Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
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Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#2I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids.
I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot afford to put a roof over their heads or feed them that's one thing. If you can't get the latest iphone or go buy a new Tesla and maybe have to sacrifice your yearly vacation to The Hamptons... well then you're just making up excuses. Kids can be very very happy with very little and sometimes it's even good for them to not be raised in a household where they believe everything just comes free and easy because that results in a lot of entitlement.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#3I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids. I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot a…
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Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#4Economically this is a problem so it’s not like there are physical limits, it’s a relatively easy problem to solve comparing to hard resource issues like lack of energy/supply of food/wars/pollution
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#5This is obviously sad where it is counter to the womens' hopes, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for men.
Previously discussed reports about the imbalances in dating market dynamics (a significant number of young males being without sexual partners) would imply potentially more childless men, but they aren't mentioned here.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#6That means about 1/3 of male population may never have any of them as well. What haunts me most is to ponder about the world we get when a lot these 18 years old become 75+ years old people with no close living relatives and their social support network mostly gone before themselves. A world of single or no children also leaves people with no uncles, aunts or cousins.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#7I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids. I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot a…
I think this is a surface level explanation but there must be deeper reasons why people aren’t having children.
Maybe our lives are so comfortable we just don’t want the inconvenience of children.
Maybe we’re so obsessed with momentary hedonism that doing something extremely hard for 18 years doesn’t seem worth it.
Maybe there are so many generational traumas built up over thousands of years that now that we have some awareness of mental health issues it’s really putting people off children before they are resolved.
I don’t know what it is. But I definitely feel like we don’t know the answer as a society deep down.
Edit: and the topic is so controversial I don’t know how we can find out. This whole issue might be about women in the workforce, or contraception, but touching these topics is insanely risky. Which is really bad, because we really need to understand in the next few decades.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#8I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids. I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot a…
I think you're largely right, but there is also the fact the expectations for childrearing have significantly increased. Several generations ago children had jobs. One or two generations ago children were allowed to roam the streets until dark. Now parents have the police called on them for letting a child walk to the park alone, and are expected to curate a list of extracurricular activities they then chauffeur their child to.
I'm very much not in the "it's too expensive/hard to have kids camp", but I do think we've raised the costs in many ways, at least in the US.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#9This means that an even bigger share of men may never have children. But that isn't important of course.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#10That means about 1/3 of male population may never have any of them as well. What haunts me most is to ponder about the world we get when a lot these 18 years old become 75+ years old people with no close living relatives and their social support network mostly gone before themselves. A world of single or no children also leaves people with no uncles, aunts or cousins.
Doesn't take much imagination given that substantial parts of the developed world haul their parents into nursing homes where care is outsourced to the market. The communal, familial support system is already gone.