I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving, many probably will not ever have kids, and a decent chunk of my cousins as well had trouble or weren’t able to. It’s not just that people don’t have cousins
Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
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Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#12Betteridge’s Law says no, it is not reshaping the experience of childhood.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#13Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#14That's an interesting way to say "the West largely stopped breeding a while ago".
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Late stage capitalism driven extinction
Bullshit. USSR did the same thing about the same time.
People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#16Anecdata: I am 31 and have 3 young kids. They have 0 cousins and, on top of that, 0... second cousins? Cousins-once-removed? Whatever the one is for my cousin's kids. My kids are my grandma's only great-grandkids. And I have... 6 cousins.
On top of that, at my last job, on my team of 15, I was the only one with kids, and only 1 of those 15 engineers were under the age of 30. At my current job, my team is 8, and again we're all about 30, and nobody is even thinking about kids at all.
It baffles me. And it's also a bit inconvenient that nobody else at work has such pressing obligations, it makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I *have* to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. USSR did the same thing about the same time.
People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
People stop having kids when they choose something else. Yes, career for one.
Thanks to birth control and modern values, Western people can bring themselves to extinction.
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bullshit. USSR did the same thing about the same time.
People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
All evidence suggests that people stop having kids when their society gets richer and better educated.
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#19Related: The Great Cousin Decline --- https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-re... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38719249 (169 points | 52 days ago | 332 comments)
It's all pretty crazy. My wife has quite a few brothers and a bazillion cousins. I have a sister and several cousins. We're the only ones of her family and until very recently the only ones in my family to have a kid (and just one). I think the population is maybe going down harder in the US than we think. It also took us like 2 years to conceive.
Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?
#20The bigger issue is still the age depopulation bomb, which is when retired non-working seniors begin to outnumber working adults. This is made worse by both liberals and conservatives being against immigration. https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/beware-depopulation-bom... Yes, the cost of living affects this but even when the economy was great, Canada was already below the 2.1 birthrate in 1972. One explanation is…
I have never understood how this is a "bomb," western cultures are so good at distancing the elderly, nobody will notice if conditions in care facilities become worse. How exactly will all of the unsupported old people overthrow society? By selling their IRAs? Will China's over-working-age-population get a second wind just long enough to take down the Party?
I think realpolitik has so permeated our way of thinking that an impending moral crisis or holocaust can only be brought into discourse as a nonexistent threat to stability. If there's any explanation for why people think an inverted population pyramid is an economic crisis, it is that their hearts are in the right place.