It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost?
I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share.
First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.
And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.
Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.
To add to my previous comment. There's nothing about "the US" that makes precludes any of this. Lots of people chose to remain (or move back to) close to their families especially when they have kids on their own.
EG when we bought the house because it was closer to the in-laws, the previous owners were moving to SC to be closer to their family. It's just a decision you make or not bother to make.
And then to make an extreme point - before this I used to live in Hell's Kitchen in NYC. When I visit my old hood now, it's basically one continuous giant Grindr date going on. That was totally fine when I lived there as a single person but as a family person it would be a tough situation (e.g. businesses not geared to kids, most neighbors aren't parents - eg there was no kids in my old building). Now I live maybe 30 miles away and it's all parents all around me. The idea of "go where parents are" and "go where other young families are" is relevant to absolutely anyone in the world, so I don't understand why whether I live in the US is even a question?
>so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
My experience so far with a kid is most people will just tolerate your child. I'm surprised your running into that attitude.
Other new parents I know that are in the suburbs aren't all surrounded by family's either. I think aging people aren't downsizing their houses and moving around. Careers scattered and cheap homes scattered everyone around.
Maybe NYC is just different. I mean I'm 100% sure it's different. I'm grew up in a NYC suburb lol
I mean I think it depends on the suburb. If you moved your family to a place where everyone is a shut-in boomer (vs the grandfatherly types that I somehow meet in my area) then... why would you move there to have kids?
To me that's like going to a badly reviewed restaurant and then complaining about the food. If you knew you were moving to a place hostile to kids, why move there?
I don't think that's right. There's a difference between "I hadn't tried to do that"(which would have been the case for me, if not for my wife's wisdom) and "it's hard"
Like literally a starting point could be -where do your friends and coworkers with kids tend to live? Or ask a realtor which parts of town have turned over with young families.
When you are checking out the house you can literally tell which houses have kids and u can ask about it.
The housing market it what it is but you get a very different outcome if you search in a a family friendly town vs not to begin with. Obviously?
I grew up in a place like that (Port Washington, NY), and it was pretty ideal; I'm raising my own two kids in a suburb of Boston that feels very, very similar along almost every axis.
You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.
Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.
And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old
I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other side of the country/world. Anecdotally the loneliest older people I know are ones who have put it upon their children to keep themselves from loneliness.
> And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them
As a parent I always find it funny that we need to add this to every statement of frustration of family life (I'm not critiquing you, I also say this every time I mention any frustration about parenting). It is worth recognizing that saying the contrary is fundamentally taboo. I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
<< I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near impossible to miss the "pregnancy will ruin your life" propaganda.
Consequences. They exist. Some are life altering and expected to last a long time.
Some of my friends and family who had kids at a young(er) age - and by that, I mean late twenties or early thirties - seemed totally oblivious to the hardships of parenthood.
You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research. Most people just have kids because it’s just “what your supposed to do” and don’t give much thought beyond that.
I don’t know what they thought to themselves, but outwardly they projected rainbows and unicorns until reality eventually hit them.
> You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research.
I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.
Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former)
But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought publicly!
"But don't expect standing ovation is my very subtle point."
that's the exact reasoning why parents who complain about how hard it is to be a parent get no sympathy from you. You blew a load in somebody (or had a load blown into you) and another human popped out. That's a choice you made for yourself, nobody forced you to, and there is a big giant swath of people out there who couldn't care less.
>You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there.
If that's the attitude it renders virtually every discussion about the topic moot and the people in question better stop trying to give life advice to anyone else.
My wife and I don't want kids and we've heard our fair share of (unsolicited) opinions on the topic from people who clearly weren't always happy. I've only ever known one woman I worked with, who was a brilliant scientist, tell me straight up she regrets having children and wished she could have focused on her research.
If that's not something you can honestly say without being berated then clearly the 'propaganda' still works mostly in one direction.
I agree with you but I don't really see what the alternative is. If you openly go around stating that you regret having children, what are people supposed to say? It's better to keep those thoughts to yourself because there, quite frankly, is nothing helpful anyone could say even if they wanted to. Not to mention that it would be unfair to the kids if they got the feeling that you regret having them.
Unfortunately, my soul brought me into that bucket :-(
I can speak about it with other (men) friends without children, and to some women without children. But if you ever say that you didnt want children when others with children are around, they see you as an alien.
Esp it gets hard if you are single (what happenend to me now) and you meet new women and tell them that the only reason for the last breakup was that I couldnt bear the stress with out children.
I knew from the beginning of my life on, that it will totally crush me if this happens - coming from a "not supportive family" makes it really hard to >actually want children<, esp. if the same stories now repeat :-(
>I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
Because there's no point in thinking about it. Your wife will ask if you want to leave, your children will hate you, and society will hate you, it will make you feel depressed, and meanwhile it won't accomplish anything. It's a dialogue only for yourself, once you acknowledge that, it becomes far less challenging to deal with and you can move forward with dealing with challenges in solvable ways.
My mothers' friends have to fund vacations for their adult children and grand children in order to spend time with them. They wont let her stay at their home.
My mother was giddy when my father died; so I have strong boundaries in our relationship.
My brother moved to colorado after the service and never returned.
I'm not convinced having children is the answer alone. (I say as a childless 35yo)
There are many reasons this could be the case. The internet (and Reddit in particular) is abound with AITA type discussions around boundaries within families.
Being a parent is orthogonal to being someone people want to spend time with. Unless I knew for sure I was not in the latter group, I wouldn’t use it as a justification for not having kids.
About your first point, I understand why it happens, but I get frustrated at these debates nowadays. Both sides cannot talk about their experiences without having to add something that invalidates the other side choice. They cannot fathom that the other side may prefer the disadvantages of their choice instead of the disadvantages of yours. Maybe it's the human condition to try to point out how the other side will regret their choices to validate our life decisions
Well said. I appreciate people on both sides that can simply acknowledge having kids is great for some people, and not having them is great for others, and the world is big enough for all of us.
Being able to hook up with random strangers on apps might be fun in your 20s and 30s. When you're old and wrinkly, it's not going to be the same. I hate to say it, but this is especially true for women entering their twilight years. A lot of childless people in our generation are headed to a very sad and lonely future.
COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just people going crazy in isolation. Trading random stocks, or ordering crazy nonsense off of Amazon. Being alone is literally psychological abuse and a lot of them were subjected to it for months at a time.
> My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way
I completely believe that’s been your experience, but want to highlight that his is a difficult asymmetry in these friendships. I in no way mean to imply that the below is the experience your friends had with you, just that the challenges are not one-way.
In my own circle, my wife and I have often felt like it was our friends with kids who vanished. We knew they were busy, we kept extending invites or asking for time. Things often didn't work especially as new parents are figuring their lives out, things are changing all the time, etc. We'd meet up here and there, but it was - necessarily - always on their terms. And so of course, our outreach tapered down incrementally but consistently.
But I do wonder: do they feel we detached from them, or do they have any inkling that we feel they detached from us? We've discussed it with one couple who we were always closer to, but it doesn't feel an appropriate topic to resurface uninvited at any given moment.
It's simply hard to plan. Before kids I'd typically meet up with friend around 8 or so maybe 9. Now bedtime rules my evenings. When my kids are asleep I'm exhausted. Most of my friends evenings are just starting at that time! (lol) and I completely understand. The other thing is I can't go out and get drunk or party because being hung over with a 3 year old pissing the bed after they crawl in to sleep/cuddle with you - nothing better/worse.
It's simply hard to relate. I have some very good friends who we've stayed in touch. I'm forever grateful for them. But when you're out and about and you meet a random person and try to strike up a friendship say at a conference. The second I mention I'm a dad I feel I'm relegated to the back of the bus.
Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them.
Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.
And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.
And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.
So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.
The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.
Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
I think it's a fair response, and I can appreciate the truth in one's own life that leads you to write it. But this situation is a complex dynamic, no two situations are precisely the same either factually or subjectively. The same couple with a new child may stay close to one, drift away from another for totally different reasons that may not have one thing to do with intention or effort.
At any rate, I'm never too proud to reach out to old friends even if the time between attempts increases. Relationships may change again!
> You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way.
Similar to what I wrote in the other reply: How far went _your_ initiative to stay in actual contact with them, in a way it's not a boring duty call, but something _actually_ nice?
If I have friends with children, sure I'm also interested in them. But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved - and they mostly expect from me that I constantly want to see the kids and "help in any way", well, where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
> But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved
See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily. My guess would be your friends would love to spend some time with you but can't, because logistics.
> where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
> See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily.
You can't, sure. You shouldn't at least. But what does it mean to me? It leads to the fact that the friendship is pointless. So why should I take a lot of initiative, when I don't get anything back anymore? For a reason that they've actively decided for (typically), btw.
> Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
I'm not talking about commercial/monetary/material profits. I'm talking about profits in terms of social lives. If my wording is unfortunate, I hope that it's still clear what I mean. One important (not the only one) currency in that regard is: Timeslots in the calendar.
PS: If the other side shows at least some remote awareness of the situation and indicates a little goodwill, it's already a different thing. In my personal experience, even that isn't common, though.
I understand why they do it, but I cannot ignore that you lose the incentive of visiting your friends and their kids when they always take that visit as a way to treat you like a babysitter. Yes, I accept sometimes looking at your kid while you take a nap, just don't make that the usual experience for years on end, though. I'm lucky, as my friends always understood when I pointed that out to them, but I'm aware that this may not be the common reaction.
It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs.
Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.)
Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-person events - cities are filled with concerts and music festivals, you name it, more Michelin Star restaurants than anyone could visit, etc. etc.)
Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
Not to mention that parents have all kinds of new social stigmas.
Having children used to be: free labor, send them off to do whatever (now you'd be accused of child abuse)
Basically, the problem is single life is too good now. We have smartphones, internet, and the economy revolves around the single experience.
The minute you have kids, you lose access to the exciting single life that the modern society has built itself around and catered itself to.
Society glorifies single life, and the signalling is so strong you know you'll lose it if you have kids. It's not like you have time anyway with the doomscrolling and dopamine addiction.
> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.
> It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
Why would it be easier today?
You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
This. I know me and all my peers roamed the neighborhood and my wife's life was not that different despite being born on different continents. Doing the same now risks a visit from state child neglect referral, which is enough to give most a pause. Parents seem to get all the risk and less benefits, while getting the stink eye when kid is not behaving properly.
In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion... but to be blunt I've only seen this in black and impoverished neighborhoods. There needs to be enough working single moms releasing their kid out of necessity that the Karens can't snitch on everyone and the police/CPS fatigue of fielding the calls after investigating and not finding anyone they can force into keeping the kids inside.
Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.
Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.
And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:
Housing floor space per person, same trend.
Life expectancy, same trend.
Leisure has increased.
Tourism has increased.
Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.
The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.
As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.
There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.
We can't return to a place where America is the only manufacturing country in the world, where every other country is in ruins and rebuilding and taking loans from America. That was a very weird set of circumstances that gave America unprecedented tailwinds that no other country has ever had.
I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record. But once I had my first child, all of those things seemed so petty and inconsequential. I don’t miss the night life, the hobbies, or the drinking buddies. My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation. I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
> I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record.
yes me too
> My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. .... I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
yes me too absolutley
> If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation.
Total opposite for me, no way. Whilst i dont want to do them now, I am so SO glad i had those experiences. I know I would be deep in a mid life crisis today wondering "what if" if i had missed the fun and gone straight to having kids in my 20s. Like, id probably be blowing up my life over it now, doing something stupid, out of FOMO for never having tried living other lives. Different people are different, but it would have been a TERRIBLE choice for me. (im also not the only one - witness the commonality of the old mid-life-crises sportscar and mistress trope that was born out of a period having kids young)
Yep this is 100% it -- my partner and I who stayed single and lived out our 20s and early 30s "experiencing life" only wish we could have met and settled down 10 years earlier. Its way more important and rewarding than all the shallow stuff that people talk about. Of course sometimes you miss the freedom, but sometimes I missed high school when I was in college -- didn't mean it was a step down. Sometimes I missed college and my old job when I got a "real job", of course, it was still a strict upgrade, but you can always look back and appreciate what was good about the old days.
$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.
> Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?
In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.
Also, a nanny is not the same ecosystem as child-care. It's not nescessarily a substitute. If what's desired is a private-private child-care, I suspect you'll be paying a lot more than the price of a nanny.
One challenge with hiring a nanny is if they need to take a sick day (or if they quit!) you can end up in a tough spot. In contrast a day care center usually has backups built in so you don’t end up scrambling.
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
The trick is that au pairs are nowhere close to that expensive. (Though the US becoming radically less attractive of a place for foreigners to live and work may be changing the availability of that option.)
I agree, it's the public attitudes that are most disheartening and probably some of the reason young people are less inclined to have children. All over society people are seeing kids as a kind of personal indulgence that shouldn't be allowed to impact other people - whether its a lack of sympathy that parents have higher priorities at work, or looking down on kids who act like kids in public. At the same time parents who let their kids look at screens in public are demonizes, as apparently only kids who are perfectly behaved without distractions should be allowed out.
Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.
When I read things like this I find it confusing in so many ways. I've been out of the US for a while now so perhaps there's some contemporary issues I'm just not considering? For $6k a month, why not hire a private nanny? You could also work with other parents in your area to setup something for a bit more socializing depending on their age.
Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally every single time we go to e.g. the park. The kids want to play with other kids, we meet their parents, and it's basically an endless source of friendships - even better because it's other parents who probably live relatively close to you enabling you to start setting up aforementioned ideas.
My childcare cost is $52k/year for two kids. To hire a private nanny for TWO kids, it'll be at least $35/hour with benefits (insurance, paid time off etc) in my area. That'll be around $80k/year for a private nanny. And once the kids are older, the value of a nanny isn't as good IMO since they don't provide the variety of social challenges that a daycare can provide (group working, relationship building, conflict resolution etc...). We have friends with kids of the same age that don't go to day care and have nannies instead, and the differences in social interaction are significant - maybe we just get lucky but I think our kids build a lot of skills being in a bigger group.
Say you hire a nanny for $6k/mo... What problem have you solved? You're still paying the six grand, and you had better hope the nanny is good, because that is your kids' whole world now for a chunk of their existence.
It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month. If desired you can also generally arrange something with other parents in your area to do a cost share with the side benefit of also getting a bit more socialization for your kids. There's endless differences with nanny vs daycare. A big one is that most studies show children do best when raised by a small handful of consistent figures. In daycares they're going to have rotating workers with relatively unfavorable ratios.
It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your children to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.
There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.
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One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
> It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Real median personal income in the US is $45k which is $3750 gross per month. [1] Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans. What was your experience with bad nannies?
A good nanny for four kids is definitely more than $6k / month in lots of parts of America, you're ignoring the downsides of nannies (like when they get sick, or need time off, etc), you're ignoring a lot of the upsides of daycare (like socialization), and the research does not support your claim that kids do better being raised by a nanny than daycare.
It's totally fine that you've chosen a nanny over daycare. I did for my first, and I think we'll go with a nanny for my second, but you're presenting a wildly misleading perspective here.
"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"
I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.
So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
I feel a big part of what you experience is based on where you live. Having a family seems incongruous to the fast paced corpo world, sadly.
I moved to a small, uninteresting town years ago, mainly to escape the hustle and crowds. Honestly, I don't like it much, it's a bit too small and dull for my tastes. But more on point, the people here have all been so mind bendingly kind and patient with the kids that it makes it really hard to leave.
I wish every place were so patient, but there's probably a pretty direct negative correlation between that and 'getting ahead', whatever that means.
Your experience sounds exactly like mine. My son is very autistic as well. I've had to cut off friends with families because either their didn't understand meltdown and were incredibly judgy because they were blaming my parenting for his ASD meltdowns, or others because my autistic son was a "bad influence". God forbid their (later diagnosed) kid have some exposure to a child with different neurodiversities.
That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.
So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.
Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.
I completely sympathize with the challenges, though I don't understand (and might completely misunderstand) the word "now". Do you meant 'in the current world'? What is different that makes it harder? And what defines now - the social media age? Post-WWII?
Now to me I think is a point in time earlier than now. I'm thinking somewhere when people didn't need to get out and do stuff with another. I think when I was a kid it was normal to have grandparents, and church settings, and just after school programs at the Y or kids in general would find each other in the neighborhood and play. I don't see much of that the same in the 'now'
If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.
> Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.
Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".
Not sure how old they are, but we found that this loneliness phase got better once they were in school (and better as they got into middle, then high school.)
I have plenty of friends with young kids that are super social. They invite people over, take their kids to restaurants and invite people to come, go to picniqs, festivals, and other things. We love their kids (or at least all the people that show up do).
You and your love for and acceptance of their kids and willingness to show up to family-friendly activities are very likely the key to their ability to do this.
> It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointless contact.
There's often the expectation that you're super interested and excited about their children. But even if you'd try. You'll never get something back. Not because they turned into bad persons. But because there are just no spare resources for it (e.g. in terms of calendar slots) on their side anymore.
Do I have to be infinitely sympathetic with them? Or is there some limit at which I am allowed to say: This friendship just doesn't give me anything anymore.
When I was young in the 80ies, my mum worked part-time 4h as basic clerk, mainly for fun and having people around her so that she doesnt have to take care of us for the whole day.
My dad worked fulltime as an engineer, the bought a house.
Today, you need 2 top tier salaries to make childcaycare and rent even possible
My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
The tipping point isn’t just take home pay. Peak daycare expense is generally only for a few years. Quit the workforce for a decade and you see long term effects.
Further if either parent loses their job you can quit daycare until they get a new one. Single income families are far less resilient.
I feel kids need that sense of community and social setting. I know it's hard to get a handle on when there's nothing I went through that with my other two during covid. The difference is night and day with dealing with anxiety in social settings.
"don't get me started on dog/cat people who..." listen dude, you chose to have kids. You and your partner made the conscious decision to produce life, maybe instead of complaining about it, just live it and stop vilifying people who made different choices than you did.
You talk about your children as if they're a burden and that's sad.
Perhaps they don't like the fact that someone is equating pet struggles to human struggles.
Doesn't sound like they are talking about them being a burden, just how their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
> their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
This is true of people with pets, too.
Everyone's struggles are equally their struggles. I too get a little miffed when someone invokes the struggle Olympics, especially when their struggles are the consequence of their choices.
Midnight PRs sounds really sad. Pager duty; I mean you’re not saving people in the ER. Everything you’ve written comes off as profoundly selfish and self-centered. God forbid your 8 month old needs to be a priority over pager duty.
Raising kids is hard, I have 3 but it’s not sad. Blowing off some steam is something every parent needs. But it sounds like you are in desperate need of some perspective on life.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.
Worry is going to present, no matter what. Parents with hundreds of thousands in the bank worry, too. That can't be optimized for.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
> such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children
To a certain extent I agree with you that lower standards in parenting made the whole project more doable.
However, when my great-great-grandmother's brother's wife died, my great-great-grandmother had to quit school (about 14 or 15 years old?) in order to stay home to help take care of his baby. Shaped the whole rest of her life.
Responsibilities being split often meant others had to sacrifice in addition to parents, and those expectations of sacrifice often fell hard on women (whether young unmarried or past their own reproductive years).
I think there's a very important distinction to be made here. Having kids and taking care of kids you already have are too very different things.
If you're calling not having kids selfish, that's just completely weird. You are going to have to prove first that your opinion isn't also one of these invented ideas.
If we're talking about taking care of them, I kind of agree. Excluding extreme circumstances like rape in a country without abortion, you kind of know what you're willingly signing up for when you have kids. You forced them into the world, they are your responsibility.
In our culture, we're socialized to minimize our "self." Your life is defined by the roles you play in the extended family at various stages of life: child, father, etc. You spend a life laboring to provide for your kids, and the reward at the end is raising your grandkids and sharing their joy as they experience everything in the world for the first time through fresh eyes. It completes the cycle of life. If you don't have grandkids, you're stripped of purpose and robbed of your reward.
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
For whatever it's worth, it's my perception that even within the US there are many who come from a culture where it's expected for adults to settle down and raise a family at some point in their lives. That describes my background, and I would like to have kids myself.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
Keep living in your bubble my friend. It is not selfish to see the sacrifices required to raise children (and I will not enumerate them here, this thread is full of them if you want to educate yourself), see that all you get from society is "thoughts and prayers" (at least in WA state where I live) and take a hard pass on having children.
This is literally the definition of selfish? You see what you must give up for the sake of someone else (children), see the lack of support you will receive, and decide that you don't want to make that exchange.
That's literally a selfish decision, because you are deciding you want to keep that energy and those resources for yourself.
It's not inherently bad to make that decision, but it absolutely is selfish.
I don't think it matters? A decision to keep resources for yourself is selfish on the basis of it being a decision to keep resources for yourself, regardless of where they might otherwise be going?
I guess, but that kinda makes the word selfish meaningless. By that logic we’re all selfish all the time since we’re keeping our resources instead of throwing them in the garbage.
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
Not to put words in their mouth, but I think part of the poster's point is that inability is is a more complex equation than simple biological capacity. A couple who judges it economically risky or otherwise irresponsible to start a family (which represents a wide swath of the population) could for example consider themselves unable.
No, this is a pretty typical conversation on the Internet these days: someone takes a relatively well-defined stance on an issue, and then someone else wildly misinterprets or misrepresents it, just to get in a dig at the original person for... Unclear reasons.
It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
> My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids.
This is true for many people. I know a few childfree couples that you could offer them a hefty salary to raise kids and they would decline.
However I know even more people who ended up having fewer kids than they would have liked, especially when I lived in a big city. Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids, found raising their current child(ren) challenging enough that they didn't think they could handle another, or reevaluated their preferences after watching friends and neighbors struggling.
> It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
For many, sure. But for other people addressing the root causes (of which cost is one) can move the needle.
> Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids
You then brought up cost as the reason. Cost can basically be removed as a reason. There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
Yes some countries like India are still like that. Parents from the smaller villages literally pick a partner for their kids if they don't find one.
I think that's really unfair, people deserve to enjoy their lives. If they actually enjoy it that's fine but nobody should be pressured into having kids.
No need to wait: they've already fried themselves out of the evolution game with STDs. Any child they have will likely be retarded or diseased in some way.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
Choosing to not have children appears to "swim against the current" of the dominant biological process/context by which one came to be and in which one exists.
Certainly not having children allows one more time to pursue other matters. Mankind in general might gain (or lose) from such behavior, depending on whether one is an Einstein or a Stalin for example. Most anyone who participates in society has some set of interests and pursuit of those interests is nonetheless very real and the results may dominate our perspective.
I see no clear way to judge whether a person contributes more through his/her work or through his/her children. Nor do I think "contributing" (whatever that means) is a known evaluation anyway. And what one man considers useful another might judge detrimental. All the more b/c history is "unfinished business". IMO in summary we simply cannot know.
Aside: there's a T-shirt that shows the sinking bow of a shipwreck through a telescope lens. It's labeled thusly:
"MISTAKES - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Yet another viewpoint.
I agree with this take. A lot of old boomers tell me how there was a lot of pressure to get married and have kids because it was the thing to do. Nowadays, there is less pressure for people to do that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
Why not ask Israelis?
Even ignoring Haredim and Arab Israelis (both whose fertility rate has fallen dramatically), secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work much longer hours than Americans (South Korea is the only developed OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working) [1], live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms low rise brutalist apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, pay San Francisco level prices for everything, and have almost nonexistent government benefits.
But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.
Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on self-centered.
It really is cultural.
The economics don't help at all, but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc.
I barely know my coworkers kids names half the time. I certainly don't see photos of them or see them popping into zoom backgrounds. Growing up my dads company had picnics and his coworkers had parties and I'd meet his coworkers & their kids.
And while theres obvious things children limit.. like 4am clubbing on a Tuesday... a lot of public spaces are less child-friendly than in the past.
Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
There's very little overlap in 20-30 something singles & family public spaces anymore. It's like the entire world has self segregated.
I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
> but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc
Pretty much!
> Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
This isn't bad if there are other parents doing the same thing too. Increasingly there are not (or at least not among the demographic who uses HN).
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
I don't think so. I'm from around that generation, and that didn't stop Asian, Eastern European, and Israeli American parents from having multiple kids here in the Bay Area when growing up in the 2000s.
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
If nothing else, it's yet another area of increased expense.
In the early 90s when I was a child, it was pretty normal to shuttle 3 kids + parents around in a cheap little late 80s used sedan or station wagon. These days 3 kids + parents looks more like a big expensive 4Runner or Highlander.
The car thing is also limiting on who can perform extra childcare, and how/where.
As a kid, I used to hang out with my 10+ years older cousins who could drive - taking me to mall/movies/arcade/sports games with them in their little 2 door coupe.
Sure they were babysitting me, it wasn't some tremendous chore of being stuck in some kids-only space. They were doing stuff that they might have done without me, and probably got $20 from my parents.
We'd go see a Jim Carrey PG-13 film, not some Disney movie with they boyfriend/girlfriend/buddy, and they'd cover my eyes when their were tits on the screen. Or I'd sit in an older cousins lap at a ballgame while they drank beer (and smoked) and shouted at the players.
Can't imagine this is acceptable or normal now, lol. But it meant different generations commingled in ways that they just don't now.
I hadn't even thought about this angle, but you're right. Furthermore, not only is it not acceptable or normal today, it's largely not even possible.
Cheap econobox starter cars have disappeared from the market, used car prices are through the roof for anything that's reasonably safe and not basically dead already, and there's nowhere for young people to go anymore even if cheap cars did exist.
Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
You seem to be supposing a model where most people naturally want kids, but are just discouraged from having kids because...other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
Yes, absolutely.
I used to work in a big city where friends, neighbors, and coworkers with young kids had to sacrifice their career trajectory, friends, hobbies, savings, personal space, and more. Most couples we knew had no kids, some had one, a few exceptional folks had two. A few couples we knew even commented that they ended up having fewer children than they were planning to because of the difficulty with the one(s) they had.
Then my partner and I moved near relatives to a small, family-friendly town. Most of our neighbors have two kids, some have three, and a few exceptional folks have four or more. Almost everything here revolves around families -- even my company has family events and taking time to take care of kids is normalized.
True, living here did not change our decision to have kids, but it actually did change how many kids we ended up having.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
That's a plausible model, but my model is that people alter their goals based on what they observe happening to other people who pursue those same goals. If young people see their friends, coworkers, and neighbors struggling due to their decision to have children, it seems reasonable that they would reevaluate how important it is to them.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids
Yes.
