https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/ezra-klein-kriste...?
"We could be raising our children cooperatively in dwellings designed to enhance rather than inhibit social connection. We could be more sustainably sharing our resources and teaching our children to value collaboration over competition. We could be living in wider lateral networks of love, care, and support; fighting the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life. Most of us are not.”
My 2*(grand)mother raised 11 children. From what I've heard from other family members, the key to success is not giving enough emotional and material support to each child.
What I'm trying to say is: the expectations on children quality of life are also much higher vs 100 yrs ago.
It's not that we can't afford more children, but that we can't afford to give more children and ourselves the level of comfort we've come to expect.
I could afford to give quite a few children the standard of living we had when I was a kid, but while it was fine for it's time, it's not what I'd want to go back to for either myself or my kids.
It's also why I don't think this is a crisis in the long term on a global basis, though it may become one for individual countries:
Once wealth catches up to a level where we have sufficient buffer, I think we can balance things out.
I don't think this is quite right, and your second paragraph is kind of alluding to the underlying issue. I think it's more that there isn't a pathway for women to drop out of the workforce permanently and revert to a single-income household. A lot of women in my wife's peer group want to do this, but can't make the finances work. Of course, they end up having to pay for child care anyway and maybe it comes out in the wash. Regardless, maybe some kind of UBI can be help here for women with children who simply don't want to go back to work.
Aside: you might be commenting specifically on Asian work culture, not sure, but the "give up freedom" thing I don't believe to be unique in that regard.
As a man, I’m looking for an independent woman with a good income, because I don’t want to get gutted in a divorce. I’d love to be a SAHD, but it’s difficult for me to find single women with comparable income.
But her finances arent the problem here. Its how high expenses are. Her job could pay 150k/yr or 20k/yr but the situation is the same when she quits. Its good that she at least makes enough money that it justifies working if she wants to.
I think what’s more important is income vs local population income. In SF, she probably earns 3-4x everyone in SF or 10x nationally. In a low cost of area place, her husband’s income might only be 1.5x more, leaving less money for retirement and child care.
Anecdotally, I was against us having the second child. I wanted my wife to head back to work once my elder child was 3. There were a bunch of reasons she had dropped out but she had liked her job.
She was lucky but not everyone is.
2. We had excellent childcare close by, as in 5 minutes from home. I had flexible and remote work and would have been able to drop and pick my child up. I also had a provision where I could write the child care off my taxes.
She finally went back to work when my little one was 8. She did go back when the little one was 3 but had to drop out again because of a health issue with the little one.
Regarding benefits - I don't know about South Korea, but where I grew up in Hawaii some of my peers or their parents purposefully had kids out of wedlock to collect the additional welfare payments that single parents were eligible for, even though they otherwise were still partnered and even living together. However, with less practical need to maintain a family over the long run, parenting quality and outcomes suffered and atomization increased. A "Great Society" era benefit intended to help those caught in tragic edge cases ended up being a perverse incentive for those in the next generation who may have avoided that situation otherwise.
While doing payments for married mothers instead may have been a net-outcome better design in retrospect, there is an opposite possibility of perverse incentives for toxic families to stay intact. I don't know if marriage-agnostic UBI for parents is the best answer, though it would at least balance the currently misplaced incentives. In an ideal world it would be better to first resolve current inflated costs by making it easier and cheaper on the supply side to provide housing, healthcare, and education.
Anecdotally: Most of my wife's circle of friends are in their early 30s to mid-30s with first children (and we're on the way to fitting this description as well) and back to work, while their mothers stopped working once they had children.
This is to say, the previous system was bad, but the new reality is in some sense worse: No, women bearing the brunt of child-bearing alone is not great, but now both parents work very hard in family-hostile work conditions to even make ends meet. Both parents working full-time is very difficult if neither employer is flexible enough not to handle "I have to pick my kid up today" or "my kid is sick".
