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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?

#341
post #221
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game. It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting. India has hit replacement and will start to see decline barring immigration over the next 20-30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa is left with above replacement birth rates. We'…

It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting. i think the economic differences and the population density still make immigration a viable strategy for some time to come, despite contracting population everywhere. the future will be that the population in every larger city will consists of least a quarter chinese and indian (and eventually african as well).

It will be a viable strategy for decades, you're right, in as much as UN population projections don't show an actual global population decline until around 2100 or so.

The challenges that will bring, though, is policy, and which countries are attractive enough to "sit back" vs. being forced to offer increasingly attractive incentives, and where it will cause substantial political complications.

E.g. China is notorious for it being near impossible to permanently settle as an immigrant. I expect that aside from increasingly drastic measures to try to bring the fertility rate back up you'll see their first attempts be to entice the diaspora back to China, secondly an increase in rhetoric about One China towards Taiwan, and only well after those attempts to loosen up visa requirements for foreigners with no ancestral ties to China.

We'll see the return of diasporas increasingly becoming a problem for countries that has come to rely on certain immigrant flows.

A lot of countries will find political tension between forces wanting to more actively court immigrants vs. anti-immigrant groups becoming increasingly challenging and a major economic issue.

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

#342

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…

Well, I have had jobs that have paid well, but not for long. If you're not working backwards from an accidental pregnancy, you just have to consider the volatility of your life, and the prospects for the future. My dad had me when he was 21, accidentally, in a time not so long ago where various alternatives weren't super available, and made it work (horribly) until they divorced, in one of the poorest and most isolated cities in Canada. He has however managed to work the same job for 30 years, and bought a house (with help from both sets of grandparents financially. Now, he does have the house, but he's had more kids in that time, and still works at the same company, but doesn't make enough to keep anything for later; it all goes to childcare and life.

In order to make something of what was an incredibly volatile childhood and an interest in computers, I eventually moved to a much more appealing and more expensive but larger pond that I could pay for at the time; my hometown just didn't really have a market. I'm also 31 now, nearly 32, and have only managed to bring in an income for a maximum of a year and a half since 18, have ended up without a stable housing situation for quite some time, and that's really difficult to pivot from if you consider that the bet you made on the thing you were capable of, just hasn't really panned out (frontend development apparently). What's next now that that the hypothetical prospects I'd have had in previous years have functionally evaporated? I'm not sure, but I'll pay for this basement apartment and drain my savings as I figure it out, going into my second year with no job of any kind.

Ironically, the people who got into trades that they had no prior knowledge of, and that didn't pursue the ambition to explore beyond the confines of their hometown, have the most stability. Me the idiot picked the computer thing and nobody taught me how to be sufficiently obedient or whatever.

So although I've been in positions where my salary was relatively higher than I could have ever imagined as a kid, I've always known it was going to disappear the next year in a layoff or a firing or a pandemic, and prospects for the future would always be just tenuous enough to barely be able to get by on my own or even with a partner. I don't take out debt, and all my money which stays liquid eventually goes to rent. I'm always in risk mitigation mode, because there's always been risk, and although I've never been compelled to have kids, some amount of that is predicated on the knowledge that it doesn't seem right to bring a kid up if I can't even figure out how to hold a job for 2 damn years.

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

#343
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misconstruing what census.gov says. If you look into the "definitions" section it defines "Housing Unit. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters." and "Householder. The householder refers to the person (or one of the persons) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented [...]" 49% of people aged 30-34 aren't…

> 49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters. Wait, this is saying less than 50% of people aged 30-34 live in a home that is owned or rented by them (or their spouse)? I can't imagine a region where this is close to true, since probably near 100% where I live either own or rent. Is there a regional breakdown for this? And where do these people live? With their parents or in a shel…

If two or more people rent the same "household" (house, apartment, couple of rooms) they are only counted a single time.

1 homeowner and 1 renter = 50%

1 homeowner and 2 renters in the same apartment = 50%

1 homeowner and 200,000 renters in the same apartment = 50%

1 homeowner and 2 renters in 2 different apartments = 33%

It's a ratio of homeowners to the number of buildings the rest of us rent out.

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

#344

I’d say half my friends have had trouble conceiving, many probably will not ever have kids, and a decent chunk of my cousins as well had trouble or weren’t able to. It’s not just that people don’t have cousins

Lot of blame gets placed on women too and sometimes it's misplaced. At-home sperm testing kits should really be covered by insurance considering how cheap and easy they are[0].

[0]https://yospermtest.com/

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

#345

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.

> Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch.

If you're in the minority, maybe you're the one who's out of touch?

It's not that they can't afford having children—many of those who are less fortunate than them still have children. It's just that they think the cost of raising children, which likely affects their current lifestyle, is not worth it.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.

If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex educa…

It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires.

It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.

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

#347

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 makes me feel bad (though not too bad at this point) that I have to log off at quittin' time, sharp, to go relieve my wife of some childcare and make a family dinner.

It shouldn't make you feel bad. I have no children and I have strict policy of logging off at the end of my work day (unless in truly exceptional circumstances). No one shuold feel shame (children or not) about finishing the work when they are no longer paid for it.

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

#348

I was lucky that my wife convinced me to move close to her family (it would have never occurred to me.) Now we live just a few doors down from her brother who's got 4 kids, and we have 2. Watching the cousins intermingle is an amazing and unique experience. It's kinda sad but it's also obvious that people are majorly missing out. On having kids, on living close to family, on all of it. Ironically, this is evolution i…

That would only make sense if the issue was biological and not socioeconomic. No one's getting selected out when the issue isn't a biological predisposition to avoiding procreation.

Of course it's a combination of the two.

In the ancestral environment, kids "just happened". There were people who specifically tried to have more children, but they would only have a small advantage over the vast majority of accidentally made children.

Fast forward to modernity. Now, children are only being born to people who specifically choose to do so. A small change in socioeconomics accidentally privileges people with a biological quirk.

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

#349

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…

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.

Those are called "bachelors", plenty of historical precedent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor

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

#350
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You have no trouble taking your share of the benefits that come from living in our society They didn't ask to be born, did they? Why should that accident of existence saddle them with obligations to birth others? This is such a shallow "yet you participate in society" argument.

It's also a zero-sum argument. Participating in society is likely to amount to giving, not taking. It's like Marxists thinking there's only so much wealth to go round and thus anyone who has any should feel ashamed.

The argument could be made that those who have children are the parasites, selfishly diverting resources to the useless ineffectual new humans that they've made for the fun of it. This argument would be nonsense too, but it wouldn't be worse than the other one.

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