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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?

#531

Post by Dalewyn »

bongodongobob wrote: post #75

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.

I can afford children but swore to never have them nor marry, for the following reasons:

* Life is a hellhole. My children must witness my (and my hypothetical spouse's) deaths; witnessing death is a fucking hellish experience, I motherfucking do not desire to force that experience on anyone let alone my children.

* The world will continue. The Earth has spun and travelled around the Sun for time immemorial and will continue to do so regardless of any decisions I make. My existence and any existences I might create are utterly and absolutely pointless in the grand scale of the universe.

* The human world (in contrast with the world at large) is a fucking hellhole. I have absolutely no desire to bring new life into this human world and tell them, with a straight face: "Welcome! This is hell I brought you into. You will suffer many tragedies, you will be wronged so many times you won't bother keeping count. No, I can't help you. Have fun." What the hell am I, a sadist?

* I have many other activities, dreams, and goals I wish to accomplish that do not and perhaps even run completely counter to having children. Life is short: I only have so many hours left and none I can or will spare for offspring.

* I find the idea of compromising my life with a spouse to be a violation of fundamental human rights. Who am I to demand my spouse to bow to my wishes? Who is my spouse for them to demand I bow to their wishes? The answer is noone: I and any hypothetical spouse are noone. All men are born equal, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thusly, I swore to never marry and (also consequently) never have children. I am far too busy with my own life, kindly and sincerely please fuck off.

So yes, I can afford children. Many children. No, I won't have children. I can't wait until I am automagically ejected from the marriage market I never even wanted to be a part of.

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

#532

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

> suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst?

In a sense they already have, most NSW government departments moved their offices from the Sydney CBD to the Parramatta CBD, which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.

Meanwhile, my multi-millionare ex-boss is struggling to buy a house, because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price.

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

#533

Post by mxkopy »

dotnet00 wrote: post #219
xyzelement wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. I didn’t mean literal genetic evolution. Cultural if you will. Parents who fail to instill love and desire of family into their kids won’t get to be grandparents. A few decades ago maybe you could take it for granted “everyone ends up having kids” now it obviously is a dead end unless you really help your kids through it. It feels to me like the next generation will have parents who will be intentional about t…

I don't think so, their kids are not robots that can be programmed, they will still choose based on if/when they think they're able to provide for kids. It'd take regression back to a society where women are considered to have no value outside of being child factories, for parents to be able to indoctrinate their kids into reproducing with no concern for how good of a life they can actually give those kids.

On a less extreme note I do think parents can instill less individualistic/materialistic/extractive ideals in their children; I think these things - more the socio than the economic - are the main drivers of lower birth rates as evidenced by the fact that even rich people aren’t having kids.

It could also simply be lead poisoning

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

#534

Post by robertlagrant »

vlovich123 wrote: post #339
voidfunc wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ownership has probably plummeted in those markets (I don't have the data) but it leads to certain types of comments being passed around as fact. The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless…

There are also people who pretend like problems highlighted in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities are unique to them. Yet every time it looks like those are just the first wave of the changes that are heading to other regions first. Like the wave of homelessness. People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality…

> People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US.

These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?

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

#535

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

silverquiet wrote: post #28
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #16

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 baffles me. Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.

For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things.

Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain!

There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!

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

#537

Post by esperent »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #329
bongodongobob wrote: post #75

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.

Housing isn't the sole factor in declining birthrates. Every industrialized nation is going through the same phenomenon and not all of them are having housing crises. It's a combination of various associated costs to raising children (housing, early childcare, food, schooling, extracurriculars, hobbies, etc.) that have risen faster than most people's wages. The nuclear family model also significantly diminished the r…

> not all of them are having housing crises

A lot of them are, actually. I'm Irish, we're having a housing (and general cost of living) crisis. I know Portugal and Germany are too.

I don't know about other countries in the EU regarding housing specifically but there's a block wide cost of living crisis going on right now. Life is hard for people in all kinds of ways because of covid, war, climate change.

Note: I'm not trying to claim any of this is the cause of declining birth rates, that's beyond my sphere of knowledge. The purpose of my comment is to note that cost of living issues are not unique to the US right now.

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

#538

Post by avgcorrection »

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.

> It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value.

A child would also be a liability for a monk.

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

#539

Post by leoedin »

npteljes wrote: post #466
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…

>The "it's too hard to have kids" crew is selecting against themselves, evolutionary speaking. That won't last. That's not how it work. Evolution only selects for hereditary, biological factors, and even then, it's not a guarantee. "Stupid people" won't "die out" for the same reason.

Is the desire to have kids (as opposed to just sex) genetic? Given that pretty much everything about our personalities seems to be genetic to some extent, it seems pretty likely.

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

#540

Post by midasuni »

Duanemclemore wrote: post #403
Defletter wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't. I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they c…

>mailman Is a bad counterexample, as that's still a good, high-paying (union!!!) job. But aside from that tiny gripe you're not wrong about the rest.

Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price.

In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k

House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k

One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x.

But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.

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