Up until the pandemic, my work schedule had almost never been affected by me being parent in any way. I chose to have kids knowing that my wife and I would be able to continue working without this significantly impacting our jobs (after the first several weeks after they were born, of course), and that has always been true until this. You are acting as though parents fully understood the pandemic would happen and would affect them at the time they decided to become parents.

This argument is like saying that a storm knocked down your neighbor's house, but not yours. So it's unfair that your neighbor get some leniency from work while he tries to repair it while you are expected to keep working. "He chose to build his house on that side of the street, so he has to deal with the consequences."

This isn't about giving extra slack to parents. It's about giving extra slack to people who were hit particularly hard by this situation that they couldn't possibly have seen coming. I was forced to return to the office even though I'd rather be at home. I have a coworker with no kids but who takes care of his mother who is very sick and at high risk for COVID. He gets to keep working from home, which is what I'd like to do. It's never crossed my mind to be annoyed with him for that.

You can tell that no one prepares for the pandemic, and that's true. But the point is that this applies to everyone, not just those with kids. What if I have an ailing parent or a sibling? What if I run an orphanage on the side? Just give the same benefits to everyone instead of cherry picking people who make life decisions that are of no consequence to their day job. If you think that's too much to provide to everyone, then I will argue that it's too much to provide for just parents.

If the obligation to care for them (during work hours) has increased due to COVID, then you absolutely should get more work flexibility to take care of that. Because that's something you must do for their health and well-being, not something that you just feel like doing because you want to.

> What if I run an orphanage on the side?

Presumably you ran that orphanage outside of work hours pre-COVID, and can continue to do the same now. This is kinda a silly hypothetical though... I wasn't aware that orphanage-as-side-hustle was such a popular thing for non-parent tech employees.

You might want to suspend judgement of parents until you’ve tried your hand at it.

I believe this is addressed in the article, and in many of the policies, where they describe the individual receiving these benefits as a `caregiver` not `parent`. What I find interesting is that the conversation seems to be geared solely around parents while others that take care of family in need are not brought into it.

Were you working on your side hustle during normal work hours before the pandemic? No? So is the pandemic stopping you from working on your side hustle after work hours now? No? I didn't think so.

> Parents deserve all the concessions that can be afforded, but people without kids should also be afforded the same.

I think you're looking at this in the wrong way, as if employers are giving parents some sort of special gift by being flexible around child care responsibilities. Child care has to get done, period. It's not opt-out. Your side hustle can wait until after work hours... as it always has.

> Having children is a personal choice in the end, but nothing special in anyway. People should not be penalized for not making that choice, just like they should not be rewarded either.

Ah, here's that tired argument again. Yes, it is a personal choice. But are we really going to penalize children because their parents, when deciding to have kids, failed to take into account the possibility of global pandemic making child care interfere with their work responsibilities? Parents aren't getting "rewarded" for having kids here; they're simply getting time to do that which they must do. Child care is unique among non-work obligations in that it's not something you can reschedule, put off, or decide not to do. There's no "reward" here.

I still don't understand how you think non-parents like us are being "penalized", though. My work day during COVID is, scope-wise, exactly the same as it was pre-COVID. I get out of bed, work for 8-10 hours, and then stop and do whatever I want. I was already working from home most of the time pre-COVID, but as a bonus, people who went to an office every day now get their commute time back! If anything, non-parents are getting a reward during COVID that parents don't get, because their former commute time is now filled with... you guessed it... more child care.

This was always OK before the pandemic. Everyone stopped working at 5, and I got to get ready for my hobby at 6. All good.

Now, parents need to be available for their children at 5. So they have to leave at 4. Someone has to stay until 6 to "make it up". It's a priority that we allow them to be available for their children. So I will have to let go of my hobby, so they can be with their children.

They might even justify it by saying "I will come early on thursdays to compensate, and you can start later". The thing is that I don't care about starting later on thrusdays. I want to be free at 6 on wednesdays.

And because my calendar does not include the magic "children" word, I automatically get the lowest priority when discussing schedules. Holidays during thanksgiving ? No sir, you don't have children, you would probably be sad and alone anyway! Those nice summer days ? Well, Henry wants to take his gasp children hiking during summer break, you can have a week in november, while his son is at school! And so on...

The children word is systematically used as an argument to justify some kind of priority for parents when defining schedules over those who don't have any children. And COVID made that really visible because people with children suddenly had even more constraint than those without - and you can guess who had to be even more flexible. And because non-parents are systematically being shown that they matter less, this creates resentment.

There are unfortunate life circumstance that falls upon you. These do exist and I would also definitely be more flexible to help someone undergoing them. Your child is not an unfortunate life circumstance. He is the consequence of a choice you made. Just like my schedule is the consequences of choices that I made. There is no reason to consider that your choices matter more than mine.

The only relevant "choice" here is the choice that companies made to close their offices and require employees to work from home. For people with children in their homes that is going to mean they are less productive, even if there is a babysitter available. If your company told you that you are required to do your work while riding on a roller coaster, where you would likely be much less productive, you would be right to ask the company for to reduce your expectations until you are allowed to return to your office. Since parents are being required to work from an environment where their productivity will be lowered, it is reasonable and everyone should expect that their expectations will be adjusted downward to reflect that. If your home environment does not significantly reduce your productivity then there is no reason to think your own expectations should be adjusted downward.

You would be exploiting a system put in place to help families survive a pandemic for your own personal gain.

I'm with you though. If I have personal obligations, I shouldn't feel any pressure to help out a coworker by working later than normal with no additional incentive just because they have children and I don't. And if I decline to help out that coworker, I shouldn't be publicly shamed.

The child rearing consume what the childless have earned under the "do what's best for everyone" motif of social programs. Who's getting the best? Do the childless get to participate in this best?

I really don't understand how you can have a perspective that leads to this question.

You argument doesn't work in that it can just as easily be applied the other way if we assume having kids is the default state. We could further argue that not having kids is an advantage, hence why should parents be penalized for not having made the same choice as those that didn't.

The amount of children we’d need to become next generation workers and support our generation are exponential and cannot be sustained. I suspect that as for the last decade or two, old age benefits will keep shrinking and shrinking anyway because there is no way we can keep having, feeding, and sustaining the exponential numbers required.

I hope I'm not coming off as anti-children but while parents couldn't have anticipated the pandemic and its impact, they need to react to the circumstances. If their home situation requires it, then they should switch to part-time or even quit temporarily.

