Basically it’s not really like the whole village raised your kid before, that’s more of a romanticized version. What happened was that your extended family helped because you lived with them for your entire life. So you have a kid, your sister in law watches them along with your mother while you work. Where do you work? Well that’s wherever your family works. If you are born into a farm, you are a farmer. If your family is blacksmiths, you’ll be a smith. Or a dung sifter, etc. If you can’t do it, maybe your farmer family sends you to apprentice with the local smith. But you rarely get a choice in what you do, where you live, etc.
Moreover, if you don’t like your family/they don’t like you: tough. You might hate your sister in law but who else will watch your kid while you sift dung?
What has changed is that we have the free market. Your can move out, have your own career and hire someone to care for your kids while you work. You no longer have access to “free” childcare but you have access to the job market instead. Want to leave the farm and move to the big city to become a jewelry maker? Go for it. But you won’t have much support to start a family. You are paying for free choice.
The village referred to the notion that children were viewed as important to the whole. The whole country, the whole province, the whole village, the whole neighbourhood, the whole family. Everyone cared about and contributed to the raising of children. In my childhood -- and at this point the village was already declining -- I had a number of friend families that were like second, third and fourth families where I could stayover for dinner whenever I wanted, they watched out for me, etc. There were many times where I spent nights at aunts with my cousins, or at grandparents.
Culturally this is far less common. We all move hundreds of kilometers apart. Sometimes for careers, more often because you're a loser if you stay near where you grew up. Many/most younger people have little relation with cousins or aunts or uncles. Grandparents now move to Arizona and ask for pictures occasionally. People have an antagonistic attitude towards other people's kids as a selfish trifle that are just a nuisance for everyone else.
No, hiring a nanny isn't equivalent and doesn't invalidate this.
What was gained is meaningless to some, and next to everything to others. I don't fucking ever have to deal with anybody's crap I don't want to. It feels amazing, simple yet right way to live a life. How shitty my life would be if I had to accept and constantly tolerate people in family circle that for example aren't good people, moral ones or just an emotional vampire. Or brutally incompatible with me in any other way. I see it in peers sucking it up over and over, oh boy do they hate relative X from their or spouse's family tree, yet since they live nearby frequent meetings are unavoidable. For some blood is sacred and above else, I don't see it that way if relationships are not at least a bit mutually beneficial.
Freedom, man, to do what you want with your life, that's a wonderful thing. Freedom to form new bonds with literally anybody in this world, as you please. Great friendships trump most of blood relationships, all if you want. Also, people change over time and common ground is getting usually smaller and smaller every year. I'd gladly give it to my kids over some tighter knit family ties with people of variable quality with highly questionable views on life, who raised their own kids only so-so and it shows later on.
Just to be clear - I've experienced most if not all you wrote. It was good. All non-good easily trumps it so thus my opinion on the matters. My kids are growing in very different world than I grew up in, that one is long gone. I look at it as a package with + and -, liking current package more.
In no way did we live with. They lived with us.
Ultimately this is cultural. JD Vance talks about this when it comes to his mother in law who did the same thing.
Cultures that value kids will have more. My parents did the same for us
Last I checked, cultures that have access to contraception and female education have fewer kids, independent of religion or tradition or practice of valuing kids.
Indian culture is no exception; total fertility rate has declined in the last ~50 years from ~6 children per woman to ~2, and continues to decline.
Wait until people realize the ladder is a treadmill and any movement is an illusion of entropy.
Every wave of humanity is like an ocean's endless beating against a beach.
"Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like the coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself."
(Philip Larkin.)
Witness the widespread shock that Joe Biden pardoned his son.
You can't do better than the daily show coverage of it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BcIHPMAHw
That's kinda the definition of the word so it isn't surprising.
Nepotism as a negative is a relatively new phenomenon, historically speaking. I suspect this is what you actually meant.
It’s the opportunity cost of having children. When you’re poor, it’s not changing what you can do with your life. You were never able to go to dinner or on vacation. When you’re wealthy, you can afford to bring them with you, or better, pay somebody to watch them while you’re gone. The well-off middle class needs to weigh completely changing their lives.
When you're poor and child-less, you can still sleep in on weekends, watch Netflix/game all day/night or whatever other (cheap) hobby you have. It's even possible to do a decent amount of travelling on a very tight budget these days (low-cost airlines, couchsurfing...). All things considered, today is not a bad time to be a poor person in terms of being able to have fun.
I think even for middle class, the main cost is actually the time rather than the monetary cost.
But I do agree that opportunity cost is the right framing.
I doubt that anyone would prefer gaming to children because they hold gaming in the kind of profound esteem you feel for the task of "raising a literal human child"; more likely, they simply don't feel much of anything about having kids, or perhaps they feel some aversion. It's not hard for even a comparatively trivial activity you enjoy to feel more appealing than an alternative you don't actually desire.