We used to make “oh it’s expensive!” excuse until we started making decent money. Now that excuse doesn’t work, but there has been a significant precedence showing you can have a fulfilling life without having a child. You can have even a better one unless you have psychological attachment to it. I’ve heard my friends getting baby fever here and there, but then quick reality check of how much work it would be reminds them it’s not worth it.
And I completely agree, what’s the point? If you have some sort of spiritual or religious beliefs about life, maybe you can excuse it. But my circles don’t buy into those. We’ve also discussed global depopulation issues on different occasions, and consensus was “well, we didn’t cause this awful environment, so it’s not our problem”. Some sort of game theory problem where if you participate you’re more likely to be screwed unless majority participates. But if you don’t participate, you’re definitely on the winning side.
And another note, my friends in their late 30s/40s who always wanted to have a child have exactly one child for myriad of reasons. And obviously that’s not enough.
Sorry for the rant, but maybe the older generations were a bit more conscious rather than kicking the can down the road.
What I mean is: A lot of the people who come down against child-rearing for lifestyle reasons assign a lot of value to things they'd rather do instead because they provide "great experiences I'd miss out on because I won't have time or money anymore" like "traveling".
Which is of course true, having kids is a trade-of. But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?
Sure, you can prefer one or the other at will, and it could absolutely be true that your pick is best for you. But I'll say that my friends who are into activities/experiences that provide challenge (e.g. sports, adventuring, what have you) also are often into having kids.
That makes me wonder if there's not something to cultivating the kind of experiences you seek to have.
Isn't this just FOMO? Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not. Is it not better to regret not having kids than to have them and regret having them?
https://www.today.com/health/child-free-adults-are-happy-par...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I'd say plenty of people do things because they can envision it might be great, not because they feel FOMO. Do you never look forward to things without FOMO being the cause?
It also depends on how much of a reasonable idea you have about what you'd be getting yourself into, e.g. from participating in siblings raising children or other opportunities.
Kids are a choice, not a mandatory checkbox. That is the thesis.
> Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not.
Thats not why people have kids. Even people that have kids (and dont regret it) would like to spend their time on other things if they could. People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.
I'm not sure I agree, at least universally. How do you decide for children without thinking about the changes it'll make to your daily life and whether that's something you want to be doing?
Of course there's plenty of people who have children because they feel it's expected of them, or economic necessity, or other external reasons.
That’s not to say everyone should have kids or feel this way. But it’s ridiculous to suggest some people just like video games, or traveling, and others like missing work deadlines to care for their sick child (or everything else that goes with raising kids).
What I meant to capture originally is that some people at least somewhat more habitually choose to spend their time in ways that involve sacrifice and delayed gratification, or are OK with activities that are e.g. (time-wise) 90% build-up for 10% release, or however you want to put it. For example, a long climb for a quick descent. Or a long march to see something first-hand.
Some people treat those activities as aspirational. And in my experience - which is of course anecdotal - that seems to correlate with whether they can get onboard with the idea of child-rearing. It's something about the effort-pleasure ratio and where your cut-off is, or your idea of how much hardship something special is worth, and perhaps whether you value cultivating an attitude about it.
People are not having kids because they have good alternatives now. International travel is affordable for more and more people, regularly going to fine dining establishments is something accessible to most American software engineers, and the people left having kids are the ones either too poor to afford those good things anyways, or people who are knowingly giving them up in exchange for expected joy from raising a child.
The only thing I'd say is somewhat qualitatively comparable is being a in a loving relationship.
The returns are guaranteed, whereas a child can end up having negative returns at an almost endless scale. The potential downsides to having a child are endless, the upside is limited and finite.
Also w/o children retiring early is doable for the financially responsible, whereas having even a single child makes that difficult.
Being financially independent at 40 or so allows for a lot of options for self fulfillment. An almost endless array of meaningful causes around the world are in dire need of help.
The tl;dr is that for a lot of people the choice comes down to "travel the world and have sex on beaches while eating fine food" or "unknown baby that might bring joy or potentially ruin your life."