They are much more tolerant about having kids and making sure to give space to people planning to have kids.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
The more likely you and your peers are to have kids, the more likely you are to live in a society which will accommodate you.
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Heck, Germany gives significantly more monetary and subsidized childcare benefits than Israel (which gives almost nothing), and Israel remains significantly more expensive than much of Germany, yet secular Israelis continues to sustain a much higher fertility rate than similar Germans.
It is hard to describe how kid unfriendly Western society has become.
I think it is more than just tolerance and stink eyes.
Some cultures actively celebrate children and families. They center them in social life in an inclusive way. This covers inclusion in social events, institutions, and civic design.
Kids are not only FUN, but interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
I would be very interested in a breakdown of how the American perception changed over time and what the drivers were.
Since total fertility rates have the same trend all around the world, why restrict the breakdown to Americans?
Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children, which necessarily includes foregoing many or all of the adult things due to lack of funds and time.
> Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children
This is exactly what I am talking about. Is the obviousness of this statement constant across time? Would someone in the 1960 or 1980 have found it equally obvious?
Alternatively, is it the emphasis on prioritizing fun that changed?
Alternatively, has both the perception and reality of fun given up changed?
Im mostly interested in breakdown in America because I am an American. Some countries match, some dont. If the underlying drivers are common, I would still find them the most relatable and interesting in the American context.
I think in atomic families in the US, more and more people are brought up without really interacting with children much once they are a teen and stop being a child themselves.
What used to be normal teen rights of passage like hanging out with your younger extended family, holding a baby, babysitting the neighbors kids, being a summer camp counselor, helping with youth sports, etc.. are less common.
Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college.
> Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college
So are Israelis. Getting into the best IDF units is much more difficult and stressful than getting into an Ivy - it's both academic and physical. But if you get into those units, you will be set for life financially.
Otherwise, your just an infantry grunt who wasted a couple years with no discernible skills and facing a future of (best case) working a dead end job that pays $40k a year in a country with a CoL similar to the Bay Area.
This is why immigrating abroad is still somewhat popular amongst non-techie Israelis (Zohran's electronics store [0] still hits somewhat close to home).
Agreed with your take. The lifestyle choices lead to the costs, and it's sort of a circular problem in the end. My dad's (European immigrant) family lived in one of those multi-generational homes you mentioned, and so there was just far less of this self enforced age segregation you see in atomic families.
From when I was young, I'd see my extended family at least every 2-3 weeks or more, every other holiday was hanging out with people from newborn to 90 years old. Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
By comparison my mom's side which had been here a few generations, I never really saw kids other than when I was a kid myself. I don't think my wife ever held a baby until she was an aunt in her 30s.
Yeah, and it forces kids to need to do "activities" to even see other kids. Makes proper development for kids much more expensive than the essentially free "existing alongside other kids" that happens in the multi-generational home.
In many cities in india, there is somewhat of a revival of this setup. What happened was that people weren't able to get homes with their aspirational square footage in the location they want. So what they end up doing these days is taking their family, the wifes family and the kids and buying 2-3 apartments in the same building. It's the closest you get to a multi-gen home. Will be interesting to see if this trend affects TFR.
Note that the recent +10% increase in TFR in rich indian states (you would expect a decline) is mostly due to better IVF availability/affordability, not due to any of the reasons I mentioned.
> Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
Yeah, this exposure also blunts some of the fear&uncertainty that puts people off of having kids.
Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
It's simply a matter of the social position of mothers, or, what defines the social status of women in a given society. In much of the world it's educational attainment and professional status, so it surprises me very little that most women in these countries don't want children, or can easily find an excuse to not to.
Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
> But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.
The dimension of this issue that never gets air time is that we've made having kids almost completely intentional. The richer a country becomes, the more intentional having kids becomes. The dynamic we see with rich countries is that as having kids becomes more intentional, there's also the increase in reasons why people would choose to delay or forego having kids.
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates.
- "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?
If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.
Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
> How do you square those facts with your view here?
"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?
Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.
Because it's not just money. It's time and money. You can have lots of money and nice things, but if you don't have time to raise your kids, you can't do it. And if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money.
First, that’s a LOT of money. Very few people can afford that at all and those that can are definitely counting down the days until their last child goes to school.
Second, it’s hard to find a good nanny. Parents live in fear of not getting a good one, having something go wrong and need to scramble for a replacement without missing too much work, etc.
It’s possible but it’s not going to move the mainstream averages because only like 5% of the population does that. If we want to materially change national averages, we should be talking about government daycare filling in the gap before public schooling starts around the country.
The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory.
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
Generally, the more developed a country is, the more capitalistic it is. Capitalism inherently assigns monetary value to everything, even children, and as capitalist societies currently function children have deeply negative value. So deeply negative that it completely nullifies the higher “default” standard of quality of life that comes with life in a developed country.
Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.
Yeah, I grew up poor in the 3rd world (not quite Chad level though) and even the upper class culture of my own country was almost alien for us and vice versa... Imagine the 1st world.
Pretty sure the poor women in Chad with no access to healthcare and quality nutrition have quite a bit to lose, and they don't have a choice not to risk it.
Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were:
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.
Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.
The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.
But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.
Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.
Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.
Is life mostly good?
Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing.
After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.
Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.
If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.
Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc.
This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.
70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.
I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child.
Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time.
It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.
> when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time
Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)
Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
> Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children.
Oh you still need them for all of those. It just so happens that developed capitalist countries figured out you can use immigrant's children for this, rather than paying to grow them in-house, since with outsourcing children you bypass a large chunk of the cost.
Developed countries already sold their own children's futures in exchange for short term equity gains, now it's being done to countries where outsourcing happens.
Capitalism is eating fertility.
> Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Aye, agreed. It will swing back one way or another.
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
CMDX is where we did a LOT of offshoring pre-COVID. Ditto for folks in Baja to cover timezones.
Definitely a paycut compared to the US but still pretty great for MX. Timezones and cultural overlap were pretty good, and there was a vibe that the folks coming out of Universities in CDMX were genuinely good, compared to iffy paper tigers in the Indian call centers.
The TN visa was also attractive, since we could just bring them north for a rotation or two. The Mexican workers love it since there was a big pay bump, but also the expectation they could continue their job back in MX later; bring em up to the RDU or Austin, put em in a few leadership roles, and then have them run a unit in MX, or help coordinate other LATAM efforts.
I find it a much more conscious choice for high paid immigrants. They can either live closely with their family, with the added bonus they basically live like a 'king' or they can move countries to live relatively wealthy lives in a new country.
Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice.
But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
> But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain
That plays some part but in most conversations I've had with Indian and Chinese nationals, the bigger issue for them was that it would take them decades to naturalize in the US. It's not worth spending your entire career and starting a family at the mercy of an employer.
I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive.
Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.
Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.
The “average crime rate” argument is disingenuous for an analogous reason to Waymo reporting that their cars are safer than the average driver is disingenuous: it lumps me in with Doris who last passed her vision test a decade ago but now has two cataracts. It also ignores that crimes in immigrant communities are less likely to be reported in the first place.
I lived in South Florida for 12 years working on mega yachts. We were all aware of the criminals raping children then. We were aware of the 14 and 15 year old child prostitutes from Russia trafficked into St Martin. The girls were in the hot tub on the third deck on the yacht in the next slip over and nobody said anything. We were all aware of the hard working immigrants from South America too busy providing for their families and sending money home to be committing crimes.
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one.
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
That basically sounds like retirement. If you choose to stop working because of kids, you could be entitled to receive social security just like in old age.
And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny.
This is a bigger issue than it may seem.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction
3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
Have you considered that rather than people being ignorant, not everyone lives this average experience, or that some portion of this increase in wellbeing creates collateral damage and those that experience it don't have the same rosy view?
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
Yeah, you have a hard life as you type on a device powered by magic with a full belly and a roof over your head in a building that magically heats and cools itself. Compared to our ancestors, who alternated between fighting to not die of hypothermia or starvation or have their infants eaten by predators, you really have it hard dude. That bald guy on the TV has a really big yacht and you don't, and that means your life is a tragedy. I'm really sorry for the suffering you're enduring because you don't get to party all day, every day. Participating in your own survival is truly an imposition that nobody should ever have to bear.
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Anything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
The past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit".
I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
It's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall.
Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
TFR doesn't account for mortality which has also continuously fallen since then. If you're not adjusting for that, then you're looking at meaningless decontextualized numbers. Obviously if people want a certain number of children and the children keep dying then they're going to need to give birth more to get the right number of children. Birthing is not a useful measure on its own because pre-adulthood dead children lead to the same impact on population growth as no children in the first place.
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
Agree, as a kid in the 1970s we ate almost every meal at home, cooked by my mother. Mostly staples rice, potatoes, vegetables, some kind of meat. Restaurants were a rare treat for something like a birthday or if we were traveling. Fast food, the same. Very infrequent, like maybe a few times a year would we be able to talk my mom into getting a Happy Meal. Pretty much the same experience for all the kids I grew up with as far as I remember.
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.
I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
When we were dating my wife always said she didn't want to have an only child. I was fine with only having one but always assumed we'd have at least two.
After going through pregnancy, she decided she was fine with never doing that again. Her's wasn't an especially difficult pregnancy, she simply didn't realize the toll it would take on her.
So we have one kid who is about to leave the nest.
> People already want more kids than they're having
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros.
You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
IMO this is a huge piece of it. People want to have it all, and things are structured where in order to have a decent income, you have to go to college. Then to pay off your loans and make it worthwhile you have to work a number of years. Then you have Madison Avenue telling you you need a fancy car, vacations, etc. You’re told you need to own a house to have a kid. You’re not even to zero by the time you’re 30, the same place prior generations were at 18.
That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.
It was a victory that the teenage pregnancy rates plummeted during the 90's in my small town high school, but when I was there there was still a real drive to discourage kids from having kids, and I internalized the idea that "having children will ruin your life" and carried that with me through my twenties.
> It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible
Let's call it out specifically - few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now and for every 1 woman who has "wants kids" in their profile, there's probably 2-3 women who say they don't want kids or "aren't sure".
And these aren't young women either, the age range is roughly 29-35, so even on the older side of optimal age for having kids.
Regardless of what men want, if so few women want to have kids - fertility will drop like a rock.
I am on the apps too and have my range set to 29-38. About 80% of the women I'm seeing have selected as "wants kids". I don't want kids and I can barely find any women to match with who also don't want kids...
I think we both have anecdotes though and unless we have data from the entire company, we can't make any real accurate claim here.
At 29-35, aren't >70% of women already in relationships?
Presumably, the majority of ones that want kids, already have them or are in the process.
Additionally, the apps tend to attract more people in hookup culture. So even from the remaining pool, 33% could be misleading.
Also, whether or not you're in a city / high-cost-of-living area makes a difference. That's less than 50% of the total population (in the US at least).
33% for that age group honestly seems high to me. I'd assume it would be lower.
That’s also my experience. Specially for women in and my wives close environment.
90% or more wanted to have kids. But the ones that started after 35+ or didn’t have a partner until that age did struggle a lot, and many never managed even after investing 10a of thousands of euros on fertility care.
They prioritized lifestyle and career before family. Then it was too late to have both.
There might be many metrics to measure fulfillment in life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably stick with love. And nothing fills my love cup more than having a large family. YMMV.
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
In Québec we have pretty extensive parental leave and we have heavily subsidized daycare (used to be 7$ a day per kid, now it's means-tested but you still get a hefty refund on your healthcare expenses come tax season).
When the program was put into place it paid for itself with the amount of mothers that entered the workforce.
I was raised by a single father, but thanks for derailing the conversation with your assumption that I'm a sexist because I didn't account for the edge case in parenting.
In most countries it's 80% if your household salary is such to support it + household expenses, and approaching 0% if it's not.
And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.
But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.
Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.
In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
The poor have nothing to lose. It's the same around the world today, poor countries have high fertility. The OECD middle class has low fertility because they're worrying about other stuff (lost wages, career stagnation, etc). The rich (high fertility) have plenty of money for private schools, nannies, housekeepers, extracurriculars, etc for 14+ kids (Musk).
It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice,
from what I have tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference.
Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...
All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.
'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.
I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.
But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
Are people who want to have kids really struggling to have them though? Keep in mind that fertility rate is not actually about fertility (not directly at least). It's a measure of the kids being had rather than a measure of the capability that the name would lead people to think.
Exactly. So since we observe that actual birth rates among women in their 30s displays a different trend than that of women in their 20s, despite decreased natural fertility, there has to be more going on.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
Thanks to inequality, the rich[1] can already afford surrogacy, aka other people's natural wombs.
Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect.
Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
> believe that their children will have good lives
Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she?
I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5.
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards.
Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing.
Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering.
If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need.
Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life.
Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
[..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this.
Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
The simple fact is that values are partially heritable, and if you believe your values to be superior (you should!) then having children and encouraging people who share those values to have children is a good way to propagate those values. This works for ~any set of values.
I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> having men who'd make women comfortable having kids
This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.
At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable:
> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.
> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.
> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the
problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public
picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the
land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his
amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they
continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.
> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in
driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his
physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area,
he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot
them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.
> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had
suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family
on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the
documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.
> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”
> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never
be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went
through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly
misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.
I understand the majority of the story, and through some personal experience really feel for women who have a controlling and abusive man. I find the story a bit strange though. It begins describing how boys inherit the idea of some beautiful woman that they are owed instead of it being something that requires constant work and effort. I agree/understand this part. But then it describes him trying to limit public access, how he has no document showing ownership, etc and this is where I get lost. To me that is what marriage is, giving up freedom for a partnership. To turn my husband self into a park, I feel like it is completely understandable my wife wants some space that is "public" and other that is "private". The key is healthy boundaries, ones set by compromise and understanding through honest communication. That's what separates healthy and abusive relationships, not the boundaries in the first place.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and if I am let me know, I just feel like it describes the ideal situation as one's partner entirety is open to the "public", and where setting boundaries itself is abusive, which I feel like is not really how most people feel nor what they want in a relationship.
I'm not the author, of course, so I can't say for certain that I have the most correct reading of it. But, if I'm reading your interpretation right, here's what I'd say:
The story analogizing women to land -- which has no voice, no agency, no mind -- is the critical part. If one is consensually "limiting public access" with another sentient human being, that's wonderful -- because you'd be doing that in dialogue, in true partnership, on the same footing, etc. "Hey, we're in a marriage now, that means we agree to not sleep with other people. Deal? Deal." I think the author (and certainly I) would heartily endorse that sort of "wanting some space that is public and some that is private".
The key word in your comment, to me, was "healthy" -- as in "healthy boundaries," and honest communication etc. You're right, it's not boundaries as such that describes abuse or even the entitlement on which abuse rests. It's the kind of boundaries.
What Bancroft is saying in the parable is that, if men see women as pieces of land -- private land, at that -- that they have a god-given right to, then anything healthy between men and women is by definition impossible. That's why, in the parable, the boy's compromises and concessions are in fact no such thing: because they're still founded on inhuman premises.
There are aspects of the parable here that the book goes into a lot more detail on -- male jealousy, in particular -- that overlap a lot with what you and me are talking about. I urge you to read it! The boy limiting public access on these entitled premises is what a lot of men will do, on either side of the "abuse" line: losing their shit when their attractive girlfriend, who they chose in part because of her attractiveness, goes out in public looking attractive, and he sees other people (other men) looking at her. Maybe next time he tells her "you're not wearing that outfit", thus "limiting public access" but not in the healthy sense that you mean it, because she's not treated as sentient, she's not part of a conversation. She's just coerced. (This is excused or minimized as "culture" or "values" by many!)
But again, if I'm reading you right, I think the part where you got lost is just that. Ironically, it's probably because you have a pretty healthy view of relationships that just how fucked up the boy in the story is confused you!
Yeah that helps it make more sense. I was reading it as Bancroft comparing woman to land, instead of it being Bancroft showing there are men who treat women as land. I'll definitely give the book a read.
1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.
3. As a result, there are fewer babies.
OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
i think those stats show the opposite. They had higher fertility rate when things were worse, but women mostly didnt have a choice. Now they're better but still bad, and women do have a choice - so they are choosing not to, judging by the collapsed birth rate.
As you say, a lot of the reasons people give are flippant and superficial. The most common claim I've seen is that everything is too expensive, but this is untrue. For some time, we have been richer than we've ever been in history, on the whole, and yet we witness decline. And all of the money-oriented incentives gov'ts have deployed have also petty much failed.
The problem is composed of multiple factors. However, I would say that there is a unifying element, a master key, that explains all of these elements, and that is consumerism. I mean "consumerism" as an ethos and as a matter of culture.
1. People are creatures of convention. Very few people operate or live life outside of the conventions of their times and of their culture. Culture creates the grain of life most people will follow, for better or for worse. In general, people are terrified of swimming upstream or going against the grain.
2. Subjectively speaking, culture determines conventions, sensibilities, patterns of life, purposes and goals pursued, and what is valued. Culture, whether explicitly or implicitly, imbues people with a sense of how life ought to be lived and where energies ought to be spent. It shapes attitudes toward the facts of life.
3. Inevitably, culture is institutionalized in law. As law is a teacher, culture is partly perpetuated through law.
4. Culture is also replicated and reinforced through media and education. It is usually insinuated.
5. Consumerism construes human nature and human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The obvious case is economic consumption. We believe buying things will make us whole. We believe money is the root of happiness. The life is the market and the market is life. Everything is for sale, for the right price.
6. This already creates an opposition. If consumption makes us whole, then children are antithetical to wholeness. After all, children are consumers! They are competitors. Given the choice between a new luxury car and another child, many couples would choose the car. People routinely make this calculation. They will limit their brood, because children eat into budgets and into time that could otherwise be spent on luxury items and vacations on tropical islands (mutatis mutandis).
7. If consumption makes us whole, then everything else that might be desired is recast as a matter of consumption as well. Even human relationships are reconsidered in consumerist terms. Sexual relationships become consumerist and transactional. Sex itself becomes commoditized, and becomes an instrument of the market. Beauty is desecrated and exploited to push products and services. A functional prostitution and an exploitative stance invade and pollute relations between the sexes, rendering them totally dysfunctional.
8. Contraception enters the picture. Contraception is the paradigmatic expression and cornerstone of all sexual consumerism. It is the incarnation of sterility and physical manifestation of a "NO" to life. It is a manifest contradiction of the essential and core function of sexual intercourse, which is procreative (the other end, the unitive, presupposes the procreative purpose, and so the denial of the procreative is a denial of the unitive). Its acceptance and normalization dethrones the procreative and elevates the pleasurable in its place. Thus, sex is no longer pleasurable. Sex is now for pleasure. The paradox, of course, is that doing this destroys the pleasure of sex, producing a pathological hunt for pleasure that is increasingly bizarre.
9, By denying the procreative, we undermine the significance of the deep complementarity of the sexes. This destroys sexual normativity and opens the door to a consuming and obsessive pursuit of an increasingly unhinged and dizzying array of erotic perversion. Children again become opposition. A child is a wet blanket thrown on the hot fire of deviant eroticism. This way enters abortion as a solution, and the pursuit of intrinsically sterile sexual gratification.
9. Consumerism propels careerism. The career is underpinned by the presupposition that you will need money to consume. A career is your path to making more money so that you can be more happy. Universities are reconfigured away from fuddy-duddy old school liberal arts education to job training centers. Woman are now taught that to be a fulfilled woman is to seek a career. Marriage and childbearing are postponed, not only to attend university, but to spend one's most fertile years shoring up one's careers after graduation. One must justify that expensive education (expensive in time and money). Careerism sacrifices the family for the mirage of consumerism.
10. Now, human life is also commoditized. When women do come around to wanting children, whether for good or bad reasons, they often discover that they are too old, having made a sacrificial offering of their fertility to their corporate god. But we believe we are entitled to children. We believe we are entitled to other human beings as instruments of our fulfillment. So we pursue fertility treatments like IVF. IVF is consumerism on steroids.
12. Consumerism reshapes social practices and life patterns. It created friction and impediments that make having children more difficult, because the assumptions that underpin it maintain that you won't have children, at least not until later. The implicit support, the social and economic architecture of the world and its operations and customs, become hostile to family life. Bad habits, like living beyond one's means, are fed. We demand a standard of living we cannot afford, and view children as hostile elements that rob us of our birthright.
13. A culture must justify itself. Thus, each failed generation rationalizes its bad decisions to soothe its own collective ego by re-presenting its failures as normative to the next.
The solution really is simple: women ought to marry in their mid-20s on average and start having children immediately. The obstacles are cultural and habitual. Our culture creates friction and our cultural programming causes us to deviate from the successful pattern. Instead of ordering the patterns of human life around human nature and human development, we strap human beings into a Procrustean culture, torturing and deforming them to suit weird and arbitrary standards. Instead of conforming our desires to reality, we deform reality in an attempt to conform it to our desires.
Everyone in this thread saying otherwise is wrong, the problem is low testosterone, simple as; there's obviously other factors causing actual health-related low fertility, but as for the lack of having children it's simply low testosterone.
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Every morning I get to my son's school about 10 minutes before the doors open. We arrive by bike and we sit ALONE on the benches near the front door.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
> Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars
Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.
A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.
It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
I am friends with a lot of other parents already. I do go out of my way to make friends. I already organize bike trips to the museum and stuff like that. I'm a very social person.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of forces keeping people solitary and anti-social. This is just one of them. I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choose to isolate themselves. Sometimes the kids in these cars are literally yelling out the window to my son because they're friends. I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Sure, school drop off is just one small aspect of life. But because of drop-off culture, there are certain people who I may NEVER have a chance to interact with. Imagine if those parents instead walked with their kid. Maybe I would make a new friend. Maybe we'd have a nice conversation.
Last year there was another woman and her son waiting with me. They walked to school every day. We became friends just through school drop off in the morning. It brought some happiness into my life and made me feel a sense of community. She could have chosen to get in her car and wait in the long line of SUVs like everyone else, but luckily she didn't.
By essentially saying "stop caring about school drop off and look for other opportunities" it feels like you're missing my point: building community means showing up in lots of different ways, and consistently. The school drop-off example is just one example of many. A woman who lived on my street since the 80s said that back then nearly everybody walked to school. By switching to a car-based morning drop-off feels to me like we've lost something, even if it's just a small thing
> I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars.
social-interaction problems aside, why are the cars idling? seems like the school/city would have an ordinance prohibiting that
> I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Yes, I'm sure there's absolutely nothing you're doing to engender the general atmosphere of distrust...
Anecdotally my experience is dramatically different.
Last week I arrived by car right near the beginning of dropoff time. Pulling in right in front of me was the mom of one of my kid's classmates, carpooling with another kid who lives in the same apartment complex. The three of them met up as soon as they got out of the car, and then another one of their friends (who lives across the street from the school and usually walks) joined them from his driveway. They met up with a 5th friend before they crossed the street.
Then I walked - well, more like ran - with the 5 of them down the 111 steps that take us from the street level to the schoolyard. When they reached the bottom, they met up with 3 more friends who had just been let out of the drop-off zone in front of the school itself. Said a quick goodbye to my kid, but he wasn't really paying attention, he was already ensconced in his pack of 8.
I've gotten there with my kid before drop-off time, walked down the stairs with him, and there's been a pack of about 20-30 kids and 2-3 parents usually milling around before the school gates open.
I realize that this is somewhat atypical in 21st-century America, and we specifically chose this community because, well, it actually has a sense of community, but it's not unique. In preschool I'd take my son over to his preschool bestie's house (she lived about 2 cities away), and there'd be a whole pack of kids roaming the neighborhood going over unannounced to each other's houses.
I think it is crazy that you have gates to get into the school grounds (buildings should be locked, I get that). Like my BIL in Sydney suburbs, he lives right next to a school with super nice basketball court etc, but can kids use those on weekends? Sadly no.
The gates here are open when school is not in session, and we (and other families) do in fact use the school grounds for playdates on weekends.
But yes, it sucks that they have to exist, and that my kids have active shooter drills and the school has a plan for what to do in a mass-casualty event. Though so far, every time they've triggered the secure campus protocols, it's because a baby coyote likes to hang out on the stairs.
The community in question was put on our radar screen when we attended a party that one of my wife's business school friends threw. It's not well-known; even in our metro area, most people probably wouldn't recognize the name or be able to place it on a map.
But then when we were house-hunting, I just drove through all the residential neighborhoods within commuting distance of our jobs. And took note of where I saw people a.) out walking and b.) talking to their neighbors. Reported to my wife (who thought this was a nutty waste of time, but really values community) "I think you'll like it here", then paid the exorbitant home value to actually buy a home in the area. Indeed, we did like it here.
If the medium is the message, the SUV communicates that there is only space for the nuclear family members, speed and comfort is of the essence, and the road is the only acceptable avenue for transportation. The sidewalks are for homeless people, jogging athletes, and eccentrics.
Oh good grief, parents with SUVs aren't that complex, and they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well (negating your first point).
People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids. If you want to translate that as "speed and comfort is of the essence", then fine. I could say the same about someone with no kids who prefers living in a highly urbanized area because their definition of speed and comfort is different.
And virtually no one is thinking "I need to demonstrate my belief that traveling on foot is only for weirdos OR exercising" when purchasing a vehicle, both because not many (to be generous) people think that in an area with sidewalks and because it's just not relevant.
> they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well
but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
> People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids
It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
> but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
My kids can (and do) walk around our neighborhood. You chose to live somewhere that didn't support that and lament it, for reasons that are not clear to me.
We also drive our SUV when the number of passengers exceeds 5, which is not uncommon at all in our household. Occasionally, we drive it solo or with less than 5 passengers, because it makes sense to do so.
> Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
Large vehicles are "dystopia"? There are plenty cruising around my town yet a kid has literally never been hit in the 20 years I've lived there.
And kids walk to school alone or in small groups on the sidewalks, with crossing guards protecting them at intersections.
> I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
Okay. Are these cars all from the 1970s, before any modern emission standards were enacted?
> It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
Good for you. I have zero interest in spending an hour plus biking my kids to and from the grocery store, so we just drive and then play in our yard when we get back. Or we just walk if we have the time and interest.
> I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
Sounds great. We have these too, without the irrational fear of cars included.
> I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
"Need" is a relative term. I don't "need" indoor plumbing to survive, yet it's nice to have and most people would consider it a need (including my wife and kids).
