Those things are given up because parenting-time is up 20-fold from a few generations ago.
From the 1960s back, kids needed parents a few hours a week.
But we reduced kids' roaming area from many sq mi to just their own property. At the same time, we instituted 24/7 adulting. Most of those hours are filled by parents.
Kids have permanently lost daily hours of peer-driven growth - the ones where complex social interactions occurred naturally. Parents are now left with trying to construct artificial environments (leagues, programs) where maybe some of that can occur.
Those efforts eat time and resources. And they're a poor substitute for the vital environments that kids once had for free.
I spent 20x the time parenting that my mom did. For all of that, my kids had little-to-none of my growth opportunities.
And of their infrastructure where everyone wants to have their own suburban kingdom with large back yard, swimming pool, garage for two SUVs and workshop.
Americans don't like living in small apartments like Europeans and Asians so this is what they get.
"This is what they get" is false causation, these things have been present for decades. Helicopter parenting, liability for walking around alone, special snowflake treatment are all newly-introduced ideas.
A few generations ago, the trend was that US kids had a broad range of appealing places to roam and were generally free to do so.
Presently the US trend is that kids have few if any appealing places to go. And should they roam anyway, they and their parents risk legal (and increasingly permanent) consequences.
I suspect there are no other kids outside because there are few/no desirable places for kids to congregate - places that are safe from moving cars, enforced property laws and adults with poor judgment.
The roads are also twisty & turny. They're difficult to drive fast on.
While this isn’t strictly impossible, it’s well beyond the reach of most, and so I suspect that this group mostly ends up never having kids.
I'm glad we are finally getting representation on that instead of all these social science studies contorting themselves to come to a child-aspiring default that couples are somehow failing to reach
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/well/family/grandparent-g...
These days, people can choose, and many women are happy to stop after 1 or 2 kids. Going through childbirth is, by many accounts, very difficult and not that much fun. All the pro-natalists (generally men) seem to completely dismiss actual women's feelings on this matter for some reason.
Anyway, when you have a society where a bunch of people aren't having kids, and the ones who are are only having 1-2, sometimes 3, the overall average is going to be well under 2, which isn't enough to maintain the population level.
As I've said many times before in these discussions online, societies need to come up with a new model, because obviously the old one isn't working, and it isn't going to come back.
The reasoning behind this is even with the best quality of life, many women will have 2 children, but insufficient women will have 3 or more children such that it offsets the number of women who have 0 or 1 child.
Those with zero children really drag the average down, and if it is because partnering with a certain portion of the population is simply not worth it, then government efforts on improving quality of life via work and benefit policies are not going to bump TFR to replacement rate.
Pensions: Wealth transfer from young to old.
Taxes: Wealth transfer from young to old.
Socialized health care: Wealth transfer from young to old.
Rent: Wealth transfer from young to old.
Inflation: Wealth transfer from young to old (who owns the real estate?)
Capitalism: Wealth transfer from young to old (who owns the stocks?)
National debt: Wealth transfer from young to old.
It seems like all different systems at work in industrialized nations has the single goal of extracting all productivity from young workers and giving it to the current generation of elderly. Even the ideologies who on the face are against each other (socialism vs capitalism) both work mainly to reap everything form the young to give to the old.
The people I've seen doing this are also just exhausted, as they've said directly.
It comes down to... the rent is too damn high.
Young people without children willing to spend 1/3 to 1/2 of their total income servicing mortgages or rent drives the cost of living to ridiculous levels. People can't afford child care either by having family live close to high earners to help, or to hire child care. So it's unaffordable. There's nowhere to live for families in high density places (apartment buildings optimize for the highest rent tennants, 1,2 BR single people)
Lots of people want children but can't engineer a life for themselves to have them without moving somewhere really far out and boring or being in the top 5% of earners, or living in squalor despite high incomes.
To give an idea of what it takes to solve a housing shortfall, Sweden successfully embarked on a million-homes program over a decade in the 70s when the population of Sweden was 7 million.
