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The window for great-grandmothers is closing

memoirsandrambles.substack.com

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Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#31

If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…

Conversely even people who start young don't necessarily end up having living great grandparents let alone grandparents. My parents were both the youngest of 6 and 7 kids so my grandparents who started having kids in their early 20s had already passed or were quite old by the time I was born.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#32
It's interesting to compare this some research which says that children of older fathers and grandfathers live longer. If I understand this article correctly, it's saying that if the paternal grandfather was also older when becoming a father, that's even better.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-18392873

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed…

yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are having too many kids!" always has this assumption that class and values are perfectly presevred across generations and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children are capable of making their own path and not just following in their footsteps.

children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly.

on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#35

If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…

The economic situation of your mom having a great career is not the same as the economic situation of today; appeal to her hard work considered. People cannot afford to have kids like they used to. And yes, the older grandparents make this much worse because they’re now a costly liability rather than a useful child watcher.

I find the idea that people haven’t considered downsides of waiting to have kids to be grating personally

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?

You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#37

If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…

One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance. There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, ....

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502822...

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#38

If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…

It's not just great grandparents, but the family calculus on grandparents changes significantly as well. If my parents were 35 when I was born, and I don't have children until 35, my parents are 70. With a life expectancy of 80, my children never really get a chance to know my parents. Whereas if each generation is having children at age 25, my children will likely be able to know their grandparents for 30 years.

I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct connection to the past.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#39
Research confirms a narrowing of families with fewer children and fewer cousins, but it also notes it's more likely for people to know their ancestors:

In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shrinking-family-...

Another thing to keep in mind: there is a lot of variability depending on the community and social standards. People in Utah will have a different experience than folks in the Bay Area. In rural northern New York and Ohio, the Amish population has exploded with couples marrying in their early 20s and families typically having at least 5 or 6 kids, sometimes more than 10.

My spouse had our kids in her late 30s, but they have no first cousins on either of the side of the family (of the 6 people in our generation, we're the only two who had kids). Of all of our kids' dozens of friends growing up, only one had more than two siblings and they were an immigrant family.

OTOH, my wife works with people who had kids in their late teens and early 20s and are grandparents by the age of 40, and that's typical in the community.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?

Because of ecological overshoot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot ), which is a real problem ( https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da... .). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.

"Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to McDonald's a few times a week.

Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.

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