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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?

#261

Post by zztop44 »

dotnet00 wrote: post #244
zztop44 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a lot easier to have kids when you have nothing left to lose. What does that even mean? I also don’t think “nothing left to lose” was really the attitude of the post-War world and (especially) the US.

You're a young male off to fight in either of the most brutal wars in history. This might just be the last time you see your wife, so you have nothing to lose in having a child at that point, as you have a much higher chance of never being able to do so later when things are better. Alternatively you lived in a city reduced to ruins by the war, everything you knew or had is gone and you have no idea when or even if y…

Yeah I mean it makes sense as a story. But it also makes sense not to have a kid if you think you’re going to die at war. Both stories are perfectly believable, I’d say. And likewise it also makes sense not to bring a child into a bombed out hellhole with severely limited food rations.

And in the 50s the future was looking good in some ways, but people also lived under a visceral fear of nuclear annihilation. These are all just feelings people may or may not have.

Ultimately, I think it’s much more complicated than saying that circumstances in the past made it easier for people to decide to have children.

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

#262

Post by swells34 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #150
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.

> You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. This is incoherent; children are not expensive.

This is likely the stupidest thing I'll read this week, thank you for that. In what way, exactly, are children not expensive? From some research and napkin math, it looks like $300k, not including opportunity cost (so in reality more like $500k), if everything goes right. Hope there's no medical issues, hope there's no car crashes. How many years of salary is that?

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

#263

Post by Runways »

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…

Texan here. Your ad hominem attack is BS.

Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.

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

#264

Post by lolinder »

hmcq6 wrote: post #250
lolinder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not. I'm citing the numbers in the table entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"* (emphasis added). That table is talking about homeownership rates, not householdership rates, and the definition they give is this: > Homeownership Rates. The proportion of households that are owners is termed the homeownership rate. It is computed by dividing the number of households t…

That table doesn't break things down by age. Just own it dude. You pulled the "49% of people aged 30-34" thing from this chart https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr423/tab7.xlsx or some variation of it and you misunderstood it.

Sorry, I just updated my links to include the citation for the age breakdown, which is in fact the link you linked to.

Note the title of the chart you linked to (tab7.xlsx): "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder" (emphasis added). This is percentage of householders who own the home that they are the householder of.

EDIT: Also, while I'm at it, here's "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: 1994 to Present" (again, homeownership), which shows a 39% homeownership rate under 35 years old, which is about the same rate as it was throughout the 90s. It broke 40% in the 2000s for a while before coming back down, but was never higher than about 43%.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab19.xlsx

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

#265

Post by remarkEon »

voidfunc wrote: post #199
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).

I just don't have any interest in kids. They're expensive and they require a ton of sacrifice. I'd rather travel, golf, do hobbies and generally enjoy my life. The only people that seem to want me to have babies are my parents so they can have grand kids... too which I've told them "Thank you for having me, but that's not a valid reason for me to sacrifice my life". I don't really care about the preservation of the h…

Whenever I encounter this attitude I like to remind that person that they should have no voice, whatsoever, in what happens in government and politics anymore. I don't want people who are self-selecting themselves out of the future having any say in what happens for my children. It's fine that you don't want kids, enjoy the golf course I guess. But in general I will discount your opinions to zero on anything else of consequence.

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

#266

Post by nox101 »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #100
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.

> 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…

Maybe this is the great filter.

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

#268

Post by bruhbruh78 »

swells34 wrote: post #262
thaumasiotes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're baffled people aren't having kids? What bubble do you live in? People straight up can't afford housing much less children. This is incoherent; children are not expensive.

This is likely the stupidest thing I'll read this week, thank you for that. In what way, exactly, are children not expensive? From some research and napkin math, it looks like $300k, not including opportunity cost (so in reality more like $500k), if everything goes right. Hope there's no medical issues, hope there's no car crashes. How many years of salary is that?

[flagged]

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

#269

Post by dghhddgg »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #241
voidfunc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't have any interest in kids. They're expensive and they require a ton of sacrifice. I'd rather travel, golf, do hobbies and generally enjoy my life. The only people that seem to want me to have babies are my parents so they can have grand kids... too which I've told them "Thank you for having me, but that's not a valid reason for me to sacrifice my life". I don't really care about the preservation of the h…

[flagged]

He is no more parasite than you are.

He is working, creating value for society, capturing only a portion of the value he creates, and deploying that value through consumption of experiences and services.

The fact that you would prefer he spent his money on children, instead of on other experiences, is irrelevant. Your desire to control other peoples spending, and to vilify them, for it, shows only that you are an immoral, authoritarian, asshole, and that you do not respect other people.

It is somewhat sad, that an immoral, authoritarian, freedom, hating, asshole, such as yourself might have children. I only hope that women are able to recognize that you are a monster, and that you do not respect other people.

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

#270

Post by TFYS »

Barrin92 wrote: post #73
toasterlovin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird.

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.

We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
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