I see no reason to reduce my standard of living by basically taking up cycling as an unpaid part time job. If you enjoy it or just feel like it's time well spent, again, good for you.
> Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
Again, using "dystopian" to describe a place that is car dependent is a pretty fringe view. It's not surprising that not many people agree.
>Oh good grief, parents with SUVs aren't that complex, and they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well (negating your first point).
If the goal was to carry more people, a minivan would have been bought, as they are more spacious and comfortable.
An SUV's goal is to use up more space and have the passengers sit higher up, to project more "power" or "status".
Nothing like a thread on vehicle preferences to rouse the extremely vocal and judgmental fuckcars crowd on here.
You may be shocked to hear this, but not all SUVs are less spacious than minivans and comfort is very subjective.
You have to define SUV to determine its goals. Most "SUVs" are basically cars that are slightly lifted and extended. The ones I assume you take most issue with are significantly larger than minivans, have 4WD (which is actually useful where I live), and also are seen as more luxurious.
I would say the primary goal, especially for parents, is occupant safety, which does come at the cost of the safety of others. Good luck convincing anyone to change with your attacks though.
Yes, we can be critical of ourselves. I guess your description of SUV-drivers looking at pedestrians with disdain and buying a car with room for more passengers to intentionally exclude potential passengers is an accurate reflection of your own opinion?
As I said, I don't believe those are very widely held and they certainly don't reflect my thoughts, so my criticisms would be quite different.
The majority of the SUVs I see driving have exactly 1 person in them. It's ok to admit that.
We can also look at the facts, which do imply a more recent disregard (if not disdain) for pedestrians:
> Drivers hit and killed 3,304 people walking in the United States in the first half of 2024, down 2.6% from the year before but a staggering 48% above a decade ago, according to a new analysis from GHSA. [0]
> The majority of the SUVs I see driving have exactly 1 person in them. It's ok to admit that.
I don't need to "admit" that, because I agree it's true.
In your rush to prove a point, you completely missed mine, which was: At least 99% of families buying SUVs to transport kids around instead of a car or minivan (which is why single occupant use didn't come up, as it wasn't really relevant) aren't intentionally firing a shot in an ideological war, they're just picking a car that works for them, they can afford, and they like.
Obviously a lot of that is subjective and has been shaped by regulation, marketing, and an interest in conformity with peers, but what will definitely not change anyone's mind is endless hostility over what is a generally benign decision.
You seem to have completely dismissed the factual data I provided that vehicle deaths of pedestrians have increased 48% in the past 10 years. This certainly implies that something has changed in how Americans drive and interact with pedestrians. It also perfectly correlates with a time period where SUVs went from 30% to 60% of vehicles on the road.
There is research on how car cost (with SUVs being the most expensive vehicle type) impacts driver yielding behavior [0]. There is also research on how being in a car changes your perspective of pedestrians and others not in the car [1][2][3].
Yea, it sure seems like we are talking about different things. I've re-read the exchange and can't find the disconnect or where the hostility came from. Maybe you thought I was another poster from a different exchange?
You clearly stated your opinion that "SUV-drivers looking at pedestrians with disdain" isn't widely held. I then provided actual data and studies that disagrees with that opinion. I'm not sure why that was so upsetting.
The data you provided isn't upsetting, other than it's sad that people are being needlessly killed.
Interacting with insufferable transit "enthusiasts" is exhausting though, especially when they jump into discussions without reading the entire thread (as you did here apparently).
You and your peers seem incapable of doing anything other than attacking, insulting, and looking down upon anyone who isn't as "enlightened" as you, making you zealots, which is why I want absolutely nothing to do with any of you even if I agree with many of your positions.
If you all ever figure out that the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know. I won't be holding my breath.
> the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know.
Is an eye-opening comment from a person who called me "insufferable", "incapable of doing anything other than attacking", and a "zealot" just in this one comment. Further up thread are plenty of other insults you have lobbed at anyone who dares to challenge you. All while continuing to claim that everyone else is attacking, insulting, and looking down at you.
This conversation is over, you can project on someone else.
This conversation was over before it started, because you saw a need to interject (without reading everything that was written beforehand) with a challenge to get me to "admit" to something (that I already agree with by the way because it is a fact) and I'm not going to participate.
You're the one who chose hostility, and of course you fall back on a display of offense when you get it back in kind.
I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).
Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.
We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.
This is exactly how it was for me and my family when we lived in Wisconsin. We live in Germany now. Everyone walks to school or bikes - there is community.
I'm not a parent but where I live in Portland a big trend has been bike buses. A couple of parents ride with a group of kids to school, I see them often. That time before class started was always an awesome time where we'd talk about video games and trading cards and stuff, I'd be really disappointed not to see that.
The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society.
Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness.
So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.
> It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, because they need to put kids to sleep. So, they have to try much harder to have any social contact.
I wonder if what you describe is a consequence of suburbia. In any sort of proper town, there's quick and easy access to parks where you encounter people on the walk to the park, which gives a great sense of community. When you have to pack up the kids in a car you are isolated from community, except through the negative community of bad driving.
The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Suburbia is the easiest place to take the kids and go find things to do on a walk.
> The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Same. As long as you don’t literally stay at home, being a parent with kids is such an easy way to meet more people.
That is not my experience with California suburbia in any way, it is extremely desolate and lonely compared to any proper town or city I have encountered. But I'm very glad that others are having better experiences!
The comment you're responding to is about a decline in social institutions in general. As someone from a tiny town, when I was growing up, stay at home moms were always outside and talking all day. They'd watch over kids together as well. The loneliness aspect of parenthood is a modern invention.
YMMV. Plenty of groups out there to meet other parents and become friends with. I know several people who had kids and were SAHP and made lots of friends this way. Mind you, as the kids got older everyone moves around so friendships might not always last but it’s very possible. And you have a very obvious thing to bond over - being a parent.
I work at faang and have no friends from that. I’m surrounded by thousands of people every day I’m at work. Everyone is there to work - not be social or hangout or be friends. People show up to social events to grab food and take it back to their desk.
I had a period of behind effectively a stay at home dad and I disagree with this completely.
Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.
It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
Stay at home parenting doesn't literally mean physically staying in the house. There's far more opportunities for socialization for those not burdened by work, kids are portable, they like doing stuff, and there's really not ALL that much to taking care of them.
> But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely
So...don't do that? Let the parent who works in the office come home and spend time with the kid, and go out for drinks (or hiking or the gym or whatever) with other friends. Do all the chores beforehand during the day, so that the working parent only has kid duty.
If both are working, both have chores and kid duty after work.
I imagine this is due to the decline of local civic life. When you're a stay at home parent, and you are a part of some voluntary association, a church, PTA-type organizations, and the neighborhood is filled with other stay at home parents that you can organize play dates with (or hang out with while the kids are at school), life is less lonely.
This is why "Moms clubs" are a thing. I get that safe spaces are wanted, especially if the mothers needed to nurse, but dads were unwelcome in the chapter near me.
I mean church people love to think of this as a decline of society but this is more about the destruction of the church itself as an out of date institution that was using itself as a control mechanism and that broke the moment we discovered the world wasn't made on hocus pocus.
The thing is the essence of the church could still maintain a huge amount of social control because people need to socialize.
I agree and am very anti-religion across the board. That being said, it certainly had and has a place in modern society. As a form of third space community and as a mechanism by which to provide social pushback where the law is lacking or lagging.
> There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others.
My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.
Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
This is absolutely not our experience, but we've been intentional about joining communities / activities that involve lots of in-person time together. Church is a huge one (especially joining small groups / service groups), but we also do 4H (they have them in urban areas too!), and my wife started an educational co-op with cool field trips, and we organize neighborhood events like caroling at retirement homes, a pre trick or treating party, and a New Year's party for kids.
Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.
Same boat, with 4 kids between church and co-op we barely have enough time for the amount of friends we have. Finding a good church might be a challenge for people but it’s worth the time and research, we just moved to be closer to a good one.
this really depends on where you live. i’m in an extremely safe family oriented suburb, there’s lot of community, kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids.
I'd say (and this is painful for many) that it really depends on who you are and how you act - if you're outgoing, or force yourself to pretend to be, and you talk, and you listen, and you don't immediately judge people (by whatever metric you come up with) - you can build community anywhere
Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.
Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.
The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
It was a lot easier to get along with people who voted differently when it was about differences in fiscal policy and taxation.
It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
> kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids
Don't have kids myself, but this aspect seems incredibly obvious just reflecting on my childhood in suburbs of Chicago through the 80s-90s.
But the causes for what's keeping the kids indoors now instead of literally running the neighborhood are manifold. In the 80s there were far fewer indoor forms of entertainment to occupy the kids without driving mom batshit insane and making a mess of the place. Now the kids have tablets and gaming consoles, the outdoors is such a scary place when it's not full of gangs of children who know all the backyards better than the parents ostensibly owning them.
It's all rather depressing and the longer I live the more convinced I am that not adding my own kids to this state of affairs was the right move.
If I'm being honest, this is the same as other times I've encountered people talk about community. I've noticed that a lot of people talk about this in a very "other people are like this" sense. I have noticed the opposite. Other people are not like this. In fact, the normies are out there living normie life in a way that is perfectly community oriented and not at all problematic.
I think the explanation for lack of children is much simpler, but one that most cannot really admit: there is an opportunity cost to having children. An entire class of lifestyle will no longer be available to you realistically. Children are not expensive for the value they provide, but there are things you cannot spend a large amount of your time on.
My experience having kids is that we walk around with our baby and people love her. Random people will look over and say "oh my goodness, what a cute baby"[0], people will hold doors for us, airlines let us transport car seats for free and discount a seat for the child. In fact, I'd say the actual reason for a lot of things is more structural.
e.g. home regulations like double-staircases, or height restrictions, and so on constrain the form factors of homes that can be built; car regulations and market demand in a few-child world emphasize form factors that constrain family size; things like that.
Besides there is a great deal of social contagion in this subject. A friend of my wife's texted her saying (paraphrased) "to be honest, after seeing how cute your baby is I changed my mind on wanting kids"[0].
0: And as the father, I definitely think my baby is exceptionally cute, but in reality this is likely everyone else's experience.
> being out for the group instead of just yourself
This is so far removed from present day US. A large portion of the country enthusiastically/fanatically/religiously supports someone who thinks exclusively of himself.
I’m a father of 4 and I’m overloaded with community, have you tried finding a good church? That’s where people have found community for thousands of years.
We lived in one of those American planned communities shaped like a kidney. Our kid went to primary school just outside the HOA gates. He had been cutting through the bushes of our neighbor to get to school because it was faster than walking the 2.5 miles through the kidney shaped neighborhood. The one day the neighbor yelled at him and chased him all the way home. We started driving him to school after that and eventually left the neighborhood entirely.
I think we understatement just how hostile western society is to children these days. It's the small things, like an unwalkable and unbikeable neighborhoods, flights that force you to pay more to sit together, and the endless liability waivers.
Yeah I think the meritocracy pushed by America is at least in part responsible for this. Social validation for being a high-performing employee is much greater, than for being a member of the community.
There are plenty of volunteers at community events in my area that have prestigious jobs, and the strivers working to maximize opportunities for themselves actually seek these out as another opportunity for accolades and networking.
You just need to find people who actually have an interest in their community. You know who those people often are? Parents. I suspect the decline in birth rates, especially in urban areas, amplifies this in both directions.
I think the fear narrative in America is just completely out of whack. Besides gun shooting and ICE, there are no real threats.
The politicians have made it seem like there is a lot of there is so much threat but realistically normal people just exist. Stop filling for fox news and maga hate messaging.
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
Children are pensions, that's why poorer nations have lots of children because lots are needed to look after people in their old age. Thus, many of these comments on HN and elsewhere, "make the nation better", only have led -- and will lead -- to fewer children.
When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any.
But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity etc. are the barrier --- this isnt some "indictment of our culture" -- a sentiment no better than "we're being punished by god"-thinking which turns every weather event into a didactic lesson on people's pet peeves.
You're implying that people incapable of planning next Thursday are thinking about their pensions. Poor countries reproduce a lot because they still have a lot of people functioning on the level of biological impulses rather than rational thought.
That...may be pushing it a lot. People in poorer countries are just as capable of rational thought as anyone else. The difference is in the education they've received, the resources they have access to, and the rights individuals have. Mentally, there's little difference - minus effects of things like malnutrition in severe cases.
I grew up in the rural South (America's Third World) (N. GA) in the late 80s / early 90s and tons of children were born out of wedlock because kids were bored and fooling around. Bored, horny kids like to have sex. Now there are so many way to occupy yourself digitally that I think these is happening less. It's not that poorer areas are dumber, it's that they had less access to entertainment and sex is free.
Everyone is talking about it like a problem that need correcting. Why? Less people seems like it could be better for everyone and everything already here, assuming "great social systems" are in place.
If there's no force that pushes it towards stabilization - then the eventual conclusion is extinction. And so far, it definitely seems like it doesn't trend towards equilibrium. People aren't like animals that reproduce based on availability of resources or predators. If the population drops, nothing forces it back up again.
And lower birth rate -> smaller young population -> higher ratio of retirees to taxpayers -> less free money to invest in new businesses/infrastructure/etc. That means a worse quality of life for everyone. Worse pay, higher taxes, less city/state/federal investment.
That's called a death spiral and eventually ends a civilization, if it goes uncorrected. There's no fancy monetary trickery that magically fixes it either. The only real hope is alleviating the burden completely - via something like incredibly advanced robots powered by real AI (not LLM garbage).
That would free up the resources to allow each new generation to do new things, instead of being less and less able to just maintain status quo.
I think it's that assumption is the problem. Most social systems are predicated on having enough net contributors to provide for net recipients, but with a declining population the ratio of contributors/recipients can get small. There may be solutions to this, but current social systems will likely fail if left unchanged. That doesn't mean the only solution is population growth, but we do need to do something
Yes, exactly. I think the real reason why we don't see aliens is that once the population reaches certain level of intelligence and awareness, it takes only one generation thinking "this is not worth it" to cause dramatic population collapse which might wipe out entire species. And the thing is, "life isn't worth it" might actually be true, as much as evolution does everything to convince us otherwise.
But now that I think of it, there might be solutions. The problem is, they're incompatible with individualism. Imagine passing a law that everyone is obliged to take care of a child. Sure, this would cause issues, but would instantly solve the population crisis. The problem is, such a law will never be passed in a democratic society, because everyone votes according to what they believe is their own best interest, not the best interest of the group. But an absolute regime could potentially do this.
Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
Following your argument, another solution would be simply to enact measures to revert that "certain level of intelligence and awareness", and it seems that some countries are doing just that, if not exactly for the sake of reproduction :-) . So there's hope for population growth I guess?
> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
What you're proposing is awfully dystopian. If people don't want kids anymore, then let them not have kids. Society should adapt to the will of its members, not the other way around. And with all our technology we can live very decent lives even with declining birthrates. Maybe we'll have to do with less travel, less cheap garbage and so, but I'm fine with that.
"People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that."
I am 45. I have fairly big* chance of making the global population curve actually drop!
No, they don't. That's the UN prediction, because they assume that somehow, magically, all countries below replacement will simultaneously, near-instantly increase in fertility rate by huge amounts over the next couple of years. Look at the graphs, they're nonsensical.
If you look at the actual trends of those rates, peak population is ~2050, maybe sooner.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
Many of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.
The goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring. It's all a distraction and there are enough hateful Americans for it to work for now.
It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.
If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.
We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.
> No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. ... They are simply worse people...
You should apply to the DNC to help with their messaging efforts, clearly they're missing an important voice!
There's like what, 15 to 20% of americans actively trying to trigger rapture? You've got a lot of religious nuts in your country, and they really are bad people.
Clearly you also learned the messaging principles so clearly demonstrated in the great Basket of Deplorables debacle of 2016. Maybe you can be GGP's deputy.
Anyway, do you have a source for that? My understanding of American evangelical protestant theology is that they don't view rapture as triggerable in nature. Not being one, I can't state that confidently, so I'd love to see your source for your stats, and understand your definition of what it is they feel they can do to trigger rapture.
It doesn’t even matter anymore, being anything less than a full citizen puts you at risk. In my community, we have a bunch of Nepalese people whose TPS is going to expire and they are going to be deported. Not far away is Springfield, where a community of Haitians, who are mostly liked by the people in their community, and who even the Republican governor is asking the administration not to deport, have seen their TPS expire.
There are a lot of non-criminals who are here legally, but still very concerned about their future. If I were one of the Haitians in Springfield, I would be looking for another country to take me in.
Every one of them are legal permanent residents who don't feel welcome here anymore. Some are afraid they're one mistaken identity away from ending up black bagged and sent to El Salvador.
We're now heading in the same direction -- will take more time than I would like to work it out, for various reasons, but this is no longer a country where I want to raise my kids (despite us being citizens and having the "right" color skin), and as much as I want to be hopeful for change it's really hard to see the damage being undone any time soon.
I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.
I guess you don't live in Minneapolis, or another targeted metro area. It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in a city where 3000 masked and poorly trained people cos-playing special forces are specifically tasked with arresting as many people as they can and told that they have full immunity.
you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.
you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).
It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
For me, it's not just that -- I don't live in Minneapolis -- but it's the sinking realization that half the country literally voted for this and is either ok or indifferent, so long as we are maintaining our "true (WASP) American culture". Call me naive, but it has come as a pretty big shock to me that Trump has exposed just how rotten a good fraction of Americans are -- and that's before even getting into the removal of climate change action (something I care very deeply about because it concerns my children's future), cuts to science, healthcare and higher education, foreign policy (admittedly, the US has always been a bully, but it's even worse now), clear attempts to rig the upcoming elections, etc. etc.
Don't be ridiculous, talking about "partisan fear". They have taken away documented, American citizens without due process.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
It’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.)
Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
> They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
That is taken away.
Someone in my network - a US citizen - was detained, taken to a city 3 hours away, and held for 10 days before being released. Was quite a while before her family knew where she was.
If you're an American who is visibly Hispanic, it's not at all hysterical. If you're in one of those cities, you do have to worry whether you'll return home when you leave your house.
> you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning
I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accordingly.
Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you. The likelihood of feds accidentally executing you in your hometown is on the rise, and we don't know when it will stop climbing.
Do you really think you have a holographic sign floating above you that tells them you are a citizen? How are you sure you are above suspicion to be an undocumented immigrant? Could you prove you aren't if some goons decided to pick you off the street right now or next time you go for a walk?
All this is about expanding the reach and normalizing abuse of the power of law enforcement, just like back then after 9/11.
It's like Germany in the 1930s again when Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their clothes, but the other way round.
If one can't even aspire to use a small portion of their dual tech sector incomes to illegally underpay someone to ensure they must sacrifice neither sleep nor income in the raising of their own children, well, then, the American dream is well and truly dead for all.
These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.
My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.
I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
I just read both articles and I think his summary is accurate enough to stand behind his claim that putting off having children (if you want them) because of a theoretical situation qualified as 'hysterical' (assuming everyone in your household is authorized). I don't think he was replying in bad faith, even if you two disagree.
People who are hysterical never think (and will not accept) that they are. They think their response is rational and everyone else it’s ignorant or stupid or evil. It’s the exact same as what goes on on the other side when people talk about how Dems want “trans for everyone”.
It’s an irrational, emotional response so it can’t be fought with logic. It seems 100% obvious to them since ICE is doing so much bad stuff (which I agree, they are) that anyone who doesn’t think it’s quite at Gestapo levels is crazy.
I don’t usually engage because what they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it, and even if I did I would assume you can’t bell a stranger in the HN comment section.
I was not replying in bad faith, I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it in here often. I’m sure if I read /r/kidrock I’d see it there too.
I also have just read both articles and think the opposite: We've got accountability-free, armed, masked, criminal thugs acting with impunity:
- Taking face scans of peaceful protestors and retaliating against them later;
- Racially profiling citizens and harassing them if they have the "wrong" skin color -- including local cops!
- Visiting the homes of citizens who have civilly and legally criticized ICE behavior online, to intimidate them;
- Invading homes without warrants and destroying evidence of their crimes (jamming wifi, covering up cameras, arresting and deporting witnesses, etc).
- Arresting people who came here legally, are here legally, and have not committed a crime in their lives, then unilaterally revoking their prior legal authorization and rapidly deporting them and their whole family;
- Raiding schools: kidnapping children and sending them off to torture prisons, while traumatizing the rest of the children (and assaulting some of the children too -- grown-ass men beating up children smh);
- Assaulting innocent, peaceful people for protesting them, whether citizen or not, whether legally here or not, including deploying chemical agents against them;
- Performing summary executions in the streets of unarmed citizens who are helping their community but do not support said masked, armed thugs;
- Etc etc etc
You'd have to be hysterical (or some other form of mentally unwell) to not let that affect your judgement of the wisdom of bringing young children into that world to be victims of it. Unfortunately, such hysterical, mentally unwell deniers never think (and will not accept) that they are. It’s an irrational, emotional dismissal, so it can’t be fought with logic. What they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it.
I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people in the minority, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it here somewhat often (roughly in proportion to the minority they represent). They just cannot process, much less accept, that most people do not agree with them, and are not hysterical and mentally unwell like them.
op had kids before the Nazis started taking over, but police were still performing routine executions, America had invaded several countries to execute their leadership, we live in a capitalist society...
All people hold inconsistent views. We are squishy meatbags.
That said, is this an example of that? Instead of declaring it so, try posing a question like "what is different about this time?" to a member of the majority you believe are holding 'inconsistent views'. You might learn that your prior assumptions were reductive, for example.
Also beyond the hysteria, you can’t post two paywalled articles and then assume bad faith on the part of any reply. My summary is based on what little I can see, though I doubt a full examination would make any sane person rethink their fertility planning.
I am with you, it is a scary time. I have to remind myself that we have gone through worst times. My grandfather grew up in a ranch, at 22, along with his extended family and friends, they took arms and joined a revolution, they overthrew a dictator. They fought on the back of a horse for years. It was a rough life, but they endured, and here I am. Enjoying a life so comfortable that would be unimaginable for them. You cannot stop moving in life because things can go wrong.
With all due respect, but this extremely biased and US-centric view. IT was not easier to have kids in 2024 or 2023, both in the EU or US. Childcare is expensive, pace of life today (and the past 20 years at least) implicitly treats kids as a liability and a detriment to career progression and financial security.
Sure, and I understand that. My point was that it was hard financially to have kids even before Trump was elected. Moreover, there are plenty of places in the US with no/little ICE activity, and it is still hard to afford kids today, a year, or three years ago.
that's an average of ~ 1 shooting every 4 school days (across ~ 120,000 schools)
that is not incredibly rare; you can try to rationalize it, but if you're a parent and your kid is going to school every day for 12 years, that's about 3000 opportunities for this rare event to happen to them
If I'm computing this correctly, that's approximately 4 * 120,000 = 1 / 480,000 chance of it happening on any given day, or a 1 / 160 chance of it happening to your child in the course of their lifetime; compare that with a 1 / 15300 chance of getting struck by lightening over your lifetime, or a 1 in 800,000,000 chance of dying in a plane crash (this is according to Gemini, I didn't research these numbers thoroughly).
And yet, look how much effort we put into airplane safety.
> existed 25 years ago too
sure, but it's so much worse: [1]
55 shootings in the '70s
80 in the '80s
157 in the '90s
121 in the '00s
260 in the '10s
312 so far in the '20s
the fact that we know this has been a problem for 50 years and instead of doing something about it, the problem is actually getting worse. All so that some grown men can play with their guns (please don't tell me that it's about 2A ability to "resist tyranny"; that hasn't been true for a very long time)
It's not shootings per child that matters, it's shootings per _school_.
I don't want my child to be traumatized by a school shooting on their school even if they themselves are not killed. That's pretty basic. If multiple people were shot and killed at your workplace, how would you feel about continuing to go there? You think that survivors of a plane crash where other people on the plane died are ready to get back on a plane the next day because "the chances of it happening again are small"?
And I don't care whether it's targeted gang violence or some other type of shooting, it's still an event where someone with a gun is on the school and kills one or more people.
What a bizarre comment. Who cares about their genetic line? Are you evolution itself? Do you have stakes in making sure your genes make it to the future?
A weird comment to make to someone who already has children, but I guess at least we can all be happy that my kids are being raised by parents that can read?
Given that I.C.E. has been allowed to stop people just for not looking white enough, and even white citizens have been shot for being "near" I.C.E. operations, I would suggest that it is not safe to assume someone is not a citizen, just because I.C.E. makes them feel unsafe in their neighborhood.
Agreed. You are not alone, all of us see what's going on, and it only takes a few bad actors that are highly motivated to cause the craziness you see on display here.
Regular, normal people are still in the majority, we just need to acknowledge each other and not let the propagandists flood the zone.
I will remove that accusation in the interests of not distracting from my main point. I don't know you and the particulars of your situation and apologize for an unsupported insinuation.
You link to an October 2025 article documenting 9 "Kavanaugh stops" to somehow claim that they don't happen?
You link to an article that is "We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days." and which has reporting inside that describes the 170 cases of ICE detaining citizens.
Note that detainment is more severe and different from the harassment of the 9 that you somehow claim refute Kavanaugh stops.
But even if the article were as you incorrectly describe it, it would be fallacious to say that because a single article doesn't describe something, it doesn't exist! That's a critical thinking and logic 101 error. And far far below the standards of HN comments.
If you read the footnotes in the article, it is apparent that somewhere between 0 and 9 of the incidents described are Kavanaugh stops. The article is trying to play up the situation in order to cater to their audience, but they have sufficient journalistic integrity to tell the truth amidst the spin.
Yes, there may be more of them, but in this particular article that was the most that they could find, and they were clearly trying to find them -- they even include 130 stops that they themselves say are of people who were obstructing or interfering with ICE operations. This is not good, but it's a pretty far cry from bystanders being harassed on the sidewalk for having an accent or the wrong skin color.
Link me a better source that describes or accounts the number of these stops and I'll update my comments and move my priors appropriately.
ICE threatens everyone, regardless of citizenship. They daily detain citizens without even bothering to ask "papers please". They menace and threaten and intimidate people just out and about in the neighborhood.
The ICE raids have little to do with immigration, they are a secret police force meant to cause terror in communities with their lawless violence. It is a politically driven attack on a state that had the audacity not to vote for Trump, nothing more.
> They menace and threaten "people just out and about in the neighborhood"? It is hard to engage in good faith when you are baldly making statements that are completely unsupported.