I also agree with giving parents "extra slack", though again there are limits. At this rate the pandemic will remain with us for another year. The onus is probably in company leadership to make the necessary changes and not have colleagues start to resent one another.

How exactly to people buy food and pay their bills in this scenario?

You're not coming off as anti-children, but you're definitely coming off as someone who lacks a basic understanding for how life in society works.

In Tech? With 3-10 times the average family income? How will they buy food if they work part time for a month or two, or one of them quits?

Probably the way as before, with their massive pay check.

Putting a family units safety and wellbeing should be a last resort solution. Major disruptions in a kids early life can have seriously negative effects on their future.

Sorry, but that is exactly how you are coming off. Your argument is basically that people with children should leave their jobs or be paid less for no reason other than that they have kids at a time when, through no fault of their own, the childcare arrangements they relied on have all been cancelled or become unreliable.

It’s not the same though. Having a so called “act of god” result in property damage is just chance. Having children (in most cases) isn’t chance. It’s a conscious decision.

Even though no one could guess the pandemic would happen, I’d hope people getting children are conscious that they’re getting into a 18–20 years commitment to support them at the expense of their finances and leisure time (to some extent)

I think the smoking analogy applies well, it’s also a choice and not due to chance.

Raising children isn't like smoking, a hobby, a side hustle, or other miscellaneous personal obligations. It's more like military service and jury duty -- an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist. And one which employers can, should, and often do make special allowances for.

We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits. As I said elsewhere, there are mechanisms for supporting parents already. If you tried to let any other charitable endeavour take over your work schedule, you wouldn't expect your compensation to remain unaffected.

I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions.

Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.

The US and most other Western countries run huge budget deficits at essentially zero interest costs. This is only possible because creditors have full faith in the ability of future tax payers to meet debt obligations.

In light of that, I’d say the overall balance is that those with children are massively subsidizing the childless.

Taxes are perpetual and mandatory. It goes towards subsidizing other people’s genes and then the childless have to be thankful for that.

Let’s not forget the children who grow up to be thugs and criminals. Not every fruit of the loin is a productive member of the society. I find it appalling that after 12 years of subsidied education, they still want free education, housing is a human right and most haven’t even paid off the cost of society paying for them ..never mind paying it forward for the next generation.

This isn’t about macro economics at all. This is all about religion forcing women to breed and the tyranny of scrotums to see who can pee farther most into the gene pool.

However a contract does exist between the parents of the child. With the male..due to the lack of anatomical bits to carry a fetus to term within his body or capable of feeding said offspring through mammary excretions is responsible for the well being of the offspring. Financially or otherwise. Because. Biology.

In the jungle, when the alpha male is unable to provide for the litter, he gets displaced. Insect brains seem to be far superior with reasoning. Clearly mammalian instincts are not up to scratch when it comes to collecting on contracts. The female praying mantis being more sensible simply devours the male after mating. The male drone bee breaks off its penile appendage and free falls from above while in the throes of a kamikaze orgasm. Homo sapiens get to go to a job and support a child. Do it. If you can’t, don’t do it. There is no societal contract to nourish the fruit of strangers’ loins.

Dear men, please curb your ejaculation. And if you can’t, make enough to support your mutated chromosome financially and when a pandemic comes around the corner, man up.

There are no contracts stating the the companies in the S&P 500 must perform enough in the future to support the current market cap of the index, but still the index is where it is.

The market is forward looking, and children are implicit in that valuation.

The rest of your post, again, seem to sidestep that argument.

Assumptions and math make market valuations, including bonds.

But I'm not even sure you are attempting to argue in good faith, so I will check out now.

The accusation reg lack of ‘good faith’ also makes no sense. Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.

I am pretty sure that I disagree with you. No need to beckon ‘good faith’.

Markets don't care about any particular specific implementation of children; the market just cares that there will be children, of some average productivity level to maintain economic growth. Sure, if we went full eugenics, markets would likely shift to expect a much higher productivity level in future generations, but... that seems like a pretty obvious outcome.

> Good faith is only relevant if both of us are in agreement according to contract law.

I think maybe you're talking about the legal definition of "good faith", wherein the rest of us are talking about the "don't be a dick" definition. Not saying you're being a dick, but it does feel like you're willfully misunderstanding the parent's argument.

To you, kelnos:

1. Sub replacement fertility rates in countries like Italy has already led to Natalist policies.*

2. The world will do better economically with a lower fertility/sub replacement rate. Why? Because the notions of money and currency is changing. Automation will reduce jobs and wages.

3. When technology will replace human labour faster than ever before in our history, we can no longer relate to replacement rate of population as an indicator of economic growth.

4. With eventual UBI adoption and possibly crypto that will change how we see ‘money’ as a financial construct, the old rules NO LONGER APPLY.

5. Being in the middle of the sixth extinction event and being a super apex predator, a higher population is guaranteed to accelerate our extinction as a species sooner than a sub replacement fertility rate. 6. In the event of a catastrophe or unforeseen disaster, we should have our genetic material preserved in a gene vault. Like a seed vault. 6. If the climate crisis becomes worse before it becomes better(which it is guaranteed to be..), then we need a robust, healthy population that will likely have to deal with a nomadic lifestyle. 7. We are no longer at the mercy of good old fashioned boinking and breeding to perpetuate the human species. We need to protect our environment instead of looking to perpetuate our own gene pool. 7. HALF a surviving child per person or a replacement fertility rate of 1.00/woman should bring us back to carrying capacity of our planet.

8. It is also likely that we will discover anti ageing technologies and perhaps even become hybrid carbon-silicon based life forms.

We can’t breed ourselves to extinction. At the current rate of consumption due to exponential population increase, if we don’t control population before the inevitable depopulation occurs in terrible and devastating ways, we won’t have any resources left in the only planet that sustains life as we know it.

*[..]Some governments, fearful of a future pensions crisis, have developed natalist policies to attempt to encourage more women to have children. Measures include increasing tax allowances for working parents, improving child-care provision, reducing working hours/weekend working in female-dominated professions such as healthcare and a stricter enforcement of anti-discrimination measures to prevent professional women's promotion prospects being hindered when they take time off work to care for children. Over recent years, the fertility rate has increased to around 2.0 in France and 1.9 in Britain and some other northern European countries, [..]

[..] In Italy, for example, natalist policies may have actually discouraged the Italian population from having more children. This "widespread resistance" was the result of the Italian government, at one point,[when?] taxing single persons and criminalizing abortion and even contraception.[..]

