121–130 of 1001 posts
You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now. Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
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This is one area where it's wrong. Instead of having 10 or more cousins...it's now common for kids to have 0 or close to it. My kid doesn't know what a cousin is. Kinda bonkers.
The headline didn’t say “reshaping the cousin experience”. It said “childhood”. Unless we’re ready to say any change is dramatic, this is the type of unprovable puffery in a headline that Betteridge’s Law was made for. FWIW, it’s true of my kids too. But growing up, my cousins were in a different country and I wasn’t close. So my kids didn’t have an experience much different than mine.
Yes, headlines are meant to grab your attention, but equating this one with the garbage that usually gets a quick Betteridge Law link is a bit drastic.
People pondering the societal implications of rapid population decline is very relevant. I'm not going to get too upset over the title.
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It is wrong that our society rewards drinking beers with tech bros and “skydiving” hobbies and what not fucking weird stuff. And doesn’t reward that much investments of money and parental time into having healthy and educated kids. Educated and well rounded kids, teenagers and adults don’t come free for society. It requires a lot of work, money, time and love. Ridiculous amounts. To a degree this resource can be stol…
From experience, I can tell you that women are far more attracted to the beer-swilling bros who jump out of airplanes than the quiet, introverted engineers who retire each night to their homes to relax while cooking dinner and watching TV. That doesn't make for a particularly interesting date. So it goes.
You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now. Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
I'm baffled my peers , who absolutely could afford to, still have no interest. These are people making 150-200k (and at my prior job, 200-400k).
Is it not totally obvious that the low birth rate is directly caused by availability and social acceptance of contraceptives and related technologies? People didn’t really “choose” to have that many kids in the past. It turns out that even if you don’t really want to have kids, not having sex is a very, very hard thing to do. Nature’s solution to making humans have kids despite being able to reason themselves out of…
I didn't have a sense that my grandmother's generation (and all children prior to that) were perceived by their parents as unwelcome consequences of their unrestrained hornyness.
Old literature starting with the bible is full of examples of people lamenting infertility, they clearly wanted kids.
Also, today the only people who have children are the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality, which kind of goes against what you're saying.
And finally, people forever back had ways to not get pregnant if they didn't want to.
Anecdata: 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…
> It baffles me. Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.
However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.
You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now. Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
The most consistent predictor of the decline of the birth rate in a society is increased levels of wealth, which indicates it's in no way that simple. Personally, I think it is that expectations rise, both for your own life and for that of children once your purchasing power increases. It's harder to give it up than to not have it in the first place. Having children increasingly has to compete with a lot of other rew…
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> It baffles me. Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.
It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible. And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but…
You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now. Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
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With how poised American infrastructure is for a huge wave of massive investment and upgrades, the economic boom following that will more than justify the increase now to fix what's left of the covid supply chain crunch.
Anecdata: 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…
with 3 kids at 31 you would most likely be the outlier in many countries. all the rest you said resonates - so many people do not want to have kids at all anymore, and it’s not difficult to understand why (socioeconomic uncertainty, environmental issues, a lot of places are not “child friendly”, and there’s more). having kids today seems to be an even more difficult undertaking than in the past; and in my opinion the…