NYC recently just celebrated the passage of a zoning reform that allows at most 80,000 new homes, and the population is 8.2 million.
While some of it may be overbearing parenting due to wanting kids to compete or train for the future, there is also the fact that kids cannot be left alone, and there is no extended family supervision for them, and you are told you cannot let your kids sit in front of a screen all day.
There’s no neighborhood chain of kids ranging from high school to toddler playing with each other, there is no outside time without adult supervision, an adult who is legally liable.
And of course, cars. The environment is optimized for cars, not kids, so kids either sit inside alone or with 1 sibling or they need to be supervised.
Not applicable to every single family, but many.
parenting doesn't have to be like this for the kids to be happy; in fact, it's probably counter-productive in many cases
I have also seen this and in many cases it's pressure for the kids to succeed. Back in the 70s and early 80s you literally just had to not fall off the wagon, and could get a job and be okay. Wanted to go to Stanford, or become a doctor? Sure it would take some work, but completely doable. Want your kid to go to Stanford now if they like? You have to put your kid through a horribly stressful regime that starts in preschool, and even then it's going to be a lottery. Granted you don't need to go to Stanford to be happy but my point being that you want your kids to have opportunities, and getting those opportunities is SO FUCKING HARDER than it was for you as the parent when you were young (and way way harder than your own parents). And so you have to optimize for it, and the earlier you start, the better your chances. It's crushing for the parents and the kids. And the more successful the parents were, the more pressure to give their kids the same opportunities they had.
But I get it, and the idea of kids was scary at one time, but it turns out they're pretty easy all things considered. Lots of talk of "sacrifice" between friends back then but as it turns out you're trading something of little value for something of immense value. But to each their own!
yeah, there are times when I've felt like that, but they're pretty fleeting
at what age did you start a family? I think one of the reasons people should start a family a bit later (early thirties maybe) is so that they have the opportunity to experience/enjoy those things without kids (and not have to wait until the kids are all grown up and then they're in their 50s and it's just not the same as the stuff you can do in your 20s).
They will never forget.
They have 2 or 3 kids. They love their kids and love spending time with them. Yet, they still have time for hobbies and side projects. I don't know how they do it
1 friend, 2 kids (8-12), FAANG job, 2nd company on the side with a partner, plays horror games and writes about them.
1 friend, 2 kids (7-11), FANNG job, plays video games with this brother remotely, takes his kids out often and they hang out with this friends (we all love the kids). He's also the cook in the house and has people over often. Goes snowboarding in the window.
1 friend, 3 kids (6-8-10), plays videos games (hobby 1), plays guitar (hobby 2), does photograph (hobby 3), see his picts on facebook all the time of the latest thing he's doing
1 friend, 3 kids (8, 10, 12), makes video games for a job and makes his own at home for hobby. One of this kids is also into making video games which they share.
1 friend, 2 kids, tech job, loves VR, plays VR with kids, writes tech tutorials for blogs as hobby.
I'm not saying "you can do it too", I'm just saying I see example of people that somehow *seem* like they're enjoying visiting friends, playing music, having time for hobbies, and they have kids
Would love to know if they just lucked out. If there's specific things they do. Or if it's just an attitude. Or something else.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")
My friends who are parents are very much trapped at home, it's actually great for me because if I'm bored I know they're not doing anything are are starving for social contact with another adult. It's hard for parents to not inadvertently isolate themselves.
- The cost (financial, time, stress/health) is incredibly high. When cost of living as one person increases somewhere between notably and substantially faster than wages, it’s hard to justify paying for another person while likely also taking an income cut. You end up with entire classes of people whose careers will struggle to pay for their own life, let alone that of a kid. This is playing out in real time - I personally know people who commute 30-45 minutes by car to make $23/hour (in Canada, in a moderately high CoL city - that’s $16USD). When I was in university, some of my classmates who worked at the Starbucks near campus had coworkers (there were at least two instances of this that I know of) in their 40s with kids who commuted over an hour to make however much money Starbucks managers make, and one had a second job on weekends. It’s not hard to look at that and think, “how is that something you’d want to do to yourself?” - The feeling (perceived or real) that the world is becoming a worse place. 24 hour news and social media don’t help, with either the perception or the actual situation. Why would I want to raise a kid who could be a victim of one of the weekly school shootings? Or who’s going to be left dealing with an even harder life financially/etc? Or who’s going to resent older generations for selfishly wasting the earth’s resources?