European analysts hope, with the help of government incentives and large-scale change towards family-friendly policies, to stall the population decline and reverse it by around 2030, expecting that most of Europe will have a slight natural increase by then.[..] <—- if this isn’t eugenics, I don’t know what is...whatever economic benefit increased population has, immigration and automation tech will compensate.

That's the thing -- you won't actually go volunteer with the homeless. (Or at least, 99% of us wouldn't.) But parents actually have to change those diapers. If there's a little kid running around in the background of that Zoom call, someone is doing a lot of hard work to keep the kid alive. And unlike volunteering at the homeless shelter, they can't just decide they don't feel like it.

This was in response to the parent post:

> an essential service that some people perform to ensure that society as we know it can continue to exist

If this was the reason why parents get a free pass, people who provide essential services would also get to do it on their employer's dime, at the expense of their colleagues.

My point across this entire comments section is that this privilege is arbitrary. A lot of people do hard work for all sorts of important reasons, but when they miss work, it gets mentioned in their performance review.

You’re framing this discussion as something you flat out don’t accept as reasonable, despite the thoughtful responses in the thread.

Is there any point in actual engaging, or have you already made your mind up?

Perhaps, rather than repeatedly and blindly repeating your view over and over, like you might somehow convince parents that they’re bad humans who deserve to be punished, try considering the views of the others here...

This a pandemic, if there was ever a situation where the situation was a bit more complicated and a bit more empathy to the circumstances was required, this is it.

Parenting in the pandemic is a systemic problem. And even in non-pandemic times, we have public schools, child services, parental leave, etc. The national guard and jury duty are likewise systemic problems; we need lots of guardsmen and lots of jurors.

Homelessness is a systemic problem, but the particular way you choose to do community service (or not do it) is for you to sort out mostly on your own.

They do. They're called government employees, and they are paid by taxes at the expense of everyone.

(1) I chose not to have children, and

(2) I find it unfair that I'm expected to work longer hours for the same compensation/work profile.

Is that it? ... No, that's not it. Your position assumes that:

(1) Child-rearing is some a-priori, guaranteed good, and

(2) That it apparently should be subsidized by employers,

(3) and (both implicitly and explicitly, from you and others) at the expense of their non-child having coworkers.

Am I getting something wrong, or missing something?

I absolutely think parents should get a break during the pandemic. I think everyone should. The work people are doing here to act like we should worship the ground parents walk is easily the most shocking thing I've witnessed.

Honestly, it's not at all a stretch to say you basically insist parents get extra compensation (in the form of extra paid vacation). Call me whatever name you want, but people are well within their rights on this, of all places, to raise an eyebrow.

---

The other generous interpretation is that there is some base assumption that we ALL (parents and non-parents) should running ourselves at 90+% capacity. And that children are an accept caveat since parents are usually at 100% capacity. What a terrifying dismal way to look at life. I hope that's not it.

When you say "longer hours" do you mean "longer hours than I worked before COVID" or "the same amount of hours, but longer than parents will be working during COVID"?

If you mean the former, then you need a better employer, because agreed, you should not be required or expected to increase your work hours due to COVID, for any reason, and certainly not to pick up the slack caused by parents losing productivity.

If you mean the latter, then this just sounds like entitled whining. Your life has not changed because parents get more flexibility. It's exactly the same as it was before.

Parents don't get to stop taking care of their kids. I know quite a few working parents, and I guarantee you that they don't want to take time away from work for child care right now. But they have no choice. You are incredibly lucky that you aren't a parent right now; take that blessing as your "subsidy" and stop complaining about things that don't actually affect you.

Parents deserve extra flexibility.

So do single people working from their bedrooms, 50 hours a week, thinking about alternatives to this existence regularly because they have literally nothing else going on and don't have the vacation to take to get away.

So do people in relationships who are trapped in tiny, tiny SF apartments with no room to breathe in, when OH ALSO, your city is constantly filled with the noise of sirens because your police department keeps gassing your neighborhood.

Everyone deserves extra flexibility right now. Acting like your kid is some exception while calling me entitled is something else.

Reading these threads, I think the conversation has blurred COVID and non-COVID times. COVID has highlighted how much leeway parents get in general, regardless of whether people think they should/should not get it.

How, exactly? It feels like the glass-makers fallacy every time this point is expanded on.

> Anyhow, try the empathy thing out

empathy means "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another"; you assume this isn't the case because others draw a different conclusion to you own. What If others understand perfectly well? From my perspective the phrasing "try the empathy thing out" is pretty patronising, leading me to conclude you either lack empathy on that point, or else wanted it to be that way; it's possible to be (if not act) empathetic while acting vindictive.

>I absolutely think parents should get a break during the pandemic. I think everyone should.

I am alone. I am completely alone. Completely socially isolated. And being expected to work 50 hours a week, as always, in my home. I get no extra time off. I get no allowances for a screaming kid in the background.

I THINK PARENTS SHOULD GET A BREAK. And I think everyone should equally.

Point-of-fact, only parents are the people in this thread demanding something and acting entitled and the fact that no one can respond to the arguments without resorting to name-calling just drives that point home.

Tell that to all the children born into poverty with parents who don't want them/are indifferent to them, and to the communities they inhabit who bear the fallout.

(This is in the context of supporting making parent leave available for non-parents).

Note also that parents did not choose the situation we are currently in. This is not a matter of lifestyle choice. The lifestyle we chose when we decided to have kids included the expectation of childcare during the day and that is what is failing here.

Parents actually have to have kids to be in a position of caring for a dependent.

What if I have no children but I have a grandparent who is ill and requires care. My point is that if employees with families require support during these hard times, there are probably many who don't have children who also have changed their lives due to this pandemic. Perhaps we should relax the expectations for EVERYONE and not find one circumstance more special than others.

I (also as a non-parent) have been mostly ok, but I've been taking more Fridays off than I would otherwise, just to have some more recharge time.

But I don't think there's necessarily a one-size-fits-all allowance solution. Taking care of a grandparent does not require the same time commitment, and, crucially, the same lack of control over one's schedule, as child care. Barring emergencies, you can schedule when you take care of your grandparent. With children, you are on call all day long, and kids can and will interrupt you for whatever (or no) reason. You can't just put them in a room by themselves for 8 hours and expect things to go well. Hell, with most young kids you can't even put them in a room by themselves for 30 minutes and expect things to go well.

At least where I work you are entitled to the same leave that is being offered to parents to help anyone in your family/household/etc.

