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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?

#351

Post by CalRobert »

lolinder wrote: post #115
CalRobert wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poorer places haven't financialized housing usually.

This isn't enough of an explanation, because surviving is still harder in such places than it is in wealthy countries with low birth rates. Birth rates are inversely correlated with wealth regardless of housing affordability.

True, I was thinking of colleagues who had moved from Eastern Europe to Ireland and were telling me that it was much more common to have homes without a mortgage, they weren't as likely to be a vehicle for getting rich, NIMBYs weren't such a big thing, etc. Maybe it's a holdover from the Soviet Union.

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

#352

Post by skissane »

NoPicklez wrote: post #335
skissane wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Australia Australia has made a bunch of home-ownership-unfriendly decisions which the US hasn't – e.g. in the US you get a mortgage interest deduction on your primary residence, in Australia you only get it on investment properties (joint filing for married couples, which the US has but Australia doesn't, also helps here); in the US owner-occupier mortgages are normally no-recourse, in Australia they are al…

Some of those things I agree with, however the issue was primarily sparked during COVID like in many countries. Houses prices were relatively affordable prior to COVID and increases in inflation. Australia kept its record low interest rates in place during COVID, then we had runaway inflation to record high’s like many countries did and our reserve bank failed to increase interest rates even slightly to help with the…

People have been complaining about housing affordability in Australia for years. I remember endless discussions of it, media articles about it, and feeling its pain myself, 20 years ago. No denying it has gotten worse, but it was already rather bad.

That said - we bought our house (NSW Central Coast) in late 2015 for AU$550K. At the peak of the COVID price surge, those property value websites were saying it was over AU$1 million. Now they are saying it is only AU$850K. Still gone up a fair bit compared to when we bought it, but also fallen a fair bit off the peak. Of course, those websites are not completely accurate, but what they say is consistent with sale prices of comparable properties in our neighbourhood

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

#353

Post by conradludgate »

Why are people so obsessed about it I have children? I'm married and we've decided we don't want to have kids. It really bothers me when people say "oh you're missing out, that's such a shame". Please think about what you are saying.

It doesn't matter if I'm gay, infertile, poor, depressed, or just don't want them. Please keep your judgements to yourself or even just stop judging others.

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

#354

Post by card_zero »

silverquiet wrote: post #80
startupsfail wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is wrong that our society rewards drinking beers with tech bros and “skydiving” hobbies and what not fucking weird stuff. And doesn’t reward that much investments of money and parental time into having healthy and educated kids. Educated and well rounded kids, teenagers and adults don’t come free for society. It requires a lot of work, money, time and love. Ridiculous amounts. To a degree this resource can be stol…

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.

Some of the women are quiet, introverted engineers.

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

#355

Post by brailsafe »

toasterlovin wrote: post #71
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.

Your comment seems to be coming from a genuine place, but you could really use some historical perspective.

Nobody has kids based on their relative circumstances to some arbitrary point in history, only those that have played out in their life and might in the future.

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

#356

Post by Biologist123 »

ako wrote: post #328
caturopath wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very confused. People these days are really rich compared to people in the past who had more kids, poorer people in countries like the US have more kids on average than richer ones, and poorer countries on average have more kids than richer ones. (People don't seem to have fewer kids because they're poor; they seem to have fewer kids because they're rich!) Despite major housing issues, people live in…

That was also concluded by Hans Rosling: the higher the education of people, the fewer kids they have. Best way to address overpopulation is by increasing education worldwide. https://www.teesche.com/bookshelf/hans_rosling_factfulness

I wonder if Rosling’s conclusions are confounded. The human and environmental systems in which we swim are complex, not simple. Education being the key driver of population numbers strikes me as overly simple.

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

#357

Post by shepherdjerred »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #177
toasterlovin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be religious, right? This is the dream for us. We reverted to Catholicism after it became apparent that the secular world was incompatible with us, then eventually found our way to a high fertility parish. It’s incredible. Kids everywhere. Average family size is 5-6 kids. Really hoping our kids choose to remain in this lifestyle and we get to enjoy dozens of grandkids.

I initially read this comment to mean “we wanted larger family, the secular world doesn’t do that, we became religious and we’re happy”. Am I understanding that correctly? If so, this strikes me as a very novel argument in favor of religion, and is more convincing to me than most others. I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with lar…

> I do wonder what I’d say if/when people question the fervor of my belief though, if I truly converted just for a community with larger families. I imagine “I believe in big families” wouldn’t cut it.

There's nothing wrong with that. Nobody should have a problem with you wanting to be a part of a church community, even if you aren't a "real" believer.

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

#358

Post by trgn »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #325
ekianjo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

White Americans just after the second world war controlled a huge fraction of the world's wealth. It's incredibly easy to raise your family in relative comfort when you're part of the only industrialized society on Earth that hasn't been reduced to rubble, the ones being rebuilt owe you billions upon billions of dollars, and you have a reliable underclass of other races to do the most unpleasant bits of labor for you…

maybe they meant europeans, because many of them did lose everything.

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

#359

Post by shepherdjerred »

dotnet00 wrote: post #182
xyzelement wrote: post #141

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.

That's too narrow a view of evolution.

A better way to frame it is: which group is more likely to propagate their genes and have more ancestors 100/1,000/10,000 years in the future? Is it the group that can afford to have more children and successfully raise them, or the group that can't afford large families?

It doesn't matter if the cause is biological or socioeconomic. Just because humans have science, medicine, economics, etc. doesn't mean evolution has "stopped".

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

#360

Post by jimbob45 »

sneed_chucker wrote: post #157
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).

The societal norms and structures that promoted natalism are gone in western countries for much of the population. Raising kids is hard work. Ideally you have them young and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare. But our society tells people to wait as long as possible to have kids, and to prioritize career over other things - so once people do have kids, if they ever do so, t…

Raising kids is hard work.

I would bet this plays a large part - people today respect the difficulty in a way past parents previously did not. Birth rates are certainly declining but I would bet the rates of accidental infant/toddler death are down as well.

That said, I personally know parents that are just taunting SIDS with the way they ignore infant sleeping best practices even though they’ve read the books to know better.

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