It’s generally quite easy when you work in tech with a partner who works in tech to just assume that having kids is an easy choice (I work with people who are like that, who apparently only see the world through rose-tinted glasses, and are shocked someone could even possibly not want to pop out as many babies as possible). But when you look at the level of struggle a significant portion of the population endures, as they become generally more educated and more capable of critical thinking over time, it’s pretty clear why large swaths of people will start thinking “maybe we shouldn’t have kids just for the sake of having kids, especially if we don’t actually want to.”
That’s ignoring of course the general overpopulation and lack of sustainability of the western lifestyle (and the associated impact of having a kid on climate change - pretty much the single worst thing you could do, if you can about that at all). People who are tuned in to those sorts of issues are also more likely to not want kids, either because they don’t want to contribute to the problem, or raise kids who will have to deal with the fallout.
If you’re driven crazy by people having a different viewpoint from your own, you may want to consider reflecting on why you are so deeply entrenched in your beliefs. It is rarely productive.
You don't owe your children much more than food, love and a roof over their head. Sure, you might want to give them the world, but don't listen to anyone telling you that's the expectation - that's a fast track to resentment.
Though I agree that doesn't have to mean conforming to societal expectations of ivy league schools and so forth. Food, love and a roof over your head goes a long way.
To be specific I dislike your framing and use of the word "forced". I do agree though that parents should deeply love and support their kids which is what it sounds like you are trying to say. And in turn, your kids should do the same despite "generational differences".
Why?
I am also a parent.
> I do agree though that parents should deeply love and support their kids which is what it sounds like you are trying to say.
Loving your kids is not a moral obligation, though most do (for the record, I love mine very much). Supporting your kids is a moral obligation, whether you love them or not, incurred by creating them.
> And in turn, your kids should do the same despite "generational differences".
I disagree. Our kids will never be morally obligated towards us in any way. We can only hope to have loved and supported them enough for them to love and support us back of their own volition.
I agree with this. Kids can't willingly bring themselves into the world (although "forced" is an exaggeration), and the burden is on their parents. A kid, until a certain point, is a person with certain needs and restrictions that call for external supervision (e.g. needing shelter, not voting). I consider a person in general to not have inherent obligations beyond not killing and whatnot. Sure, I can ditch my friend in a socially awkward moment and that would make me a huge jerk, but surely it doesn't rise to the same level as hitting someone.
> Loving your kids is not a moral obligation, though most do (for the record, I love mine very much). Supporting your kids is a moral obligation, whether you love them or not, incurred by creating them.
I don't quite know what you mean by "loving" versus "supporting". To me, supporting sounds like loving, with the caveat that I think emotional care ties into supporting a kid. Do you mean extra things like buying more presents on holidays?
Maybe. "Forced" implies "against their will", and prior to existing they of course had no will to oppose. It seems like you know what I mean though, and I'll try to think of less harsh verbiage for my point.
> I don't quite know what you mean by "loving" versus "supporting". To me, supporting sounds like loving, with the caveat that I think emotional care ties into supporting a kid. Do you mean extra things like buying more presents on holidays?
I may have been overly pedantic in separating them. By "love" I mean the actual emotion, which can never be forced or obligated. By "support" I mean everything we do for our kids. And part of supporting our kids is making sure they never doubt that we love them, which perhaps renders the difference moot.
As a parent you want to give them everything but you then have to balance that against realities & other priorities. That's part of the training of a good moral character: learning to manage life's limitations & your response to those limitations.
One can also turn around your moral argument: Your children owe you everything, since they wouldn’t exist at all without you.