"Perhaps we should relax the expectations for EVERYONE and not find one circumstance more special than others"

Like other parents I made it clear to my boss that if I was required to work from home my productivity would be lower because there is a toddler running around my workspace. It is not that my circumstance is "more special" as much as that I am being required to work from an environment that makes work more difficult. My company operates a large system of offices for the purpose of providing employees with a workspace that improves productivity and I have been forbidden to enter any of those offices for six months.

(Just to be clear on what it means for a toddler to play in your workspace, given the opportunity my son will try to "type" on my keyboard and wreak havoc on whatever code I am writing. If I close the door, he will start banging on it and then crying if nobody opens it up. If I step into the kitchen to get some coffee he will chase after me and demand that I read him a book, and if I go back to my workspace he will start crying. My son is starting to figure out doorknobs and it is likely that by the end of this month I will not actually be able to keep him out of my workspace by closing the door.)

Well, why shouldn't it be?

> I'm not resentful at parents. It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure, as if they didn't already do it through 40 years of tax contributions.

Those children will later subsidize many childless people's retirement, either through contribution to pension funds or simply by keeping the world going.

> Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.

As I wrote earlier, it can be both a choice and a service to society/humanity.

It depends where you work, but potentially? I work at one of the FAANGs and we can take up to 20hr/y of work hours for volunteering.

A lot of companies will happily let you do that. Microsoft and Google even donate in $ for every hour you volunteer, up to a certain limit.

It seems that situation, wherein you cannot reduce or substitute your working hours as an individual to instead volunteer, is what they are commenting on. Parents are being allowed to do this with their parental duties, which seems to be the perceived unfairness.

You don't have to help the homeless during the work day; that's a choice. But parents don't get to decide not to care for their children during the work day, when school/daycare/etc. is not available.

> It just seems completely unfair to make childless employees subsidise this adventure

How is that happening, though? As a non-parent who chose to work from home most of the time pre-COVID (despite HQ being a 30-minute walk from home), my work life is nearly unchanged due to COVID. I get up, work 8-10 hours, and then go and do whatever I want (obviously "whatever I want" has been curtailed due to COVID, but that's not my employer's or parent-coworkers' fault). I'm not "subsidizing" anything when a parent gets more flexibility during their work day due to child care obligations. The thing that changes for the company as a whole is that projects take longer to complete because many employees have taken a productivity hit, but that's no skin off my back.

> Besides, let's not pretend that people choose to have kids as a service to humanity. I've never, ever heard anyone claim that. People have kids because they're fun, and because making them is fun.

Agreed, and as a non-parent I can't help but roll my eyes whenever a parent tries to tell me what a grand service to humanity their child-rearing is. But, at the end of the day, humanity would cease to exist without people having kids, so regardless of their actual motivation, they are providing a valuable service to humanity.

maybe? at my company we get a few days worth of "VTO" (volunteer time off) per year. so if you worked here, you could absolutely do that.

People don’t have kids directly to service humanity. But the bet effect is kids do benefit humanity. It’s worth supporting. In fact it’s quite sad how low the birth rate has become among those that can afford to have kids.

I kind of want our race/country/planet to continue existing even if I can’t.

I want to emphasize that a sustainable average number of children per family is not zero [0] but around 1-1.5 for a sustainable population size in 100 years, according to the linked article. So given that you presumably live in a developed country (well educated, and don't need children for labour), and have a human's normal biological urges to reproduce, it's not immoral to produce children, but it's certainly not morally commendable.

[0] https://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/yes-overpopulation-problem/

I also think we should work towards preserving genetic material so in case of a catastrophe we will still have a diverse human gene pool.

This couldn't be further from the truth. I don't know anything about you but I can confidently say for every person like you, there are 5 that have a lot of kids purely out of inability or unwillingness to try not to. We are so far from not having enough children that your service to humanity is nothing but a stroke of your own ego. If you really, truly believed what you're saying, would you give up your right to have children under a guaranteed contract that someone else would in your place? Probably not.

Your comment would be completely correct if the children ceased all communications and transactions with the parent upon entry into the labor force; but that's not what happens.

In fact, your entire existence as an old person will be completely dependent on those kids working.

Non-parents get many benefits from children, but the parents get far more. To be clear, I think many of the arguments for subsidizing the rearing of children are coherent, such as arguments in favor of public schooling and healthcare (on the basis that the children are the primary beneficiaries), but I think those arguments do not apply to the parents' workplace.

Regardless of any direct benefit to me, I am willing to accept parents getting some small benefits that I will not as a childless person as an overall investment in society as a whole.

I empathize with parents, but please don't make it sound like it's a selfless act they are doing for the good of society.

Also, childless couples/singles get taxed at quite a high rate (after any returns) vs parents. You compound that over 21 or whatever years it takes for kids to become "productive". Furthermore, people who choose to stay childless still have to work and pay higher taxes till the age of at least 66 in US. Life expectancy for males is 78, so that gives you 12 years. Social security is in no way enough, and you must survive on pension that you paid into for your retirement. So the child that I helped raised with my extra taxes and without any preferential treatment at work will never even come close to paying me back.

As far as being taxed “more” than a couple with kids, yes you do potentially miss out on a tax credit of $2k/year. Going through my food bills I easily spend that much just feeding that child- let’s just call it $5/day. So that child I’m rearing is at best netting me $0, and most likely will never be able to pay me back! So much for my supposed economic advantage!

So no it’s not some selfless act to society. After all nature makes the kid making process somewhat enjoyable and you take immense pride in your offspring. On the other hand the argument that you’re disadvantaged as a non parent because you miss out on a small tax break that, at the end of the day, at most subsidizes the nourishment required for said human to survive, rings hollow.

Your taxes enable young people to exist/grow-up and extend those services to you. Providing for kids is selfish, not selfless. Until the singularity happens, we need young children to grow into functioning adults that continue and (hopefully) advance society.

Let's stick to the simpler rationale that some people have kids because they love kids and/or want to pass down their genes.

Similarly, people choose to have kids for lots of reasons (family pressure, want to pass on genes, etc.) but society's continued existence depends on people having kids, so it's on all of us to support the people who do have kids whether or not any given individual's motivation is noble.

How might we use the trillions of dollars spent on the military for education, healthcare, retirement and other betterment initiatives for U.S. citizens? If hypothetically all nations agreed on world peace, then having a military becomes superfluous but the would-be soldiers can find other meaningful professions in society rather than being soldiers.

Again I'm not against supporting parents. Just when there's immarginal benefits being conferred, that are not available to non-parents.