I understand procrastination for sure, but the idea that someone would avoid having kids to do the above is absolutely bizarre to me.
One thing which I kind of regret about having children relatively late in my life (although I wasn't that much older when I had my first than you are now) is that I won't be there for them (and potentially grandchildren) as long as I wish I would be, esp. in good health. A depressing way to think about this is that every year I've enjoyed the freedom before them is a year I'm not going to spend with them.
In any case, it’s just a plain fact that some people don’t desire to raise a child. Many, probably most, do, but many don’t. Personally, I’d pick the video games. Heck, I’d pick nothing as a preferable alternative to raising children. Not everyone considers it a positive.
crazy thought i know.
https://x.com/theHauer/status/1222514313723875332/photo/1
From "Population Pyramids Yield Accurate Estimates of Total Fertility Rates", https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13524-019-00842-x?sh...
I’m very happy for people who have children and love them to bits, but many of just don’t want to.
That doesn’t make anyone who has kids or wants to have kids better or worse. Plenty of people have kids and should not have, and they end up neglecting their kids or abusing them.
Have kids if you want to. Don’t if you don’t. Just realize that if you wait too long to make a choice, those options become much more limited and lean much more toward not having them. And if you make the choice without thinking, you’re just gambling, but you’re gambling with someone’s life, not to mention your own.
If it sounds scary… good. That means you’re thinking about it. You just have to decide if you want to do this particularly scary thing, and if the potential reward outweighs the risk.
And, I think it’s important to be okay with that choice changing in either direction. My wife didn’t want kids, and that opinion has changed, through no pushing of my own.
(The proverbial you, not you specifically, since it sounds like you’ve decided)
It probably true but even the well of who can afford to buy the village aren't having kids.
I think it has more to do with
1. cultural acceptance and lack of strict cultural pressure to have kids. Its unimaginable in India to not have kids by choice. Its not a choice at all unless you want to be pariah.
2. Availability of affordable widespread recreation that will keep you occupied. Affordability of lots of on demand TV, dining out, live music, internet, hobbies, travel ect.
The high survivability of children now means that having large numbers of children dropped everywhere. You don't need to have "extras". The problem is when the number drops too much. It did in Iran due to literal government influence, and is quickly turning back to replacement level. Saudi Arabia is above replacement level.
That is very different than Canada (1.33) or South Korea (0.88), or Switzerland (1.39). The scale is dramatically different.
Not my view, just suggesting who might believe the "children as selfish luxury" line.
Money is a grease to help direct resource utilization. You can't expect the big bucket of grease you saved for the future to mean much if there are no resources to flow. You cannot rely on a financial abstraction to "invest" in the future without everyone also actually concretely investing in creating a future.
Luckily we both have three and we at least want more (they might be aging out... Maybe they'll have one more).
Kids are so much fine and they love each other too. It's amazing
Anecdotally the more kids in a family the more neglected the child. I can't imagine having more than one child a decade and raising them well.
Seeing children with multiple siblings with less than 8 year difference between them vs single children is shocking just how differently kids are treated.
This is the most accurate but least factual description of what it looks like from the outside when a family keeps adding kids as fast as they can https://malcolminthemiddle.fandom.com/wiki/Flashback
Do you think all of the latchkey lone children of the current generation are the most psychologically healthy individuals the world has seen? Do you think they're the most loved or coddled? The most educated? Your anecdote is actually kind of hilarious in context.
The idea that 2 children splits the love or attention is absolutely insane.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/siblings.html
80% of kids under 18 have siblings in the USA today.
>The idea that 2 children splits the love is absolutely insane.
It's also what's blindingly obvious when you spend more than 5 minutes in a playground with single kids and multiple kids.
I wasn't claiming that all or most kids are single children. I was observing that by your philosophy those single children would somehow have the best outcomes (in a multivariate manner). I don't think that's the case.
>It's also what's blindingly obvious
Sure.
A parent can snuggle multiple kids at once, read to multiple kids at once, take multiple kids to the zoo at once, etc.
Moreover siblings have their own rich relationships.
Having closely spaced siblings is pretty normal.
And in the year of our lord 2025 it's normal not to have kids in the west.
In most of the rest of the world neither of those things were normal.
Which is the point.
The west is weird when it comes to raising children and has been uniquely bad at it for over 80 years which happens to be living memory for pretty much everyone on here.
You can see the change in the Boy Scout manual.
That the majority of conservatives today pine for the 50s us that we not only lost the ability to have a stable society but even the memory of what one should look like.
Parents can spend time with their children as a group. Parents with lots of kids have the kids do the chores.
Your issue here is that you have labeled the single kids life as good and the multi sibling family as bad .
It used to be the opposite. People would pity a single child.
