471–480 of 770 posts
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Can you point to the 'dramatic' risks for older fathers? Usually it is a minor change in chance blown up by sensational press.
First hit on Google: https://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20100208/autism-risk... 77% increase seems pretty dramatic to me.
Wait, why is the advice to 'do something invasive, risky, and unnatural' when the actual advice should be 'have children when you're younger, not older.'
You shouldn't refrigerate your food. It's risky and unnatural. For the first 300,000 years of human history, people got along fine without refrigeration - why don't you just hunt and gather like you were intended to? IVF, egg and embryo freezing, and related technologies are modern miracles that allow people to live better lives by increasing their fertility options.
IVF is not a miracle. It's a last resort that doesn't even guarantee results. With IVF women have a chance to have children. The probability of success is always inferior compared to healthy women choosing to have children early. By choosing this route, these women face a significant risk of failure with serious consequences.
A lot of couples want to have children but do not succeed. IVF can help these people overcome real fertility issues. It was never meant to be used as an insurance policy by people with no medical impediment to reproduction.
Now I am older and more senior, I have more responsibilities and the expectations are higher so it is more "difficult" to dedicate more time to my offspring by taking more time off or just not going to late meetings etc.
Of course there is some power that comes with more seniority to simply say no to things outside of the normal office hours or not "taking one for the team" or whatever to do a late night or a weekender.
I guess there is an element of me thinking "If I had just done this 10 years ago it would have been a lot easier now" sort of hindsight type thing going on, but yeah it is difficult to shake the thought that I waited too long. Not just for work but also for normal social life/holidaying etc too - like if you had kids in your early 20s you could have had teenage kids (who can look after themselves) and yet be in your 30s and still be young enough to do fun/crazy things, rather than be 55-60 with teenage kids and then be too old to do a lot of stuff you used to enjoy (e.g. sports, social scene etc) although the flip side is you got to spend those 20s-30s years doing fun stuff anyway .... as you can see I am conflicted :)
tl;dr - if you are young, there is never a time when you are 100% "ready" for kids so just go ahead and do it before it is too late.
I agree completely with the premise that most people don't appreciate just how fleeting fertility can be, but I think rather than freezing eggs, the solution is for people to normalize having children at a younger age and designing work and home life around children existing and even being present in certain work contexts. Obviously freezing your eggs is something that you can do as individual without society's input…
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So you want the husband to explicitly pay his wife a W2 wage to raise their kids, which just means as a couple they pay more taxes and have less money than before? I don't see the upside.
No, you’re right that doesn’t make sense, and I wouldn’t be for that. I think government should expand paid time off for family leave, especially in the US.
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Imo it's because there's less social resistance for women to take on the roles of men. Until men that take on the former roles of women are viewed equivalently in the dating market, it's going to be a much harder slog
Women across all income demographics desire men who make as much or more than them. It's a fundamental preference that OKCupid identified a long time ago. As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out…
Could you provide a cite for this? It's an extraordinary claim. It doesn't match with my understanding of some historical cultures.
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I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.
Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes? Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.
Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1
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> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Are you suggesting that the father should pay the mother a salary for raising the kids? (Or same thing with the sexes reversed if it's the father raising the kid) Isn't that just a more formal arrangement of a stay-at-home mother/father? The main difference would be: more financial independence to the stay-at-home party, which is good in my book, but I'm not…
I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.
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I appreciate your posting about your personal experience but your comment also crosses into an ideological flamewar rant and we don't want those here. Please stick to the former and edit out the latter in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Will do, and yes, you are correct. Shouldn't have gone into that territory.
Your whole blog resonates deeply with me. All this corporate grifting and women's empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders. Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that…
Thanks. This is something dudes can't write about. My wife & I simply decided decades ago that one of us would always not work. We lived cheaply so we could accomplish that goal, but we wanted a good family life. I would have been happy to be a househusband because she's about 50 times the programmer I am, but she doesn't love business and I do. We ended up doing great, but we had to start out assuming that a 2-caree…
(Preamble: not trying to argue anything about parent comment's experience, just wanted to find data about this.)
Some data on the rate of Down syndrome per 10,000 births vs. maternal age appears on p10 of this paper [1]. The rate is a stable 6-7 per 10,000 for the mothers in their 20s, about 50% higher for mothers age 30-35, and then jumps to 25-30 per 10,000 for mothers age 35-40 (4x the 20s rate), and something like 100 per 10,000 for mothers age 40+ (>10x the 20s rate).
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636004/pdf/nih...