In a perfect world, that would work. We don't live in a perfect world, which is why virtually no society has ever disbanded their armed forces and lived to tell about it.

Similarly, in a perfect world, we could treat every individual exactly fairly and never given someone slightly more than they should have. But in this real fallen world we live in, sometimes the best we've got is simplistic decision rules like "support categories of people who do work that is essential for society to survive".

Yes parents should be given the time off. But do all parents need the time off? What if you have teenage kids? Also why limit this for parents only, why can't the same benefit apply to singles who can use the extra time off to find their potential partner and hence help in societies growth. I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.

You're mistaking an acute problem for a chronic one. Society won't be harmed if you have to put your dating life on hold for 6 months because of a pandemic. But putting child care on hold for 6 months will result in a lot of dead, injured, or developmentally messed-up kids.

> I feel it's tone deaf to just talk about parents problems during these crisis.

I don't think that's the case at all. As an example, my employer also talks about general mental health during this pandemic, and encourages everyone -- parents and non-parents alike -- to take the time they need to care for themselves.

But as a non-parent I recognize that I haven't been affected much by the pandemic. Yes, I miss seeing my friends, and doing normal things out of my home, but I'm dealing with it reasonably well. If I had kids, what I'd be dealing with would be orders of magnitude more difficult. So I expect and accept that orders of magnitude more time will be spent talking about the problems parents are having right now.

It's really not like military service or jury duty: things which in most cases people do not have an extremely strong biological urge to do.

The best available evidence is that fertility rates are highly sensitive to external incentives. For example Russia managed to raise its fertility rate from the lowest in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. They did that through a combination of cash incentives, extended maternity leave, and various social status and privileges for mothers.

The only way it is beneficial is because some jokers decided that running country on ever increasing debt (esp. retirement) is acceptable, and another decided that growth rates have to be high.

So the biological urge apparently isn't doing the trick.

While that may end up being the case for centuries to come, I don't think it's a great outcome for humanity as a whole to require vast wealth inequality between nations in order to keep humanity from dying out.

I raise you Israel as an example of not a poor country with big increase in birth rates.

You have people who essentially outsourced parenting to have a career and that’s not a ‘sacrifice’. It’s a choice.

Which begs the questions: is the race to fulfill replacement rate in developed countries the real reason to incentivise child births?

However, retirement and social systems were designed during a boom and were inadequately funded.

Or immigrant labour. I'm not a parent-hater or a child-hater (One Billion Americans Go Go Go!) but you can import a lot of people. Heck I'd boost the economy by sustained long term importation of labour to bolster birth so that we can target long term of a billion Americans.

We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.

> We owe the coming generations one last push to glory.

This is not a Marvel movie. If our oceans turn acidic, if our glaciers melt, it's going to take a lot more than a magical South African to turn back time.

If you think modern science's very real concerns for the near future of our planet amount to "Doomsday Cult nonsense", I don't know what to tell you. This stuff isn't magic- it's not made up- the evidence is right there out in the open. We can bury our head in the sand or we can face it with clear eyes.

We have too many of them. It's not polite to say, but ultimately many of the problems faced by the human race (like global warming) are a result of over-population. We don't want the replacement rate to drop too low, because it fucks up cross generational dynamics (e.g. social security), but we really would be better off if we had like 5% less kids over the next 20 years.

That won't happen: Parents will insist on raising their kids (with their DNA), their way, without any strict oversight, or societal interference. The "essential service" is as much about the desires of the parent, than the desires of society.

And as for "society as we know it" - what if I don't care for society as we know it?

I like that analogy a lot and it has me switching my opinion to an extent. While having children is a huge responsibility, many parents don't actually treat it as so. (I would like to think the vast majority do). Is there a way we (socitey) can reward for responsible parenting? Can we decide as a collective what makes "good parenting".

Unfortunately, in most companies this is not an option. Full time (and be happy if this doesn't include overtime) or go away. And I can't afford to go away.

I've seen parents who negotiate hard for three days a week get it, but they are quickly 'mommy tracked' and stop getting promotions. Additionally when a crisis at work happens on their off day, they still get the call.

I think a tech company that figures out how to make part-time jobs work culturally will have a huge recruiting and talent advantage, especially this year. I haven't seen it pulled off yet though.

I'm going to ask you to clarify this.

In my experience, medical professions are LOUSY for "part time". You are on horribly long shifts. They move around continuously. You have no control over your shifts until you get to a very significant level of seniority.

And, right now, you're on the front lines of a pandemic.

The only advantage to something like nursing (at least it used to be) is that no matter where your spouse is, you will have work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24401206

Life during COVID is not what parents expected (or reasonably could have expected) when they chose to have children.

> However, if this arrangement is to last, then childless employees should also get time for their personal obligations, whatever they might be.

Meanwhile, non-parents will just work normal full-time jobs and get raises and promotions at their usual cadence, and it'll be more or less status quo.

The issue now is that we're not expecting this to go on for multiple years, and are hoping that things will go back to some semblance of normal sometime early- to mid-next year (whether that comes to pass or not is irrelevant; the expectation is what matters). With that thinking, you can expect solutions to problems to be blunt and short-term, not well-thought-out policy changes and cultural shifts that in the best of times can take years to work out and transition to. And because they're blunt and short-term, they are going to have rough edges, as we're seeing here.

* parents need more time to care for their kids

* parents feel guilty for the time off they’re taking

* non parent workers might feel some resentment, but probably not overtly

* non parent workers probably feel like they need to pick up the slack

Let’s be real here: very few of us are doing anything of actual consequence. Your job is not important. Your job is not you and you are not your job. Take as much time as you need, and if your company or your boss doesn’t get it, leave. I’ll fucking hire you.

In reality, none of us work 8 hours a day, and if someone slacks off, we'll push the deadline and go home.

In real reality, I'm self-employed and none of this matters. I just found that it was something interesting to discuss.

What I'm seeing overall is a shocking lack of empathy for that situation and seeing home-parenting obligations during a pandemic as not being too dissimilar from taking time to binge Tiger King or take a road trip.

If this crisis required the employee to take several weeks off, it would require scrambling and maybe require some unpaid leave, but it would get done.

But that has nothing to do with what's going on now. We have a chronic situation where parents need to take care of their kids all day, every day, for every week and month that this pandemic shuts down schools and other child care services. You can't address this with an afternoon off or temporary leave of absence. This requires a complete change in expectations. You can't pause child care for 8 hours while mom and dad work. You can't even pause it for 30 minutes.