Is it any wonder rational people are choosing the path that allows them to travel, eat well, be financially stable, and find meaningful hobbies and activities?
Again, I believe what it comes down to now is that people have a choice. It isn't "get married -> have kids" but rather "find partner, figure out what to do next".
Heck marriage rates are also plummeting (which IMHO is bad news for social stability).
The lack of social support certainly makes the choice of having kids harder, but my #1 ask isn't government funded daycare, it would be a world where having a large familial support structure is the norm.
Honestly the hardest part of having a kid is that without family nearby, there is no down time.
Government programs can't help that capitalism spread families to the winds.
I'm just pointing out (from personal experience, an experience someone who doesn't have kids doesn't have) that it's not a float happiness with traveling the world adding +1.5f and a child +4.3f. It's not comparable, not in the colloquial sense that one is a much bigger value than the other but literally in the sense that it's not the same quality/feeling/satisfaction.
It's true that you don't know what you're going to get (e.g. children with disabilities are a lot more challenging that healthy kids) but I think the materialistic approach ("should I take 4 vacation or raise 1 child?") is not conductive to finding happiness in life.
I agree regarding the challenges in our current system & government/societal support.
[0] even if there are plenty instances where they also annoy me
I did, I made a conscious thoughtful decision that I'd be trading off stuff I wanted to do and taking care of a child instead.
One I certainly agree with.
Couples take on all sorts of challenging hobbies and endeavors on a regular basis, some requiring years to build up and master. The difference is that with most of those things, they're not walking a tightrope and putting the wellbeing of another person in the balance by doing so. Many couples would be putting themselves at much higher risk of financial ruin by having kids and making sure they're properly cared for.
Maybe for you, but the value proposition isn’t there for me. There’s no indication that the world is willing to fix its global problems (climate change, housing problems and etc.), why would I also subscribe my child to this “fun”? It is weird to write that sentence, as I am generally a fairly optimistic person. But “let me sacrifice a ton, for a decent chance of misery of myself and my offspring” doesn’t sound right to me.
I was about to write a paragraph how my friends also like challenging activities, except having a child. But I couldn’t make my brain to compare “having a child” to a “challenging” activity. At the end, it’s one of the things, where you either want it or not. If you want people to want it, get the older generations to make a sacrifice for us and somehow fix the current socio-economic problems that’s discouraging the women.
Another possibility is this isn’t actually the difference between you wanting kids or not. Perhaps this is an oversimplified reason, but Im taking you at your word.
And again, for a lot of people life can be more fulfilling without having a child as well. The general economy want these people to have children for its own benefit, not for the benefit of the parents.
Well maybe the parents aren’t supposed to be the beneficiary in the parent-child relationship.
You shouldn't take OP at his word though. The glaring observation I had that was shared by many, many, is that this is a very age-group specific thing.
Even the most vocal ones of this existential pessimists stopped it at around 28-30 years old, when the question stopped being idealization but very personal.
Existential pessimism leading to life decisions are usually just an rationalized excuse for other, often more personal, situational and emotional, reasons.
"are humans rational or irrational? It's a trick question, humans are ratioanalizers. We make up our mind and then come up with a plausible reason and believe in it"
Existential dread is a catchy, relatable idea without any consequences.
Holding that idea when you're under 30 doesn't mean much because most people don't have any important life decision they can't postpone while holding it. As soon as the reality offers the consequence of said belief, people will actually have a serious thought about it.
Very few people I know that in the end decided to live child free at later age, claimed existential dread as the reason. Most people grew up enough to realize that it is ultimately a decision based on personal/ego reasons/preferences, a gut feeling, and trying to justify it with some limited scope "rationalization" is just kidding themselves
"Challenging" also maybe doesn't quite capture what I meant. Do you know how you sometimes have to bike somewhere two hours on a slow, heavy MTB that makes it a slog for a 15min downhill descent? It's more that kind of challenge.
