Yeah I used to think that until I had a family. In reality it's more like:

1. Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children, and most of it probably comes from one earner. You can say "don't have children if you can't afford it" all you like, but you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.

2. For men performance expectations are the same but now you have to somehow simultaneously be at work and also pick up your children from school at 3pm. Oh and don't forget you have to somehow cover like 80 days of school holidays a year. For women... well you can legislate that being off work for 2 years doesn't matter all you want; in reality it is a major disruption to careers.

3. Childcare is far more expensive than any increased cost I experienced for being single, with the possible exception of not being able to share rent with a partner. But once you have children... rent for a family is more than double rent for a one bed flat.

4. Yeah price me up a skiing holiday for a family of 4. Now do it for a single person (and double it if you like).

The very reason that discounted family tickets exist is that families wouldn't buy any tickets otherwise because they would be too expensive. It's the same reason student discounts exist. It's called price discrimination.

I do agree it's pretty annoying and feels unfair though. The optimum group from a price point of view is really a couple, not a family.

> you wouldn't be alive if nobody had children, so it's quite selfish of anyone to be anti-children.

It gets into philosophical territory, but the default "having a pulse = good" thinking is pretty shortsighted IMO. Life is inherently suffering and no one got a yes/no prompt before being born.

For a society it's not philosophical. If it wishes to exist past a few decades then it needs children, simple as that. Therefore societies are (and should) be skewed towards that.

I'll ask this in response: why does society need to exist at all?

Obviously ideas like yours are ingrained into us at a biological level and it logically makes sense if we want to survive as a species... but there is no inherent reason other than "just because" right?

Well yeah, because of our ingrained sense of morality & self-preservation. But we're talking about the policies of society so it's kind of pointless discussing them if you don't accept that society should exist in the first place.

Also... it's not society, it's the human species.

That's indeed a philosophical question. Should we even exist at all?

It's a strange thing of nature and evolution that it creates a species that can plan and execute its own intentional suicide.

It's fairly irrelevant to the discussion. All societies that choose not to exist also choose for all their policies about (not) reinforcing children to not exist.

“No children” and “single” isn’t the same, as evidenced by DINKs. That set aside, you’re just confirming that singles are (or should be) penalized.

Yes, that's just a necessity for the persistence of a society. Otherwise there's no point in even organizing as one. I'm not making a value judgment by the way, just an objective statement. I was also once part of a "DINK" and someone who thought would not have children, I have no qualms with that, but there's just no point in prioritizing that segment.

While there are people who wish that "yes" was a "no" instead, they form an exceedingly small portion of the general population. Most people are happy they exist.

you get a yes/no prompt every day after you are born though -- and most people keep saying yes until they're ripped out

More like it gets into edgy teenager territory.

I think what's more angsty is replies like this. You can't possibly fathom anything other than the default so you fallback to slop like this.

Yes, life can suck and I'm not saying we need to suicide as a species because of that. But, individuals can experience a much larger percentage of suffering than joy. So is it unreasonable to at least consider that possibility rather than going "haha you were brought into this world, suck it up and be happy"?

> Yeah I used to think that until I had a family.

It is amazing how blatantly people will just admit "I agree with politics that benefit me even if they exclude others."

> Taxes are more punishing because you're spending half your disposable income on children

I probably spend on my dogs what you do on your children. Gosh life sure is hard because of my decisions. Where are my discounts and tax refunds?

> It's called price discrimination.

...and when is discrimination ok? Lets all say it out loud.

> dogs

Dogs are not people. Society does not rely on the continued existence of dogs. Do you see any governments enacting policies to make people have more dogs?

> when is discrimination ok?

When it makes things more moral/fair. Do you object to student discounts? Progressive taxes? You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "discrimination". It's also called "price differentiation". Maybe that sounds less bad to you?

Who do you think will look after you when you are 70? Who will grow your food, make your car, fly your plane etc?

