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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?

#371

Post by TeMPOraL »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #332
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).

Birthrate by income levels is approaching a dumbbell distribution in industrialized nations. Lower income people have kids due to the lack of options, while ultra-high income people have kids due to the need for heirs (and they can afford to completely offload childcare to dedicated high-quality staff). Those in the middle are stuck because having children is a net negative to the continuation of career advancement,…

> without completely relieving the parents of their duties.

That's an underappreciated point. Kids in daycares and kindergartens get sick a lot. Those places are pathogen swapping grounds. Especially early on, you may have your kid 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out on average. And the "on average" is a killer, too - you can't schedule when your kid will get sick, so you're effectively on-call all the time anyway, and have to have a job compatible with you just taking off in the middle of the day and getting a day or two of leave, on the spot, at random.

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

#372

Post by dmurray »

atoav wrote: post #321
echelon wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting. The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life. I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of the…

As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason. The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark. The rest is probably due to individualism. Kid…

> We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.

Those countries all have a fertility rate [0] almost identical to the US - three of them are lower if you look at 2020 figures. All of them have been relying on immigration [1] to maintain their demographics, with various levels of backlash in recent years. The US is still ahead of all but Ireland on that immigration list.

In Ireland at least, the narrative around the "housing crisis" and people being priced out of starting families is far stronger than what I get from US media. So I think you need to look elsewhere.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...

[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/net-migration-r...

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

#373

Post by shepherdjerred »

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.

Yeah... I really don't understand why so many people revel in doom about today & the future.

What period of time would you rather live in, as an average person? What period of time did the average family have a better time?

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

#374

Post by chaostheory »

whatshisface wrote: post #20
chaostheory wrote: post #6

The bigger issue is still the age depopulation bomb, which is when retired non-working seniors begin to outnumber working adults. This is made worse by both liberals and conservatives being against immigration. https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/beware-depopulation-bom... Yes, the cost of living affects this but even when the economy was great, Canada was already below the 2.1 birthrate in 1972. One explanation is…

I have never understood how this is a "bomb," western cultures are so good at distancing the elderly, nobody will notice if conditions in care facilities become worse. How exactly will all of the unsupported old people overthrow society? By selling their IRAs? Will China's over-working-age-population get a second wind just long enough to take down the Party? I think realpolitik has so permeated our way of thinking th…

> I have never understood how this is a "bomb,"

Because it’s taxed working adults who pay for entitlements like social security and socialized healthcare programs. When retirees outnumber them, these entitlement programs will collapse. As you’ve alluded to Asian culture, these entitlement programs are even more important in Western societies because multiple generations do not live in the same home. Also high trust societies tend to have much weaker family links.

> How exactly will all of the unsupported old people overthrow society?

They are reliable voters. You can already see this in play in places like Japan. As for places like China, they just won’t have enough workers and soldiers in the long run. Yes, their economy is terrible at the moment, but nearly everything is cyclical. Also the younger generation will just see how the elderly are treated and will lose more faith in their government.

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

#375

Post by shepherdjerred »

brailsafe wrote: post #355
toasterlovin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gaining perspective by inspecting arbitrary points in history can be quite useful.

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

#376

Post by the_gipsy »

steve1977 wrote: post #284
smallmancontrov wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One could argue that women being part of the formal economy is also out of an exploitative playbook.

No. Women working AND rearing children (or taking on the majority of that work), is.

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

#377

Post by sangnoir »

keiferski wrote: post #346
brailsafe wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is daycare "consumerism"? Other factors include stagnant wages, collage debts, amd even high medical costs - a vaginal birth with no pain medications and no complications can cost 5-figures (and may include a line-item for a parent holding the baby!).

Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless you're willing to subject your child to informal daycares. None of that is consumerism.

No one should be surprised that a country with a threadbare social safety-net and inflation outpacing childcare costs experiences a fall in birthrate - this can be explained in market-dymamics terms

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

#378

Post by keiferski »

brailsafe wrote: post #364
keiferski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too…

Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”

At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.

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

#379

Post by keiferski »

sangnoir wrote: post #377
keiferski wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is daycare "consumerism"? Other factors include stagnant wages, collage debts, amd even high medical costs - a vaginal birth with no pain medications and no complications can cost 5-figures (and may include a line-item for a parent holding the baby!). Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless…

Plenty of countries with good social nets have worse birth rates. Plenty of other countries with no social nets have high birth rates. I don’t think it’s particularly related, and as I said, I think it’s more of a cultural problem related to values and expectations.

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

#380

Post by hnick »

skissane wrote: post #286
NoPicklez wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I don't disagree with you. That doesn't mean those with mortgages aren't struggling to pay. Also if true, that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia. Here in Australia, we don't have fixed rate mortgages for the life of the mortgage we have variable and fixed upto around 1-5 years. Our interest rates have…

> 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…

Reminder that Dubbo (population of only ~40,000) had to have water shipped in on trucks during the recent drought, so there are valid environmental reasons for the current layout too. A lot of those cheaper places are struggling, they cannot support large populations, and it's been said we've used up the good topsoil over the last 200 years so farming may be facing some issues in the coming years too.

I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing, which will probably feed commuters into Sydney more than they already do.

Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney. I think our issues are far more political as you point out, so other fixes are just bandaids, but anything that impacts home prices will be unpopular with the dominant voter bloc.

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