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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?

#991

Post by themacguffinman »

toasterlovin wrote: post #852
kelnos wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? If people think that their children's future will be worse than their own, it doesn't really matter what people experienced 500 years ago. A common sentiment among parents is giving their children more opportunities and a better life than they had. If some people don't feel like they can do that (regardless of whether it's true or not), I imagine that's a powerful demotivator around having kids.

Yeah, so if you are familiar with human history and the exponential curve of increasing human wellbeing that we're riding and you still feel strongly that the future will be worse, then the conclusion should be that you're probably in an irrationally negative emotional headspace for some reason, not that you're right! (I say that without judgement, having been in that exact headspace myself not too long ago.)

If you're actually familiar with human history then you'll know that it's uneven with horrifying dark periods and isn't some consistent curve that goes up.

In the lead up to the 2008 financial disaster all the bulls were saying "the housing market only goes up" without any understanding of the underlying shifts that would come to bear. It's easy to predict the status quo, they didn't need any thought, they could be replaced with a rock with "housing goes up" written on it.

For the first time in decades, risk of global conflict is rapidly rising. Two revanchist empires in the east are eager to reclaim lost territories and see their chance as the American hegemony that presided over the long peace faces stagnation & decline. This is the stuff that makes world wars. Who wants their child to live through that?

But fine, anyone can write "human well-being only goes up" on a rock.

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

#993

Post by angra_mainyu »

askonomm wrote: post #965
angra_mainyu wrote: post #962

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course. They'd do it all over again without hesitation. Also, we were technically homeless for a time and a church took us in and let us live in their attic. I'm deeply grateful to have been given the chance to be alive and for all those experiences as a child. > And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels someone needs therapy...

So you think people should suffer homeless if it comes to it, as long as they make kids? What a horrible view of the world you have.

feel free to ragepost on r/childfree

Also, the logical consequence of your position is all poor people should be banned from procreating, trickling off to enormous chunks of third world countries.

Bizarre position.

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

#994

Post by caturopath »

mrguyorama wrote: post #855
keiferski wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.

If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases. I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children. That life is o…

I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation.

Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.

The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.

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

#995

Post by paulryanrogers »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #895
throw_siblings wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err, yeah I'm a little skeptical of parents who want lots of children. I'm in my twenties now, but I was raised Catholic, I have twelve siblings, and I was homeschooled until my senior year. There were several issues: - Me and my siblings all feel like our parents loved the "identity" of being parents and having lots of children, but when it came down to the brass tax of actually caring for our emotional needs, they…

According to the sociological data, the same happens in smaller families, but the support structure is worse, so people are worse off. Life is challenging!

Citation?

Kids in smaller families don't have to raise their younger siblings.

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

#996

Post by ChainOfFools »

jodrellblank wrote: post #893
ChainOfFools wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> That's all there is to it. There is no big picture. Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if tha…

OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones.

If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.

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

#997

Post by ben_w »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #868
vundercind wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kids aren't expensive. They're a distraction from dopamine and career advancement. They really are. You can pay for some of it by letting your and their quality of life suffer, instead of with money (cram 3 kids into the 2-bedroom you already own; don’t worry that the schools are bad and dangerous and that’s why the place was cheap; that kind of thing) but not all of it, and most people don’t find making those comp…

I have four kids in one room and it's a blast. After family prayers we turn off the lights and tell stories and their imaginations go wild! The joy is palpable. Bedrooms are for sleeping, there is other space to spread out :)

I can't imagine what puberty would've been like if I'd not had a room of my own. Even just experimenting with goth aesthetics would've been so different.

Hope it works out for them.

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

#998

Post by ngngngng »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #896
jasongrout wrote: post #894

Another data point: My wife's grandparents have 10 children, 81 grandchildren (mostly adults), and around 300 and counting great-grandchildren. It's wonderful! When we go on trips around the U.S., we are almost always staying with a cousin. Our children really enjoy meeting and getting to know cousins their age. That said, I do notice that the younger generations typically are having smaller families (like 3-6 childr…

> we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S. Everybody in America would know to fill in all that information if you simply said "We are Mormon". I'm glad you're enjoying your rich family!

"Mormon" was originally a derogatory term that was coined by those that legalized killing Mormons on sight until 1980. So some are understandably uncomfortable with its continued usage.

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

#999

Post by freedomben »

ngngngng wrote: post #998
kridsdale3 wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are religious, the family is predominantly active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a significant portion live in the intermountain west area of the U.S. Everybody in America would know to fill in all that information if you simply said "We are Mormon". I'm glad you're enjoying your rich family!

"Mormon" was originally a derogatory term that was coined by those that legalized killing Mormons on sight until 1980. So some are understandably uncomfortable with its continued usage.

It may have been coined that way, but Mormons quickly adopted it as well as a favorite term and used it that way coming up on 200 years. The church used the word extensively in marketing campaigns for decades, between mormonads and I'm a Mormon, etc. Under Hinckley who was media savvy, it was used a lot.

Nelson (current head of the church) just doesn't like the word and wants to change it. Confusion, inconvenience, and Pragmatism be damned. It's his right as prophet to say that Jesus told him to use the full name of the church and drop Mormon, but let's not pretend it's suddenly offensive because it's been used by enemies of the church. They've also used the full name as well, so that should be offensive if we're staying consistent.

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

#1000

Post by ngngngng »

freedomben wrote: post #999
ngngngng wrote: post #998

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mormon" was originally a derogatory term that was coined by those that legalized killing Mormons on sight until 1980. So some are understandably uncomfortable with its continued usage.

It may have been coined that way, but Mormons quickly adopted it as well as a favorite term and used it that way coming up on 200 years. The church used the word extensively in marketing campaigns for decades, between mormonads and I'm a Mormon, etc. Under Hinckley who was media savvy, it was used a lot. Nelson (current head of the church) just doesn't like the word and wants to change it. Confusion, inconvenience, a…

I find your insistence that they can't be offended by a word with an objectively offensive historical origin fascinating. Do you deny that sometimes opinions on words and language can change over time?
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