Seems to me that parents should want to minimize that suffering, even if I also disagree with “owing them everything” as parents should also help them to grow into self-sufficient beings. It’s a tough balance to strike and I won’t pretend to be an expert on it, I’m only just getting started myself.
The thing is the vast majority of people find living to be on the whole a source of great joy, far greater than any suffering they may experience as a byproduct of it. The handful who don't do have the option, grim as it may be to consider, of returning to nonexistence. The fact that this option isn't taken by even 1% of people suggests strongly that nonexistence just isn't that compelling an alternative.
The point is that the obligation flows one way because one party was inserted into it without their consent.
Does their lack of preexistence impact that equation in a meaningful way?
Yes. Obviously.
Well, philosophically it's not a big problem, because dissatisfied can very easily stop participating.
I offer that the above is the first truth of parenting.
After I understood it, organizing my priorities became far simpler.
Parenting is service.
What's the difference? If you don't boost them with all your might, you effectively condemn them to a life of struggle and misery, in today's world. Knowing this, it's gonna be you forcing yourself to give them your all, not society's expectations.
That's not my experience of the world at all. Quite the opposite, in fact: I had a pretty good time when I was coasting by on minimum effort, and I'm having an even better time now that I'm putting in some mild amount of effort.
I have no reason to suspect this will change in the next generation. If anything the falling costs of goods and services everywhere suggests they'll get an even easier ticket.
Well OK sure I get that that would be good for kids but you're also gonna limit the number of parents if that's the new normal.
- entertaining themselves
- working/providing for themselves
- having to do things that they don’t want to do
- being told no, and dealing with unfulfilled desire
All with balance, I am not proposing that kids are just left to fend for themselves. Caring for your kids materially and emotionally is important, but so is living your own life and making them live theirs.
I may be having kids in the not too distant future, and when I think about how I would parent, I consider 2 families I know who I have seen raise children.
In one, the kids are often denied requests they make for objects they want to own and activities they want to do. The parents drag their kids along to things that they (the parents) want to do, rather than not doing the thing because the kids don’t want to. At family gatherings, their parents expect that they will take care of and entertain themselves, while the parents enjoy time with the other adults.
In the other family, the kids are showered with toys and attention, and their mom goes to great effort to open any door for them that they express interest in. At family gatherings, the parents are always checking on their kids, and indulge every request the kids make of them.
Which family has happier, more capable, and well-adjusted children? Which family has happier parents? The answer to both is the first family.
Kids love screens, parents love getting to do their own thing while the child is quietly occupied, but a certain type of parent feels the need to go to war over the screen time limit rather than enjoy their dinner. Neither father nor son is having a good time at soccer practice, but a kid's got to have a sport. And so on.
We're calling for something bolder here than merely the will to override a child's wishes. Parents need a permission structure to prioritize their own desires, not just the ones they have on behalf of the children.
There was a good Ezra Klein episode about this [0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
And past a certain point it's not.
> And past a certain point it's not.
Where do you estimate that point is? What harm do you believe lies past it?
However, the idea of parents giving 100% of themselves to the children is also an unsustainable one, and fundamentally horrifying one - if everyone things this way, generation by generation, then this robs existence from any meaning. It's admitting that all the good and nice things in the world, all that separates us from other animals, are all accidents, all made by people who weren't good enough at giving their children their best, and instead wasted their time on stuff like arts and sciences.
So I think there must be a point somewhere. And perhaps a hint of that is the observation that kids are better off with happy parents than with unhappy ones.
No one is suggesting giving 100% because it is an impossibility. What is suggested is that parents and children have the same priority - the children's wellbeing.
I have 5 adult sons. The value of my wellbeing is that it enhances their wellbeing. This reflects the nature of our one-way debt. They owe me nothing. I owe them what I can give.
except that "love" part is a huge bucket that includes pretty much everything that we do for our kids (which is a heck of a lot more than food and shelter)
> expectation
it's not social expectation that drive what we sacrifice for our children; it's our love for our children that does, at least the parents I know (including myself)
That's a rather simplistic view where your kids don't get ill and are born healthy.
Not to mention many other complications.
