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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?

#31

Post by slibhb »

whatshisface wrote: post #15
jojobas wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility:

1. Decline in religious belief

2. Widespread, easy to use birth control

3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless series, or playing computer games

4. Strong anti-natalist sentiment that was pushed very hard post-war and persists

5. Higher rates of college attendance, which means people are studying and furthering their careers in their 20s rather than having kids

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

#32

Post by whatshisface »

slibhb wrote: post #31
whatshisface wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility: 1. Decline in religious belief 2. Widespread, easy to use birth control 3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless seri…

Children are not too expensive for anyone to afford, they're too expensive for most people to think it is worth having more than two. That might sound like a qualification, but it's what population decline means.

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

#33

Post by ChainOfFools »

solveit wrote: post #18
whatshisface wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When there is consequently more to do, more to experience, more people to meet, more to discover, more novelty to novel at. In short, the modern era has more of what makes the childhood experience what it is, enough to spill over into what was previously considered adulthood.

I sometimes ponder what would happen if we did discover the secret to substantial life extension or even immortality; if this phenomenon of trying to stretch that delightful halcyon glow of childhood wonder - what I've heard the Finns call lapsuus - would extend into decades or centuries or perpetuity as a result. It would if nothing else provide a plausible explanation for the behavior of characters like Q from Star Trek.

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

#34

Post by silverquiet »

whatshisface wrote: post #32
slibhb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility: 1. Decline in religious belief 2. Widespread, easy to use birth control 3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless seri…

Children are not too expensive for anyone to afford, they're too expensive for most people to think it is worth having more than two. That might sound like a qualification, but it's what population decline means.

I believe the average cost to raise a child in the US is comparable to a Lamborghini. I suppose it's up to the individual to decide what the more desirable purchase is.

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

#35

Post by mmasu »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #16

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 there is a lot less peer pressure pushing to procreate

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

#36

Post by MBCook »

justrealist wrote: post #7
irrational wrote: post #3

I have 11 siblings and 75 first cousins. But, we lived thousands of miles away from any of those cousins, so I never got to know them very well and now have no contact with them. In the other hand, my daughter has a single cousin around her same age who lived about three hours away growing up, so they saw each other a few times a year, Now, as adults, even though they live in different countries, they still maintain…

How did your daughter only end up with 1 cousin from your 11 siblings? That's a catastrophically low TFR.

I could be 1 in the same age range.

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

#37

Post by samatman »

LoganDark wrote: post #30

I wish the world weren't so bad that potential parents don't want to bring new lives into it... honestly, if I were a mother considering whether to have a child, I wouldn't want them to have to grow up in this terrible day and age. They'd end up more traumatized than I am. I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

[flagged]

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

#38

Post by justahuman74 »

silverquiet wrote: post #28
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #16

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.

For me it's like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_une...

(third square)

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

#40

Post by dgfitz »

justahuman74 wrote: post #38
silverquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For me it's like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_une... (third square)

Heh, maybe if people were having more kids the US political landscape wouldn’t be so fucked.
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