What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? • Hacker News Board

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#351

Post by phil21 » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

itake wrote: post #161

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks. In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day. Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-part…

And conversely being a dad sucks. For the same reasons you list.

There is no longer a way to come up with a sane division of labor for the average couple. Both parents are not intended to be working full time. It does not work for either party.

Heck, humans are not designed to operate as two parents even. There should be multiple generations of help at hand for it to truly be a decent experience. Humans need breaks and our hyper scheduled existence is entirely unnatural.

I watch friends who have kids where both have professional careers and to be honest none of it looks like a fun time. I don’t think it’s good for the kids either.

15-20 years of “sucking it up” and dealing with a horribly overbooked and stressful life is not good for any party. Women have it worse on average, but no one appears to be having a good time.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#352

Post by Tsiklon » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:05 AM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #291

crtified wrote: post #178

My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing. Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother. Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the chi…

[flagged]

I feel this isn’t so generous a response. This person is describing their lived in experience, coloured by the time and experiences they’ve had since. They certainly recognise that it would have been a moment that had things transpired differently would have dramatically altered the course of their life.

I read their remarks as a somewhat mournful expression of a desire to follow “the road not travelled”.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#353

Post by redeux » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:06 AM UTC

itake wrote: post #241

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women can leave and get alimony, child support, and often times greater custody of the kids. Men don’t want to take that risk, so many men opt out of marriage as well.

Alimony is temporary and fixed, whereas careers are not only life-long, but have compounding growth. There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.

In my state Alimony is neither temporary nor fixed, depending on the length of the marriage.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#354

Post by bethekidyouwant » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:07 AM UTC

epicureanideal wrote: post #327

itake wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alimony is temporary and fixed, whereas careers are not only life-long, but have compounding growth. There is a significant financial gap between a divorced woman in her 50s with only five years of alimony remaining and a career woman in her 50s with a $400,000 401(k) balance.

You forgot to mention child support which is for up to 18 years. Also, nothing stops the woman from having a career, especially if she cooperatively shares 50/50 custody, but often they prefer aiming for nearly 100% custody because it increases their child support payments, and then still have the option to cry victim that they’re a single mother despite getting thousands of dollars a month and they’re actively preve…

Child support is until the kids become independent not 18 years, which I don’t know if you’ve checked these days but kids stay at home indeterminately

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#355

Post by more_corn » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:09 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #242

crtified wrote: post #178

My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing. Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother. Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the chi…

Underrated comment right here. When the baseline belief in society goes from “make it work” to “better to end the pregnancy” it shouldn’t be surprising that overall the number of birth goes way down.

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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#356

Post by epicureanideal » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #354

epicureanideal wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention child support which is for up to 18 years. Also, nothing stops the woman from having a career, especially if she cooperatively shares 50/50 custody, but often they prefer aiming for nearly 100% custody because it increases their child support payments, and then still have the option to cry victim that they’re a single mother despite getting thousands of dollars a month and they’re actively preve…

Child support is until the kids become independent not 18 years, which I don’t know if you’ve checked these days but kids stay at home indeterminately

Probably depends on the state, but last time I checked it was until 18 or high school graduation, but not later than 19, in the state I’m familiar with.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#357

Post by fknorangesite » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:11 AM UTC

epicureanideal wrote: post #317

UncleMeat wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many men advocate for an equitable household. But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.

The stats are rigged and biased by not counting the types of work men do, and if they did count it they wouldn’t reach the “right” conclusions so wouldn’t be published. This is written about quite a bit.

> This is written about quite a bit.

Go on.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#358

Post by wl » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

mapotofu wrote: post #306

bachmeier wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I honestly don’t know how you can say this. When my son was born, we were asked enough times about circumcision that it seemed like a battle to get to “no”. (USA) The system has a system and a narrative. If you’re working against the narrative you have to be very prepared.

It's less that hospitals are pushing circumcision and more that there's a discharge checklist everyone is working from and the circumcision question is on it. The repetition is some combination of verifying your answer and/or people not reading the notes other people have written when they document your answer. If your answer were "yes, we want a circumcision," they'd be asking you repeatedly just the same until they actually did it.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#359

Post by more_corn » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

itake wrote: post #323

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll also reject this sort of man at the start of a relationship for being "too nice".

I don’t think “too nice” is correct, but I’ve definitely seen women pass on great guys that weren’t 6ft or good looking.

I fucking love the 6’ restriction. I can think of no better way to eliminate unsuitable mates than to identify that they have a height restriction.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#360

Post by arp242 » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

Even a stable population can't mean it can never shrink. A long-term stable population means that sometimes it grows a bit over a period of decades, and sometimes it shrinks a bit over a period of decades. Overall long-term it roughly stays the same, but short-term it doesn't necessarily.

The baby boom caused huge problems down the line: now we have an elderly population with proportionally a relatively small working population, and no one really knows how to deal with that. Keeping the population growing forever is not physically possible.

The real question is whether we want another baby boom. It seems to me it might solve some issues 20 years down the line, but will cause lots of issues 80 years down the line. Before crashing catastrophically at some unknown point in the future.

And lets be real here: the US has a population of about 340 million people today. In 2000 it had about 280 million people. If the system can't handle a relatively small shrink back to 330 million or 320 million over a period of several decades, then the system is bad.