There are no shortage of videos showing ICE agents on roaming patrols in Minnesota -- and elsewhere -- menacing anyone they come across who appears undesirable. All you have to do is not look away.
Would you mind linking to some of the videos? You link here to an episode of This American Life featuring 911 calls.
While disturbing to listen to, without context, I don't hear anything to substantiate the claim of ICE agents menacing anyone they come across.
All the videos I've seen, [1], [2], [3], for example, from a quick check, are ICE reacting unprofessionally and with excessive force against people who are deliberately attempting to obstruct or interfere with them. Let's not play games here and say that they are menacing innocent people walking down the sidewalk. That's not to say that these assaults are justified or appropriate, but let's start the conversation in a good faith position, and not make up bullshit about ICE walking around menacing innocent bystanders.
I can't find an original source on the first one. To my eye it is ambiguous in the sense that he does appear to be taunting the officers or otherwise engaging with them. I may be mistaken here but without larger context it's hard to say. Taunting or insulting law enforcement is not a crime and does not warrant the notice of officers, much less confrontation or pursuit or detention. But what we are talking about here is whether people are in danger simply walking down the street.
There is a line where this becomes truly frightening behavior; where you have to keep your head down and avoid eye contact because they might fly off the handle for no reason, like crazy homeless people on the subway but with badges. So far I haven't seen anything approaching this.
The second one is [1] Jacelynn Guzman, age 23, who was mistakenly identified as part of a targeted immigration enforcement action. She fled the scene after agents approached her and identified themselves. A suspect who flees is likely to be chased -- this does not seem strange or off-putting to me at all. I think notable, for what its worth, is that they did not ask her father for ID or question his citizenship in any way; they were there for a targeted operation and he was not the target, so they left him alone while they attempted to verify the identity of the suspect that they were targeting.
For anybody looking on, this sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days. All that crazy stuff Europeans are seeing with JD Vance and Trump's Greenland behvaior is what everyday Americans experience on a wide range of topics.
Having somebody link to a source that directly refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is something I've experienced multiple times in the past week! It's quite shocking.
When the Trump administration went so hard on open lies that are directly contradicted by videos we all saw of ICE events, it was vice-signaling that started even greater amounts of bearing false witness. Openly lying seems to signal "in-group" status these days, like the sign in the green grocer's shop[1]. Get people to lie about the evidence they see with their eyes, and the become completely controlled, because to do so is to have total subservience to their master. No more eyes or ears except for those of their master. People that used to have values slowly abandon them, all in service to the lie that they are living. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
That is the state of the US at the moment. I have hope that we can return to our former sanity, or at least ensure that the reigns of power are in the hands of normal, centrist people instead of the extreme fringes, but it is in no way certain.
For anybody looking on, THIS sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days.
Having a source that makes a false claim as a headline but refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is extremely common in a media landscape that wants to signal their "in-group" status.
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
Real people are annoying, hard to deal with, unpredictable, dirty, smelly, all sorts of issues.
The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away.
What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone else.
They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.
That's the point - real people are annoying because you are annoying. (Not you in particular, but me, you, everyone.)
Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.
In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.
One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.
I wouldn't take what they said as an actual insult. They're saying reality is dirty and social media is making us want to live in bubbles rather than deal with it. Thinking that was is to our detriment which I understand OP agrees with.
The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.
He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.
He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.
I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.
If you look at the top companies in America currently by market share, pretty much all are selling addictions while maybe a handful actually selling tangible products.
Captain’s Log, Stardate 48492.1 We have entered orbit around Sol III-bis. Long-range scans suggested a pre-warp civilization at the peak of the Information Age. However, upon arrival, Lieutenant Uhura reports total silence across all hailing frequencies. No radio, no subspace chatter, not even leaking analog television waves. Yet, life sign readings are off the charts. It is a ghost town inhabited by eight billion ghosts.
[Surface - The Town Square]
The transporter beam hums and fades. Riker, Spock, and Counselor Troi materialize in the middle of a bustling intersection.
Riker immediately reaches for his phaser, expecting a reaction. A panic. A scream. Nothing.
A native walks straight through the space where Riker’s arm is raised, correcting their path by mere millimeters at the last second, eyes never leaving the blue glow of their palm.
"Captain," Riker taps his combadge, voice tense. "We've landed. We are... invisible."
Spock raises an eyebrow, scanning a nearby human with his tricorder. "Incorrect, Commander. We are simply irrelevant. Their optical sensors are registering our presence, but their visual cortex is filtering us out as 'non-content'. We are pop-up ads in a physical reality they have deprecated."
Suddenly, Troi gasps. She stumbles, clutching her temples. Her knees hit the pavement hard.
"Counselor!" Riker is at her side instantly.
"It’s... it’s too loud, Will," she whispers, her face pale, sweat beading instantly on her forehead. "It’s not voices. It’s not emotions. It’s... flashes."
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears leak out. "A billion images of felines. Dancing figures. Arguments without context. Tragedy mixed with absurdity. It’s a scream, Spock, but it’s a scream about nothing."
"Motion sickness of the mind," Spock observes, looking at his readings. "A precise description. You are attempting to find a focal point, Counselor, but there is none. The signal is not radiating from a central broadcast tower. It is a mesh network of pure dopamine."
He turns his tricorder to the crowd. "Fascinating. They utilize a tight-beam UHF protocol—what the archives call 'Bluetooth 17'. It ensures that no signal ever touches an unintended recipient. They have achieved perfect privacy, and in doing so, created perfect isolation."
"They could have warp drive," Riker mutters, looking at a mag-lev train passing silently overhead, filled with slumped, blue-lit figures. "Look at this infrastructure. The power efficiency alone..."
"They do not want warp drive, Commander," Spock says, closing his tricorder with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet street. No one flinches. "Space travel requires looking up. Warp drive requires a destination. This species has already arrived."
Troi looks up, her eyes bloodshot, trembling. "We have to leave, Will. Please. It’s... sticky. The thoughts... they want to be thought. They’re hungry."
Riker taps his badge. "Enterprise, three to beam up. Now! Lock on to my signal, not the ambient noise."
[The Bridge]
Back on the ship, Troi is in sickbay, sedated. Spock stands at the science station.
"Status on the planet, Mr. Spock?" Picard asks, looking at the viewscreen. The planet is beautiful, blue and green, peaceful.
"It is a tomb, Captain," Spock replies, his voice devoid of judgment but heavy with implication. "They have not been conquered. They have been optimized. They have traded the chaotic inefficiency of exploration for the streamlined certainty of simulation."
"The Great Filter," Picard murmurs.
"Indeed," Spock turns. "We often theorized that advanced civilizations destroy themselves with fire. It appears, Captain, that it is just as likely they destroy themselves with a warm bath."
Picard stares at the screen for a long moment. "Helm, engage. Warp 1. Get us away from here."
"Course, sir?"
"Anywhere," Picard says, adjusting his uniform. "Just... outward."
As much as I love this post, I have to be the one to point out that Uhura and Spock are from a different Enterprise than Picard, Riker, and Troi. Great work, though, I can practically hear Leonard Nimoy reading this dialogue.
I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.
There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could:
- get married
- buy a house after a year married
- start a family at 20
- had 1 car for the family
- had a boat
- had a motorcycle
right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
Everyone should ask themselves how much healthcare, and how high quality of healthcare, and how much defined benefit pensions old people received during prirun’s parents’ young days.
It’s 2/3rd of all federal government spend today, and doesn’t even included all the state and local government spend. There are cities and states spending double digit percentages on paying for pensions and retiree healthcare for labor that happened in the past.
You can liquidate all the equity rich people have (which will cause its price to drop precipitously and so you won’t get as much you think it will), but it won’t make a lick of a difference, because the numbers show the wealth transfer from working to non working is far, far greater than it was when prirun’s parents were young.
That is one of the reasons prirun’s dad had much more purchasing power. The president just said the country’s goal is to make sure the people who own land are prioritized over those who don’t, by keeping house prices high.
That would not have helped prirun’s dad buy a house out of high school. Everything we do is to benefit the asset owners and the old, at the expense of the young and yet to be born. And it’s happening all over the world.
We don’t want young people to have more fruits of their labor, we want the fruits of their labor to be eaten by old people to meet their expectations of quality of life because they are a bigger voting bloc.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
This is surely part of the story historically, but not recently. Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s in the US, while total fertility rate is down ~20% since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
There could be a rubber band effect, where it takes time to get a feel for things like paying for childcare. The reaction is going to come from those who are observing what's happening to the "early adopters".
The U.S. birth rate was falling from the late 19th century until after WWII, when the Baby Boom began. This historical fact generally invalidates appeals to post-WWII women’s liberation as the primary cause of falling birth rates. They were falling decades before it happened, during the exact time you are citing.
This seems like the type of argument that is possible to perform a data analysis to defend or refute. Lot of countries collect data on female participation in the workforce and birth rates. Many countries also collect data that could determine if this has an impact on the individual household level.
In my opinion, it's this, though I think it's a second-order effect. I believe that the issue isn't so much that women are working, but rather that there is a shortage of household labor. This labor pool is what was traditionally used for childcare needs. When you pair that labor shortage with (terrible) modern parenting standards, there just isn't enough time to raise kids without becoming a zombie.
Edit: To be clear, I think there are multiple contributing factors. It's just that, in my view, the time/labor shortage is the core of the issue. Everything else feeds into it in some way. The factors eventually start stacking and problems that contribute to the time issue get exacerbated by their own contributing factors.
Economics pressures, for instance. Bad housing economics means couples work maximum hours to afford daily expenses, decreasing available household labor. It also fractures extended family systems when people have to relocate for cheaper housing or better jobs, eliminating the traditional labor-pooling arrangements for childrearing. Generally poor median household economics keep parents in constant anxiety too, which then requires time to be spent on coping routines.
Social atomization has further taken away the kind of pooled childcare labor that used to absorb overflow. Media has displaced churches, bars, parks, and bowling alleys with private screen time, shrinking social circles with scarce opportunities to rebuild them. Car-based infrastructure further reduces local community interaction and subtly dehumanizes neighbors into obstacles who steal parking and slow you down. Remote work and online shopping accelerate this deterioration. The result of all of this? Parents who already don't have extended family, also don't have friends, neighbors. or community to cover childcare needs. The sort of "Hang out at the neighbor's house while I go to my book club meeting." scenario has largely gone extinct because of this.
Even if a couple does better than the average bear in these areas, and they have options, ambient paranoia bottlenecks their outsourcing of childcare anyway. Our media environment has normalized constant fear. Fear that every blade of grass conceals a potential predator, so every adult is regarded as a serious risk to your kid(s). This compounds further because it's gotten to the point where children (and teenagers) can't play outside or otherwise exist independently without supervision. This increases the time parents must spend on daily childcare needs. So not only can they not decrease the time spent, but they now have to spend even more because of it.
On top of all of this, the fraying social fabric creates an effect similar to cellular breakdown. Where those who become disconnected from the larger biological system stop acting for the collective benefit and further prioritize the self, becoming cancerous. This leads to growing numbers of extremist, anti-social individuals with poor mental health. Individuals who both compound the scarcity and isolation of parents, and justify their media-sourced fear of other adults. This is an example of the contributing factors to the contributing factors.
While I think I see myself in the chart, I am not exactly sure what it says, especially the "Controlling for children under 5" and the time.
This seems like a good place for a study using matched subjects. Do 23 year olds of a certain generation spend more time with 7 year old children than another generation? Etc., etc., then you can calculate the baseline and excess for each generation
I would guess it's a lot more to do with globalism and the increasing ability for work to be done remotely (offshore). The US actively encourages American companies using foreign labor, which I have no moral qualms with, but it does make the value of American labor plummet when we're competing with groups of people that will do similar work for 1/10th the price or less.
Honest question: why are we so afraid of population decline? For people on the left, it means less consumption, less environment impact, less carbon footprint, and in general fewer damn evil people who are destroying the mother earth. For the right, everyone is responsible for their own destiny including their retirement life so they worry about their retirement spending solely on their own anyway. In practice, Japan seems to be fine. In particular their young people have so many job openings to fill.
So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?
Mostly because when social security was designed there was a retiree to worker ration of 1:130. Today it is closer to 1:3. Soon it will be 1:2.
We already allocate immense resources to the elderly (over 50% of US federal budget is for old people + national debt, where debt accrues for fungible reasons but the biggest explosion is money transfers/healthcare to the old). We have a few levers we can pull there - we don't have to give money transfers to the wealthiest members of what are, in fact, the wealthiest generation by taking from younger people. We could maybe means-test some of it. But they are politically hairy and come kind-of late. All that debt is essentially already borrowing from people who don't yet exist to pay off the old of today.
So it would be somewhat nice to have more people in the future because we have already borrowed their money (or if you are 30, our money).
That makes things difficult. Even if we did not set up the entire USG to do this, having more retirees than workers makes it hard economically. You could imagine a decade where every 4th person is working in a nursing home, basically.
But other than the massive looming financial crisis and the care problem, yeah, its not so bad.
Japan seems to be fine? Japan, which created its own lost generation [0]? Japan, which has a word for "death by overwork" [1]? Japan, which has 9 million abandoned homes in ghost towns [2], the highest public debt in the developed world [3], and healthcare system under strain because old people are being left there for no other reason than there's no one to care for them? [4]
I haven't been able to get a good answer to this, but gently asking this question of people around me, I've noted that even people who aren't usually tuned-in to social issues have an opinion on it (specifically that it's vaguely a bad thing). I suspect that there's a bit of latent tribalism inherent in people. People don't like to see their "tribe" get smaller. It just instinctively gives people anxiety. (I somehow dodged this sentiment, maybe a benefit of my neurodivergence).
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
As a man who's never wanted kids, and is now getting to an age where it probably wouldn't be a good idea, those weren't really the big factors for me.
Having a kid is just an unfathomably large commitment. If you bring a kid into the world, I believe you're responsible for creating the conditions where that kid can grow into a healthy, well adjusted adult, and that's seemed like an increasingly impossible commitment for the past few decades.
It's not that hard. Sorry you missed out on a wonderful thing.
You are not responsible for the world or its conditions. You just have to support the kid and be a good role model, that is 95% of the job.
You're definitely responsible for the environment you bring a kid into. It doesn't matter what is going on in the world. You're the parent and ultimately you're responsible for the environment where you raise your children. You're responsible for having the right resources to raise them trauma-free. Did you...not realize this when you made kids?
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Maybe all these things are true at the same time. More of a “is it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all” kind of dialogue.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
It's a lot easier if you live near either your parents or your in-laws. Having grandparents around to help is the cheat code to making parenting easier. We didn't have that until our oldest was 7 and it was life changing.
But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.
It's a tale as old as life itself. Some organisms succeed in coping with the environment they find themselves in. The genes and culture of these organisms gets passed on to the next generation.
yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.
Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.
> Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
I actually don't think I've ever read anything that made as little contact with reality as this. Its actually impressive. If you actually think this is in any way true, you need to deeply deeply reevaluate the way you perceive the world.
The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.
Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually.
Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.
The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
How many years/generations are you willing to spend on a ship in the middle of space? Remember, Biodome didn't work. Are you going to join that prison for the off chance of your progeny occupying a land that we haven't even discovered yet?
And, before you suggest it, no, there will never be faster-than-light travel, and even relativistic travel is super unlikely.
The generation ship genre of science fiction is very interesting to me, but I've never read one that didn't seem absolutely horrifying. I don't think it is a realistic option. Especially if we aren't even capable of stabilizing our "closed system" known as Earth. A generation ship would be the same problem but 100 times more difficult.
I think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.
> The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.
But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.
That tells a quite grim story, with an outcome thats totally inevitable but will take 20 years to play out. the die is already cast, and I cant see how the country survives.
What does it mean for a country to not survive? There will be people there. There will be a system of governance. Sure, there will be hardship and suffering, but I don't see how this equates to extinction.
Yes, probably not people extinction. But economic extinction - the tiny amount of young supporting 10x the amount of elderly will lead to economic collapse. On top of the collapse in raw productivity. It’s not hard to imagine that level of disruption leading to a failed state scenario.
> At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?
Realistic solutions look something like:
- we increase productivity of the working population
- we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees
- we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired
I am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing).
The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
Predicting population decline is safer than overgrowth. Since with low birth rates we know we need substantially higher than replacement rates to make up for the deficit. Which seems unlikely
Safer in the sense that its better to be overcautious than under? I definitely agree! I'm just saying we could do without the finger wagging. Either we commit to fostering relationships or we commit to their substitutes. I'm just saying I call their bluff.
I think the solution is in adjusting our ways of life. Simpler living, smaller houses and more density, being able to walk and bike, shared common areas, increase health span, being able to live independently for longer, simpler hobbies, not needing so much stuff, etc.
Despite the hype cycle around humanoid robots it's unlikely that they'll advance enough to be capable of replacing many human workers in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities within our lifetimes. Expect to see lots of really sad stories about elder abuse and neglect because as a society we simply won't have the resources to adequately care for them all.
Paid by whom? That's the problem. The people with money won't be willing to pay more taxes to fund workers to care for a growing indigent elderly population. It's already causing shortages today and will only get worse.
it isn't just about money, it is about production. Even if the money is evenly spread, if there isn't enough production (because not enough people providing goods and services) you'll just have inflation. But ya, if all the money is concentrated and billionaires are indulging in most of the production while the elderly starve, most of us are still screwed.
They don’t have to. If say robotaxis become widespread, you’ve freed up some portion of the labor market to do something else. They don’t have to automate all jobs, just some.
The evidence has shown that this thinking is flawed - disruption of jobs in an industry causes a slow, wrenching, scarring adjustment process that increases the load on welfare programs and makes quality of life broadly worse: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got...
It won't. The economic gains of automation will continue to be captured by the capital-owning class. It's simply too valuable to just give over to the masses.
If they were only eating there would be no problem. But they want fancy vacations. They want houses. They need drugs. They need MRI machines. And they need these things for decades for minimal cost irrespective of ability to pay. And, when they do die, they expect to pass estates tax-free to thier children. Supporting the retired population is one thing, but the day may soon come when we revisit what it means to be retired.
Ya but those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers. The ability to purchase shares in both the hospital that is treating you and the company that authorizes your treatment is a uniquely american priviledge.
You jest but to play devil's advocate every system has its supporters. One of the reasons we didn't get a public health plan option is because the Senator for Connecticut was representing his constituents such as Cigna and Aetna. If you provide an easier exit for the former death panel workers in the form of working at the public option administrator, re-training, etc. you might be able to assuage unemployment based opposition to reform.
People don't gloat at privatization but aforementioned wealthier retirees rely on corporations squeezing ever more money out of customers, employees, and vendors.
Those other countries are still paying for those things somehow. (or they really have the alleged death panels critics talk about) You can shove the cost in different places, but somehow they still have to be paid.
That's the way the system is set up but basically it's not sustainable. You can have more young people now to fix the problem of funding older people. But what happens when these young people get old? Now you need even more young people.
Basically it makes people feel good. Growth is exciting and motivates people to do stuff. Shrinkage makes people sad, depressed and more likely to try to protect what they have. It's often irrational, but that's just the way it is.
Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
This might be a really good analogy - we're in an endless summer and we have people who are now dying having lived in it their entire life - we don't even know what fall is like, let alone winter.
On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
Look at the problems South Korea is having, where there are not enough young people to support and care for the elderly. Elders face economic hardship and the healthcare system is buckling under load.
The Social Security system relies on creating a debt of unborn children to older people based on those older people having already paid now dead people, so keeping it solvent requires more meat for the tax machine.
A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot.
---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled -----
yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
Mentioning Social Security and government implies there is some other form of retirement that doesn't inherently depend on younger people still working, doesn't it? I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
Even if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden.
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
> They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
That's always been my deep unsettling feeling about the whole idea of "mass-market social security nets" of the type Americans call "social security" - it's one thing to provide for those who literally have nothing and nobody; it's another to blanket everyone with it and disrupt natural processes that are as old as time.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
Forms of retirement that don't have the force of law can be adjusted on the fly to match the available resources. When the government forcibly requires that each elderly person be paid a fixed amount of resources yearly, it's possible for there to be literally zero surplus for the young people making the resources. That can't happen under systems where the transfers are voluntary.
More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
(I am a social democrat, not a libertarian) All models require to some extent the youth working, but not all require a part of the youth's fruits of their labour being taken and put into social security. A libertarian might say that the onus is on the boomers to save enough money to fund their own retirement so that they're not reliant on the social security safety net.
It doesn't really matter on a macro scale if you have social security doing it, or "retirement accounts" doing it - at the base there is capital and value-add (work) and you're transferring from one to the other.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
The point is that money is still just an abstraction. When you take a step back and analyze things in terms of goods and services being the value, you end up with the same types of questions as when analyzing social security in terms of money.
GDP is correlated only while good things are increasing - forcing every married family to divorce at gunpoint and become two family households would greatly increase GDP - but I don't think we'd agree that's good.
This. The prospect of a brighter future at least means capital and labor are fighting for slices of a bigger pie. If the pie per capita stays constant or shrinks there will be a lot more anti-social behavior to response to the zero-sum environment.
I think people really fail to understand the gravity of an inverted demographic pyramid, going from 2 young people supporting 1 old, to 1 young person supporting 2 old. That's .5 -> 2x, a 4x increase in burden (taxes / extra work).
If you planted an apple tree and it never produced apples, you might start to wonder what's wrong with the tree. Maybe there's something wrong with the soil?
How do you know if an organism is thriving in its environment? You count the offspring over generations.
American capitalists and economic planners fret about "Japan Syndrome". To have more productivity and more consumption i.e. GDP growth, you need more people as a core driver. We don't actually need this, we could do fine with a stable population, but capitalism needs to grow or perish.
Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
If you or anyone you care about is or will be elderly and is not financially independent, you should care.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
You're talking about age structure, but overall population age-structure can be adjusted by immigration flows, births, deaths, etc. My point was about the total population number.
You can imagine a steady-state population where the age structure is stable and productivity is high enough to sustain the retirees, trainees, and disabled.
The line has to go up every year forever, even if it causes cyclical market instability and consolidation into mega conglomerates. Creating sustainable wealth across all sectors of society just isn't profitable enough in the short term.
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
Fully agree and I don't see why more people aren't talking about this.
World population in early 1800 was around a billion. As recent as 1928, it was only 2 billion. We added 3x that number in the last 100 years!
I see population decline as a good thing. Nations should focus on managing the decline gracefully. It's good for the environment. It's good for distributing our limited resources equitably.
It's not just numbers or speed. It's the shape of the population pyramid. Around the world except Africa, populations are aging. This means less taxes will come in, less workers of prime age, much more healthcare and elder care will be needed, and thus less of the valuable workers in other sectors.
That's only a bad thing if automation and AI don't increase productivity (shrink the number of workers needed). Otherwise, it's a benefit. Taxes are already unsustainable in the US.
Childcare can be nice to have but it can also be a full-time job just getting the kids there if you have more than a few.
We certainly take advantage of things like free preschool; but if we look at it objectively (and ignore benefits to the child) it consumes more time than if we didn't use it - getting him ready, walking him to school, picking him up, etc. Since it's free, we look at "time spent" and it's something like 2-3 hours spent to "get" 3 hours.
Minus the commute you had to do most of that anyway though, right? We get my four year old ready and walk her to school (city free pre-k a few blocks away, plus paid aftercare).
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
You got 8 hours out of it, we get maybe three - because of how it works out.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
I don’t think the evidence either way is strong enough to call that one a myth. There are lots of other differences between the two countries that could offset the impact of Austria’s childcare subsidies.
Just to expand a bit on Zurich and comparing with Slovenia (another "very socialist" country).
Childcare in/around Zurich is (was 2 years ago) 2500 - 3000 CHF / month (lower prices after ~18 months). This is and isn't expensive. The list prices are high, but so are salaries (and taxes are low), and this is cheaper than rent (for 1 kid). Not subsidized.
In Slovenia, the full price is about 700 EUR / month, subsidised up to 77% by the government (i.e. by high-earners, effectively a double-progressive taxation with already high taxes).
What you get for that price in Zurich? A lot! Kindergarten starts at 3 months and can take care of kids for the whole work day (7am-18pm). Groups are tiny and lots of teachers - 3 adults per 12 kids. Groups are mixed age as well, which I think are preferable. You also get a lot of flexibility - e.g. half-days (cheaper) or only specific days per week (e.g. Mon-Thu). Jobs are equally adaptable, a lot of people work 80% (so Friday free, spend with kid(s)).
In Slovenia, the situation is much worse. 2 teachers per 12 or even 20 kids (after age 4), age-stratified groups, childcare finishes at 5pm (but start at 6am, if someone needs that...). Children are only welcome after 11 months of age. No flexibility at all. This is all for public childcare - we also looked at private, but generally you pay more (1000+ EUR) but get ... not much more. Maybe nicer building (not even), but groups are equally large (IMO biggest drawback).
So as far as childcare is concerned, Switzerland is IMO much better.
But where Switzerland fucks you, is elsewhere. As mentioned, tax is low, so that's a plus. But there's minimal maternity leave (hence kindergarten starts at 3 months). If women can, they take more time off work, but not everyone can. What I wrote above about "kindergarten" only applies until 4 years of age, after which "preschool" starts, which is government-funded and hence free. Well, "free". It ends at 12pm after which you need to move your kid back into private childcare if you have a job. After that, school starts, which has a lunch break around 12pm as well - children are supposed to eat lunch at home - which again isn't really compatible with 2 working parents.
I'm not in Switzerland any more so I don't know how people actually manage when kids start school...
In the USA there's a definite "kid gap" around 4k-1st grade - before that, childcare if used is "open late" and flexible (if you have the cash) - and after 1st the kid is often mature enough to do simple movements on their own if school doesn't go long enough (walk to the library, or get into extra curricular activities, etc).
At 4k-1st you often have shortened hours, so if you're a working parent you need to arrange for transportation or be able to take long lunches, etc to move children from one place to another.
This "gap of annoyance" happens right about when you'd naturally be looking at a second or third kid as a possibility - I wonder how much effect it has on people.
I can only speak for myself, but 2 was a good number for me. This amounts to somewhat less than a replacement rate. My wife and I had enough time and energy to give the kids what they needed, and still have some for ourselves at the end of the day. And if either of the kids needed extra resources or attention, we were able to do it without neglecting the other one.
I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.
Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.
I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.
(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)
TL;DR: the article argues we cannot fix the population crisis with small tax breaks or traditional values because the modern world has made the cost of raising a child being too high for most people to want to try.
