131–140 of 160 posts
> fertility rates tend to fall below the level needed to maintain the population, 2.1 children per woman. Why 2.1 and not 2?
You've got a like 1/9 chance of dying by 21 I've heard. It's probably wrong but a decent amount of people die before they are able to have kids so they add a 0.1 to the replacement level.
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Why is it serious?
Most countries social security systems rely on workers today paying in. The dependency ratio of workers to people on pensions may get to the point where it breaks. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPDPNDOLUSA
IMHO it is rising individualism triggerred from FOMO from social media where in you believe you still have something left to experience outside in the world and which cannot be done once you have small kids. Another one probably is how people with kids narrate their experience , where in they mention all the sleepless nights , limitations and costs , without telling about the postive aspects like happinesss , satisfa…
Yes, this is very true. If you listen to some people you would think that once you have kids your life is basically over. You will never be able to spend any time on yourself anymore. This is just not true - at least if you refuse to become an extreme helicopter parent. I have four kids. I had a ~10 year break where I very rarely made it to parties and music festivals, and my life was mostly work and kids. I had a gr…
Might be an atypical case here but it's my experience.
This article is selectively excluding large chunks of the planet. It mentions the developed world, but then continues to suggest that birth rates are falling below 2 everywhere when they most certainly are not. Niger: 6.89 Nigeria: 5.31 Mali: 6.04 Somalia, Chad, DR Congo are all over 6. There are going to be young people around when you get old, they’re just going to originate from different parts of the world. Assum…
>This article is selectively excluding large chunks of the planet. If someone writes an article about cats would you complain it's not saying anything about dogs?
> No one really knows why birth rates are dropping so fast. [...] Many people have theories but if you critically examine them they fall apart. > [#1] People do not have money for kids. [#2] The Government isn’t Providing pro-natal policies. [#3] This is happening only in societies that are not religious. [#4] Women are working and not having kids. That seems like an incomplete list. For example, how about this one:…
I'm not having kids because I expect the world they would live in by the time they would be adults will be too dystopian. Even more dystopian than it is already. I opine that we humans increasingly shape our living situation such that it causes friction with our nature, our primitive psychology and biology. This friction causes increasing unhappiness. When I first realized this in my early twenties I was able to vast…
So move now to somewhere you expect to be long-term viable before the crunch...?
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I'm not having kids because I expect the world they would live in by the time they would be adults will be too dystopian. Even more dystopian than it is already. I opine that we humans increasingly shape our living situation such that it causes friction with our nature, our primitive psychology and biology. This friction causes increasing unhappiness. When I first realized this in my early twenties I was able to vast…
> avoid man-made degeneracies will be extremely difficult or impossible in a matter of decades So move now to somewhere you expect to be long-term viable before the crunch...?
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When I was growing up in the 80s, working class neighborhood, most wives had a part time job. Whoever was off that day would watch the kids. I remember sitting in random houses with 7 or so other kids, eating mac n cheese or bologna sandwiches, waiting for our moms to come pick us up after work. As an adult with my own kid now, it would seem such an idea is a pipe dream.
Yeah, the decline in neighbourlyness would be an even more interesting phenomenon to study. My person hunch is back in the day there was a more "we're all in the same boat" feeling at the street level, where everyone had similar socioeconomic backgrounds whereas now that's not true at all. In the past, in the UK, everyone living in a road may have had the same landlord (the local council) but now you can have multi-m…
I grew up on a street (in the US) where many of my neighbors did have the same landlord as my family, but none of us spoke to each other; they were basically strangers like any other.
I was born in 2003, so this is more recent than the 1980s.
I believe one reason that is rarely talked about is that having children later in life makes you more tired than if you had them in your 20s. In the times when people were having more children, they were having them early. We all now how it is easier to shrug off a sleepless night in your 20s than in your 30s. We use that advantage to stay out drinking more when we are young, but it was probably evolved to help stay…
I don't want to denigrate any parent. It's a tough thing to do. And it is exhausting. But, at least for me, once I became a parent, I just stopped caring that I was exhausted. When that screaming pooping little money sucker comes toddling over to you with a huge smile on the face after you walk in the room from work or wherever, all those worries and fears just somehow melt away and you just think to yourself how lucky you are to have any of it.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you think you want to have kids, don't let your lack of energy due to age be a factor. Kids give you the energy.
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Which cultures are those? Ancient, tribal cultures, absolutely raised children in a communal way as you say. There's even a saying, "it takes a village to raise a child..." But I'm not aware of any modern cultures that still do that in reality.
Villages and tribes have typically been composed of people who are related to one another. So another way of saying this is that the extended family participates in raising children. Not long ago, children were allowed to roam freely in the neighborhood, walk to and from school, and have some essentially unsupervised time to play and be children. The reason this worked well is because they were known to the neighbors…
They still are in most safe modern nations.
> so if you do raise children, you're raising children who are unprepared to be parents.
That is such an astute observation!
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My experience raising kids and the experiences of many parents I know has been very enjoyable and rewarding.
"Building better startups. CTO, Consultant & Recruiter. Over 50 IPOs/Exits incl. Palantir, Fiverr, Okta, Elastic, BrightBytes (aq. Google)" I would assume because you had massive amounts of money you could treat raising a child like a recreational activity.. and even then i am betting there is a lot of pink glasses looking in the past involved
Everyone’s experiences are different and true to them. I’m not trying to tell you that your experience or ideas of raising children should be the same as mine. But I’d be careful assuming that people who don’t think the same way as you about it are delusional or privileged.