Let me offer a different perspective. Whenever I see your sentiment - that you are choosing to not have kids because the world sucks and you don't see us solving anything - my immediate reaction is that you deserve no voice whatsoever in how the rest of us decide to solve those problems. No voting, no representation, nothing. Having kids, in a sense, is a bet that we'll figure things out one way or another. You've made your bet, and are exiting the conversation because you don't have skin in the game (literally).
That might sound harsh, but it's essentially just the inverse of your sentiment justifying not having kids in the first place because of overwhelming pessimism about the future.
Glad that my attitude is in somewhat majority, otherwise we wouldn’t have potential depopulation problems. Don’t have to worry about these type of takes.
Have a good day!
I'm pointing out the absurdity of your position. Look, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim you care about the future and what happens to the planet and then intentionally make yourself not a part of it. I simply tune out and don't consider the opinions of folks who fall into that camp. Why would I?
It’s not like we’re some bunch of people who would never change our minds, but actions speak louder or something. If older people want us to take these bets, give us better odds.
Maybe you yourself don't care about other people's kids and need "skin in the game" in order to incentivize good behavior. I don't think it's fair to generalize that same bizarre standard onto other people. The average person has a nonzero amount of concern for society outside of their own household
What an odd perspective. Are children the only way to have skin in the game when it comes to the future?
One consequence of doing something like this would be an almost complete removal of people who through no fault of their own cannot have children as well as some religious practitioners from public life.
Having just read the FDA announcement on artificial wombs, how would those fit into this?
What, specifically, is odd about it? I think the stranger position is the one that allows people to inform policy that affects future generations when they themselves are intentionally not making themselves a part of that future. Put simply: why do you get a voice in what will affect my kids when you think the future is all for naught anyway?
Think of it like this: why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)? Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.
>One consequence...
I've stated twice now that intentionality matters. If you're referring to things like Monasteries, where people take vows of chastity (which would obviously preclude children), the idea of political participation is already complicated. I've known a Priest or two who don't believe Clergy should vote.
>Having just read...
I'm radically opposed to AWT for other not-unrelated reasons.
It's arbitrary and dogmatic to require having kids in order to have a say in the future, for starters?
> why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)?
That's not true in Western Europe and increasingly untrue in the US too.
> Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.
As an example I can think of many US politicians who had kids that supported the 2017 tax cuts and opposed measures to decarbonize the US economy. Kids or no kids, they don't care about the future.
Get over yourself.
It's completely legitimate in the same way as this argument is: "since there's a risk of me being hit by a car, or having an unpleasant day when I go outside, I better stay inside."
Overly focusing on the negative outcome to the point of inaction is often a thinly veiled excuse for some other often internal/personal reasons.
Doomerism doesn't have legitimacy because it's just a decaying idea. If ideas had an evolutionary tree, it is a recurring branch(leaf) that always died off while legitimately calling itself legitimate, every single time.
Keep in mind I'm responded to a comment that speculated on which choices lead to a "more fulfilling" life, which means it's a decision couched in a certain amount of safety and freedom. IMHO that set direction a bit and begged the question.
If you make it specifically about "more fulfilling", other branches of discussion (e.g. whether having children is a good idea for them or the planet) are at least partially taken off the table already. If you decide against children for one of those reasons, you don't even need to feel addressed.
This mentality of "I'm a mom, what's your superpower?" really irritates me. For what you know, I could be fitter, smarter, more interesting that you and embrace challenge every day of my life. But having a child would always put you a step above, because it's oh, so challenging.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...
Childcare subsidies.
But the more we fight the second proposition, the more we reinforce the first.
Trying to make kids less expensive still treats this as a financial calculation.
When you ask “why have kids?” there needs to be a real answer, and I don’t think “the economic public good” is going to convince people.
They don't want you to sleep around, and in some religions they don't want you to use birth control, but there's not a lot actively saying you need to have kids.
Sometimes having children is strongly implied for those who follow the path of marriage (and may officially even be the purpose of that), but there are typically also paths where people are expected to remain celibate.