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The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.
1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.
Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.
2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).
Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.
3. Myth: Women working is the cause.
Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.
4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.
Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.
This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.
You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.
Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)
I am at work and didn't have time to read the full article. Here's Gemini summary:
The article "The End of Children" (published in The New Yorker, March 2025) explores the global phenomenon of plummeting fertility rates, examining why traditional explanations and policy solutions are failing to reverse the trend.
Here is a summary of the key points:
* Economic Support Isn't Enough: The article challenges the popular liberal argument that fertility decline is primarily caused by economic insecurity or a lack of childcare. It points out that Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden—which offer generous parental leave, "baby boxes," and flexible work cultures—still face declining birth rates similar to or lower than the U.S. Even in places where childcare is free (Vienna) versus expensive (Zurich), fertility rates often remain identical.
* The "Achievement Culture" Trap: The definition of "affording" a child has inflated significantly. In many wealthy, educated circles, raising a child now implies providing a suite of expensive advantages—individual bedrooms, travel sports, private lessons, and organic diets. This "intensive parenting" model means working mothers today actually spend more time on active childcare than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations, making the prospect of parenthood feel overwhelming.
* Political and Educational polarization: There is a widening fertility gap based on politics and education. Democrats and those with higher degrees are significantly more likely to be childless. This is partly attributed to the extended time required for education and career establishment, pushing childbearing to later years when it is biologically more difficult.
* Failed Government Interventions: The author highlights various aggressive attempts by governments to boost birth rates, such as Hungary's tax exemptions for mothers of four and South Korea's numerous "happiness projects" and subsidies. Despite spending fortunes, no modern nation has successfully reversed a low fertility rate back to replacement levels.
* A Shift in Meaning: The article concludes with a philosophical reflection on how children have transformed from a natural part of life into "variables" in a high-stakes lifestyle choice. They are increasingly viewed through the lens of identity and personal fulfillment, leading to a culture where parents fear judgment and non-parents fear being seen as selfish, intensifying the anxiety around having children at all.
I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
Hard to believe that people who suffered the atrocities of the first half of the 20th Century were tremendously optimistic about the future, yet birthrates were MUCH higher across the world.
The birth control pill wasn’t on the market in the first half of the 20th century (1960) and there was more religious pressure not to use contraception (e.g. how many women faced significant external pressure to be married housewives and mothers and weren’t even allowed to pursue careers?). Lack of choice masked true preferences – but as we could see from things like the big spike in divorces when it was legalized, there were costs to that.
While acts of war separate couples and would confound the analysis a bit, I think there is typically a big spike in births following wars. Baby boomers most notably being born after WWII. Optimism is dynamic and not a set threshold, wrapping up wars leads to new found optimism about the future. How terrible the recent past was is not all that relevant as it is about the trajectory.
If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.
And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
Don't agree with the supporting statements though.
Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
> The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.
I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.
If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.
The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
I've wondered if massive one time payments would be a solution. Like 100k for the first kid, 90k for the second, etc. Obvious moral hazard around having kids just for the payment, but if population decline is actually a big problem, it isn't necessarily worse.
Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal value?
ive seen similar things like no income tax if you have 3 kids. i think that give you slightly better alignment because you still want to be productive.
As a parent, I genuinely question why I continue to participate in a society that tolerates traffic deaths and firearm violence like the US. If there's a large chunk of people who won't lift a finger to keep kids from being shot at school, there's a large chunk of people who value my child's life at zero.
One of the ways the Netherlands made streets safer for dismounted people was by framing it as stopping killing kids with your cars. Yes this is "think of the children" logic but since kids are generally healthy the top causes of kid death in the US are gunfire and cars.
The USA had those same protests a decade before the Netherlands, but collectively decided that they preferred to blame the parents more than they wanted to restrict car drivers:
> "all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses." ...
> "Many demonstrations—particularly the biggest ones—were triggered by the injury or death of a child. Against any tendency to blame the parents for permitting their children to have a life of their own beyond home and school, demonstrators consistently demanded streets that local children could use safely. And while the demonstrations were nearly always nonviolent, they were vocal and insistent, and sometimes confrontational. They included some degree of traffic obstruction, sometimes even full blockades that barred all motor vehicles." ...
> "Women bearing signs picketed streets and intersections, or set up folding chairs across the breadth of streets and sat in them. Children often participated. A mainstay of the demonstrations was baby carriages, occupied or not, which rhetorically associated the demonstrations with motherhood and with the safety of children. The technique was common enough to give the demonstrations a name: Some newspapers called them “baby carriage blockades.”" ...
> "the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was the mother’s fault."
FWIW "gunfire" as a killer of children (under 18) is mostly inter-gang violence, not school shootings or anything else. Cars dominate. Guns are mostly a risk factor you have some control over as a parent (don't have guns at home, don't raise your kids into gangs), whereas car culture really isn't.
FYI this is like telling poor people that they just should move to a better neighborhood. This advice is about as practical as telling people to move to Manhattan to reduce car accident injury risk for your teen driver.
and also there is the deeply ingrained attitude that your kids are your problem. there is very little help from the government to offset the negative effects and opportunity costs of having and raising children.
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
"The US" as a whole definitely does not want that, just the deeply unpopular white nationalists who have their hands on the levers of power at the moment.
As an aside, it's hilarious that they try to brand themselves as "Heritage Americans" since "Native American" is already taken.
I think capitalists just want cheap labor. The US itself doesn’t have a unified position on population. Plenty of people want a population decrease because they feel everything is overcrowded.
Well, when I say "US" I mean the current administration and the people that have power within it. Maybe that's not their actual intention or desire, but that is the story their policies and actions are telling.
It's interesting how the sides flipped. Left was strongly anti-immigration because it saw it as a tool of capitalism to drive down wages and just general abuse of working-class rights. Now Left is pro-immigration, and the right is against for the same reason the Left was.
When did this change happen?
I'm on the left and am anti-immigration. Always have been. I think pulling the cream of the crop is objectively good for the country, but bad for the places they come from. Liberal low skilled immigration is just bad for everyone except the handful of people that actually employ them.
Globalists have been taking over liberal institutions since the 90s (they have control of the DNC for longer). Media, academia, education are aligned with the globalist agenda. And the left dare not speak out against it, or they get mobbed.
When the “left” started becoming more about social wokeist policies than about economics and fiscal policy.
I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.
The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…
It's amusing. The left is always accused of "woke" but the ones constantly crying about it are those on the right. The right will even vote against their own economic interests to "stick it to the woke."
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
The US has endless backlog of people waiting in line to legally enter the country. It doesn’t need to keep any illegal aliens to meet its immigration goals.
> Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate". For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law. But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
> And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
There's nothing bizarre about workers being angry at a system that is being abused to drive down wages. The reality is that there are segments of workforce in the USA that will only hire H1Bs workers because they know they can treat them illegally. This happens all over the place but is particularly prevalent at larger orgs (both in tech and finance). The behavior is implicitly authorized by the companies as they outsource the "being the jerk" to those managers.
The non-H1B workers rightfully feel angered by this because it directly lowers their wages. It's like scabs flooding a union shop. Only worse as the scabs are scared of not only losing their jobs, but their visas.
> And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
> Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country.
Quit burying your head in the sand of what is happening around you. I urge you to actually read the reality in the court records of what is actually happening.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate".
You are wilfully unaware.
> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.
The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.
Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.
Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.
When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.
> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.
The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.
> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.
ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."
"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."
"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here
I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....
State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.
Only in theory - they went through years and decades of hell already so it's not like people are going to try to emulate it just in case it works. Anyway, countries like America "contain multitudes" and there can and will always be seemingly contradictory paths chosen at the same time.
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?
Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.
How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.
What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.
The vast majority taken up in these dragnets are legal residents of the united states.
The attorney representing ICE to the courts in MN admitted it directly, admitted that ICE does not believe it needs to honor orders of the federal court system, and that they do not comply with orders to release legal residents of the united states.
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
It's not a guarantee that we'll import more food - though that may be a good thing in the long run to help other countries - we could also switch what kinds of food we eat.
Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.
Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.
Eating only corn and wheat will leave you with nutrient deficiencies. You can be obese and still malnourished if all the veggies you eat are a slice of tomato and lettuce in your burger and half a potato with the same volume of frying oil.
a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong, and not even plausible (anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings, and they could not even afford proper sunday shoes for all of them, much less current living standards).
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
> "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
Yes - because they have high standards! Higher than achievable standards, and more income to give up if they start trading off time from work to actually raising their own children.
I'm not going to find sources right now, but from my understanding the research shows that the greatest impact on number of children is education of girls. Once women have more options, staying home their whole life popping out babies seems less desirable.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
I'd argue that the minimum education level rising in general is already strongly correlated itself, because it indicates that "uneducated" children are economically worthless (=> parents need to pay more to educate and children take longer until self-sustainable and economic "worth" of adolescents is relatively lower).
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
In my opinion, it mostly comes down to contraception and changing lifestyle choices. Most child-free people I know simply prefer not to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
>I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
> anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
Your post implies that costs for raising kids stop when the kids are in school. Your post did not include costs for college - which is becoming a norm for a lot of people. Un-subscribing from the idea of giving your kids college education is a bad decision.....
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
I can't agree with you enough. I am so sick and tired of the cost of living argument. Back in the 1800s people were living in tiny cramped places and having 5-6 kids while barely able to afford necessities.
People then also largely worked on family farms and having kids was the economically sensible thing to do. Times change and people expect differently for both their own lives as well as the lives of their children.
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
This is often a commonly blamed reason, but I think the data at this point pretty strongly suggests that the more affluent a country is the less kids they have.
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
Seems like when you give women the choice, many elect to have fewer kids than replacement level.
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
You've missed my point... Those allowances and subsidies don't remotely cover the cost of having children. Especially in the US with the wild costs of hospital childbirth itself.
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
Yes, the "cost of having kids" argument is 100% bunk. Africans in abject poverty are having 6-7 kids, while individuals living in the richest countries are having 1 or none even though they clearly can afford many more.
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
This comes up in every discussion about demographics. But counterintuitively, there are no examples of financial incentives actually fixing this problem.
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
Back of an envelope suggests that to really make this work you'd need most women in the 20-40 range to have the job title of "parent" and a lower middle class or more salary paid by the state, so .. 10-20% of GDP? Nobody wants to contemplate just how expensive this is going to be, including the fact that now you have a short-term labour shortage (because they're out of the regular workforce as well!)
If that were true then we would expect to see a positive correlation between income and family size, but households making 500k are basically the same size as households making 50k.
Your specific claim may indeed be true, but it's misleading. The relationship between income and children is U-shaped. From middle incomes to higher incomes, fertility rises. It is also important to point out that income is tied to other factors in America. You're going to disproportionately find your $500k earners in a handful of superstar coastal cities. Those things need to be controlled for if you want to isolate the effect of income on family size.
More that young(er) folks could afford to live on a single income for the pre-school years. Or, I guess, that there's extensive parental leave and support for the parent doing primary caregiver.
Mixed in with all this, and possibly preceeding all this, is declining marriage rates. It's significantly riskier, financially and relationally, to have kids without getting married.
There are many solutions to different aspects of the problem - if we define the problem something like "people get together older, and have kids older, and have fewer."
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
The Amish aren't on the consumer treadmill. They have amazing social support from their community. They tend to be "traditional families" so there's no question re: child rearing. So I guess that satisfies both of the original conditions... But I figure people would prefer a more commercial lifestyle. Particularly on places like HN.
By all estimates, they have also fairly high rates of domestic violence and abuse rates. Which to be fair, traditional families also frequently featured.
I disagree. I think there is a lot we can learn from Amish society. Main of the 'ills' of modern society don't exist in their community. I believe that we can learn and apply aspects of what they do well without losing our ability to support entrepreneurs and engineers.
You need a positive life affirming story in your life to set up kids and the current core does not have that. "You will be either a concentration camp guard or a prisoner, in a apocalyptic war" is not a life narrative, its a contraceptive.
Lots of people are doing the math and explaining why what the people who aren't having kids are saying is wrong. They have their math and the people still don't have kids.
Is housing really that expensive? When you price out a loan on a starter house it really ain't that bad. I'm a recent first time homebuyer and I don't understand why people think they aren't affordable. There were plenty of cheaper homes that I looked at and even with rates at their highest would be cheaper than my rent.
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
When you say housing, are you excluding utilities or just not direct rent / mortgage / property taxes?
Either way, that's a good example of how different things are without kids and maybe why folks are choosing not to have them.
As someone without kids who lives in NY (not NYC), I couldn't even imagine spending 36k / year (minus rent). Even if I took a 3 week international vacation every quarter I wouldn't come close to that amount after factoring in my normal costs.
From the link I posted, a "family of 4" in R.I. has a cost-of-living of $3090 / month (without rent.) It then line items "rent & utilities" as $2644 / month.
In general the “housing is too expensive” people mean “I looked at every available house in both San Francisco and New York City, and didn’t find anything cheap!”
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
such annoying pedantry to point out that "akshually houses are cheap in southern missouri"
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
the cities mentioned account for nearly 10% of US GDP by themselves. That's not exactly what I would describe as a "jet set fart sniffing town." maybe you misread and thought the OP said Jackson or Sun Valley or something?
Housing for the boomers used to cost 3x the median salary. Now it's more like 6x the median salary. These are nationwide numbers. Wage growth isn't keeping up to pace with housing prices
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
God forbid paying the masses a living wage or allowing them access to things their forebears had. They will own nothing and they will be thankful for it.
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
I think it's clear that the reduction in teen pregnancy is indeed a big contributor to the decreasing fertility rate. I would guess the reason this doesn't get brought up in discussions about how to _increase_ the fertility rate is that reversing the trend on teen pregnancy is just really not a palatable solution to many people. Although there are some, usually on the religious right, who advocate for banning contraception, teaching abstinence-only sex education, etc., which would most likely have the effect of reversing the teen pregnancy trend.
I think not talking about it skews the conversation towards incorrect remedies - the discourse is about what has changed about the economy, communities, family life, etc, that makes people want fewer kids and then trying to derive solutions from those things as the assumed problem. It makes too much of the discourse a question of “how do we go back to the previous conditions?”
If instead we say this is a biological imperative that we have interrupted and many people don’t rationally want children no matter how perfect those conditions are, then instead of looking back to previous states, we can ask what new conditions must occur to change this behavior.
For me, it was choosing between having kids or caring for my aging parents. With social security probably getting cut in the next 5-10 years, I just couldn't swing it. So I prioritized the already living over the potentially living. Hopefully we'll have robots for when I get old.
Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self. My sister and her husband get 1-2 hours of time for themselves per day, and then they are too tired to do anything but watch TV. They've ceased to exist as individuals, basically. To them, work and the office are their places of relaxation.
They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
> Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self.
I am a parent and have definitely felt very stressed on account of children. But as for feeling like my "self" was destroyed, I can't really say I ever experienced that; and I'm not even sure about the idea of a fixed immutable self anyway. I'm not advocating for having children, or against having children; but I don't think I was crushed as a human being because of my choice.
My last child is graduating from high school this year. She's a violinist and I'm a pianist. I've always accompanied her since she was 3; and we do a lot of musical collaborations. I definitely feel like my sense of self is expanded by all of this. But maybe I just got lucky.
I should have made clear that being a parent _of young children_ is destruction of the self. I'm sure once the kids are all old enough to use the toilet independently and otherwise entertain themselves it will be different. But right now their situation reminds me less of a lifestyle and more some kind of punishment.
Arranging society in such a way that women would rather have a career than be a mother will have profound consequences. The value of motherhood needs to be properly valued in society's collective mind.
They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like government-provided childcare are good societal investments.
The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split. I do not think government provided childcare is a good idea since it would incentivize children to spend time away from their family.
> The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split.
Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.
Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.
I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
What's the problem? The US is simultaneously flirting with potential AI. If the AI proves to be productive, we won't need as many workers. The economy can shift from a human worker only base to a human + AI base. The solution is merely to tax the AI part too!.
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
It's only a short term solution, as all countries around the world (even those third-world ones, with current fertility rate above 4.0) are experiencing lower birthrates every year. See the movie birthgap
As long as people from those countries want to come to the USA, it would be a problem for those countries and not the USA.
However, "those third-world ones with current fertility rates above 4.0" probably have a ways to drop before it actually becomes a problem for them, couple few generations or so. In that time, the context for all of this could change (50 years ago, people were more worried about too much reproduction? Who knows in another 50).
In fact, for whatever reasons, the most predictable trend seems to be that fertility rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. As standard of living goes up, fertility goes down and vice versa. if those "third world ones" actually drop their fertility to "first world" levels, it would probably mean that their standard of living is such that immigration to the USA won't be so appealing either.
At that point, it seems the global social political context is changed enough that we will have an entirely different set of problems and solutions that are hard to predict now.
Robots may fill the gap. Really. It seems silly now, but give it twenty years.
The developed world may end up with a modest human population and a large robotic population. Asimov explored that idea in SF decades ago.
The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
I don't see why there has to be a "gap" at all. The country had half as many people in 1950, and it got along fine. The world is different now, but I don't see why it takes 300 million people to run the country today.
If the US gets back to 150 million people, it will look different, but I don't see why it has to be any worse than it is now. And I can think of a lot of reasons why it might be better.
Get rid of Medicare and Social Security, and the transition would be fine. The problem will be in transferring more and more wealth from the working and giving it to the non working, resulting in an everlasting loss of quality of life for the working (absent sufficient advances in automation).
Yes the world is overpopulated. However a lot of developed societies based their framework for budgets on permanent growth, for example the idea that the young paying tax will always pay for the benefits of the elderly. However with the population rate decreasing, suddenly there is lots of older population expecting things like healthcare and pensions to be paid for them. With less and less young people to cover the cost in tax, there is a looming defecit which is very worrying to a lot of economists.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
Pulling out is pretty effective when you do it right, they can't really ban that. In very catholic Quebec up to the 1950s priests would get involved in couple's marital lives and apply pressure when wives weren't getting pregnant for just that reason.
I think you're the closest to being right, but assuming that dystopia can actually arise is a stretch. A proper understanding of the world incorporates the understanding that there the population and leadership are a fluid, with people moving back and forth all the time. Maybe with a robot army the rulers can impose a dystopia for the rest, but at that point we also would have infinite robot labor, so it's kind of a cop-out.
As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR?
(Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
Childless women don't age well. If they are saved from the effects of a never-pregnant climax on their arteries/metabolism, they will face a dementia cared by nieces. Not that mothers don't have these but physically and psychologically they are much less burdensome. The hormone flooding of pregnancy is a health blessing.
Needs citation for your argument. All I read today on this subject claims the contrary:
"Associations between number of children, age at becoming a parent, and dementia risk were similar for both sexes. Lifestyle and socioeconomic factors are more likely to explain the observed associations than normal pregnancy-related physiological changes."
Caring for elderly depends on the role of family in society. In my country family still plays a huge role so having no direct descendants has it's impact.
I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this,
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
Wanting them gone isn't the same as putting the blame on them. It isn't a personality conflict or a troubled relationship; immigrants shouldn't feel guilty for wanting to stay and the people competing with them should feel guilty for wanting them to go. Or rather, who cares? Shouldn't people be allowed to have their inner states to themselves? Can't we own anything? How did a discussion about labor exploitation turn into a discussion about feelings?
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
>I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
The same thought formed in my head listening to that the other day. He even talked about how, as an independent contractor with his own business, he couldn't hire help. He refuses to pay undocumented immigrants under the table (kudos to him), and recognizes that hiring people legitimately would raise his costs too high above the competition. But then he latches onto the idea of deporting the immigrants instead of punishing businesses violating labor laws.
It's not that he apologized for the shady business owners. He didn't seem to ever consider it an option.
I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to give it back, but otherwise did not have to face prosecution.
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
There are such deep contradictions in these thoughts. You think that the illegal immigrant is going to starve without the criminal employer? When just a second ago you were saying they should be deported, and that "most" people think that's OK?
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
My thoughts on this have always been a blend of your two 'they should not be deported' scenarios, with a slow, measured rollout.
Sudden changes cause too much chaos, and you don't always know what works until you try it. Avoiding entitlement abuse is always going to be part of the conversation, and it seems to me the fix for this (and nearly any other issue) needs to be approached carefully from both the supply and demand sides until what's effective is more clear.
I guess where we differ is that I believe that we've tried the other side and found it wanting. You can say that the Biden asylum catch-and-release policies did not include entitlement reform or worker protections so they don't count, but what it shows me is that too many moving parts mean that only the worst aspects of the worst solution are what get implemented. The simplest solution is securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants.
Every single other previous advance that could have done that has NOT produced the less stressed part - imagine taking an 1800s subsistence farmer and arming him with modern equipment and tooling; he'd be ecstatic.
The key is always internal, personal, once you right yourself, the world starts feeling much better.
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
The ever-advancing big tech dystopia where individuals are pervasively tracked, quantified, and siloed. A destroyed economy squashing mobility, making the basic necessities uncertain, and future wealth questionable. Terrorist gangs abducting people in their homes based on what AI says, and executing people in the streets for protesting about it. All things that make for warm fuzzy feelings about bringing children into this world!
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead, downward. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
The interesting thing is this is Spain's second wave of doing this, and the economic studies on the first wave of it showed visibly positive results. Spain's economy moved in growth, and with a size larger than many other European nations in similar background conditions of flat to negative population growth, but tighter immigration allowances.
Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system.
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
They contribute to GDP spend, but from the fiscal point of view they are a drag. As for actual percentages per country, I think it heavily varies. In EU i think family spending is like 3% of GDP.
The hope is that this drag will either generate higher cash flows later (i.e money spent on education now will allow them to create value for economy later) or reduce outflows later (i.e a child that gets braces and dental health care now won't spend their whole adult life dealing with teeth issues on taxpayer's dime).
The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers. Its even higher value for the economy when wages do a catch up slowly over their time. I think it is politiczed fear mongering to suggest that the economic balance is negative in that kind of exchange.
Legal immigrants if this change goes through - and if the minimum wage of these nations doesn't support any citizen living through their life perhaps the minimum wage should be increased and non performant businesses that can't support it will be shed
You're mentally stuck in 2009-2015. The world has moved on and Spain is now significantly outperforming Germany in growth (obviously not yet in wealth, which is the integral of growth over much longer time periods). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YZeqk8NCQ&t=456s
I have no doubt that this has positive effects on the national economy as a whole (you get workers, on demand, without really paying for raising, educating, training them), but it is not really sustainable because population growth is low/negative pretty much everywhere, and it also leads to significant pushback from cultural friction and local workers (that dislike competition).
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
As I see it, the root of unhappiness in voters is nonperformant housing markets and unaddressed growth of inequality where wages are not sharing in growth of profits. This creates a raft of difficult issues. And the rightwing indeed has an effective playbook to exploit these unaddressed shortfalls while blaming immigration. And the center left parties seem unwilling or unable to address the root problems.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
And yet, birthrates jacked up for 2 decades after communism collapsed, stayed high until the bank crisis, tanked both times Trump came into office, recovered a couple years into Covid.
All the comments are about having babies but as the article points out the actual proximate reason the US population is declining right now is the immigration enforcement approach taken by the Trump administration. Fewer people are coming the the US (including legally), and more people (including legal residents) are being deported or are leaving, and as a result there is net outflow of people from the country. The situation will only worsen with the incipient war on H1B and other visas.
After a brief look at this discussion I am surprised that little reference is made of the evolutionary aspects of having children. Posts tend to center on "It's all about me!" rather than "it's all about the genes!"
Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).
Good? Population can't grow forever. We're not even fucking close to going extinct, and if we did start trending that direction countries like the USSR demonstrated that simple objectives like promising a medal to anyone who pops out 7 kids solves that problem overnight.
Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
I don't think the ideas linking immigration to population growth or decline are productive. It hides the root cause of potential population decline. Why aren't people who are raised in the US having children? I think it's because most of us are lonely and miserable.
Perhaps we can try and take care of each other, and many other things will show signs of improving? There needs to be more access to things like healthcare, childcare, education, entertainment, leisure, arts, recreation, and so much more. There needs to be more love in our societies and the numbers that indicate well-being will follow. After all, what is the point of all of this? To get a promotion?
But it's objective!! You can objectively measure the value of people. We could just plug people's value into a database and let AI do the match-making. People don't have to be involved in the decision-making. Especially not female people!
that, but also men in their 20s and 30s refusing to settle down, and wasting with gaming, entertainment, and porn (and caling women that are objectively their equal, or even much superior "mid").
My only advice to you is: clean up your grooming, spend some time getting in shape, treat women as equals, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. It also doesn't hurt to have a sense of humor. Guys who are funny will always have girlfriends. Even when I was poor as dirt I always had girlfriends.
Get a job, make your bed, clean yourself, read, walk, and talk to everyone.
If you think you can't do any of those things, figure out how. If you're scared to try, start by talking to old people - and really listen.
Stop thinking about yourself, think about others, and don't get fixated on "one girl" or otherwise drive yourself insane.
If you've done all of the above for a few years, then you may be in a position to complain - and change something drastic about your life (move, change jobs, travel, etc).
But the root of it all is treat everyone as a person worthy of respect, not just "hot girls" as trophies to be won. It ain't no video game.
I have a close male friend in their mid-thirties that has struggled dating since I've known him (~10 years). He is attractive, dresses well, goes to the gym, eats well, has a few hobbies, and isn't emotionally stunted nor suffer from any arrested development issues. My girlfriend thinks he might be cursed since we don't have any single friends to match-make him with.
He moved to a different city a few years ago and reported more hookups, but serious dating is just as bad. I'm starting to notice him becoming tired of it all, even though he hides it quite well.
Given it's not realistic to keep moving to different cities as it's financially and socially expensive to do so. What should I suggest?
Many are trying to get some punani, many have given up and live in the setup I described (some openly incel-y, others expecting the girlfriend to fall from the sky), way fewer are trying to settle. At best they want to settle after 35+.
Do you really believe that "women/DEI" folks have ever had more political power than white males? Seems weird to me to put blame on them instead of the wealthy and ruling class.
>Do you really believe that "women/DEI" folks have ever had more political power than white males? Seems weird to me to put blame on them instead of the wealthy and ruling class.
YES!!!
Let me bring your knowledge up to speed.
The Australian group Collective Shout went after Steam because of games "exploring kids".
Steam didn't do anything.