Indeed, it's precisely that I care so much that having children wasn't some carefree social media event for me. It was an enormous commitment. The biggest commitment a human can make, in my judgment, and I was all in.
And as another poster already said, one of the greatest gifts a child can have is siblings. This isn't always true and of course there are many counterpoints, but siblings are usually the closest friends and allies in a hostile world.
Four? So many? According to Churchill, four would be the bare minimum.
There's also some deterioration as men age, but it's less obvious.
Some say the combined age should not be over 80. Shrug.
(Should be obvious fertility varies greatly between individuals.)
People say it’s the cost. But what’s way worse is the effort and time you need to spend for every child.
A normal couple, most often with both having to work, will be at their limits to provide for more than 1 child - constantly.
A couple can’t replace the village unless they have tons of money.
Just as one small example, daycares/schools will call for you to pickup your kid -- blowing up your day -- at the slightest indication of illness. With four kids going to school, this means two to six+ times a month your day is going to be completely blown up at any moment. I'm not complaining (though when I was a kid if you had a bit of a stomach ache you chilled in the nurse's office for a bit and 9 times out of 10 go back to class), but the average person cannot accommodate this without quickly finding themselves unemployed. This is just one of a million cases where two working parents and few or no supports leave you in a precarious situation.
I got lucky in a sense, when covid came along and sent me home permanently, it makes dealing with kids so much simpler. My wife and I both work from home now, and schedules are a breeze.
Parents today not only have lost the village but are also expected to be with their children more.
I personally found the complexities of parenting and, even more importantly, family life, don't really start to emerge until after the first few years.
Talk to divorced parents of older children about the "Surreal Magnificence" of parenting and you'll likely get a hearty chuckle out of them.
* Divorced parents aren't representative experiences for most parents. (The oft-used statistics that >50% of marriages end in divorce miss that those with one divorce often end up with N divorces. Aka most PEOPLE, and most COUPLES, do NOT end up divorced)
* The job of a parent is to raise an adult. There are certainly those that become enamored with the idea of parenting a baby/toddler/child and are unprepared for the complicated job ahead. But there are also those that seem to think their job ends as soon as the child is legally an adult. Or those that are all too happy to throw away their decade plus of investment because their teenager going through absolutely normal hormonal chaos are suddenly disrespectful to them.
* In essence, I'm trying to say that divorce parents of older children are just as much full of shit as the new parents in terms of giving someone advice.
* Being over 25
* Having a college degree.
The people who worry about marriage because of these stats are typically in this category. I bet just by accounting for these 2 points, the numbers would plummet to the 20s if not teens.
I have a two year old (well, she'll be two next week, close enough). Among my nearby friends are five couples who have have children that are one or two years older than mine. Their input has been extremely helpful in the last two years, because it's been mostly in the form of "these are the mistakes we first made and what we eventually figured out". It also helps that they are five very different couples so my partner and I can compare their experiences and figure out what applies to our situation and what doesn't.
Also, by comparison, I have friends with much older children too, and their input can essentially be reduced to "I'm sorry the first two years are a sleep-deprived haze of which my memories are limited to the photos and videos we took, so we have no advice for you."
> And as children get viewed as a selfish luxury
e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=children+a+luxury+item
With this comes the perspective that every downside parents enjoy is earned if not poetically satisfying. It is amazing how absolutely without sympathy -- instead holding smug satisfaction -- people are if a parent faces obstacles.
[1] Obviously there are exceptions and different situations exist in different cultures and socioeconomic settings.
Edit
I forgot: ALL of Latin America: False, children are treated as a blessing!
Yeah. This has been the worst part. Neither of our parents feel the need to help with their TIME, but they will sporadically send us money after making us feel bad about asking. Meanwhile they had all kinds of help from relatives, in time, sweat, and money. Part of the problem is that you don't get your full Social Security benefits until age 70, so for the one grandparent that is still working, they literally do not have the time to help. If they wanted to retire early, they would have to forgo what they perceive as critical $. Alternatively, they could sell their multi-million dollar home and downsize, but their egos could never handle that.
Incentivize remote work so we can spread out into these cheaper and under served communities.
At the same time I do think articles like this should be countered with the reality that many fathers aren't overwhelmed with waves of love or "surreal magnificence". With each of my children being born the primary emotions I could point to were dread and anxiety.
The sudden overwhelming obligation to provide care, comfort and security for such a vulnerable human for decades encompasses your being.
One of the reasons birthrates have plummeted in the West, and sentiments about having children have dropped, is that we have no "village", so to speak. Having children is not only an astronomical expense -- every single element of life is dramatically more expensive, made much worse with the housing crisis occurring in many Western nations -- a couple is often entirely on their own. There are no respites or breaks.
And as children get viewed as a selfish luxury, the social norms for what a parent needs to do to be proper climb ever higher.