Arguably, say in the Catholic church, there is too much emphasis on the latter, what with celibate clergy and everything. In LDS I would say family is more of an ideal. This extends even into the theology. Catholics say "'til death do us part", but LDS say husband and wife go to heaven together and stay married there forever. Hinduism overall seems less obsessed with correct behavior (it has dharma, of course, but no simple hell thing), but it also provides both householder and ascetic paths.
I think religions sort of take it for granted that enough people will want to get married, and that if you get married you'll have kids. Instead they're worried about self control.
Little did they anticipate that the superego would maintain its iron grip without help, that the rationally-planning ego would have the means and motive to skip kids entirely, and that the id would get so distracted with hatred of other people that it wouldn't even try to bring them together, even in unwise or destructive ways. But that's where we are.
A child has extremely high long-term ROI for the economy. But (for good reasons) you can't take out a loan in the name of a future child for a larger house now. Someone (aka) the government needs to be future-sighted enough to make the investment. Unfortunately, governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.
I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.
Yeah this is the only serious fix, but once childless people become a large % of the electorate (aka it's a real problem), they can vote against assuming responsibility for the problem they created... and your country is basically in an inescapable doom loop.
That road is extremely grey and has a lot of really difficult edge cases you'll need to sort out.
Also - if we just need a next generation in the workforce immigration is an excellent option for the time being.
IMO thats btw. one of the downsides of the EU, eliminating the differences/competition between countries stalling this kind of evolutionary truth seeking process
Study proposal: Are there more family-friendly policies in hereditary monarchies (which have longer incentive horizon than democratically elected politicians do)? Are birthrates higher in kingdoms?
it's going to be a sad, empty and quiet world in the west a few decades in the future.
Some of these beliefs still stretch into the modern day in really toxic ways - my sister-in-law (a tenure track professor) got a lot of flack from tenured professors who had deferred having a family until the window had closed when she had to duck out of a semester for maternity leave.
What do you think your future holds? If we are entirely realistic, I think in 50-60 years, and perhaps much sooner, we'll almost certainly be dead. On our way out everyone and everything we've ever known will also be dying. Best friends we'd thought would last to the end will fade and disappear long before.
And that's just the start. Because well before the end our bodies will begin to fail, with our minds often enough not far behind. And, without family, a very likely scenario is that we simply end up alone. In Japan there are so many people dying completely alone, often unnoticed until a neighbor or service worker smells the rot, that they have a term for it: kodokushi - lonely deaths. [1] South Korea has followed suit with godoksa. By raising a family we not only get to fulfill our ultimate responsibility in the continuance of the species, but also you in many ways provide some continuance of ourselves. And as you age we will always have family, such that we will never truly be alone in this world.
It seems to me that the masses of people not having children today is vaguely familiar to the masses of people taking out 6 figure loans to pursue random degrees, unlikely to benefit their ability to provide a living for themselves. They certainly know what everybody is saying about such decisions, but somehow think it won't apply to them. And in any case the consequences are so far removed from the present that it can sometimes be difficult to take them seriously, but that doesn't mean those consequences don't exist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
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Edit: As some odd coincidence, this just popped up on the frontpage of HN. It feels relevant enough to link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327432
Why should women help here? Why acquiesce to the needs of a society that doesn't care about their mental, physical and professional needs?
This is largely governance issue and not corporate. Korean officials largely undereducated and lack integrity as those in Singapore where they sack officials if even involved in marital affairs NATIONALLY.
Child rearing takes a group of people not just a nuclear family where both parents work long hours. Cost of living and work culture is forcing people to work long hours and women don't find a good enough reason to give up their freedom, and keep in mind it's what childbirth is in most Asian cultures, a woman giving up what she wants to do until the child is independent. I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice ?
All studies mention these, they just don't provide any concrete solutions. It's typically around creating some committee or forum that is looking to change this. Nothing will change, not until the corporations start running out of people to hire or the country runs out of soldiers for defense.