791–800 of 927 posts
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I think the uncomfortable truth that many are reluctant to admit is that religion and societal norms (as you highlighted above) played a major role in this. I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary. Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of saf…
The issue is not so much the access to the methods, but the negative feedback loop that they cause. For every woman freed from unwanted childbearing, how many are socially pressured into not having a child? Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were goin…
People expected a married couple of grown adults to get an abortion by default rather than congratulating you on accomplishing what you were plainly trying on purpose?
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People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child". Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us. Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".
Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
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> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child". Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items
- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel
- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you
- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior
- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)
- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor
My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
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I think the level of obsessive care people feel obliged to deliver to their single child prior to age of 8 is a part of the same story. You can see how radically it changes even with the second child (not to mention the third) but half of the parents never get there nowadays and think it's the norm.
I actually have two children and this is nonsense. Obviously the first child gets more attention than the second, but not in terms of the amount of time and money the childcare involves. And most people (in the UK at least) are not delivering obsessive levels of care. Some are of course, but most aren't.
I'm not in the UK, but in France it seems that people generally won't let their kids outside alone until they're 10 or not even then. That makes a difference of several hours of free time a week which is quite significant. Luckily people seem to be fine to leave their kids alone at home, which amounts to a few more hours of time per week. Also luckily there are mandatory public schools starting from the age of 3, so France in general is not bad for raising kids time-wise and money-wise. However I do notice that amount of autonomy people entrust to their kids here is lower than what I tend to do.
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No need to contemplate anything if your run-of-the-mill average job lets you support your entire family and purchase a house.
People are acting confounded that the birthrate is goong down. But if people cant afford kids they wont have them. Its like super simple.
Back in the 90s, there was fear about a population bomb. 10 billion people by 2010, mass starvation, etc. We've successfully defused the population bomb since, and now the conversation has flipped. In most developed countries, there's declining birthrates and new concerns over who will support the future economy. The problem now is that these countries do very little to support new families and children. Housing is e…
Yet, richer people have fewer children. It isn't clear that reducing costs (making people richer) would actually increase birth rates
There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential.
Quick google shows some support for this idea:
"There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women."
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...
ergo, there is probably a level of financial support/wealth at which people start having more children. Or more simply, the point at which the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs.
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Yet, richer people have fewer children. It isn't clear that reducing costs (making people richer) would actually increase birth rates
Is this true for very wealthy people, or only for above average earners? There are many examples of very wealthy people having lots of children. Children are still a significant investment for high earners, but at a certain wealth level it becomes inconsequential. Quick google shows some support for this idea: "There is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less wel…
While I'm sure won't be a popular opinion, the data seems to backup that the rise of far-left liberalism and feminism by women and shift toward moderate and conservative men has been a huge contributing factor. Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]! Seco…
In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.
But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.
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> And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place. The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all…
There’s plenty of countries with above replacement level fertility rates. This is a nothing burger