However, anyone dealing with a "crisis", and also more explicitly a "mental health crisis", should not be punished in their job, esp during everyone-remote-pandemic-time (though overall, but I have had pretty cushy jobs since joining industry).

Maybe you have a specific example where the "adult, not child" thing mattered in a crisis, but that would make me very disappointed with my company, with HR, and compel me to start doing my best to look elsewhere for more empathic colleagues.

The social benefit of well raised children benefits all. There are no benefits to having you get equal time off. You’re only serving yourself, not society.

Btw - smokers got to go outside to have a smoke break because we banned smoking from inside. Before that a smoke break didn’t exist. So it’s a trade off. Smokers stop creating second hand smoke in exchange for us tolerating them getting a “break” to feed their nicotine addiction so they can function. Cigarettes are legal and taxes are collected - we should tolerate them getting time to service their addiction so the rest of us don’t have to breath it.

There is no biological point of anyone’s life. This is nonsensical, it is also extremely offensive both to childless by choice and, especially, to infertile people.

I’m not a biological essentialist but I also won’t deny this simple fact that binds humans to plants - we exist to generate new variations of ourselves.

It doesn’t mean someone who won’t or can’t have children can’t contribute to humanity in a range of ways for their lives are just as worthy. But regardless if you choose to not or can not have children, this biological imperative has not selected you and your DNA will die with you. That’s just a fact.

It is like saying the sky is blue, therefore the point of the sky existing is to be blue, or all physical interactions generate entropy, so the point of the universe is to create entropy.

Yes, life often replicates itself, but that is not why it exists. Any possible reason for existence is a story assigned by a conscious observer. Humans are conscious and decide their own purposes.

Lifeforms can have their own purposes, which may or may not involve reproduction. Yes, those that don't reproduce go extinct, but that doesn't mean their purpose is not fulfilled. There is no objective value in evolutionary fitness or replication.

>Weak life dies out and strong life continues until it too is superseded. Evolution is a thing. Look outside and you see it everywhere.

To this

>life exists to reproduce life

You make a logical leap when you change "we generate new variations of ourselves" to "we exist to generate new variations of ourselves."

>It doesn’t mean someone who won’t or can’t have children can’t contribute to humanity in a range of ways for their lives are just as worthy. But regardless if you choose to not or can not have children, this biological imperative has not selected you and your DNA will die with you. That’s just a fact.

Exactly. So it is as meaningless and wrong as saying that the point of a falling ball is to hit the floor and bounce or that the point of the sun is to become a red giant. There is no "point", it is just a fact that will happen.

The biological point still exists. It’s up to you to judge how much that means to you - to some nothing; to others everything. Why else would we have an entire chromosome dedicated to aiding in the reproduction of ourselves? Why do my plants spend so many calories on developing seedlings to reproduce a variation on themselves?

Reproducing doesn’t say anything about you in my opinion. It is our biological purpose I believe through the science of evolution, however. And to the original point of the thread - it’s a benefit to society to have healthy, educated children in our society. This is the gift to all of us that parents give us. We should privilege that. We shouldn’t penalize this because of not only the societal benefit but because it’s objectively natural. The proof is the 7 billion people on earth. (Natural doesn’t mean better. It just means the biological drive our sex hormones and sex mechanisms grant us)

>It is our biological purpose I believe through the science of evolution, however.

The science of evolution doesn't say that it is our purpose. In fact, biology students are sometimes even trained to rewrite statements about natural selection that imply any teleology (stuff like "in order to"). Again, saying that something is the biological point is as meaningless as saying that the physical point of the sun is to become a red giant.

The Sun analogy doesn’t make sense. You are describing the existence of an object/being in terms of existence and death. This is more analogous to an individual than a biological _system_.

Indeed a star can’t reproduce as far as we/I know. However I’d argue a star that contributes to life, as the Sun does, is far more meaningful than one that does not. My evidence is me. There is no one to speak for the stars that don’t contribute to life.

Perhaps my language was too strong. I do believe it’s important we make accommodations (extra time off when having or adopting a child for both parents, accommodations during Covid and work from home, etc) that those of us (myself!) don’t get.

I feel like more and more society is penalizing people for having kids and I feel like that’s a sickness in a society.

How, though? Tax breaks haven't gone away and FMLA has been expanded. This, despite the fact that we're seeing the environmental impacts of rampant, unchecked population growth every day. If there's a sickness in society, maybe it's an inability to look in the mirror and say "hey, maybe we don't need humanity to occupy every square inch of the planet".

At the risk of over-using a tired phrase: that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Life has no purpose beyond what we individually ascribe to it.

> However I’d argue a star that contributes to life, as the Sun does, is far more meaningful than one that does not.

That may be true, but a human that reproduces does not necessarily contribute to life more than one that does not. And even under individual circumstances where that reproducing human contributes to life more, that does not make reproduction its purpose.

For the record, I have no issue with parents getting some more work flexibility due to COVID. It's absolutely the right thing to do. But this has nothing to do with some abstract notion of life's purpose; it's because children need child care, and not allowing parents the time to fulfill that obligation is an awful thing to do to both child and parent.

I am explicitly privileging society allowing additional time for parenting. It should not be a game of everyone gets x-days. “Use them to go to a ball game or take care of your kids. Your choice.”. It’s equivocating raiding kids with personal obligations. Our biology drives most of us to want to create life and a just society should appreciate that. Putting it on the same level as personal interests doesn’t make sense to me.

And to clarify as I have in other responses - I’m not saying it is the purpose of life. But that it’s pretty much the biological purpose. We have infinite other purposes and it’s up to each individual to find theirs and their priorities. As a society though I think we can and should privilege the raising of children.

We can make anything ridiculous. That doesn’t mean we take it seriously.

When my wife and I chose to have a kid, there was absolutely no reason to think that we would have any difficulty finding a nanny/daycare or that we would have to try to work in the same environment that our son is playing in. When COVID-19 restrictions went into effect, we had basically no notice that we would be expected to work from home full time, that our building's common areas would all be closed a few days later, that our nanny would be unable to make the commute (no license should not have been in issue in NYC) and that daycares would all be closed exactly when we needed to find one, etc. We had to move just to get an extra room that could be used as an "office," because working from the kitchen table is impossible when a baby wants to crawl up to you, pull himself into a standing position, and grab whatever you are "playing" with.

