511–520 of 1001 posts
Interesting to hear this. My personal experience is the complete opposite. My sister has 2 kids, my wife’s sister and husband have 2 kids, my wife’s brother has 3 kids with one on the way, and we’re having our first in about 3 weeks. That’s 12 cousins just in our little circle.
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.
But it sounds like the GP is looking to the future, and is pessimistic about their ability to do that. History doesn't matter too much here, even if I agree with you that much of history was a cesspool of pain and misery compared to these days. If people don't see a viable, prosperous future for their kids, as good as or better than their own lives, that's what matters.
Now, I say this without passing judgment on whether or not this future pessimism is warranted. Even if it isn't, what matters is how people feel about it.
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…
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People stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
The whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility: 1. Decline in religious belief 2. Widespread, easy to use birth control 3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless seri…
This is such a mystery, why would people buy homes, I just can’t figure it out.
If it weren’t for housing costs, I would have 4 kids right now
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…
People nowadays focus on career till 30 and after 30 (when you loose that naive optimistic outlook on life) realize that having kids is too much of a risky obligation - you don't have any guarantee that you will remain healthy enough to sustain family till they grow up and that your kids will be born healthy. Also, life has gotten quite expensive.
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>It baffles me. My hypothesis, which I rarely hear anyone else mention, is that we no longer look to our children for entertainment. Life used to be really boring. Kids are excited by things adults find painfully dull. Having a weird little person around who is overjoyed playing with a stick is a pretty great thing in a world where there isn't much else to do. Today people often seem to regard interacting with childr…
> we no longer look to our children for entertainment Anyone bringing kids into the world for entertainment value is doing them a disservice. These are humans, not pets. Parenting is hard.
I do have 7 cousins, though. And 2 of them (the ones raised by my grandmother that lived next to my house and that I saw almost everyday during my childhood) are the family closer to siblings that I've got.
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The only real perspective I have is that a bunch of today's issues didn't exist in my own childhood, and a bunch of my childhood issues haven't been solved. That means there's been a net increase in issues. For example the internet is much unfriendlier to children nowadays, social media is far more predatory than it used to be. The housing crisis is worse (the exact same place is nearly twice as expensive as it was w…
Read some history! The last 500 years are humanity’s Golden Age of Golden Ages. 100 years ago half the people you love would‘ve died in childhood.
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What do you mean? Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings? Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can't afford to pay for health care in the only country where it's not free? Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet, with TikTok and other predatory social media running rampant? When they get older do I want them to have to deal with how…
Try to actually do the math on school shootings, and compare it to car crashes when you were conceived. If you were objective and considered risks equally, for school shootings to even come into your calculations (instead of immediately dismissing it as not worth your time) the world would have to be almost utopian. Try to calculate how many times more likely it is for you to have a miscarriage than any of your poten…
While it's still unlikely that any given person's kid will be killed in a school shooting, the idea of it is heartbreaking enough that I can understand why it's a part of someone's calculus.
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We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time. Natural selection doesn't work like that. There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.
If we don't have such a trait and the decision to have kids is based entirely on the environment, then this evolution will be cultural instead of biological. Cultures that have more kids will replace those that don't.