Does this also mean a third of 18 year old men will also skip children ? Sadly it’s very typical of conservative Japanese society to single out women.
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
#92There is no highly-developed country with replacement-level fertility. And, in fact, the only places left with fertility rates that are above replacement (and not rapidly dropping) are sub-saharan African countries with a median income below 5k USD. On the other end of the spectrum, you don't see fertility rates tick up again until you get to the 500k USD and above bracket. My personal hunch is that this is a form of…
> One typical response is that we should simply subsidize those childcare programs. Fair enough, but the countries that have taken this idea the farthest -- the Nordics -- have still not achieved replacement-level fertility. Childcare is built around taking care of the kids only when their parents are at work. When they parents comes home from work, they have to find time to take care of the household chores (dinner,…
Yes, exactly. This is what I'm trying to get at with "market failure" -- the total economic cost of doing all of that is drastically higher than even the cost of just childcare.
In the past, many of those duties would be distributed throughout a community. And on isolated farms, parents would intentionally have big families so that the eldest could help raise the younger kids.
Doing it all with two people is a huge burden. Doing it with just one is a heroic act. Throwing in the extra burdens and expectations of the upper-middle class professional world -- homework help, extracurriculars, etc -- makes it virtually impossible.
So it makes sense that only the 500k+ income crowd is having big families. That's probably a good approximation of the income required to afford the total cost of replacing all of the childcare benefits of an informal community with paid labor.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#93I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…
I agree, it's not surprising given birth control and economic pressures to join the workforce, but it is new and distinctly modern, and writing it off as "some people just don't want kids" isn't a satisfactory explanation. Something is deeply wrong in a society if it has all of the social safety net tools, like Finland does, to ease the burdens of childbearing and people still choose to not do it. It's a society in a…
If society is already committing a fast suicide by destroying the habitability of the Earth, then doesn't it seem rational?
Like imagine a meteor was going to destroy the Earth in a year - would it make sense to have children? 10 years? 100?
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#94I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…
It's true, and fair enough. It is also true that societies are brutally darwinian. The ones that prevail are the ones that can produce the most offspring, and bring it to economic maturity. This is the story behind the enormous success of China and India, per capita they are relatively poor but punch well above that weight since they have enormous populations. If they can sustain that population dynamic (which seems…
You realize China is having its own demographic crash, yeah? And India's birth rate is at or below replacement?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
Bluntly, whether you meant to or not, this comment is full of coded bigotry. It invokes images of a foreign hoard, bang at the walls of the west, threatening to dilute or destroy "our" way of life.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#95I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…
A lot of liberal (in the classical, broad sense) young folks simply shrug their shoulders at this fact -- not everyone wants kids, so what? I think it's worth considering, if you're one of these people, that without children being born to liberal parents, the "extremists" of the world -- fundamentalist muslims, christians, and so on -- will inherit the earth. Of course some of their children will grow up to be libera…
...so then they inherit the earth?
I wonder if this sort of thing is cyclical. The next dark age, caused by the earth being overrun by the fecund and illiberal peoples of the world until they can only eat themselves. Maybe a plague wipes them all out and they are too poor/illiterate/unlucky to survive it. 600 years later, someone re-invents the internet, for people to use to post that they don't want kids.
I don't think "let's make some babies to keep those extremists at bay" is the sexiest of pillow talk. But then again, I have dated individuals with severe enough views on the world where I could see that actually working. :)
My lifespan is too short to worry overmuch about any of it.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raising kids is difficult and time consuming. As people gain more opportunities to do other things than raise kids they chose to do those other things instead. It's an opportunity cost issue, not a literal cost issue. That's why the birth rates goes down rather than up as you climb income percentiles. People with more money have more opportunities. The only real force to counteract that is cultural/social pressure to…
> having kids was much less of a "decision" for couples not that many decades ago and was much more just an assumed fact To your point, oftentimes the marriage wasn't considered valid if there were no children, after all, what evidence was there that the marriage had been consummated? In fact, that we used to talk about a marriage being "consummated" shows how our views on marriage and family have changed in a very b…
> To your point, oftentimes the marriage wasn't considered valid if there were no children, after all, what evidence was there that the marriage had been consummated?
No, I don't know what culture or religion you're referring to, but this is absolutely backwards to what the Catholic Churches (and, by extension, other Christians) believe and teach.
First of all, every marriage that is going to be valid, is valid without consummation. Remember, Joseph married Mary and they never consummated: she retained her perpetual virginity, so that is our gold standard.
Now, traditionally for the Catholic Church, if the bride and groom were alone together after the wedding, consummation is presumed. It might be difficult to disprove a consummation, children or no children, because a married man and woman will naturally wish to do what is natural to their state in life, and will indeed be encouraged to have as much sex as they wish. Interestingly, if the man or woman is fully impotent and unable to complete the marital embrace, then the marriage is invalid from the start. The ability to consummate is vital to validity, but not the fact of consummation itself.
Christian marriages (and natural marriages) are valid from the moment the spouses exchange consent. The consent makes the marriage. Full stop. Of course, consent must be given by qualified persons, in an approved ceremony, before the proper witnesses, too.
Now, a consummated Christian marriage (between a baptized man and baptized woman) has a special property: it is absolutely indissoluble. There is nothing in Heaven or Earth that can separate the marriage bond in this case, except the death of a spouse.
Now it follows that if a consummated, sacramental marriage is indissoluble, then an unconsummated marriage may, in certain cases, be dissolved, and this is correct. If the couple finds trouble and procures a divorce, then the Catholic Church may grant a dissolution of the bond. This is different from a declaration of nullity ("annulment"). A dissolved marriage recognizes the validity of what came before, but for some reason it was broken up.
I hope that helps; Christian marriage law, and Catholic canon law, is rather confusing and surprising to most laypeople.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#97I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…
A lot of it is explained by rising marriage ages. Women lose the ability to have children at around 40, so the later they get married, the less chance they have of having children, even if all other things are equal. E.g. if we assume an even chance of having children per year, then we'd expect an increase of the average marriage age from 32 to 36 to halve the birth rate (as in the former there are 8 years in which t…
Clearly, it's impossible for women to have children before getting married.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#98Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#99I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…
I had kids relatively late in life (42) and it's been amazing. I love being a dad, far more than I thought I would. It wasn't really about wanting kids or not wanting kids, it felt more like...puberty in that for most of human history you don't really get to choose to do it or not, it happens pretty naturally. I guess that's unfashionable to say. Perhaps some would say it's irresponsible. But the opening montage in I…
> I believe thinking too much about kids is a trap. Basically you should have them if you can.
I cannot think of worse advice.
Congratulations to you that you found a life that works for you.
But the idea that people should just stop thinking and start procreating is absurd. Kids are a gigantic decision, the biggest one a person will ever make in their life. To not carefully consider that decision is utterly irresponsible, and to tell people to thoughtlessly have children without considering those consequences is equally so.
Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study
#100I know that commentators won't like this but people will start have kids again when they'd be able to once again instill a degree of service-ism in them towards parents.
As things stand a successful kid is essentially a socialized commodity and the taxes they pay are used for all sorts of stuff in a socialized manner, whereas back in the days a successful kid would be a good news for themselves but also to those who got him there , being the parents who'd be able to retire early and enjoy the monetary income stream and make a profit of their investment.
It doesn't make sense to invest in a kid nowadays, from the moment they are born they become property of the State.