CS went after Visa and Master Card and because of CS political influence, Visa and Master Card went after Steam: You either comply or you can no longer use the only payment system used worldwide.
CS has done the same in the past, they have massive political influence and the group is composed of 100% feminists only who hate men in any way and form, check their X account.
The same week that happened, the UK pushed age verification, everything went to shit from there which brings us to the mess things are right now, all in the name of "protect the kids", all started by one group with enough power.
All it took was a feminist group with political influence to create a domino effect that isn't stopping any time soon.
Services are rushing to comply causing personal information of millions of people to be for sale on the dark web :)
But hey, you don't have to believe on me.
I gave you the names and order of how things happened.
Feel free to cross-check them.
You have given an example of a group which affected change on a $10+ billion estimated valuation company, in a ~$43 billion PC gaming market.
You then insinuated that it was connected to age verification in the UK because it happened in the same week - not very convincing evidence. Isn't it more likely that age verification is another attempt by tech oligarchs to stockpile more of our personal data?
I think you may need to take a few steps back and widen your perspective beyond the gaming world. US GDP was $31+ trillion which puts the PC gaming market at .0014% of US GDP. So some small company used their collective power to force some larger company to do something they didn't want to do. Form your own company and do the same thing then. It's quite weird that you blame all women and DEI for this, and not the bean counters and wealthy/powerful people.
I challenge you to question WHY so many women hate men - they weren't born hating them. Maybe numerous men did something vile enough to them and earned their hatred? Generalizing that hate onto all men would merely be a survival tactic if that were true, don't you think? Sort of similar to how you seem to hate women because perhaps you were physically or emotionally hurt by them in the past.
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
It's actually not a good trade at all, you need a balanced population pyramid if you want a functional economy in the future. The housing stock is behind due to financial crisis in 2007, as well as lots of other factors, and population decrease won't solve most of those.
In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
I wish there were more reasoned debate and distinguishing between legal immigration including tech workers (H-1B visas) versus illegal immigration for eg food truck workers, DoorDash scooter drivers.
Also the lack of knowledge about the existence of the fantastic and generous H-2A visa for farm workers is maddening.
H1B is just a cheap labour scam unless you think there aren't any Americans that could do the jobs on the jobs.now website that reposts the H1B re-advertisements.
H-2A is expensive and prone to abuse. It is generally considered a failure by both employers and workers who participate in it. So I’m guessing your use of fantastic and generous is either sarcasm or uninformed?
I've read opinions from farmers who say they wouldn't be able to operate without H-2A.
The stipulations are incredibly generous with unlimited renewals though have to leave the country for 60 days every 3 years.
There's also a pathway to citizenship for specializations in agriculture such as the dairy industry. And they can bring family members too. It's an uncapped program too.
At least on paper it's an incredibly generous visa compared to other types of visas with more restrictions for family sponsorship and immigration.
I agree it's expensive though, that's a big reason why there so many illegal immigrant farm workers. A few reforms and that can be legalized through H-2A
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force" - amazing that you can get people to believe that. There is a massive shortage of labor and the labor force participation rate is already dangerously high.
Yes, Trump is also successfully destroying the demand side of the labor economy at the same time. Is that what his supporters imagined that sentence means? It is nevertheless the case that the prime-age labor force participation rate is bouncing off 85% and getting it any higher than that is impossible.
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
this is the quietest crisis in the us right now. our entire insurance and social safety net system (especially ltc and social security) is mathematically dependent on a forever growth pyramid.
once that population curve flattens or flips, the risk pooling math just breaks. you can’t underwrite a 30-year health or life liability for a cohort when the generation behind them is 20% smaller. we’re looking at a fundamental failure of the actuarial models we've used since the 50s.
Every country will have to figure out how to deal with this. Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? It's impossible. The only question is whether or not countries can retain their culture and population or whether they will be replaced by outsiders.
Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.
The economics of infrastructure actually improve for stable or shrinking populations because funding can shift from raw capacity buildout (extremely expensive) to maintenance and value-add services (profitable). Observe that the best infrastructure in the world is in nations with slow population growth, like Western Europe, Japan, and more recently the U.S. and China. Whereas nations with very high population growth struggle to deliver capacity for even basic needs like clean water or paved roads.
Slow population growth or even stable population is dramatically different from population decline. Usually slow growth is the ideal. But even a modest decline shifts extreme burdens onto wage earners. OTOH, it’s great for buying up property.
I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share.
First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.
And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.
Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.
Do you live in the US?
To add to my previous comment. There's nothing about "the US" that makes precludes any of this. Lots of people chose to remain (or move back to) close to their families especially when they have kids on their own.
EG when we bought the house because it was closer to the in-laws, the previous owners were moving to SC to be closer to their family. It's just a decision you make or not bother to make.
And then to make an extreme point - before this I used to live in Hell's Kitchen in NYC. When I visit my old hood now, it's basically one continuous giant Grindr date going on. That was totally fine when I lived there as a single person but as a family person it would be a tough situation (e.g. businesses not geared to kids, most neighbors aren't parents - eg there was no kids in my old building). Now I live maybe 30 miles away and it's all parents all around me. The idea of "go where parents are" and "go where other young families are" is relevant to absolutely anyone in the world, so I don't understand why whether I live in the US is even a question?
>so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
My experience so far with a kid is most people will just tolerate your child. I'm surprised your running into that attitude.
Other new parents I know that are in the suburbs aren't all surrounded by family's either. I think aging people aren't downsizing their houses and moving around. Careers scattered and cheap homes scattered everyone around.
Maybe NYC is just different. I mean I'm 100% sure it's different. I'm grew up in a NYC suburb lol
I mean I think it depends on the suburb. If you moved your family to a place where everyone is a shut-in boomer (vs the grandfatherly types that I somehow meet in my area) then... why would you move there to have kids?
To me that's like going to a badly reviewed restaurant and then complaining about the food. If you knew you were moving to a place hostile to kids, why move there?
With the housing market competitive as it is you don't really get to much of a choice and it's not like there's yelp reviews for neighbors.
I don't think that's right. There's a difference between "I hadn't tried to do that"(which would have been the case for me, if not for my wife's wisdom) and "it's hard"
Like literally a starting point could be -where do your friends and coworkers with kids tend to live? Or ask a realtor which parts of town have turned over with young families.
When you are checking out the house you can literally tell which houses have kids and u can ask about it.
The housing market it what it is but you get a very different outcome if you search in a a family friendly town vs not to begin with. Obviously?
Doesn't sound different than most of the neighborhoods in Brooklyn
I am in a suburb that's closest to NYC without being a part of the city.
I grew up in a place like that (Port Washington, NY), and it was pretty ideal; I'm raising my own two kids in a suburb of Boston that feels very, very similar along almost every axis.
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You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.
Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.
And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old
I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other side of the country/world. Anecdotally the loneliest older people I know are ones who have put it upon their children to keep themselves from loneliness.
> And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them
As a parent I always find it funny that we need to add this to every statement of frustration of family life (I'm not critiquing you, I also say this every time I mention any frustration about parenting). It is worth recognizing that saying the contrary is fundamentally taboo. I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
<< I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near impossible to miss the "pregnancy will ruin your life" propaganda.
Consequences. They exist. Some are life altering and expected to last a long time.
Some of my friends and family who had kids at a young(er) age - and by that, I mean late twenties or early thirties - seemed totally oblivious to the hardships of parenthood.
You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research. Most people just have kids because it’s just “what your supposed to do” and don’t give much thought beyond that.
I don’t know what they thought to themselves, but outwardly they projected rainbows and unicorns until reality eventually hit them.
> You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research.
I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.
This is a hilariously narrow view of family life.
Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former)
But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought publicly!
You can entertain it. You just did. But don't expect standing ovation is my very subtle point.
<< This is a hilariously narrow view of family life.
Quite the contrary, it allows for a very broad range of outcomes, because it deals with reality of the human condition.
<< which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former
Everything always is. Why, tomorrow I could quit my job and start a bar in Hawaii. As arguments go, this one was pretty weak.
<< Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between
Why am I getting this feeling that you completely misread what I wrote.
"But don't expect standing ovation is my very subtle point."
that's the exact reasoning why parents who complain about how hard it is to be a parent get no sympathy from you. You blew a load in somebody (or had a load blown into you) and another human popped out. That's a choice you made for yourself, nobody forced you to, and there is a big giant swath of people out there who couldn't care less.
I sense there is some confusion, but I can't pin point where it is coming from. Is it possible you are not replying the person you thought you were?
>You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there.
If that's the attitude it renders virtually every discussion about the topic moot and the people in question better stop trying to give life advice to anyone else.
My wife and I don't want kids and we've heard our fair share of (unsolicited) opinions on the topic from people who clearly weren't always happy. I've only ever known one woman I worked with, who was a brilliant scientist, tell me straight up she regrets having children and wished she could have focused on her research.
If that's not something you can honestly say without being berated then clearly the 'propaganda' still works mostly in one direction.
I agree with you but I don't really see what the alternative is. If you openly go around stating that you regret having children, what are people supposed to say? It's better to keep those thoughts to yourself because there, quite frankly, is nothing helpful anyone could say even if they wanted to. Not to mention that it would be unfair to the kids if they got the feeling that you regret having them.
This!
Unfortunately, my soul brought me into that bucket :-( I can speak about it with other (men) friends without children, and to some women without children. But if you ever say that you didnt want children when others with children are around, they see you as an alien.
Esp it gets hard if you are single (what happenend to me now) and you meet new women and tell them that the only reason for the last breakup was that I couldnt bear the stress with out children.
I knew from the beginning of my life on, that it will totally crush me if this happens - coming from a "not supportive family" makes it really hard to >actually want children<, esp. if the same stories now repeat :-(
What even is this? People will say what they will say when they listen to it. It’s not like you are complaining to the kids.
>I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
Because there's no point in thinking about it. Your wife will ask if you want to leave, your children will hate you, and society will hate you, it will make you feel depressed, and meanwhile it won't accomplish anything. It's a dialogue only for yourself, once you acknowledge that, it becomes far less challenging to deal with and you can move forward with dealing with challenges in solvable ways.
My mothers' friends have to fund vacations for their adult children and grand children in order to spend time with them. They wont let her stay at their home.
My mother was giddy when my father died; so I have strong boundaries in our relationship.
My brother moved to colorado after the service and never returned.
I'm not convinced having children is the answer alone. (I say as a childless 35yo)
> They wont let her stay at their home.
There are many reasons this could be the case. The internet (and Reddit in particular) is abound with AITA type discussions around boundaries within families.
Being a parent is orthogonal to being someone people want to spend time with. Unless I knew for sure I was not in the latter group, I wouldn’t use it as a justification for not having kids.
About your first point, I understand why it happens, but I get frustrated at these debates nowadays. Both sides cannot talk about their experiences without having to add something that invalidates the other side choice. They cannot fathom that the other side may prefer the disadvantages of their choice instead of the disadvantages of yours. Maybe it's the human condition to try to point out how the other side will regret their choices to validate our life decisions
Well said. I appreciate people on both sides that can simply acknowledge having kids is great for some people, and not having them is great for others, and the world is big enough for all of us.
Indeed. There was a CBC radio episode last year that had parents discussing regrets. It felt weird to hear people saying these things out loud.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.6661746
Being able to hook up with random strangers on apps might be fun in your 20s and 30s. When you're old and wrinkly, it's not going to be the same. I hate to say it, but this is especially true for women entering their twilight years. A lot of childless people in our generation are headed to a very sad and lonely future.
COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just people going crazy in isolation. Trading random stocks, or ordering crazy nonsense off of Amazon. Being alone is literally psychological abuse and a lot of them were subjected to it for months at a time.
And wife and I are both old and wrinkly and happily child free. Childfree people aren't just hedonists.
So why do you have children? Can't synthesize a reason?
> My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way
I completely believe that’s been your experience, but want to highlight that his is a difficult asymmetry in these friendships. I in no way mean to imply that the below is the experience your friends had with you, just that the challenges are not one-way.
In my own circle, my wife and I have often felt like it was our friends with kids who vanished. We knew they were busy, we kept extending invites or asking for time. Things often didn't work especially as new parents are figuring their lives out, things are changing all the time, etc. We'd meet up here and there, but it was - necessarily - always on their terms. And so of course, our outreach tapered down incrementally but consistently.
But I do wonder: do they feel we detached from them, or do they have any inkling that we feel they detached from us? We've discussed it with one couple who we were always closer to, but it doesn't feel an appropriate topic to resurface uninvited at any given moment.
It's simply hard to plan. Before kids I'd typically meet up with friend around 8 or so maybe 9. Now bedtime rules my evenings. When my kids are asleep I'm exhausted. Most of my friends evenings are just starting at that time! (lol) and I completely understand. The other thing is I can't go out and get drunk or party because being hung over with a 3 year old pissing the bed after they crawl in to sleep/cuddle with you - nothing better/worse.
It's simply hard to relate. I have some very good friends who we've stayed in touch. I'm forever grateful for them. But when you're out and about and you meet a random person and try to strike up a friendship say at a conference. The second I mention I'm a dad I feel I'm relegated to the back of the bus.
Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them.
Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.
And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.
And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.
So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.
The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.
Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
I think it's a fair response, and I can appreciate the truth in one's own life that leads you to write it. But this situation is a complex dynamic, no two situations are precisely the same either factually or subjectively. The same couple with a new child may stay close to one, drift away from another for totally different reasons that may not have one thing to do with intention or effort.
At any rate, I'm never too proud to reach out to old friends even if the time between attempts increases. Relationships may change again!
I cut my parents out of my life as soon as I was able. Depending on the 'vibrancy of family life' when you're old is often a bad gamble.
> You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way.
Similar to what I wrote in the other reply: How far went _your_ initiative to stay in actual contact with them, in a way it's not a boring duty call, but something _actually_ nice?
If I have friends with children, sure I'm also interested in them. But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved - and they mostly expect from me that I constantly want to see the kids and "help in any way", well, where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
> But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved
See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily. My guess would be your friends would love to spend some time with you but can't, because logistics.
> where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
> See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily.
You can't, sure. You shouldn't at least. But what does it mean to me? It leads to the fact that the friendship is pointless. So why should I take a lot of initiative, when I don't get anything back anymore? For a reason that they've actively decided for (typically), btw.
> Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
I'm not talking about commercial/monetary/material profits. I'm talking about profits in terms of social lives. If my wording is unfortunate, I hope that it's still clear what I mean. One important (not the only one) currency in that regard is: Timeslots in the calendar.
PS: If the other side shows at least some remote awareness of the situation and indicates a little goodwill, it's already a different thing. In my personal experience, even that isn't common, though.
I understand why they do it, but I cannot ignore that you lose the incentive of visiting your friends and their kids when they always take that visit as a way to treat you like a babysitter. Yes, I accept sometimes looking at your kid while you take a nap, just don't make that the usual experience for years on end, though. I'm lucky, as my friends always understood when I pointed that out to them, but I'm aware that this may not be the common reaction.
Admittedly, I don't know that particular case from practical experience, but yeah, well, that sounds very symbolic for what I meant.
It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs.
Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.)
Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-person events - cities are filled with concerts and music festivals, you name it, more Michelin Star restaurants than anyone could visit, etc. etc.)
Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
Not to mention that parents have all kinds of new social stigmas.
Having children used to be: free labor, send them off to do whatever (now you'd be accused of child abuse)
Basically, the problem is single life is too good now. We have smartphones, internet, and the economy revolves around the single experience.
The minute you have kids, you lose access to the exciting single life that the modern society has built itself around and catered itself to.
Society glorifies single life, and the signalling is so strong you know you'll lose it if you have kids. It's not like you have time anyway with the doomscrolling and dopamine addiction.
> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.
> It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
Why would it be easier today?
You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
This. I know me and all my peers roamed the neighborhood and my wife's life was not that different despite being born on different continents. Doing the same now risks a visit from state child neglect referral, which is enough to give most a pause. Parents seem to get all the risk and less benefits, while getting the stink eye when kid is not behaving properly.
In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.
> You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner.
Still works this way in my suburban Ohio world
> today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
though yes I see this in the childhood sport arena, club teams, traveling teams, etc.
>Still works this way in my suburban Ohio world
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion... but to be blunt I've only seen this in black and impoverished neighborhoods. There needs to be enough working single moms releasing their kid out of necessity that the Karens can't snitch on everyone and the police/CPS fatigue of fielding the calls after investigating and not finding anyone they can force into keeping the kids inside.
Kids aren't dying in childbirth, for one.
Well sure, that doesn't really make parenting itself easier/harder.
Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.
Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.
And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:
Housing floor space per person, same trend.
Life expectancy, same trend.
Leisure has increased.
Tourism has increased.
Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.
The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.
As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.
> The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se
Deopends on country and social support Id say?
In western EU countries, parental-costs are estimated to 180.000 - 200.000 EUR per head that parents will pay for the first 25 years.
> post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke
No fluke. A deliberate policy
There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.
We can't return to a place where America is the only manufacturing country in the world, where every other country is in ruins and rebuilding and taking loans from America. That was a very weird set of circumstances that gave America unprecedented tailwinds that no other country has ever had.
I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record. But once I had my first child, all of those things seemed so petty and inconsequential. I don’t miss the night life, the hobbies, or the drinking buddies. My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation. I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
> I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record.
yes me too
> My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. .... I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
yes me too absolutley
> If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation.
Total opposite for me, no way. Whilst i dont want to do them now, I am so SO glad i had those experiences. I know I would be deep in a mid life crisis today wondering "what if" if i had missed the fun and gone straight to having kids in my 20s. Like, id probably be blowing up my life over it now, doing something stupid, out of FOMO for never having tried living other lives. Different people are different, but it would have been a TERRIBLE choice for me. (im also not the only one - witness the commonality of the old mid-life-crises sportscar and mistress trope that was born out of a period having kids young)
Yep this is 100% it -- my partner and I who stayed single and lived out our 20s and early 30s "experiencing life" only wish we could have met and settled down 10 years earlier. Its way more important and rewarding than all the shallow stuff that people talk about. Of course sometimes you miss the freedom, but sometimes I missed high school when I was in college -- didn't mean it was a step down. Sometimes I missed college and my old job when I got a "real job", of course, it was still a strict upgrade, but you can always look back and appreciate what was good about the old days.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
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$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.
Only two are in daycare. LOL I wish it was for all 4. My autistic girls insurance cost I hit the OOP max in 2 months but still.
Those prices are weird. Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?
> Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?
In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.
Also, a nanny is not the same ecosystem as child-care. It's not nescessarily a substitute. If what's desired is a private-private child-care, I suspect you'll be paying a lot more than the price of a nanny.
One challenge with hiring a nanny is if they need to take a sick day (or if they quit!) you can end up in a tough spot. In contrast a day care center usually has backups built in so you don’t end up scrambling.
Because a nanny in Seattle charges $30/hr.
Something's not adding up there unless you mean 30/hr/kid
At $30 an hour, $6,000 would cover 10 hours a day for 20 days per month.
A private nanny isn't realistic for 4 kids. You need 2.
The few people that I've known with private nannies (usually au pairs) have had only one and also each had 3 or more (up to 6) kids.
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
The trick is that au pairs are nowhere close to that expensive. (Though the US becoming radically less attractive of a place for foreigners to live and work may be changing the availability of that option.)
I agree, it's the public attitudes that are most disheartening and probably some of the reason young people are less inclined to have children. All over society people are seeing kids as a kind of personal indulgence that shouldn't be allowed to impact other people - whether its a lack of sympathy that parents have higher priorities at work, or looking down on kids who act like kids in public. At the same time parents who let their kids look at screens in public are demonizes, as apparently only kids who are perfectly behaved without distractions should be allowed out.
Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
Speak for yourself.
I live to be happy, but you do you.
When I read things like this I find it confusing in so many ways. I've been out of the US for a while now so perhaps there's some contemporary issues I'm just not considering? For $6k a month, why not hire a private nanny? You could also work with other parents in your area to setup something for a bit more socializing depending on their age.
Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally every single time we go to e.g. the park. The kids want to play with other kids, we meet their parents, and it's basically an endless source of friendships - even better because it's other parents who probably live relatively close to you enabling you to start setting up aforementioned ideas.
My childcare cost is $52k/year for two kids. To hire a private nanny for TWO kids, it'll be at least $35/hour with benefits (insurance, paid time off etc) in my area. That'll be around $80k/year for a private nanny. And once the kids are older, the value of a nanny isn't as good IMO since they don't provide the variety of social challenges that a daycare can provide (group working, relationship building, conflict resolution etc...). We have friends with kids of the same age that don't go to day care and have nannies instead, and the differences in social interaction are significant - maybe we just get lucky but I think our kids build a lot of skills being in a bigger group.
> 52k/year
LOL, this is my income after taxes before paying anything! :-X
I wish I could accord private nanny. Do you know of good resources to find this? Esp in the USA I'm in texas.
Say you hire a nanny for $6k/mo... What problem have you solved? You're still paying the six grand, and you had better hope the nanny is good, because that is your kids' whole world now for a chunk of their existence.
It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month. If desired you can also generally arrange something with other parents in your area to do a cost share with the side benefit of also getting a bit more socialization for your kids. There's endless differences with nanny vs daycare. A big one is that most studies show children do best when raised by a small handful of consistent figures. In daycares they're going to have rotating workers with relatively unfavorable ratios.
It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your children to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.
There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.
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One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
> It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Real median personal income in the US is $45k which is $3750 gross per month. [1] Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans. What was your experience with bad nannies?
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
A good nanny for four kids is definitely more than $6k / month in lots of parts of America, you're ignoring the downsides of nannies (like when they get sick, or need time off, etc), you're ignoring a lot of the upsides of daycare (like socialization), and the research does not support your claim that kids do better being raised by a nanny than daycare.
It's totally fine that you've chosen a nanny over daycare. I did for my first, and I think we'll go with a nanny for my second, but you're presenting a wildly misleading perspective here.
"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"
I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.
So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
Thanks for sharing.
I feel a big part of what you experience is based on where you live. Having a family seems incongruous to the fast paced corpo world, sadly.
I moved to a small, uninteresting town years ago, mainly to escape the hustle and crowds. Honestly, I don't like it much, it's a bit too small and dull for my tastes. But more on point, the people here have all been so mind bendingly kind and patient with the kids that it makes it really hard to leave.
I wish every place were so patient, but there's probably a pretty direct negative correlation between that and 'getting ahead', whatever that means.
Your experience sounds exactly like mine. My son is very autistic as well. I've had to cut off friends with families because either their didn't understand meltdown and were incredibly judgy because they were blaming my parenting for his ASD meltdowns, or others because my autistic son was a "bad influence". God forbid their (later diagnosed) kid have some exposure to a child with different neurodiversities.
That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.
So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.
Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.
> It's just hard now.
I completely sympathize with the challenges, though I don't understand (and might completely misunderstand) the word "now". Do you meant 'in the current world'? What is different that makes it harder? And what defines now - the social media age? Post-WWII?
Now to me I think is a point in time earlier than now. I'm thinking somewhere when people didn't need to get out and do stuff with another. I think when I was a kid it was normal to have grandparents, and church settings, and just after school programs at the Y or kids in general would find each other in the neighborhood and play. I don't see much of that the same in the 'now'
> So when one of my kids throws a tantrum
If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.
> Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.
Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".
Not sure how old they are, but we found that this loneliness phase got better once they were in school (and better as they got into middle, then high school.)
I have plenty of friends with young kids that are super social. They invite people over, take their kids to restaurants and invite people to come, go to picniqs, festivals, and other things. We love their kids (or at least all the people that show up do).
You have the agency to make it happen.
You and your love for and acceptance of their kids and willingness to show up to family-friendly activities are very likely the key to their ability to do this.
If your friends suck, get new friends.
Lack of sleep when they are young makes you into a zombie
> It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointless contact.
There's often the expectation that you're super interested and excited about their children. But even if you'd try. You'll never get something back. Not because they turned into bad persons. But because there are just no spare resources for it (e.g. in terms of calendar slots) on their side anymore.
Do I have to be infinitely sympathetic with them? Or is there some limit at which I am allowed to say: This friendship just doesn't give me anything anymore.
This is such a great comment. I think people don't realize how much harder it is to raise kids now than the 90s or even early 2000s.
When I was young in the 80ies, my mum worked part-time 4h as basic clerk, mainly for fun and having people around her so that she doesnt have to take care of us for the whole day. My dad worked fulltime as an engineer, the bought a house.
Today, you need 2 top tier salaries to make childcaycare and rent even possible
$6000 a month for daycare? Either you're really bad at math or you're a sap!
"There's a sucker born every minute!" - P.T. Barnum
> I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare.
My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
The tipping point isn’t just take home pay. Peak daycare expense is generally only for a few years. Quit the workforce for a decade and you see long term effects.
Further if either parent loses their job you can quit daycare until they get a new one. Single income families are far less resilient.
I feel kids need that sense of community and social setting. I know it's hard to get a handle on when there's nothing I went through that with my other two during covid. The difference is night and day with dealing with anxiety in social settings.
"don't get me started on dog/cat people who..." listen dude, you chose to have kids. You and your partner made the conscious decision to produce life, maybe instead of complaining about it, just live it and stop vilifying people who made different choices than you did.
You talk about your children as if they're a burden and that's sad.
>who equate their struggles to mine...
Perhaps they don't like the fact that someone is equating pet struggles to human struggles.
Doesn't sound like they are talking about them being a burden, just how their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
> their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
This is true of people with pets, too.
Everyone's struggles are equally their struggles. I too get a little miffed when someone invokes the struggle Olympics, especially when their struggles are the consequence of their choices.
Midnight PRs sounds really sad. Pager duty; I mean you’re not saving people in the ER. Everything you’ve written comes off as profoundly selfish and self-centered. God forbid your 8 month old needs to be a priority over pager duty.
Raising kids is hard, I have 3 but it’s not sad. Blowing off some steam is something every parent needs. But it sounds like you are in desperate need of some perspective on life.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.
Worry is going to present, no matter what. Parents with hundreds of thousands in the bank worry, too. That can't be optimized for.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
kind of a "yes, and", but:
> such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children
To a certain extent I agree with you that lower standards in parenting made the whole project more doable.
However, when my great-great-grandmother's brother's wife died, my great-great-grandmother had to quit school (about 14 or 15 years old?) in order to stay home to help take care of his baby. Shaped the whole rest of her life.
Responsibilities being split often meant others had to sacrifice in addition to parents, and those expectations of sacrifice often fell hard on women (whether young unmarried or past their own reproductive years).
