811–820 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peak fertility though is early 20s. By the time people are in their 30s, having trouble getting pregnant is a more common problem.
Are people who want to have kids really struggling to have them though? Keep in mind that fertility rate is not actually about fertility (not directly at least). It's a measure of the kids being had rather than a measure of the capability that the name would lead people to think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning . But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time. It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionall…
Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)
Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society. Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
>Church membership is down. I mean church people love to think of this as a decline of society but this is more about the destruction of the church itself as an out of date institution that was using itself as a control mechanism and that broke the moment we discovered the world wasn't made on hocus pocus. The thing is the essence of the church could still maintain a huge amount of social control because people need…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Being able to hook up with random strangers on apps might be fun in your 20s and 30s. When you're old and wrinkly, it's not going to be the same. I hate to say it, but this is especially true for women entering their twilight years. A lot of childless people in our generation are headed to a very sad and lonely future. COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just pe…
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household. And y…
You can mess with assumptions and see how it projects out the population of any country/continent/the globe (based on 2024 data and trends).
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.