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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
481–490 of 927 posts
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
We certainly can't have a stable society with a rapidly shrinking population.
Then we haven't had a stable population in several centuries, because it was rapidly growing. Yet we have made (hopefully this is not contentious) great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life. Certainly there were some stable societies in that timeframe?
"great strides in technology, human rights, and general quality of life." is growth, not stability.
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh, I’ve never met a man who was incapable of doing what it takes. It’s not rocket surgery. Just mostly don’t be a dick and treat your wife how you’d want to be treated. If there’s anything more to it please let me know (for the sake of my marriage)
The bar is not high but a shocking number of men still fail it. I’ve lost track of how many coworkers I’ve had relate some story about their “crazy” girlfriend or wife expecting sympathy and not noticing that their audience is feeling bad for her.
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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#484As a new parent, it’s money. Daycare costs $400 USD per week in my area, from 7am-6pm, 5 days a week. So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually. Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures. So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons. If you want actual action…
How fast are you popping out those kids to have more than 2 children in daycare rather than free public school?
I mean, kids start school at around 6 in the US. So one every 2 years. That's not uncommon for people who want families? Most of the folk my age with 3 kids had them within 3 or 4 years?
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#485I find the repeated comments of how much parenting 'sucks' and how much childbearing 'sucks' to be distasteful. It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over). I feel like, primarily, the reason why our society isn't having children is because of a growing selfishness and entitlement; which happens to be the very thing that Rome was suffering from when their society was collapsing too. No,…
Having kids you don't want is more of a moral failing than choosing not to have kids because you don't want them
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#486The baby boom started immediately after the Great Depression. I think that what happened is that the depression wiped out the rich, and the mega-corps of the time, and leveled the playing field by a lot.
The Googles and Facebooks of the time were destroyed, and there was a vast green field on which people tried to build new empires.
Nobody cared if you went to Yale or Oxford, or were related to the upper management somehow, they just hired based on ability.
For a brief period the American Dream was real: work hard, work smart, and you'll get far.
So people worked hard, and rather than having their job stolen by ofshoring or AI, they get compensated well. They spent that money on houses, and then... they didn't know what else to do. They had everything they needed. Money in the bank. Investments. Stocks. Bonds. Might as well have a big family, too.
So that explains what caused it. What would it take to have another? We're currently having one in another part of the world.
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were those children born to brave parents who made a choice to selflessly sacrifice to do their societal duty, or could it be that having sex is fun and only relatively recently have we managed to figure out how to do it without risking pregnancy? Given individual choice, would we have such a large population to begin with?
People just figured out how to pull out?
Pulling out is not birth control. Good Lord.
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age. Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all. It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses…
The data doesn't exactly support your argument though: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother: * 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then * 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 40-44 is higher than the…
Bear in mind, those appear to be absolute numbers, not relative to world population.
Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Women aren't able to attract the mates they want, so they would rather try to do it on their own or wait, than "settle" for a guy that isn't meeting their standards. This seems like a rational decision to me. Better go it alone than risk becoming the sole carer of both a baby and a man-baby.
This tracts, but I think women are evaluating men in “TikTok” metrics, instead of qualities that make a man a great partner. For example, being over 6ft doesn’t make you a good dad. Or being physically attractive, doest’t make you a supportive partner. If anything, these characteristics make a man worse, as men in these categories tend to have the pick of the litter, resulting in many women frustrating and disappoint…
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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure this scans really because teenage births as well as teenage pregnancies enjoyed a local peak around 1990. There certainly was not a general pan-American societal instinct against teenage births at that time. The rate has fallen by more than 75% since. Even the mother-under-15 birth rate in 1990 was ridiculous (about 10x more than today, in most states).
Teenage births peaked in the late 1950s, by a significant margin. See https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th... It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/p…
I don't doubt their personal narrative, I just am not sure the generalized conclusion they drew from it was proper.