Is it possible to distinguish between society penalizing being single and society incentivizing having children? Since society's existence requires that people have children (even in the fairly short term, someone younger has to be around to take care of the older folks) it seems reasonable to incentivize it.

I guess it's all relative, lower taxes for A compared to B looks like higher taxes for B compared to A, but I suspect most of this comes from a) incentivizing people to form as many families w/ children as possible and then b) since there are so many families w/ children, people build businesses that assume most people will be in families.

I think even calling it "society incentivizing people to have children" is a bit of a stretch, since in most cases the tax advantages are unlikely to result in a net financial advantage given the financial costs of raising children. In most cases the thought isn't "I'm ambivalent about having children but I will do it for the financial benefits" and rather "I'd like to have children, but it's very expensive, and the tax advantages slightly lessen the expensive."

This has been my experience as well, childcare alone is a pretty big part of my budget. I am definitely not better off financially by having a toddler :D

I still think of it as incentivizing in the same way the EV rebate helped encourage me to buy my first EV, even if the cost of the car still was more than I would have been willing to pay for an ICE car. It made a difficult thing (slightly) less difficult.

Incentivizing doesn't have to mean that the incentive alone makes it worth to have children. It just means that it makes it a better deal than it would have been without the incentives.

Single also differs from being in a childless couple e.g. in your early 20s.

To get on the ladder today, 5 years sharing rent is priceless. Then once you do, you get child benefits. Many people are single late in life too. So I don't think it's something you can equate.

OTOH when you retire those other people's kids will be powering the economy that will be financing your pension.

It's not even retirement.

When a 25-year-old lands a senior role in 10 years at 35, it's because someone else's 13-year-old grew up, graduated college, and got hired as a junior. Promotions are 10% Crushing It, 90% dumping your grunt work on some poor sap too young to know better.

Society is a pyramid scheme, and, like all pyramid schemes, bringing more people in is ultimately more valuable than actually selling the LuLaRoe or whatever.

I went to buy tickets to a comedy show last year and they wouldn’t let me buy a single ticket. I had to buy 2. It quite literally doubled the cost, and then a seat went empty.

If someone were to buy 3 tickets, it could just as easily leave an orphaned seat.

I've never run into such a thing across many years. I buy single tickets to Broadway/West End shows a lot of the time and I often land great tickets.

I've seen it twice now, both times within the past couple years. I'm not sure if it is the venue of the performer that imposes it, but it's really bad. To get single tickets, people are basically left to sit and wait for all the other seats to be bought, then hope there are single person gaps they can fill.

how are there less options for people without families to eat out? I'm not following that part

Nicer restaurants often won't accept reservations for solo diners, leaving them to come at off-hours or eat at the bar.

Obviously that's a pure economic thing you can't get mad at as tables are designed for 2+ and you're trying to get in during a high traffic time.

You can’t eat out alone everywhere

"Table for one" is nearly always accommodated. Bringing a family of 4 or 5 out, and you're much more likely to be denied, or to suffer a long wait.

And, in fact, if there's a bar where they serve food that makes it even easier.

This is extremely uncommon in my experience, to the point where I've really only heard of it happening secondhand. I've seen people eating alone everywhere from fast food to Michelin star restaurants and done it myself many times. Where have you seen it?

In my experience as well, never been denied dining. But... maybe different parts of the world have different customs.

I’ve eaten alone in hundreds of places in dozens of countries, not sure where these mythical places are.

I mean, you almost always can? During COVID, there was a certain degree of reservations required--min 2 people. But it's pretty darned rare. And I say this as someone who has eaten out solo many hundreds of times. (And tend to eat at fairly decent restaurants.)

> Higher costs in every aspect of life

...except for the average $300,000 cost of raising a child in the US. That one would seem to rather balance out all those others.

That argument only makes sense if you see no inherent value in the child.

This makes sense because a healthy society needs families, especially young ones who can still make healthy children.