post by yesenadam »

beaconstudios wrote: post #91
yesenadam wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the mainstream media is, by definition, normative" ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.

sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want…

Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many jargony or cliché phrases in this paragraph as the previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the objective ideal"

All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's not possible, or would be too lengthy, to ELI10. I kind of know what you mean, but I feel there are unexamined assumptions buried in those murky phrases. Who can tell if they're right or not? It's impossible to say exactly what they mean. e.g. How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#114

Post by TacticalCoder »

motohagiography wrote: post #64

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families…

> An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

I don't follow: is a single kid from a middle class family an outsider to kids from other middle class families where they have 2 or 3 kids? I mean, I understand that middle class is neither rich nor poor, but what's the difference for a unique child compared to middle class families with serveral kids?

Do the siblings typically provide opportunities for their brothers/sisters? (I'm personally launching atm a new endeavor with my brother but I don't see that as particularly common).

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#115

Post by ed25519FUUU »

gwbas1c wrote: post #92
a_brawling_boo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I had decided to start trying for a second child around the beginning of 2020, after the outbreak we put those plans hold because we didn't want to have to make repeated trips to the doctor/pediatrician/hospital where all the covid was. What was our employment/financial situation going to look like? In the spring of last year a million people were loosing their jobs a day at one point. Also, friend of our…

My wife and I started talking about having a kid and.. oooops! The maternity visits are fine. The major consequence is that only mom can go. I didn't get to see the ultrasounds this time around. For the maternity ward, just make sure to have an N95 or KN95 mask. Keep it on AT ALL TIMES that you are outside of the room. The hospital we went to had negative pressure machines in case a mother was covid positive. Have yo…

Around here the fathers (or any visitors) weren’t even allowed in the delivery room, not to mention being forced to labor with a mask on. An awful experience for the mom. Nevertheless some of us are crazy enough to build our families even during these times because, like you said, it’s about the long plan.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#116

Post by 1-more »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #99
mbg721 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual happens.

I’m in San Francisco, where we’ve consistently had some of the most restrictive policies. My wife is pregnant and they’ve told me the whole time that I’d be allowed in for the birth, but while rates were climbing I’ve been unable to attend any appointments or ultrasounds. It’s been kind of surreal knowing that, yes, we’re having a baby, but not having been able to really see it. Now that rates have dropped, I’m final…

Congrats!! Hope it's smooth sailing for you and your spouse and your child.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#117

Post by andrew_ »

Anecdotally, my experience within my immediate geography in a southern state are opposite from the hypothesis in the article. My wife and I had a child in late 2020, and with my social circle I can name a dozen more newborns last year that were conceived after we became aware of the pandemic. Just last week two friends announced they were expecting.

This could be regional, as the economy where I live hasn't taken as big a hit. I wonder if the state's lax policies amidst the pandemic, which have and are sure to continue to draw strong emotional responses, are responsible for a different outlook amidst the turmoil.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#118

Post by dahart »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #29

I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.

There are certainly tallies of the expenses. I don’t know about over time, but Googling immediately got me the number $233k in 2015 from the USDA. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil... I’ve seen many other such lists over several decades, so charting the average costs over time should be possible.

It might be worth checking out the countries that have implemented child bonuses to check the hypothesis that costs are the reason. https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate... (Not to mention what others nearby have called out: look at birthrates tallied by socioeconomic status. If birthrates go down with increasing income, maybe costs aren't a major factor in birthrate declines, perhaps increasing income is the reason?)

What this kind of thing doesn’t tell us is anything about the alternative choice that is much more difficult to model: what is the cost of not having children. There are cities in the US and countries in the world whose economies are collapsing due to population loss. And I’ve watched people in my life go through breakdowns due to angst over not having kids. I’ve lost at least one very close friend in part because I chose to have kids and he chose not to.

The costs also don’t really help evaluate the goals or the choice to have kids or not. The reason to have them usually isn’t primarily financial, and for most people the reason not to have them also isn’t primarily financial, even if there’s a secondary influence like costs.

Re: We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

#120

Post by sokoloff »

gwbas1c wrote: post #88
jasode wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Couples are spending a lot of time together [...], so I'd expected that to result in more baby making But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9 months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a COVID-overloaded hospital. COVID makes the opportunities for conception easier but adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care. (So maybe more sex activity but also more contra cep…

> But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9 months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a COVID-overloaded hospital. My wife works in a maternity ward. Babies are a high priority. They're fully prepared to deliver babies from covid-positive mothers. (And, yes, there's been plenty of covid-positive mothers.) And, because visitors are strictly limited, it's actually quite easy in the maternity…

We have two kids (meticulously over-planned :) ), but when I look back to the incredible level of uncertainty that was in the world in March-May of last year, we'd have taken significant precautions to not get pregnant during that timeframe.

No one knew what hospitals were going to look like in July 2020, let alone Feb 2021. I'm glad that we are in a stable situation where providing in-hospital labor&delivery care is reasonably safe, but you couldn't have really banked on that to be the case at the critical start of the process.

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