Normalize stay-at-home moms. This will raise the birthrate and drive up wages. For now us faithful Catholics, as well as Mormons and Muslims, will keep civilization going.
We should just normalize stay at home spouses, no need for it to specifically be moms. Also we need to bump wages enough for that to make sense for most people.
Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
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Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#32Normalize stay-at-home moms. This will raise the birthrate and drive up wages. For now us faithful Catholics, as well as Mormons and Muslims, will keep civilization going.
This seems to be a big issue. e.g. it seems Israel has permanently shifted to the right because of the excessive growth of the (societally/economically) useless ultra-orthodox population. While other people have to spend their lives working they can spend their reading their boom and having dozens of children because of government subsidies.
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a big issue. e.g. it seems Israel has permanently shifted to the right because of the excessive growth of the (societally/economically) useless ultra-orthodox population. While other people have to spend their lives working they can spend their reading their boom and having dozens of children because of government subsidies.
Yes of course religious people only have kids because they just want those government subsidies, not because God told us to "be fruitful and multiply"
Also I was almost exclusively talking about a specific group in Israel:
50% or so of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work (instead they spend their days studying religious texts or something…). They have massive amounts of children and are supported by the state and/or their wives (78% of whom do have jobs).
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes of course religious people only have kids because they just want those government subsidies, not because God told us to "be fruitful and multiply"
I never said that’s the reason why they do that. It’s possibly one of the reasons why they can, though. Also I was almost exclusively talking about a specific group in Israel: 50% or so of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work (instead they spend their days studying religious texts or something…). They have massive amounts of children and are supported by the state and/or their wives (78% of whom do have jobs).
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#35I would have loved to have kids. I'm 33 and will never have children. I consider it morally irresponsible to bring children into a world where they will have to deal with the worst of the changing climate. That's it, that's the only reason. It's heartbreaking, and yes, cynical -- but it's not a risk I'm willing to take ("the world will turn itself around and band together to mitigate climate change" is not a gamble I…
Do you think unbeing is preferable to a potentially miserable life that would still likely result in them having their own children that didn't experience their own level of suffering? How many generations of potential suffering is required before having children is off the table? How many n+ future generations of having potentially joyful and regenerating lives would offset the former generations of suffering?
What level or type of disaster would trigger it? Would you have had kids if you knew that the Black Death was coming or, being a Roman citizen, that the Roman Empire was going to fall? If you were a European in 1920, fully knowing the outcome of WWII, would you intentionally have kids? What if you only had models that these things were coming in a fuzzy way?
My father-in-law told me don't have kids. My brother-in-law sees climate change as catastrophic to any progeny, and my best friend views human life itself as an involuntary evil inflicted on children, but I have difficulties understanding their positions on an intuitive level. I get the reasoning on a rational level, but I don't have the gut-sense of it and it hurts my relationship with my family and friends.
Like, my position is that I'd like to think that I'd undergo torture for my kids, and that my kids would do so likewise for theirs recursively until the number of generations outnumbered the stars. From what I can see, living-on is the only thing that actually lasts--everything else will fall away, improve, and fall away again, including what we mean by being human itself, but procreation is forever.
How can I understand your perspective? Can I understand it? It would help me build stronger bridges if you (or anyone else) could help me intuitively picture it.
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should just normalize stay at home spouses, no need for it to specifically be moms. Also we need to bump wages enough for that to make sense for most people.
No moms specifically. It's better for the family as their nature is specifically ordered toward raising children. Men on the other hand are ordered towards protecting and providing for the family. The feminist movement to get women working is the great hoax. It makes women miserable and it is the single great cause of the wage stagnation by doubling the workforce. Corporation love this.
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You put it like it's not normal to not wanting kids. I'm pretty sure a lot like and love their kids but I'm quite fine with not having to shift my life around kids. We area much fuller planet than before. Everything is full. We also have plenty of other things to occupy our time than kids and we can have sex without kids and stigma.
afaik Its not normal in the statistics sense of the word, most people are falling in a tightly centered distribution. But I'm not going to debate here that it's a moral choice, or that you're somehow wrong by being one or more SDs out of center. (It might be, but this isnt the forum for it). Anyone who does not want to have children of their own are well within their rights. I'd encourage anyone who doesnt have kids…
Re: Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children
#38There was a significant dip in birthrates during the 1920s. Twenty years later something terrible happened to a lot of sons. It is plausible to me, some people lose the will to have kids, when it is most disadvantageous to have children. Something is off, we can all sense it.
That sense is just prior experience, from conversation, news story, etc building memory over time. “Inequality is growing” headlines have been in the news since the 90s. What you prescribe to ethereal magic is years of shared prior experience and exposure.
Millions of men are not 'pulling through' like they used to, something is definitely off and it feels very impolite to say anything more serious about it.