I think there's a very important distinction to be made here. Having kids and taking care of kids you already have are too very different things.
If you're calling not having kids selfish, that's just completely weird. You are going to have to prove first that your opinion isn't also one of these invented ideas.
If we're talking about taking care of them, I kind of agree. Excluding extreme circumstances like rape in a country without abortion, you kind of know what you're willingly signing up for when you have kids. You forced them into the world, they are your responsibility.
> Like all ideas, someone had to invent them
Not at all. Behaviors can be emergent based on environmental conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
is one example.
I was referring to the parent commenter’s specific ideas and conclusions, not general behavior patterns.
"Selfish" is exactly the word my dad uses. But then again we're third worlders and the idea of not having grandchildren is literally horrifying.
> the idea of not having grandchildren is literally horrifying.
Why?
In our culture, we're socialized to minimize our "self." Your life is defined by the roles you play in the extended family at various stages of life: child, father, etc. You spend a life laboring to provide for your kids, and the reward at the end is raising your grandkids and sharing their joy as they experience everything in the world for the first time through fresh eyes. It completes the cycle of life. If you don't have grandkids, you're stripped of purpose and robbed of your reward.
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
For whatever it's worth, it's my perception that even within the US there are many who come from a culture where it's expected for adults to settle down and raise a family at some point in their lives. That describes my background, and I would like to have kids myself.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
Keep living in your bubble my friend. It is not selfish to see the sacrifices required to raise children (and I will not enumerate them here, this thread is full of them if you want to educate yourself), see that all you get from society is "thoughts and prayers" (at least in WA state where I live) and take a hard pass on having children.
I... What?
This is literally the definition of selfish? You see what you must give up for the sake of someone else (children), see the lack of support you will receive, and decide that you don't want to make that exchange.
That's literally a selfish decision, because you are deciding you want to keep that energy and those resources for yourself.
It's not inherently bad to make that decision, but it absolutely is selfish.
But that "someone else" doesn't exist yet...it seems nonsensical to gauge whether you're keeping resources from a non-entity.
I don't think it matters? A decision to keep resources for yourself is selfish on the basis of it being a decision to keep resources for yourself, regardless of where they might otherwise be going?
I guess, but that kinda makes the word selfish meaningless. By that logic we’re all selfish all the time since we’re keeping our resources instead of throwing them in the garbage.
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
Productive conversation is infeasible with someone who interprets my position to be that it’s selfish to be unable to have children.
Not to put words in their mouth, but I think part of the poster's point is that inability is is a more complex equation than simple biological capacity. A couple who judges it economically risky or otherwise irresponsible to start a family (which represents a wide swath of the population) could for example consider themselves unable.
No, this is a pretty typical conversation on the Internet these days: someone takes a relatively well-defined stance on an issue, and then someone else wildly misinterprets or misrepresents it, just to get in a dig at the original person for... Unclear reasons.
It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
> My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids.
This is true for many people. I know a few childfree couples that you could offer them a hefty salary to raise kids and they would decline.
However I know even more people who ended up having fewer kids than they would have liked, especially when I lived in a big city. Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids, found raising their current child(ren) challenging enough that they didn't think they could handle another, or reevaluated their preferences after watching friends and neighbors struggling.
> It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
For many, sure. But for other people addressing the root causes (of which cost is one) can move the needle.
> Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids
You then brought up cost as the reason. Cost can basically be removed as a reason. There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
Yes some countries like India are still like that. Parents from the smaller villages literally pick a partner for their kids if they don't find one.
I think that's really unfair, people deserve to enjoy their lives. If they actually enjoy it that's fine but nobody should be pressured into having kids.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
Turns out that's mediated by the sexual impulse, and can be short-circuited via contraception.
It's not that easy to beat evolution, some will still have kids while those who only care about the fun will die out.
No need to wait: they've already fried themselves out of the evolution game with STDs. Any child they have will likely be retarded or diseased in some way.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
Third such comment I see in this thread. And... so what? What does the Darwinian purpose have to do with anything mentioned here?
Choosing to not have children appears to "swim against the current" of the dominant biological process/context by which one came to be and in which one exists.
Certainly not having children allows one more time to pursue other matters. Mankind in general might gain (or lose) from such behavior, depending on whether one is an Einstein or a Stalin for example. Most anyone who participates in society has some set of interests and pursuit of those interests is nonetheless very real and the results may dominate our perspective.
I see no clear way to judge whether a person contributes more through his/her work or through his/her children. Nor do I think "contributing" (whatever that means) is a known evaluation anyway. And what one man considers useful another might judge detrimental. All the more b/c history is "unfinished business". IMO in summary we simply cannot know.
Aside: there's a T-shirt that shows the sinking bow of a shipwreck through a telescope lens. It's labeled thusly: "MISTAKES - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Yet another viewpoint.
I agree with this take. A lot of old boomers tell me how there was a lot of pressure to get married and have kids because it was the thing to do. Nowadays, there is less pressure for people to do that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
Why not ask Israelis?
Even ignoring Haredim and Arab Israelis (both whose fertility rate has fallen dramatically), secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work much longer hours than Americans (South Korea is the only developed OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working) [1], live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms low rise brutalist apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, pay San Francisco level prices for everything, and have almost nonexistent government benefits.
But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.
Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on self-centered.
[0] - https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
[1] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
It really is cultural. The economics don't help at all, but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc.
I barely know my coworkers kids names half the time. I certainly don't see photos of them or see them popping into zoom backgrounds. Growing up my dads company had picnics and his coworkers had parties and I'd meet his coworkers & their kids.
And while theres obvious things children limit.. like 4am clubbing on a Tuesday... a lot of public spaces are less child-friendly than in the past.
Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
There's very little overlap in 20-30 something singles & family public spaces anymore. It's like the entire world has self segregated.
I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
> but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc
Pretty much!
> Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
This isn't bad if there are other parents doing the same thing too. Increasingly there are not (or at least not among the demographic who uses HN).
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
I don't think so. I'm from around that generation, and that didn't stop Asian, Eastern European, and Israeli American parents from having multiple kids here in the Bay Area when growing up in the 2000s.
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
If nothing else, it's yet another area of increased expense.
In the early 90s when I was a child, it was pretty normal to shuttle 3 kids + parents around in a cheap little late 80s used sedan or station wagon. These days 3 kids + parents looks more like a big expensive 4Runner or Highlander.
Similar 80s/90s upbringing for me.
The car thing is also limiting on who can perform extra childcare, and how/where.
As a kid, I used to hang out with my 10+ years older cousins who could drive - taking me to mall/movies/arcade/sports games with them in their little 2 door coupe.
Sure they were babysitting me, it wasn't some tremendous chore of being stuck in some kids-only space. They were doing stuff that they might have done without me, and probably got $20 from my parents.
We'd go see a Jim Carrey PG-13 film, not some Disney movie with they boyfriend/girlfriend/buddy, and they'd cover my eyes when their were tits on the screen. Or I'd sit in an older cousins lap at a ballgame while they drank beer (and smoked) and shouted at the players.
Can't imagine this is acceptable or normal now, lol. But it meant different generations commingled in ways that they just don't now.
I hadn't even thought about this angle, but you're right. Furthermore, not only is it not acceptable or normal today, it's largely not even possible.
Cheap econobox starter cars have disappeared from the market, used car prices are through the roof for anything that's reasonably safe and not basically dead already, and there's nowhere for young people to go anymore even if cheap cars did exist.
Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
You seem to be supposing a model where most people naturally want kids, but are just discouraged from having kids because...other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
Yes, absolutely.
I used to work in a big city where friends, neighbors, and coworkers with young kids had to sacrifice their career trajectory, friends, hobbies, savings, personal space, and more. Most couples we knew had no kids, some had one, a few exceptional folks had two. A few couples we knew even commented that they ended up having fewer children than they were planning to because of the difficulty with the one(s) they had.
Then my partner and I moved near relatives to a small, family-friendly town. Most of our neighbors have two kids, some have three, and a few exceptional folks have four or more. Almost everything here revolves around families -- even my company has family events and taking time to take care of kids is normalized.
True, living here did not change our decision to have kids, but it actually did change how many kids we ended up having.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
That's a plausible model, but my model is that people alter their goals based on what they observe happening to other people who pursue those same goals. If young people see their friends, coworkers, and neighbors struggling due to their decision to have children, it seems reasonable that they would reevaluate how important it is to them.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids
Yes.
They are much more tolerant about having kids and making sure to give space to people planning to have kids.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
The more likely you and your peers are to have kids, the more likely you are to live in a society which will accommodate you.
---
Heck, Germany gives significantly more monetary and subsidized childcare benefits than Israel (which gives almost nothing), and Israel remains significantly more expensive than much of Germany, yet secular Israelis continues to sustain a much higher fertility rate than similar Germans.
It is hard to describe how kid unfriendly Western society has become.
I think it is more than just tolerance and stink eyes.
Some cultures actively celebrate children and families. They center them in social life in an inclusive way. This covers inclusion in social events, institutions, and civic design.
Kids are not only FUN, but interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
I would be very interested in a breakdown of how the American perception changed over time and what the drivers were.
Since total fertility rates have the same trend all around the world, why restrict the breakdown to Americans?
Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children, which necessarily includes foregoing many or all of the adult things due to lack of funds and time.
> Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children
This is exactly what I am talking about. Is the obviousness of this statement constant across time? Would someone in the 1960 or 1980 have found it equally obvious?
Alternatively, is it the emphasis on prioritizing fun that changed?
Alternatively, has both the perception and reality of fun given up changed?
Im mostly interested in breakdown in America because I am an American. Some countries match, some dont. If the underlying drivers are common, I would still find them the most relatable and interesting in the American context.
I think in atomic families in the US, more and more people are brought up without really interacting with children much once they are a teen and stop being a child themselves.
What used to be normal teen rights of passage like hanging out with your younger extended family, holding a baby, babysitting the neighbors kids, being a summer camp counselor, helping with youth sports, etc.. are less common.
Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college.
> Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college
So are Israelis. Getting into the best IDF units is much more difficult and stressful than getting into an Ivy - it's both academic and physical. But if you get into those units, you will be set for life financially.
Otherwise, your just an infantry grunt who wasted a couple years with no discernible skills and facing a future of (best case) working a dead end job that pays $40k a year in a country with a CoL similar to the Bay Area.
This is why immigrating abroad is still somewhat popular amongst non-techie Israelis (Zohran's electronics store [0] still hits somewhat close to home).
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSdIAajX_sI
Yes, this is closer to my take:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098431
Agreed with your take. The lifestyle choices lead to the costs, and it's sort of a circular problem in the end. My dad's (European immigrant) family lived in one of those multi-generational homes you mentioned, and so there was just far less of this self enforced age segregation you see in atomic families.
From when I was young, I'd see my extended family at least every 2-3 weeks or more, every other holiday was hanging out with people from newborn to 90 years old. Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
By comparison my mom's side which had been here a few generations, I never really saw kids other than when I was a kid myself. I don't think my wife ever held a baby until she was an aunt in her 30s.
Yeah, and it forces kids to need to do "activities" to even see other kids. Makes proper development for kids much more expensive than the essentially free "existing alongside other kids" that happens in the multi-generational home.
In many cities in india, there is somewhat of a revival of this setup. What happened was that people weren't able to get homes with their aspirational square footage in the location they want. So what they end up doing these days is taking their family, the wifes family and the kids and buying 2-3 apartments in the same building. It's the closest you get to a multi-gen home. Will be interesting to see if this trend affects TFR.
Note that the recent +10% increase in TFR in rich indian states (you would expect a decline) is mostly due to better IVF availability/affordability, not due to any of the reasons I mentioned.
> Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
Yeah, this exposure also blunts some of the fear&uncertainty that puts people off of having kids.
Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
Or Israel?
It's simply a matter of the social position of mothers, or, what defines the social status of women in a given society. In much of the world it's educational attainment and professional status, so it surprises me very little that most women in these countries don't want children, or can easily find an excuse to not to.
Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Very different things
> But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.
That doesn't seem to be supported by the data, the "nicer" and richer a country becomes, birth rates drop.
And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate.
How do you square those facts with your view here?
The dimension of this issue that never gets air time is that we've made having kids almost completely intentional. The richer a country becomes, the more intentional having kids becomes. The dynamic we see with rich countries is that as having kids becomes more intentional, there's also the increase in reasons why people would choose to delay or forego having kids.
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates. - "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
> To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported.
This is the most casually psychotic thing I've read on HN.
You're advocating forcing women to bear children they don't want and taking away control over their own body.
US voters chose to put people with that view in charge of the federal US government. 1990s and 2000s me would have never believed it.
We need to strike the right balance between personal benefit/freedom and societal benefit.
Clearly we are way too on the individualistic side of the pendulum now.
Why don't you have a few extra children for societal benefit, being aware of the importance thereof?
Oh I'm on it don't you worry son
Proofs or didn't happen.
That's far from clear.
How is forcing people to have children they don’t want a good outcome?
How about we set up society in such a way that choosing to have children is a more appealing option.
> birth control ban will be supported
Wtf... totally the wrong tool to change the calculus of intentionally having children.
However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
> unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today
No amount of climate change today could compare with the threat of war and famine in the past, and yet they still had kids.
Louise Perry even goes so far as to hypothesize that the distinct lack of threat contributes to low fertility, under the term "mortality salience": https://x.com/Louise_m_perry/status/2014296167262126192
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?
If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.
Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
> How do you square those facts with your view here?
"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?
Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.
Because it's not just money. It's time and money. You can have lots of money and nice things, but if you don't have time to raise your kids, you can't do it. And if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money.
If you have the money you hire help like a nanny. I know plenty of families who have a nannies to help with their children.
First, that’s a LOT of money. Very few people can afford that at all and those that can are definitely counting down the days until their last child goes to school.
Second, it’s hard to find a good nanny. Parents live in fear of not getting a good one, having something go wrong and need to scramble for a replacement without missing too much work, etc.
It’s possible but it’s not going to move the mainstream averages because only like 5% of the population does that. If we want to materially change national averages, we should be talking about government daycare filling in the gap before public schooling starts around the country.
The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory.
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
As someone with unsupportive family, I feel this.
I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
Generally, the more developed a country is, the more capitalistic it is. Capitalism inherently assigns monetary value to everything, even children, and as capitalist societies currently function children have deeply negative value. So deeply negative that it completely nullifies the higher “default” standard of quality of life that comes with life in a developed country.
People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.
you think people in Chad are optimistic about the future of their village and are therefore having lots of kids? Give me a break dude.
Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.
Yeah, I grew up poor in the 3rd world (not quite Chad level though) and even the upper class culture of my own country was almost alien for us and vice versa... Imagine the 1st world.
Those who have little also have little to lose, which reshapes dynamics.
Pretty sure the poor women in Chad with no access to healthcare and quality nutrition have quite a bit to lose, and they don't have a choice not to risk it.
Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were:
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.
Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
It truly is beautiful.
On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.
The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.
But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.
Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.
Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.
Is life mostly good?
Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing. After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.
Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.
If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.
Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc. This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.
70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.
I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child.
Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time.
It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.
> when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time
Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)
Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
> Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children.
Oh you still need them for all of those. It just so happens that developed capitalist countries figured out you can use immigrant's children for this, rather than paying to grow them in-house, since with outsourcing children you bypass a large chunk of the cost.
Developed countries already sold their own children's futures in exchange for short term equity gains, now it's being done to countries where outsourcing happens.
Capitalism is eating fertility.
> Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Aye, agreed. It will swing back one way or another.
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
CMDX is where we did a LOT of offshoring pre-COVID. Ditto for folks in Baja to cover timezones.
Definitely a paycut compared to the US but still pretty great for MX. Timezones and cultural overlap were pretty good, and there was a vibe that the folks coming out of Universities in CDMX were genuinely good, compared to iffy paper tigers in the Indian call centers.
The TN visa was also attractive, since we could just bring them north for a rotation or two. The Mexican workers love it since there was a big pay bump, but also the expectation they could continue their job back in MX later; bring em up to the RDU or Austin, put em in a few leadership roles, and then have them run a unit in MX, or help coordinate other LATAM efforts.
I find it a much more conscious choice for high paid immigrants. They can either live closely with their family, with the added bonus they basically live like a 'king' or they can move countries to live relatively wealthy lives in a new country.
Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice.
But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
> But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain
That plays some part but in most conversations I've had with Indian and Chinese nationals, the bigger issue for them was that it would take them decades to naturalize in the US. It's not worth spending your entire career and starting a family at the mercy of an employer.
As a con though, specially for Latin Americans, is the lack of family support, which is a big thing back in your own country.
So it's not all roses, it's one of my wife's main concerns about having kids, the lack of family support and them growing away from family.
I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive.
Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.
Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.
It's a band aid. Sure, first gen immigrants may have more children than locals, but then their children are locals, and they follow the local trend.
Kurgezat video on South Korea fertility explains this.
The “average crime rate” argument is disingenuous for an analogous reason to Waymo reporting that their cars are safer than the average driver is disingenuous: it lumps me in with Doris who last passed her vision test a decade ago but now has two cataracts. It also ignores that crimes in immigrant communities are less likely to be reported in the first place.
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I lived in South Florida for 12 years working on mega yachts. We were all aware of the criminals raping children then. We were aware of the 14 and 15 year old child prostitutes from Russia trafficked into St Martin. The girls were in the hot tub on the third deck on the yacht in the next slip over and nobody said anything. We were all aware of the hard working immigrants from South America too busy providing for their families and sending money home to be committing crimes.
> No amount of baby cash
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one.
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
That basically sounds like retirement. If you choose to stop working because of kids, you could be entitled to receive social security just like in old age.
And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny. This is a bigger issue than it may seem.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
> hire a competent housekeeper/nanny
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
there's also other options - your own parents, and other new parents and their parents.
"it takes a village" is an old saying that isnt going anywhere
> There is an amount of baby cash that would work
Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
The timing for those factors doesn’t match the timing of the fertility decline in the US.
Birth control usage is slightly down since the mid 90s. Among sexually active women not trying to get pregnant, the rate has been flat since 2002. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-unit...
Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
It’s hard to see how a stronger social safety net would decrease birth rates, but that has actually also decreased, e.g. from welfare reforms in 1996.
Meanwhile, total fertility is down ~20% over the ~30 year period since then.
You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
I don't follow.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
The magnitude is what I wish to quibble about. There may be a trend, but it's much smaller than the other effects.
> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
Have you considered that rather than people being ignorant, not everyone lives this average experience, or that some portion of this increase in wellbeing creates collateral damage and those that experience it don't have the same rosy view?
Great point. I'd argue though, is it a utopia if we're not as happy?
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
No, its because its obviously a utopia meant for all which is only one for some (those who are hoarding resources)
Yeah, you have a hard life as you type on a device powered by magic with a full belly and a roof over your head in a building that magically heats and cools itself. Compared to our ancestors, who alternated between fighting to not die of hypothermia or starvation or have their infants eaten by predators, you really have it hard dude. That bald guy on the TV has a really big yacht and you don't, and that means your life is a tragedy. I'm really sorry for the suffering you're enduring because you don't get to party all day, every day. Participating in your own survival is truly an imposition that nobody should ever have to bear.
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> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty
That’s looking at history through a modern lens.
The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex.
They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.
It's more complicated than that.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
TLDR: Peasants could expect between 8-12 pregnancies, with 2 (!) surviving to adulthood.
Christ, that is a lot of dead children for every woman. Your heart just breaks over and over.
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Anything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
> rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures
Same in EU
Germany in the 1930s. Not that we'd want to emulate their methods.
> but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
PR comes to mind. They managed to convince millions of people that smoking is 'cool', we just need another Bernays to do the same for having kids.
>without being authoritarian.
Too late. We already have the eyes/muscle and nascent legal justifications; leadership will eventually force the issue.
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
The past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit".
I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
You really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough.
In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival.
In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.
Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
It's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall.
Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Easy.
In the West at least, having more kids is no longer advantageous. In the past this could reduce the need for labor.
Now there isn't a "farm labor" problem to solve.
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
> And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
Funny how you don't realize you fit perfectly into the description of one of the groups that know exactly what is going on.
What do you mean?
Analysis from a time before the birth control pill is pointless. It's an alien society.
> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
> Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
TFR has been falling in the US since the 1800s, long before birth control.
TFR doesn't account for mortality which has also continuously fallen since then. If you're not adjusting for that, then you're looking at meaningless decontextualized numbers. Obviously if people want a certain number of children and the children keep dying then they're going to need to give birth more to get the right number of children. Birthing is not a useful measure on its own because pre-adulthood dead children lead to the same impact on population growth as no children in the first place.
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
Agree, as a kid in the 1970s we ate almost every meal at home, cooked by my mother. Mostly staples rice, potatoes, vegetables, some kind of meat. Restaurants were a rare treat for something like a birthday or if we were traveling. Fast food, the same. Very infrequent, like maybe a few times a year would we be able to talk my mom into getting a Happy Meal. Pretty much the same experience for all the kids I grew up with as far as I remember.
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
> TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
Coincidentally, TFR was higher when women had to be paired up with a man and have sex without the use of birth control.
It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.
I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
I think there are two steps: 1) Make people want to have kids. 2) Make it feasible for them to do so.
People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.
Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
When we were dating my wife always said she didn't want to have an only child. I was fine with only having one but always assumed we'd have at least two.
After going through pregnancy, she decided she was fine with never doing that again. Her's wasn't an especially difficult pregnancy, she simply didn't realize the toll it would take on her.
So we have one kid who is about to leave the nest.
> People already want more kids than they're having
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
"for every three kids wanted… only two are born".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyv7211jljo
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros.
You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
IMO this is a huge piece of it. People want to have it all, and things are structured where in order to have a decent income, you have to go to college. Then to pay off your loans and make it worthwhile you have to work a number of years. Then you have Madison Avenue telling you you need a fancy car, vacations, etc. You’re told you need to own a house to have a kid. You’re not even to zero by the time you’re 30, the same place prior generations were at 18.
That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.
It was a victory that the teenage pregnancy rates plummeted during the 90's in my small town high school, but when I was there there was still a real drive to discourage kids from having kids, and I internalized the idea that "having children will ruin your life" and carried that with me through my twenties.
> It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible
Let's call it out specifically - few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now and for every 1 woman who has "wants kids" in their profile, there's probably 2-3 women who say they don't want kids or "aren't sure".
And these aren't young women either, the age range is roughly 29-35, so even on the older side of optimal age for having kids.
Regardless of what men want, if so few women want to have kids - fertility will drop like a rock.
I feel like this is merely an anecdote.
I am on the apps too and have my range set to 29-38. About 80% of the women I'm seeing have selected as "wants kids". I don't want kids and I can barely find any women to match with who also don't want kids...
I think we both have anecdotes though and unless we have data from the entire company, we can't make any real accurate claim here.
Well, that's self-selective?
At 29-35, aren't >70% of women already in relationships?
Presumably, the majority of ones that want kids, already have them or are in the process.
Additionally, the apps tend to attract more people in hookup culture. So even from the remaining pool, 33% could be misleading.
Also, whether or not you're in a city / high-cost-of-living area makes a difference. That's less than 50% of the total population (in the US at least).
33% for that age group honestly seems high to me. I'd assume it would be lower.
> Few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now
I'm on an app where you can discuss wedding dresses and most women are interested in having children!
I'm joking of course. But a dating app embedded in hookup culture isn't a representative sample of women.
Not all dating apps are focused on hookup culture.
Besides, that's how people match these days. If you say the culprit is hookup culture, then most people are into that culture and don't want kids.
That’s also my experience. Specially for women in and my wives close environment.
90% or more wanted to have kids. But the ones that started after 35+ or didn’t have a partner until that age did struggle a lot, and many never managed even after investing 10a of thousands of euros on fertility care.
They prioritized lifestyle and career before family. Then it was too late to have both.
There might be many metrics to measure fulfillment in life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably stick with love. And nothing fills my love cup more than having a large family. YMMV.
you're in a bubble. probably urban, educated and wealthy.
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
> My take on it is:
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
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"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
Lord isn't that true...
Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.
My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
In Québec we have pretty extensive parental leave and we have heavily subsidized daycare (used to be 7$ a day per kid, now it's means-tested but you still get a hefty refund on your healthcare expenses come tax season).
When the program was put into place it paid for itself with the amount of mothers that entered the workforce.
Interesting that you only seem to think that mothers should take care of their kids.
I was raised by a single father, but thanks for derailing the conversation with your assumption that I'm a sexist because I didn't account for the edge case in parenting.
If you think that fathers taking care of their kids is an "edge case in parenting" I don't really have anything to add.
In most countries it's 80% if your household salary is such to support it + household expenses, and approaching 0% if it's not.
And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.
But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.
Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.
In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
Well, they know the middle will work no matter what, so they may as well squeeze them.
George Carlin had a bit on this. Went something like:
The rich people take all of the money, do none of the work and pay none of the taxes.
The middle class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes.
The lower class is there to scare the shit out of the middle class.
He was wrong about the taxes, the rich do pay most of them but in proportion to their wealth it can look like not much.
Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.
Where though? It isn't the case here in Sweden, it's pretty great.
That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.
I had great childcare that was subsidized such that my parents paid 7$ a day when I was a kid.
This hasn’t been my personal and 2nd hand experience.
Not in Germany, though.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
The poor have nothing to lose. It's the same around the world today, poor countries have high fertility. The OECD middle class has low fertility because they're worrying about other stuff (lost wages, career stagnation, etc). The rich (high fertility) have plenty of money for private schools, nannies, housekeepers, extracurriculars, etc for 14+ kids (Musk).
It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
The data doesn't support your position.
Birthrates historically increase when the world is burning. They fall during times of peace and prosperity.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216331/1/dp13019.pdf
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
It’s surprising that effective, cheap contraceptives aren’t on the list.
We’ve only had a couple generations where this was widely available, and somehow we’re shocked that populations decline afterwards?
Thats kind of the point.
Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, from what I have tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference.
Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...
All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.
'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.
I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.
But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.
Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
That's because a foreign substance is introduced into their precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
That’s not true, secular Israelis fertility rates are also above the replacement level and are quite high
I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
I think that perfectly aligns with their take.
People in their 30s, married, tend to have more stable lives. They are in a position where they feel they are able to give that child a good life.
That actually makes sense. I think I broadly agree with this. Maybe we can do 100 different little things to help people feel like they are "set up".
Peak fertility though is early 20s. By the time people are in their 30s, having trouble getting pregnant is a more common problem.
