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The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

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Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#611

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #463
WhompingWindows wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends…

> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other sid…

You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near impossible to miss the "pregnancy will ruin your life" propaganda.

Consequences. They exist. Some are life altering and expected to last a long time.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#612

Post by kadabra9 »

bigyabai wrote: post #482
mattmaroon wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go. And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.) Hysterical people think they are being rational…

> you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accord…

[flagged]

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#613

Post by takklob »

Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

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Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#614

Post by Balgair »

ajross wrote: post #597
Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

> I like to hang out on fertility twitter. I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while. We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a resul…

> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#615

Post by mothballed »

didgetmaster wrote: post #606
Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better. Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have mad…

Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros.

You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#616

Post by TheGRS »

greedo wrote: post #500
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much. It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relative…

Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.

Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#617

Post by xeromal »

compounding_it wrote: post #185
bombcar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real people are annoying, hard to deal with, unpredictable, dirty, smelly, all sorts of issues. The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away. What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone…

>Real people are annoying They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.

I wouldn't take what they said as an actual insult. They're saying reality is dirty and social media is making us want to live in bubbles rather than deal with it. Thinking that was is to our detriment which I understand OP agrees with.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#618

Post by tfehring »

coryrc wrote: post #562
tfehring wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US. Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit... Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 It’s hard…

You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer. Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.

I don't follow.

The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.

So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#620

Post by steveBK123 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #596
steveBK123 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is cultural. The economics don't help at all, but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc. I barely know my coworkers kids names half the time. I certainly don't see photos of them or see them popping into zoom backgrounds. Growing up my dads company had picnics and his coworkers had parties and I'd meet his coworkers & their kids. And while theres obvious things…

> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same. If nothing else, it's yet another area of increased expense. In the early 90s when I was a child, it was pretty normal to shuttle 3 kids +…

Similar 80s/90s upbringing for me.

The car thing is also limiting on who can perform extra childcare, and how/where.

As a kid, I used to hang out with my 10+ years older cousins who could drive - taking me to mall/movies/arcade/sports games with them in their little 2 door coupe.

Sure they were babysitting me, it wasn't some tremendous chore of being stuck in some kids-only space. They were doing stuff that they might have done without me, and probably got $20 from my parents.

We'd go see a Jim Carrey PG-13 film, not some Disney movie with they boyfriend/girlfriend/buddy, and they'd cover my eyes when their were tits on the screen. Or I'd sit in an older cousins lap at a ballgame while they drank beer (and smoked) and shouted at the players.

Can't imagine this is acceptable or normal now, lol. But it meant different generations commingled in ways that they just don't now.

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