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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?

#131

Post by ekianjo »

dalyons wrote: post #102
haimez wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be a little charitable here- having and raising children has been a much, much more dangerous proposition health wise even at your parents generation to say nothing of your grandparents generation.

There’s not a lot to be charitable about in the parent comment. Some poorly researched race replacement bs? You personally are right, it has never been safer health wise to have children. It has never been more expensive either, win some, lose some.

more expensive than when? people had nothing 150 years ago and still had kids, mind you

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#132

Post by latentcall »

xyzelement wrote: post #90
bongodongobob wrote: post #75

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 avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now And yet somehow places I visit (which lately has been between NY, Ohio, and Florida) has young families living in houses. I am not saying there's no challenge but your comment would imply that these houses are standing empty because nobody can afford them when in reality each one coming to the market is immediately snapped up mainly by families l…

In my area these houses are snatched up by real estate companies and turned into rentals within a week of closing.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#133

Post by Aeolun »

boredtofears wrote: post #107
Barrin92 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.

Does it not strike you as strange though that so many different nations / cultures are all seeing the same downward trend at the same time? There is something about it that feels like a biological imperative.

We have better things to do than hump like rabbits? We don’t need kids to work the farm, or to provide net positive muscle power input to the economy. We have machines for that.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#134

Post by silverquiet »

xyzelement wrote: post #125
pfannkuchen wrote: post #112

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 think this is a naive view. 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 h…

> the religious, which are also people that have objectively got the greatest control and ability to restrain their sexuality

I cannot properly put into words how different the reality you live in must be different from the one I do.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#135

Post by vidarh »

beaned wrote: post #64
mmasu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did. An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where the fertility rate is still over replacement (~2.1 children per woman), and it's rapidly dropping there too. The first African country has dropped below replacement (Mauritius), with 10 more (of 55) having dropped below 3 already as of 2020.

China is seeing a population decline not caused by famine for the first time in modern history.

India's fertility rate is at or below replacement at this point, and India is a couple of decades from population contraction unless they increase immigration.

Having 3 children at a young age is an outlier in the vast majority of the world at this point.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#136

Post by jwells89 »

skissane wrote: post #108
jwells89 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speculate of course, but I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary. In a developed society, people are more likely to have many things they want to pursue and achieve, and due to various factors (financial and otherwise), having kids usually entails giving up on most or all of that. That probably see…

> I think something that'd increase birthrates in urbanized society would "simply" be arranging things such that raising a family isn't so exclusionary. There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are un…

> There's only so much you can do. You can introduce as much subsidised childcare, parental leave, flexible working conditions, free higher education, etc, policies as you like – those things can alleviate the disadvantage to other life goals of having kids, but are unlikely to ever be able to reduce it to a level at which it ceases to be significant.

Reducing disadvantage to insignificance is indeed unlikely, but if things were structured such (for example) that working a part-time job paid a wage capable of supporting a family, that’d go a long way. It’d enable parents to work full-time for the extra cash for some period of time prior to starting a family to build substantial financial padding and then drop back to part-time once kids are in the picture, opening up time for parents to be both parents and be people.

We’ve seen incredible improvements in productivity in the past several decades, so there’s not really much reason why that shouldn’t be possible.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#137

Post by Aeolun »

silverquiet wrote: post #128
xyzelement wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.

> I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being

Is that truly any more likely than the non-extinction of our being? It seems like a safe assumption as a default, but…

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#138

Post by aaomidi »

ekianjo wrote: post #124
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

[flagged]

I don’t think it’s selfless or selfish to have or not have kids. It just is.

There’s no reason to say it’s selfish tbh.

Re: Cousins are disappearing. Is this reshaping the experience of childhood?

#140

Post by lolinder »

bongodongobob wrote: post #75

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.

This is unnecessarily confrontational and inaccurate. According to census.gov, the current national homeownership rate is hovering at about 66%, which is about the same rate that it's been (+/- 3%) since they started tracking in 1964 [0][1]. This isn't restricted to old people either: 49% of 30 to 34 year olds and 58% of 35 to 39 year olds owned a home in Q4 2023 [2].

There are certainly regional differences in housing affordability, but the average American lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35.

[0] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/current/index.html

[1] edit since there's some confusion—here's the direct link to the table I'm citing from, entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab17.xlsx

[2] "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: Fourth Quarter 2022 and 2023"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr423/tab7.xlsx

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