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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?

#91

Post by paul7986 »

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…

I think it's a mix of many things with the cost of living be number one and way down list or in the middle it could be...

- social media (want beautiful family to post n get likes)

- online dating want the most attractive I can get so I can get likes for who I'm with and kids i made

- thus everyone is pursuing a certain types/groups who they interact with and get burned by cause they have so much choice ..then get jaded about dating.

Again those reasons are by far not on the top of list reasons why but are on the list.

Maybe Hollywood needs to start reshaping our beauty standards for the sake of the human race ;-)

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

#92

Post by yoyohello13 »

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…

We must live in different areas because I’m the only one without kids on my team of 8. I also kind of resent the implication that pops up in these threads that people without kids are living some kind of immoral, selfish life. Not everyone without kids is just out partying all the time. I would love to have kids, but fate it seems has different plans for me.

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

#93

Post by pfannkuchen »

silverquiet wrote: post #65
NhanH wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as describing the situation being weird. The people being normal is what makes the whole thing weird

I guess the older I get, the more unclear I am on what normal is supposed to be or what it ever was. What percentage of men historically even had children? My impression is that it has always been significantly less than the percentage of women who do.

Historically as in recent history or more distant?

In more distant history, yes most women had children and many men did not.

In recent history (in the west), I believe the ratio was much more equal due to culturally enforced monogamy. Obviously it was never 100% followed but I believe it made a very large impact on this metric.

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

#94

Post by macinjosh »

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.

False, folks just choose to live in places they cannot afford. Plenty of small towns in the US dying for new blood. You could buy a block's worth of houses for what one in SF, Austin, Seattle, NYC, LA, etc. goes for. Remote work + starlink makes this possible.

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

#95

Post by samatman »

LoganDark wrote: post #43
samatman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

Depression isn't always treatable, although it's worth a shot.

But it's a serious mistake to think it's a fact about the world. It isn't. It's a fact about you.

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

#96

Post by ChainOfFools »

Barrin92 wrote: post #73
toasterlovin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird.

Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.

A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.

edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.

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

#97

Post by SoftTalker »

dalyons wrote: post #81
SoftTalker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people wait way too long to have kids these days. Prime fertility is your 20s. After 30 more and more people will have trouble conceiving.

Why do you think that is? People waiting I mean

Increasingly people feel pressure or obligation to go to college and spend their 20s getting established in a career. By the time they feel ready to have kids it's more likely they'll have trouble.

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

#98

Post by nradov »

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.

The average American owns a home. Current homeownership rate it 66%. Some states such as Iowa and Minnesota are particularly high.

If you're referring to people of child bearing age though the rate is lower.

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

#99

Post by atomicnumber3 »

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'm baffled my peers, who absolutely could afford to, still have no interest. These are people making 150-200k (and at my prior job, 200-400k).

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

#100

Post by smallmancontrov »

beaned wrote: post #64
mmasu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with 3 kids at 31 you would most likely be the outlier in many countries. all the rest you said resonates - so many people do not want to have kids at all anymore, and it’s not difficult to understand why (socioeconomic uncertainty, environmental issues, a lot of places are not “child friendly”, and there’s more). having kids today seems to be an even more difficult undertaking than in the past; and in my opinion the…

It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did. An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.

> Only in the Western first world is this now normal

It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman:

    1.64 USA
    1.34 Japan
    1.28 China
    0.84 Korea
> we've just been raised softly and do not value children

Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reaping all of the benefits no longer functions.

We have two paths: dust off the shitty exploitative playbook of yesterday, or build a new playbook for tomorrow.

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