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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?

#201

Post by vecinu »

echelon wrote: post #187
zigman1 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what is also anti-child? Having parents that were completely unprepared to be parents. Stop with this dopamine epidemic nonsense excuse for everything that isn't working the way you want

[flagged]

> Here I am, just fine, a self-made millionaire today.

That says everything about how you view the world. "self-made". Nothing about how your adoptive father contributed, your peers or the entire society you grew up in.

Something else I'd love to get away from is that having money != being a well adjusted individual.

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

#202

Post by xyzelement »

dotnet00 wrote: post #196
xyzelement wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely haven’t met anyone who deeply wanted children and then didn’t because of “socioeconomics”. I met plenty of ppl who talk about the climate or cost of housing as the reason for other ppl but I never knew of anyone making a decision this way. You know someone?

By socioeconomics, I'm referring to all those different factors. The point is that "I don't want to have children because I'm worried about the impact of climate change" (social) or "I don't want to have children because I think it'll be too expensive" (economic) is not caused by biology and thus there is no selecting such concerns out of the gene pool. Not even mentioning that evolution doesn't even meaningfully wor…

I see. I didn’t mean literal genetic evolution. Cultural if you will.

Parents who fail to instill love and desire of family into their kids won’t get to be grandparents. A few decades ago maybe you could take it for granted “everyone ends up having kids” now it obviously is a dead end unless you really help your kids through it. It feels to me like the next generation will have parents who will be intentional about this value. Others won’t bother having kids to begin with.

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

#203

Post by esafak »

beaned wrote: post #179
smallmancontrov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only in the Western first world is this now normal It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman: 1.64 USA 1.34 Japan 1.28 China 0.84 Korea > we've just been raised softly and do not value children Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reapin…

I will admit that I was a bit off-the-cuff in terms of the Western aspect of my comment. There are lots of factors, of course, and the trend isn't limited to only the west. Though it has certainly become a more normal trend in developed and developing countries than those with a higher level of poverty and poor. I still contend however that it has never been easy. My grandparents had four children starting at age 20.…

The human population is expected to peak at ten billion, and that's in the latter half of his century. We have no reason to fear declining birth rates in an existential sense.

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

#204

Post by em-bee »

silverquiet wrote: post #50
datavirtue wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with plenty of people who have no visible significant other, even. It's fucking weird. Thirty+ (40+) year old guys living alone in huge houses, never married. I'm guessing they are just hitting up sex workers. These are smart, well adjusted people who would have made good fathers.

Maybe they just never met the right lady. Calling it "fucking weird" seems a bit over the top, and contradictory to your statement about working with plenty of them.

if you don't meet the right lady by 40 then you haven't been looking hard enough. meaning, you were not really interested or focused on getting married. i am the only male among all my cousins that i know of to be married with children. and i am your proverbial geek who has a hard time meeting women. which my cousins or brothers are not. they had more opportunities to meet women than me (as far as i can tell), but for me, getting married and having children was one of my life goals. i achieved my goal. my brothers or cousins simply didn't even have that goal.

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

#205

Post by vidarh »

afavour wrote: post #123
silverquiet wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates and got married I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it depends on age. What you say is probably true at age 21, by 29 most of the women I met were very set on meeting a serious life partner, not a bro. I found that actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders, even if my introverted instincts didn’t tell me to.

As an introvert, I feel I had to work harder to compensate for the fact that I didn't naturally find myself in environments where I'd meet people and engage with them, but I've also found that the attraction I've gotten from women has steading increased over time. I've found it far easier to date in my 40's than in my 20's. Not just people who wanted a serious life partner. Some of it does seem to be women equating older men with more maturity, some of it hopefully reflects actual maturity...

I don't know if you had to learn how to do this, but for me I think a large part of it is also the same thing you mention - it took a lot of effort for me to figure out, but the same parts of my nature that was a disadvantage for me when younger drove me to experiment, even take notes, until I figured out what I got wrong and how to improve myself.

Ironically I've found one of my best assets when dating in my 40's was my past struggles. Particularly recognising them and being able to use them to give observations about how clueless men tend to be about dating based on the mistakes I used to make myself.

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

#206

Post by dalyons »

somenameforme wrote: post #145
dalyons wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nevermind the most expensive housing, education and healthcare ever, even in inflation adjusted terms. No it’s the children who are wrong. you might look at the birth rates in china or almost any other Asian country, and see how your vague rant holds up.

In the past, if you could not afford to feed your family, you could literally starve to death. And people saved money by doing things like crafting clothes out of feed sacks. [1] It became common enough that companies would start selling their feed in sacks with floral designs, specifically with the intent of then being reused as clothing. And that's just one among a vast array of lifestyle differences. Now a days th…

2019 data is fairly out of date. 2023 shows India is below replacement now (2.1 and dropping). china drastically so (1.2 and dropping). Those are the biggest populations by a large margin. Projections for the region show continued declines, not sustainable at all.

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

#207

Post by riku_iki »

lolinder wrote: post #140
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 housi…

> According to census.gov, the current national homeownership rate is hovering at about 66%

majority of those 66% are older generation who benefited dramatically on homes prices increase. New gen is priced out.

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

#208

Post by somenameforme »

vidarh wrote: post #135
beaned wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates. And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9. The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).

For those who don't understand why 1.5 is so much worse than 1.9, it's because fertility is an exponential system. Every generation's (~20 years) size is (fertility_rate / 2) times as large as the one prior that gave birth to them. So after 5 generations (~1 century), a fertility rate of 1.9 would see the next generation's size go from 100 to 77 (100 * (1.9/2)^5). A fertility rate of 1.5 would go from 100 to 23. South Korea, at 0.78, would go from 100 to 0 - extinct, in a century.

And most people, across the world, do have children at what you'd call "young" ages. Female fertility rates start to decline rapidly as they age, obviously hitting zero at menopause which tends to happen in their 40s. Even when successful, an older parent results faces exponentially increased odds of seeing a variety of issues with the child, such as Down Syndrome.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

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

#209

Post by esafak »

doubleg72 wrote: post #76
silverquiet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the older I get, the more unclear I am on what normal is supposed to be or what it ever was. What percentage of men historically even had children? My impression is that it has always been significantly less than the percentage of women who do.

0% as far as I am aware

That sounds wild. Got a reference?

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

#210

Post by echelon »

voidfunc wrote: post #195
lolinder wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 housi…

HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ownership has probably plummeted in those markets (I don't have the data) but it leads to certain types of comments being passed around as fact. The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless…

> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.

The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.

I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.

They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.

On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.

There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.

I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.

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