Even with the extra room, we still have trouble. Our son walks (and runs) now and is beginning to understand how doorknobs work, but he still has no concept of leaving us alone to do our work. If he has the chance to run into our office he will, and if he does not he sometimes bangs on the door and cries when nobody opens it. Either way it is a huge distraction that makes it much harder to get anything done. Try explaining to a toddler that mommy and daddy are working and see how far you get. We also continue to see chaos with our childcare arrangements, which takes its toll on productivity.

Your side hustle is optional and can be put on hold. When you already have kids you cannot stop being a parent and children cannot be paused. I agree that employers should give people time for "personal obligations," and in fact mine does and my boss has been using that time to check in on elderly parents, but the fact is that parenting is one of the few 24x7 personal obligations. It is not like I can say that I am setting aside one day a week or two hours per day to be a parent.

As hard as it is to deal with a toddler while trying to work, it is harder for parents who are being told that they must supervise their children's schoolwork. It is easy to forget that part of the job of a teacher is to watch over the kids in their classroom and ensure they are not just goofing off all day, but with kids doing "school from home" that is now the job of their parents. Again, it comes down to having someone else there to take on that job while parents are working, and again it is not a question of time and it is not something optional that people can put on hold until the crisis is over.

Basically there is no way to make any of this sustainable. COVID restrictions make childcare arrangements more difficult and less reliable, but those gaps must be filled and in the end it is parents who have to fill them (if someone else could do so, then it would not be a 'gap').

Wife had a breakdown today from not being able to get any work done because she is constantly getting up to help the kids with school work or when school is done they automatically call out to her whenever they need anything. We are snapping at the kids for just normal kid things because we both have to work and are getting so little done. She has a massive amount of responsibility where she is the bottle neck for multiple departments as all work has to be legally approved by her.

I am in a new role and essentially on conf. calls all day while still having to get software built.

This sucks for everyone, but I can guarantee that as much as the childless people resent people with kids getting to slack on work time, we are paying for it in spades in other aspects of our lives.

Most of all I feel bad for my kids, this is not a situation they have any control over and all they know is that things are hard for them.

It's not just child care, the response to COVID is unsustainable period. People will continue to act out and single out things like this topic, but all in all, the current solution won't get the United States through the next year without a massive economic collapse.

There is no easy solution here, no magic cure, and the "let's just let the 30% who can work remote do so" is already collapsing in almost every vertical.

To come around to an actual point here, I think we're going to see COVID responses become much more "practical" which are going to be bad news in the short term for parents, when a company can practically say "you are not as productive as a person without children and we can't afford you", which will be an absolute truth in many cases. Lawsuits will be attempted, and some might succeed, but most will fail.

As someone who raised a child alone, without her mother, or an extended family from birth, you have my utmost sympathy and I wish I could say more than this: If you're not planning around your children and thinking of ways to make them invisible to your employment, you're putting them and yourself at risk. Yes, society should care, yes, you should get a break and understanding in dealing with the stress and physical reality of dealing with it, but no, capitalism won't allow for that for very long.

COVID should have brought the country together but it's thus far brought us further apart. I see no sign of that fact changing.

Do you have a retirement plan and do you want a return on it? Guess who'll generate that return: other people's children.

childless employees should also get time for their personal obligations

That's a tricky one. Is your paragliding trip an investment that will generate future value for society?

This seems insane to me but everyone seems to put up with it

Having children can be a choice in the implementation details like when, how many etc. and at the same time a benefit to, and a necessity for, society in the grand scheme of things. I don't expect praise or a medal for having children, but I do expect support and recognition. The same argument, by the way, goes to other caregivers and professions with a comparable contribution to society as a whole.

But let's turn to another question instead. Is the way we think about productivity, compensation and performance still appropriate now that we've transitioned from business-as-usual world to a global battlefield of sorts with all its chaos, unpredictability and lack of controllability? What would happen if "best effort" replaced "highest return" going forward? I'm sure there are tons of other questions that could help challenge our current thinking and move the needle on making the world a better place.

That would feel like an appropriate middle finger gesture towards The Virus, wouldn't it?

I don't think we should disadvantage parents because they failed to take into account the possibility of a once-in-a-century pandemic when planning their family. This reads as "oh, don't want to have extreme work+family stress during a global pandemic? Don't choose to have kids!"

> Whatever I have going on instead can't have priority over my work schedule. Whether it's a side hustle or a little league baseball team, it has to wait.

You're mistaking wants with needs. Child care isn't optional. Parents don't want to take time away from their workday to care for their kids right now, but they have to. You can't just stick a 5 year old in a room and be like "mommy/daddy has grown-up stuff to do, see you in 8 hours, try not to kill yourself, and oh, learn how to feed yourself as well".

Your side hustle or baseball team are things you want to do, and can easily wait until the weekend or after hours. Child care is something that must be done, all day long, every day, whether someone wants to or not at any given moment.

> However, if this arrangement is to last, then childless employees should also get time for their personal obligations, whatever they might be.

Childless people don't have work-hours personal obligations unless they choose to. And I expect any employer, under normal times, to frown upon anyone, parent or non-parent, who tries to get out of work due to personal obligations they've intentionally set up to conflict with work.

As a non-parent, I have exactly the same amount of time for my personal obligations as I did pre-COVID. COVID has not given me new required responsibilities during work hours, but parents have gotten that in spades. If you do have a new COVID-related responsibility that needs to be taken care of during work hours (like caring for an at-risk relative), then I think your employer should give you some extra flexibility as well. But your side hustle or little league team is a luxury that didn't need to intersect with work hours pre-COVID, and doesn't need to do so now.

1. There are already functional mechanisms for contribution. A single, childless person is already contributing more through their taxes. The government already heavily subsidises child-rearing.

2. Child-rearing is given an arbitrary pass that other equally charitable actions wouldn't get. A single, childless person couldn't let his commitment to Doctors Without Borders affect his work performance.

3. I'm not sure if "children are our future" is our future. This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.

Ah yes, the lofty government subsidy of x < $600 on average per family that has enough taxable income to receive the CDCTC (x < $100 all families with children)[0]. The cost of raising a child for an average family is $12,000 per year[1].

> Child-rearing is given an arbitrary pass that other equally charitable actions wouldn't get.

Raising a child is spending 20-40 hrs a week for 18 years and a boatload of money to create another person in the workforce who will spend ~40 years generating GDP and paying taxes. Considering GDP per capita in the USA is ~$62,000 and rising, I think it is pretty safe to assume that your average-ly skilled single childless person contributing anything less than 20 hrs/week to just about any charity isn't even in the ballpark of "equally charitable."

