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The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

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Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#311

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> Because the best thing you can do for the world Is to not have any children so the population gets back down to sustainable levels

You need to watch Idiocracy https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ When some people stop procreating and educating the next generation, the world population does not simply go down. Instead it gets replaced by those who do continue multiplying.

There are no signs that intelligent people are not procreating. More affluent countries are not procreating, but that does not correlate with intelligence.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having kids is a benefit to society. Even though nobody has kids "for the greater good", it still is in everyone's interest that there is a strong upcoming generation. I think it's not unreasonable for a society to pay parents who decide to stay at home during the first years for their efforts, if only to make having kids sufficiently attractive. Lots of people just can't afford to stay home and capitalism makes it h…

This is where theory and practice collide. In theory, society should pay parents. In practice, paying parents results in incentivizing the people you do not want being parents into having more kids. What society really wants is to incentivize good parents to have kids, but that is nowhere near possible to measure and implement.

actually it is possible: education. basically, the reason one might not want some people to have kids is their lack of education. provide them with better education and that "problem" goes away.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#313
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I missed the “first years” portion of your comment. I had originally read it as simply paying people to be stay at home parents for the whole time they have children at home. Paid parental leave up until at least breastfeeding is done is a no brainer.

Just spitballing, here, but maybe some sort of voucher system to distribute leave among all your "alloparents?" But that's hard to systematize. Probably the simplest thing is simply to increase wages and PTO across the board, and let workers/consumers act on their own priorities.

no need for vouchers. we just need the right and the support for more people to work part time. that right for example is already law in germany. the problem is that not many people make use of it, partly because it would reduce their income but partly also because there is no broad social support for people to reduce their worktime in order to do other useful things.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#314

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I’m already doing this with a set of friends in a big city with decent public transportation (relative to the world). We all share a two story two flat. It’s quite fun, and my mental health is great. The big “but” is that it’s unlikely to last because people value different things. Most of us are doing this arrangement because it’s ridiculously inexpensive compared to other forms of housing. One has already moved out…

I don’t think remote work is the bottleneck to people living like this. It’s fun when you’re young but most people outgrow the situation relatively quickly as they age (barring budget-driven forced decisions). I also see a growing detachment from reality in some of the remote work maximalists who forget that not everyone has a job sitting at a computer all day. A significant number of younger people have jobs involve…

>It’s fun when you’re young but most people outgrow the situation relatively quickly as they age

It might be fun if you get the right group of friends together. Until one of them has to leave and now everyone has to pay more rent, or a new roommate moves in and everyone hates him.

I got tired of the roommate thing in college very quickly after having a roommate with terrible hygiene who refused to clean and ate my food. It's better for people to have small, private apartments so they don't have to deal with all the stresses and annoyances of living with someone, without any of the benefits a romantic relationship provides.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#315
post #289

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>but it's a kind of experience that you either have or you don't, and it's hard to understand if you never had children. this kind of mention is only ever asymmetrical -- generally in the direction you mentioned -- but i'd like to mention that being a childless adult with a long term relationship (or not) is also a unique perspective that very young parents / couples will never experience. I had plenty of friends in…

I should have further specified that I didn't have a child at 14 or 17, but at approximately 30. I essentially had about a decade to live the care free life with my wife who I'd been with since 18. So I understand that lifestyle choice and it's fine. I'm offering a counter explanation for the other comment suggesting we're all delusional for saying it is a unique experience. That doesn't mean the childless lifestyle…

Here’s the problem though. If you had your kids at about age thirty five and they do the same, you’re seventy when your grandchildren are born. How much can you realistically expect to help raise a child at seventy plus?

I think we should teach young people that it is ok to not have children. There is nothing wrong being child free and it ought to be the default for most people.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#316
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have further specified that I didn't have a child at 14 or 17, but at approximately 30. I essentially had about a decade to live the care free life with my wife who I'd been with since 18. So I understand that lifestyle choice and it's fine. I'm offering a counter explanation for the other comment suggesting we're all delusional for saying it is a unique experience. That doesn't mean the childless lifestyle…

Here’s the problem though. If you had your kids at about age thirty five and they do the same, you’re seventy when your grandchildren are born. How much can you realistically expect to help raise a child at seventy plus? I think we should teach young people that it is ok to not have children. There is nothing wrong being child free and it ought to be the default for most people.

if not having children is the default, then population will decrease and eventually die out, or the burden of keeping the population stable rests on those few who need to have lots of children.

if the replacement rate today is 2,3 children per couple, then when half of couples don't have children the others need to have more than 4 children. in an environment that is not supportive of having children this is going to create a two class society.

better to spread the load.

also, having children late also means that more children per family are needed. so you can choose between having 2 children when you are young or having 3 or more when you are older. (i don't know the actual numbers but i think you can get the idea)

so i disagree that teaching young people that not having children is ok. we need to teach them the opposite, and most importantly, we need to teach those that do not want children of their own, that they need to actively support those who do have children instead.

we need to create a child friendly society. and we can't do that without everyone contributing to that.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#317

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The vast majority of child abusers are male and known to the child and family (not strangers), so there is some evidence behind the bias, I suppose.

All stereotypes grow from a kernel of some truth. Lets calculate. - 80-90% of child abusers are male. (Lets use 90% further on). - Us population is 330 million. (So half will be 165m male). - It has 750 thousand registered sex offenders Calculations: - 750t * 0.9 = 675t male offenders; 675t / 165000t = 0.4% of male population in us are registered sex offenders. (1 out of 243 males). - 750t * 0.1 = 75t female offender…

I wonder what kind of impact removing priests from the statistics would have

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#318

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> I cannot understand how come there are so many parents bearing children worldwide. Because the best thing you can do for the world is to raise children well. If they raise theirs, etc. its a cycle of good over thousands of years, that will have more positive impact than anything you could do in your life as an individual.

> Because the best thing you can do for the world Is to not have any children so the population gets back down to sustainable levels

We could 10x the human population and still be sustainable. Your idea of sustainable is a common misconception.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue is not with the fact that some parents are happy with their decision. My issue is the implication that the joy of parenthood is above every other joy. For comparison, you don't see programmers claiming the joy of programming is superior to all other jobs. Mountaineers don't claim that you haven't enjoyed life unless you climb mountains. Why? Because those things are obviously joyful, but not accessible to ev…

The same reason sex is pleasurable. We would not be here if it were not this way. Put in different terms, there are many experiences which have an evolutionary origin. Disgust reactions to certain sights/smells are a near-universal experience, for example. Individuals that don't share these experiences (or who are attracted to them) are considered weird or degenerate precisely because they are so universal.

Yeah but no. Pleasure is brutal manipulation at play.

Sex is short-lived pleasure, dopamine. Family relationships are long-term happiness, serotonins.

Re: The key to mother and child well-being may be many caregivers

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot understand how come there are so many parents bearing children worldwide. Because the best thing you can do for the world is to raise children well. If they raise theirs, etc. its a cycle of good over thousands of years, that will have more positive impact than anything you could do in your life as an individual.

> Because the best thing you can do for the world Is to not have any children so the population gets back down to sustainable levels

What makes humanity unsustainable is not the amount of human but the unleashed greed of a minority.

100 billion aborigines would pollute less than a handful of western oligarchs

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