The demographic problems during a decline are only temporary.
If the world had only 1 billion people it would be a lot easier. The whole idea that humanity would go extinct is ridiculous. And humanity is still growing anyway due to the many countries that don't have falling birth rates.
There's always people wanting to have kids. This is just society adjusting itself to the current overpopulation.
And honestly I agree with the "if you are single you should pay more taxes" as a motivator to either get you to have your own kids or to simply ease the burden of those who are actually making humanity move forward but as a parent I am a bit biased here. It should be a significant amount.
So... how are things going to "have to change" if you can't threaten childless couples and you can't redistribute the wealth to people that do want kids? Continually fearmonger mandatory birthing policies without actually implementing them just to get a rise out of your citizens? It's nonsense, and if America is given a choice between "fucking over wealthy people" and "having tons of kids to staff McDonalds at minimum wage" I can tell you offhand which one 99% of citizens will pick. We're already halfway there given how far China has surpassed the US in places - today's Americans hate capitalism so much they're content watching their country suffer until businesses get the message.
More then this - public pensions are one of the main reasons for low birth rate. You can't have both, if children's role as social insurance passes to public pensions - children became useless.
This is the only point in reality, everything else is just fuss and excuses. Women who don't want to have children don't want them because child rearing dramatically changes their bellies and their breasts. It's vanity only. I will be down voted for writing it, but it's still the truth. Anybody is free to live believing lies, but it's in the end about not wanting to be less sexually attractive because of a child.
And it's sad really, because there are ways to deal with the bodily changes from a pregnancy.
What a retarded statement. How much would I have to pay you to put on 30 pounds and deal with morning sickness for the next 9 months? Does $0 sound about right?
Oh, so now it's not about vanity and has everything to do with your comfort as an individual. Crazy what a tiny bit of empathy can do - and we haven't even gotten to the part where you have to choose between a C-section or double suicide.
Fucking ingrate.
I find it surprising this is somehow difficult for governments to grok.
We really have done a great disservice to a generation which believes the planet will be dead in a few decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/young-adults...
Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.
Yeah, people don't want to raise children in this sort of chaotic, apocalyptic scenario where your town is wiped out by some major, never seen before flash flood event. You rebuild and some new major storms topples it.
In fact, as the temperature rises slightly, fewer people will die due to temperature extremes. This is because at present, many more people die due to exposure to low temperatures than high temperatures.
Not where I live, farmers were having trouble doing their jobs due to the extreme heat this year. In 50 years at current trajectory? More people on earth, likely less food, what will that be like?
If we want to get all utilitarian about it, these things might be the most important:
1) Identifying the kids with the highest potential to contribute the most to society, and giving whatever support it takes.
2) Identifying which kids and parents are the most needy, who will benefit the most from support that enables them to have a good life. It’s probably not the average family in a developed country.
If there’s someone who wants to raise my taxes to pay for that stuff, I’ll vote for them.
I'm not going to idly sit by and let people who have children take my hard earned money from me. If you think increasing taxes on those without children won't cause a massive retaliation by the men who are not able to find female mates to have children with, you are in for a massive surprise.
A significant part of the decrease in fertility rates comes from the sharp decline in teen pregnancy (counted as live births) over the past 30 years.
My parents' lives revolved around their children too, and me and my brother are both working abroad at the moment (for work, love and adventure). My dad hasn't invested much in his social life, hobbies or skills, because he had a family. Divorced with kids out of the house and even out of the country, he's lonely.
Meanwhile his childless brothers and sisters have much more active social lives. They're an active part of the family life as well, but it's not the only thing they have going for them.
That's what I mean when I say they should try making life better. Make it so that with kids I can have a house and family vacations and all the other things that my parents had access to. It's logically equivalent to say "life is harder with kids" or "life is easier without kids".
As a high-earning childless person myself, I'll freely acknowledge that I should have been paying significantly higher taxes in order to benefit my counterparts who did have kids. Although it would be a challenge to do that redistribution in a way that doesn't just get captured by daycare and college.