>This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.

Yeah, this is the "The Population Bomb"[2] argument that could possibly be the case but so far has no real evidence beyond hypothesis to support it... since 1968.

[0] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publicat... [1] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

> Raising a child is spending 20-40 hrs a week for 18 years [...] to create another person [...] who will spend ~40 years generating GDP and paying taxes

Let's not forget that this person will eventually retire and require increasingly expensive care.

That makes me curious. If the current economy can only function with a growing population, then it takes > 1 person to subsidise your upbringing/retirement. Does that mean that 1 human life costs more than the output of a human's entire life?

Those people making $62K are getting paid for their work, not donating it.

You chose one particularly inexpensive subsidy, and ignored everything else. 200 days/year of free childcare is not free. Maternity/paternity leave is coming out of someone's pocket. Many social programs are heavily skewed towards children (SNAP participants are around 1/2 children, despite them only being 1/4 of the population, for example).

I'm not saying we shouldn't do these things - modern society makes having children expensive, and it's obviously best for all of us if we ensure some base level of care for them. But we don't have to pretend it isn't happening.

In the case of SNAP I think you've confused secondary/tertiary effects of a subsidy with a subsidy itself. In the case of education, I think you've confused an externality of an investment in education with a subsidy. I'm not sure you can even consider maternity/paternity leave a government subsidy considering what federal law exists for leave is unpaid (maybe if you consider the continuation of healthcare benefits?).

I can see how some would think I'm splitting hairs here. Taken to its logical conclusion, I could argue with your broad definition that just about any subsidy or tax on anything is also a subsidy or tax on raising children. E.g. families have more cell phones and higher cell phone bills, so taxes on cell phone bills are also taxes on having children. Gas taxes are a tax on extracurricular activities for your kids. That's a little much for me, I prefer to call them what they are, secondary/tertiary effects of a subsidy or tax.

I can't see this as anything other than a deliberate misrepresentation of my stance. In the SNAP case, the key point is not that children benefit from it, it's that children benefit to an enormously out-sized degree - they're over-represented by a full 100%. I pretty deliberately did not say the words you're putting in my mouth - any tax or subsidy that affects children to an approximately equivalent degree as others are obviously not related to this discussion.

As to the education bit, I don't see why the reason we're spending a ton of money subsidizing children affects whether we're subsidizing children - which education very clearly does. You can wave away any subsidy that way, if you so choose.

2. Donating to Doctors Without Borders is just enabling someone else to do a good deed, the donator has zero responsibility. Parents are legally required to look after a child for 16 (i think, in most countries) years.

3. The world population won't keep growing, fertility rates are only above 3 in Africa. Other "developing" countries are on course for the population to stabilise, western developed countries will see population dropping. Google tells me 2064 for current projected population peak.

We must control population to conserve non renewable resources. So we can comfortably perpetuate our species without burning the house down and killing everyone.

That 'heavy subsidy' doesn't even begin to cover the economical costs, let alone the crazy amount of work.

>I'm not sure if "children are our future" is our future. This model might not be viable forever as the world population keeps growing. This is a whole other can of worms.

What's the alternative? Hoping that the children of other countries will just work for your retirement out of the goodness of their heart? Well, maybe you're rich and invested in foreign markets so this isn't a worry for you, but for the vast majority of people this isn't an option.

I think you bring up some good points and also I can sympathise with the parents in my workplace that had this issue thrust upon them due to covid. I won't comment on them nor does it personally affect my work much, if at all - barely anyone on my team are parents and those that are are making it work so I'm not picking up any extra work because of their kids.

But I have never heard of any parent ever say that they are having kids because children are the future so it's odd for me to see so many people say that in this thread. I don't need parents to justify to me why it's harder for them, I already agree with that but the future thing is a very interesting viewpoint I've never personally come across before.

It's not a model, a mental experiment, or a charitable action. It's the x2 amount of work you need to do, day and night, 365 days a year.

What do you think nannies, daycare centers, and schools are doing? It is exceedingly rare for a child to be raised from birth to adulthood by just their close family.

"That’s how we evolved"

BS. We evolved to live in groups of 100-200 people (i.e. villages). Primates generally live in such groups (size varies by species) and will generally help with raising the young within the group, often with some form of social structure determining which group member is helping or being helped (e.g. lower-ranking females will act as "nannies" for higher-ranking females prior to mating and having their own offspring). Moreover, humans evolved a many-to-many mating pattern, so the "village" was the smallest unit of genetic closeness until extremely recently (and even so, people often break the social rules and have adulterous sex, and often change partners multiple times in their lifetime, resulting in a large number of half-siblings).

It would be interesting to model around insect populations rather than ape societies as we have increased in population and there are way too many unique sets of specializations.

I like modeling villages around 125-250. It’s closer to the Dunbar number and we can have diff age groups. And cluster several ‘villages’ together for services that scale.

(*) For example, if you saw a lost child wandering around crying, your first thought would probably be to try to help the child find his parents, even if it was inconvenient to do so, despite not knowing who the child or his parents actually are. Most people would at least stay with the child to wait for the police (or whoever) to arrive and take over, and many would willingly give the child food, an umbrella or coat, or whatever else the child needs.

This, 1000%.

2. It's not an arbitrary pass. A childless person's commitment to Doctors Without Borders is much more flexible than a parent's commitment to a living a human.

3. The world population is only really growing in less developed countries. But it doesn't matter because if you have too many people they will either die because the system can't support them. Or the system will innovate to be able to support them.

why exactly? generally, it is rational to subsidize things that society does not have enough of and tax things that we have too much of. are we currently not producing enough children? this is not necessarily implied by birthrates being below the replacement rate.

2. Child-rearing is a thing tens of millions of people actually do interleaved with full-time work, and has to be addressed by high-level decision makers. There are lots of hypothetical things a specific individual might want to do that maybe have high social utility, and that's an interesting question for them to sort out with their manager and isn't really relevant to how parents are treated.

3. A stable population -- not growing -- requires a little over 2 children per woman, and the US fertility rate is waaaay below that right now.

From companies? The market doesn't care about all that. It's supply and demand. If parents get "perks" from companies it's because the companies need to provide them to attract workers(on the whole).

Society does in fact mediate the purely rational economic incentives and companies thus don't act purely rationally, nor are they society in and of themselves. America isn't the best about it relative to European countries but even here in the U.S. the FMLA bars employers from dropping employees just because they're pregnant or having a kid.