Are people who want to have kids really struggling to have them though? Keep in mind that fertility rate is not actually about fertility (not directly at least). It's a measure of the kids being had rather than a measure of the capability that the name would lead people to think.
Ivf is way more frequent then it used to be
Exactly. So since we observe that actual birth rates among women in their 30s displays a different trend than that of women in their 20s, despite decreased natural fertility, there has to be more going on.
More and more women have the power to choose when they get pregnant every day.
This is the number one reason for the decrease in fertility. Unplanned pregnancies are becoming a thing of the past.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
> Since the fertility problem is worldwide
Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.
The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.
Not entirely. Sperm counts in young men have been falling for decades. No one is sure why.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/declining-sperm-count-much-...
Per the above, it seems that the change in spermcount worldwide seems to be flat.
Interesting. That page shows some pretty strong evidence that the prevailing thinking is incorrect. Will have to look more.
You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo
Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.
I think if artificial wombs ever succeed it will turn the world upside down
Thanks to inequality, the rich[1] can already afford surrogacy, aka other people's natural wombs.
Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect.
1. i.e. FAANG employees
Israel had a net birth rate increase from 2000-2025 despite being at war and under regular rocket barrages for much of that time.
While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?
Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
Israel is a very complex case to say the least...
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
> I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
> believe that their children will have good lives
Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she?
I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
"The Beggar CEO"
It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5.
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
Mean age was 21.5 in 1970.
I personally think we over urbanised. If i look at my friends circle, most of the urban ones are childless and the rural ones have 2~4 kids.
Super anecdotal and totally non scientific observation.
There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards.
Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing.
Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering.
If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need.
Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life.
Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
It's all of it. We need cheaper housing, we need cheaper childcare, and cheaper food.
Basically all of the things the current administration is sabotaging. Not going to end well.
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones. [..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
I used to think similarly but I disagree.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
Please don't post the same sentence 3 times in one thread.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.
[dead]
> I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
This is why I love the internet because this sentence alone holds so much treasure.
Seriously, the issue is more our economic system. It is certainly not humanity in danger of dying out with 8 billion people, on the contrary...
Some argue the wrong people procreate, but meh...
Personally I just think less people want children because they find other things to do.
Great comment.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
Theyre probably all correct.
Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?
Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
The simple fact is that values are partially heritable, and if you believe your values to be superior (you should!) then having children and encouraging people who share those values to have children is a good way to propagate those values. This works for ~any set of values.
I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
s/fertility/any other complex issue in the world/
and the rest of the comment still applies. The issue here is trying to make sense of any of it on Twitter.
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> having men who'd make women comfortable having kids
This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.
At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
I agree that male culture in the US has a lot of room to grow (so does female culture, for that matter).
But that doesn't explain why many countries that rank higher in terms of egalitarianism have even lower birth rates than the US.
Female/leftist projection at its finest. There is no single group more entitled than the AWFL.
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable:
> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.
> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.
> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.
> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area, he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.
> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.
> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”
> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.
I'm praying for you, internet friend!
I understand the majority of the story, and through some personal experience really feel for women who have a controlling and abusive man. I find the story a bit strange though. It begins describing how boys inherit the idea of some beautiful woman that they are owed instead of it being something that requires constant work and effort. I agree/understand this part. But then it describes him trying to limit public access, how he has no document showing ownership, etc and this is where I get lost. To me that is what marriage is, giving up freedom for a partnership. To turn my husband self into a park, I feel like it is completely understandable my wife wants some space that is "public" and other that is "private". The key is healthy boundaries, ones set by compromise and understanding through honest communication. That's what separates healthy and abusive relationships, not the boundaries in the first place.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and if I am let me know, I just feel like it describes the ideal situation as one's partner entirety is open to the "public", and where setting boundaries itself is abusive, which I feel like is not really how most people feel nor what they want in a relationship.
Thanks for your comment!
I'm not the author, of course, so I can't say for certain that I have the most correct reading of it. But, if I'm reading your interpretation right, here's what I'd say:
The story analogizing women to land -- which has no voice, no agency, no mind -- is the critical part. If one is consensually "limiting public access" with another sentient human being, that's wonderful -- because you'd be doing that in dialogue, in true partnership, on the same footing, etc. "Hey, we're in a marriage now, that means we agree to not sleep with other people. Deal? Deal." I think the author (and certainly I) would heartily endorse that sort of "wanting some space that is public and some that is private".
The key word in your comment, to me, was "healthy" -- as in "healthy boundaries," and honest communication etc. You're right, it's not boundaries as such that describes abuse or even the entitlement on which abuse rests. It's the kind of boundaries.
What Bancroft is saying in the parable is that, if men see women as pieces of land -- private land, at that -- that they have a god-given right to, then anything healthy between men and women is by definition impossible. That's why, in the parable, the boy's compromises and concessions are in fact no such thing: because they're still founded on inhuman premises.
There are aspects of the parable here that the book goes into a lot more detail on -- male jealousy, in particular -- that overlap a lot with what you and me are talking about. I urge you to read it! The boy limiting public access on these entitled premises is what a lot of men will do, on either side of the "abuse" line: losing their shit when their attractive girlfriend, who they chose in part because of her attractiveness, goes out in public looking attractive, and he sees other people (other men) looking at her. Maybe next time he tells her "you're not wearing that outfit", thus "limiting public access" but not in the healthy sense that you mean it, because she's not treated as sentient, she's not part of a conversation. She's just coerced. (This is excused or minimized as "culture" or "values" by many!)
But again, if I'm reading you right, I think the part where you got lost is just that. Ironically, it's probably because you have a pretty healthy view of relationships that just how fucked up the boy in the story is confused you!
(If I haven't read you right, let me know.)
Yeah that helps it make more sense. I was reading it as Bancroft comparing woman to land, instead of it being Bancroft showing there are men who treat women as land. I'll definitely give the book a read.
Thank you for posting this. This parable does sadly ring true.
Huh? How does your tirade have anything to do with lower birth rates?
Here’s how:
1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.
3. As a result, there are fewer babies.
OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
[0]https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
Has coercion ever been tried?
There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
"People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc."
Here is the fertility rate in Bangladesh: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/bgd/ban...
I stand corrected, it doesn't have "insane fertility rate".
That's still a high fertility rate for a country with stats like this: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/bangladesh.html
> 25.1% of children under five are stunted, 10.7% of children under five are wasted
And the country had even higher fertility rates when it had higher frequency of famines, and much higher rates of hunger and malnourishment.
The point i was making however, is that parents don't truly - at a deeper level - consider the quality of life they are subjecting their child to.
Natural selection doesn't maximize for quality of life (it doesn't care for it), it selects for procreation and survival.
i think those stats show the opposite. They had higher fertility rate when things were worse, but women mostly didnt have a choice. Now they're better but still bad, and women do have a choice - so they are choosing not to, judging by the collapsed birth rate.
Eh, historically, both worse and better living conditions led to more kids.
It’s not that simple.
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As you say, a lot of the reasons people give are flippant and superficial. The most common claim I've seen is that everything is too expensive, but this is untrue. For some time, we have been richer than we've ever been in history, on the whole, and yet we witness decline. And all of the money-oriented incentives gov'ts have deployed have also petty much failed.
The problem is composed of multiple factors. However, I would say that there is a unifying element, a master key, that explains all of these elements, and that is consumerism. I mean "consumerism" as an ethos and as a matter of culture.
1. People are creatures of convention. Very few people operate or live life outside of the conventions of their times and of their culture. Culture creates the grain of life most people will follow, for better or for worse. In general, people are terrified of swimming upstream or going against the grain.
2. Subjectively speaking, culture determines conventions, sensibilities, patterns of life, purposes and goals pursued, and what is valued. Culture, whether explicitly or implicitly, imbues people with a sense of how life ought to be lived and where energies ought to be spent. It shapes attitudes toward the facts of life.
3. Inevitably, culture is institutionalized in law. As law is a teacher, culture is partly perpetuated through law.
4. Culture is also replicated and reinforced through media and education. It is usually insinuated.
5. Consumerism construes human nature and human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The obvious case is economic consumption. We believe buying things will make us whole. We believe money is the root of happiness. The life is the market and the market is life. Everything is for sale, for the right price.
6. This already creates an opposition. If consumption makes us whole, then children are antithetical to wholeness. After all, children are consumers! They are competitors. Given the choice between a new luxury car and another child, many couples would choose the car. People routinely make this calculation. They will limit their brood, because children eat into budgets and into time that could otherwise be spent on luxury items and vacations on tropical islands (mutatis mutandis).
7. If consumption makes us whole, then everything else that might be desired is recast as a matter of consumption as well. Even human relationships are reconsidered in consumerist terms. Sexual relationships become consumerist and transactional. Sex itself becomes commoditized, and becomes an instrument of the market. Beauty is desecrated and exploited to push products and services. A functional prostitution and an exploitative stance invade and pollute relations between the sexes, rendering them totally dysfunctional.
8. Contraception enters the picture. Contraception is the paradigmatic expression and cornerstone of all sexual consumerism. It is the incarnation of sterility and physical manifestation of a "NO" to life. It is a manifest contradiction of the essential and core function of sexual intercourse, which is procreative (the other end, the unitive, presupposes the procreative purpose, and so the denial of the procreative is a denial of the unitive). Its acceptance and normalization dethrones the procreative and elevates the pleasurable in its place. Thus, sex is no longer pleasurable. Sex is now for pleasure. The paradox, of course, is that doing this destroys the pleasure of sex, producing a pathological hunt for pleasure that is increasingly bizarre.
9, By denying the procreative, we undermine the significance of the deep complementarity of the sexes. This destroys sexual normativity and opens the door to a consuming and obsessive pursuit of an increasingly unhinged and dizzying array of erotic perversion. Children again become opposition. A child is a wet blanket thrown on the hot fire of deviant eroticism. This way enters abortion as a solution, and the pursuit of intrinsically sterile sexual gratification.
9. Consumerism propels careerism. The career is underpinned by the presupposition that you will need money to consume. A career is your path to making more money so that you can be more happy. Universities are reconfigured away from fuddy-duddy old school liberal arts education to job training centers. Woman are now taught that to be a fulfilled woman is to seek a career. Marriage and childbearing are postponed, not only to attend university, but to spend one's most fertile years shoring up one's careers after graduation. One must justify that expensive education (expensive in time and money). Careerism sacrifices the family for the mirage of consumerism.
10. Now, human life is also commoditized. When women do come around to wanting children, whether for good or bad reasons, they often discover that they are too old, having made a sacrificial offering of their fertility to their corporate god. But we believe we are entitled to children. We believe we are entitled to other human beings as instruments of our fulfillment. So we pursue fertility treatments like IVF. IVF is consumerism on steroids.
12. Consumerism reshapes social practices and life patterns. It created friction and impediments that make having children more difficult, because the assumptions that underpin it maintain that you won't have children, at least not until later. The implicit support, the social and economic architecture of the world and its operations and customs, become hostile to family life. Bad habits, like living beyond one's means, are fed. We demand a standard of living we cannot afford, and view children as hostile elements that rob us of our birthright.
13. A culture must justify itself. Thus, each failed generation rationalizes its bad decisions to soothe its own collective ego by re-presenting its failures as normative to the next.
The solution really is simple: women ought to marry in their mid-20s on average and start having children immediately. The obstacles are cultural and habitual. Our culture creates friction and our cultural programming causes us to deviate from the successful pattern. Instead of ordering the patterns of human life around human nature and human development, we strap human beings into a Procrustean culture, torturing and deforming them to suit weird and arbitrary standards. Instead of conforming our desires to reality, we deform reality in an attempt to conform it to our desires.
This is human arrogance and human folly.
Everyone in this thread saying otherwise is wrong, the problem is low testosterone, simple as; there's obviously other factors causing actual health-related low fertility, but as for the lack of having children it's simply low testosterone.
Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Every morning I get to my son's school about 10 minutes before the doors open. We arrive by bike and we sit ALONE on the benches near the front door.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
> Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars
Anecdotally, when my work schedule was wonky for a while I would do the same with my kids. Those few extra minutes hanging out with them in the morning were something I valued a lot. We got to talk and relax a little bit after the rush of getting ready in the morning. They had all day to spend with their classmates so a few extra minutes in the morning wasn’t going to change much.
A suggestion: If you want to make friends with other parents, morning drop off is the worst time to do it because everyone is going from the rush of morning routines and mentally preparing for their jobs. After school is better, but the best is at events and activities away from school hours completely. Our schools have done parent socials that have been great for meeting people. Sports and activities are also a great way to get introduced to other families.
It also helps to be the one leading the charge. We’ll do things like go to the museum or other activities and then send invites to 5+ other families. Tell them to invite other families.
I am friends with a lot of other parents already. I do go out of my way to make friends. I already organize bike trips to the museum and stuff like that. I'm a very social person.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of forces keeping people solitary and anti-social. This is just one of them. I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choose to isolate themselves. Sometimes the kids in these cars are literally yelling out the window to my son because they're friends. I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Sure, school drop off is just one small aspect of life. But because of drop-off culture, there are certain people who I may NEVER have a chance to interact with. Imagine if those parents instead walked with their kid. Maybe I would make a new friend. Maybe we'd have a nice conversation.
Last year there was another woman and her son waiting with me. They walked to school every day. We became friends just through school drop off in the morning. It brought some happiness into my life and made me feel a sense of community. She could have chosen to get in her car and wait in the long line of SUVs like everyone else, but luckily she didn't.
By essentially saying "stop caring about school drop off and look for other opportunities" it feels like you're missing my point: building community means showing up in lots of different ways, and consistently. The school drop-off example is just one example of many. A woman who lived on my street since the 80s said that back then nearly everybody walked to school. By switching to a car-based morning drop-off feels to me like we've lost something, even if it's just a small thing
> I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choose to isolate themselves.
Early morning in the narrow time between getting the kids ready and going into work is not the time to expect people to be social.
> I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars.
social-interaction problems aside, why are the cars idling? seems like the school/city would have an ordinance prohibiting that
So glad to live in a country where you'd get fined for that :)
Climate control. Heaven forbid spending a few degrees out of comfort zone.
or get an EV
> I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Yes, I'm sure there's absolutely nothing you're doing to engender the general atmosphere of distrust...
Anecdotally my experience is dramatically different.
Last week I arrived by car right near the beginning of dropoff time. Pulling in right in front of me was the mom of one of my kid's classmates, carpooling with another kid who lives in the same apartment complex. The three of them met up as soon as they got out of the car, and then another one of their friends (who lives across the street from the school and usually walks) joined them from his driveway. They met up with a 5th friend before they crossed the street.
Then I walked - well, more like ran - with the 5 of them down the 111 steps that take us from the street level to the schoolyard. When they reached the bottom, they met up with 3 more friends who had just been let out of the drop-off zone in front of the school itself. Said a quick goodbye to my kid, but he wasn't really paying attention, he was already ensconced in his pack of 8.
I've gotten there with my kid before drop-off time, walked down the stairs with him, and there's been a pack of about 20-30 kids and 2-3 parents usually milling around before the school gates open.
I realize that this is somewhat atypical in 21st-century America, and we specifically chose this community because, well, it actually has a sense of community, but it's not unique. In preschool I'd take my son over to his preschool bestie's house (she lived about 2 cities away), and there'd be a whole pack of kids roaming the neighborhood going over unannounced to each other's houses.
Have seen this in Portland (lots of e-bikes with child carriers as well, even in the cold and rain), but not in more spread out cities.
I think it is crazy that you have gates to get into the school grounds (buildings should be locked, I get that). Like my BIL in Sydney suburbs, he lives right next to a school with super nice basketball court etc, but can kids use those on weekends? Sadly no.
The gates here are open when school is not in session, and we (and other families) do in fact use the school grounds for playdates on weekends.
But yes, it sucks that they have to exist, and that my kids have active shooter drills and the school has a plan for what to do in a mass-casualty event. Though so far, every time they've triggered the secure campus protocols, it's because a baby coyote likes to hang out on the stairs.
How do you find communities like that? It’s not exactly a Redfin search.
Word of mouth and on-the-ground sleuthing.
The community in question was put on our radar screen when we attended a party that one of my wife's business school friends threw. It's not well-known; even in our metro area, most people probably wouldn't recognize the name or be able to place it on a map.
But then when we were house-hunting, I just drove through all the residential neighborhoods within commuting distance of our jobs. And took note of where I saw people a.) out walking and b.) talking to their neighbors. Reported to my wife (who thought this was a nutty waste of time, but really values community) "I think you'll like it here", then paid the exorbitant home value to actually buy a home in the area. Indeed, we did like it here.
If the medium is the message, the SUV communicates that there is only space for the nuclear family members, speed and comfort is of the essence, and the road is the only acceptable avenue for transportation. The sidewalks are for homeless people, jogging athletes, and eccentrics.
Oh good grief, parents with SUVs aren't that complex, and they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well (negating your first point).
People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids. If you want to translate that as "speed and comfort is of the essence", then fine. I could say the same about someone with no kids who prefers living in a highly urbanized area because their definition of speed and comfort is different.
And virtually no one is thinking "I need to demonstrate my belief that traveling on foot is only for weirdos OR exercising" when purchasing a vehicle, both because not many (to be generous) people think that in an area with sidewalks and because it's just not relevant.
> they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well
but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
> People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids
It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
> but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
My kids can (and do) walk around our neighborhood. You chose to live somewhere that didn't support that and lament it, for reasons that are not clear to me.
We also drive our SUV when the number of passengers exceeds 5, which is not uncommon at all in our household. Occasionally, we drive it solo or with less than 5 passengers, because it makes sense to do so.
> Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
Large vehicles are "dystopia"? There are plenty cruising around my town yet a kid has literally never been hit in the 20 years I've lived there.
And kids walk to school alone or in small groups on the sidewalks, with crossing guards protecting them at intersections.
> I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
Okay. Are these cars all from the 1970s, before any modern emission standards were enacted?
> It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
Good for you. I have zero interest in spending an hour plus biking my kids to and from the grocery store, so we just drive and then play in our yard when we get back. Or we just walk if we have the time and interest.
> I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
Sounds great. We have these too, without the irrational fear of cars included.
> I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
"Need" is a relative term. I don't "need" indoor plumbing to survive, yet it's nice to have and most people would consider it a need (including my wife and kids).
I see no reason to reduce my standard of living by basically taking up cycling as an unpaid part time job. If you enjoy it or just feel like it's time well spent, again, good for you.
> Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
Again, using "dystopian" to describe a place that is car dependent is a pretty fringe view. It's not surprising that not many people agree.
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>Oh good grief, parents with SUVs aren't that complex, and they are often purchased to carry around their kids' friends as well (negating your first point).
If the goal was to carry more people, a minivan would have been bought, as they are more spacious and comfortable.
An SUV's goal is to use up more space and have the passengers sit higher up, to project more "power" or "status".
Nothing like a thread on vehicle preferences to rouse the extremely vocal and judgmental fuckcars crowd on here.
You may be shocked to hear this, but not all SUVs are less spacious than minivans and comfort is very subjective.
You have to define SUV to determine its goals. Most "SUVs" are basically cars that are slightly lifted and extended. The ones I assume you take most issue with are significantly larger than minivans, have 4WD (which is actually useful where I live), and also are seen as more luxurious.
I would say the primary goal, especially for parents, is occupant safety, which does come at the cost of the safety of others. Good luck convincing anyone to change with your attacks though.
I own two SUVs because they are useful. Can't we be critical of ourselves and some of the consequences of our own choices?
Yes, we can be critical of ourselves. I guess your description of SUV-drivers looking at pedestrians with disdain and buying a car with room for more passengers to intentionally exclude potential passengers is an accurate reflection of your own opinion?
As I said, I don't believe those are very widely held and they certainly don't reflect my thoughts, so my criticisms would be quite different.
The majority of the SUVs I see driving have exactly 1 person in them. It's ok to admit that.
We can also look at the facts, which do imply a more recent disregard (if not disdain) for pedestrians:
> Drivers hit and killed 3,304 people walking in the United States in the first half of 2024, down 2.6% from the year before but a staggering 48% above a decade ago, according to a new analysis from GHSA. [0]
[0] https://www.ghsa.org/news/early-2024-us-pedestrian-fatalitie...
> The majority of the SUVs I see driving have exactly 1 person in them. It's ok to admit that.
I don't need to "admit" that, because I agree it's true.
In your rush to prove a point, you completely missed mine, which was: At least 99% of families buying SUVs to transport kids around instead of a car or minivan (which is why single occupant use didn't come up, as it wasn't really relevant) aren't intentionally firing a shot in an ideological war, they're just picking a car that works for them, they can afford, and they like.
Obviously a lot of that is subjective and has been shaped by regulation, marketing, and an interest in conformity with peers, but what will definitely not change anyone's mind is endless hostility over what is a generally benign decision.
You seem to have completely dismissed the factual data I provided that vehicle deaths of pedestrians have increased 48% in the past 10 years. This certainly implies that something has changed in how Americans drive and interact with pedestrians. It also perfectly correlates with a time period where SUVs went from 30% to 60% of vehicles on the road.
There is research on how car cost (with SUVs being the most expensive vehicle type) impacts driver yielding behavior [0]. There is also research on how being in a car changes your perspective of pedestrians and others not in the car [1][2][3].
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8758047/
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233520099_Acoustic_...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227874062_Territori...
You. Do. Not. Get. It.
Best of luck to you.
Yea, it sure seems like we are talking about different things. I've re-read the exchange and can't find the disconnect or where the hostility came from. Maybe you thought I was another poster from a different exchange?
You clearly stated your opinion that "SUV-drivers looking at pedestrians with disdain" isn't widely held. I then provided actual data and studies that disagrees with that opinion. I'm not sure why that was so upsetting.
Thanks for continuing to prove my point.
The data you provided isn't upsetting, other than it's sad that people are being needlessly killed.
Interacting with insufferable transit "enthusiasts" is exhausting though, especially when they jump into discussions without reading the entire thread (as you did here apparently).
You and your peers seem incapable of doing anything other than attacking, insulting, and looking down upon anyone who isn't as "enlightened" as you, making you zealots, which is why I want absolutely nothing to do with any of you even if I agree with many of your positions.
If you all ever figure out that the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know. I won't be holding my breath.
> the first step to improving a situation isn't "try to make everyone who disagrees with me feel bad about themselves via hostility" let me know.
Is an eye-opening comment from a person who called me "insufferable", "incapable of doing anything other than attacking", and a "zealot" just in this one comment. Further up thread are plenty of other insults you have lobbed at anyone who dares to challenge you. All while continuing to claim that everyone else is attacking, insulting, and looking down at you.
This conversation is over, you can project on someone else.
This conversation was over before it started, because you saw a need to interject (without reading everything that was written beforehand) with a challenge to get me to "admit" to something (that I already agree with by the way because it is a fact) and I'm not going to participate.
You're the one who chose hostility, and of course you fall back on a display of offense when you get it back in kind.
Enjoy tilting at windmills for eternity.
On the off chance you’re in the Bay Area, look into Walk N Roll: https://walknrolltoschool.org/
I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).
Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.
We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.
A different experience here in London - when we are 10 minutes early there's a big load of kids waiting with their parents, most arrive on foot.
What are the kids waiting for? Why are their parents there?
This is exactly how it was for me and my family when we lived in Wisconsin. We live in Germany now. Everyone walks to school or bikes - there is community.
The funny thing about that in the context of this thread is Wisconsin has a Total Fertility Rate of 1.7 and Germany has a TFR of 1.3.
I'm not a parent but where I live in Portland a big trend has been bike buses. A couple of parents ride with a group of kids to school, I see them often. That time before class started was always an awesome time where we'd talk about video games and trading cards and stuff, I'd be really disappointed not to see that.
That's an example of a low-trust society.
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The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society.
Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Second this. Maybe also "The Fourth Turning"
It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness.
So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.
Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.
> It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.
Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, because they need to put kids to sleep. So, they have to try much harder to have any social contact.
I wonder if what you describe is a consequence of suburbia. In any sort of proper town, there's quick and easy access to parks where you encounter people on the walk to the park, which gives a great sense of community. When you have to pack up the kids in a car you are isolated from community, except through the negative community of bad driving.
The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Suburbia is the easiest place to take the kids and go find things to do on a walk.
> The stay at home parents k know are not lonely and go out and engage with other parents and have perhaps a far stronger community than the working parent.
Same. As long as you don’t literally stay at home, being a parent with kids is such an easy way to meet more people.
That is not my experience with California suburbia in any way, it is extremely desolate and lonely compared to any proper town or city I have encountered. But I'm very glad that others are having better experiences!
The comment you're responding to is about a decline in social institutions in general. As someone from a tiny town, when I was growing up, stay at home moms were always outside and talking all day. They'd watch over kids together as well. The loneliness aspect of parenthood is a modern invention.
YMMV. Plenty of groups out there to meet other parents and become friends with. I know several people who had kids and were SAHP and made lots of friends this way. Mind you, as the kids got older everyone moves around so friendships might not always last but it’s very possible. And you have a very obvious thing to bond over - being a parent.
I work at faang and have no friends from that. I’m surrounded by thousands of people every day I’m at work. Everyone is there to work - not be social or hangout or be friends. People show up to social events to grab food and take it back to their desk.
I had a period of behind effectively a stay at home dad and I disagree with this completely.
Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.
It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.
Did you struggle with dirty looks at the park?
I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.
Never once.
The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.
We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.
I've found people are friendlier with me when I'm with my son. His aura of cuteness probably makes me look less curmudgeonly.
This sounds made-up.
I can assure you that it is not.
Stay at home parenting doesn't literally mean physically staying in the house. There's far more opportunities for socialization for those not burdened by work, kids are portable, they like doing stuff, and there's really not ALL that much to taking care of them.
> But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely
So...don't do that? Let the parent who works in the office come home and spend time with the kid, and go out for drinks (or hiking or the gym or whatever) with other friends. Do all the chores beforehand during the day, so that the working parent only has kid duty.
If both are working, both have chores and kid duty after work.
I imagine this is due to the decline of local civic life. When you're a stay at home parent, and you are a part of some voluntary association, a church, PTA-type organizations, and the neighborhood is filled with other stay at home parents that you can organize play dates with (or hang out with while the kids are at school), life is less lonely.
This is why "Moms clubs" are a thing. I get that safe spaces are wanted, especially if the mothers needed to nurse, but dads were unwelcome in the chapter near me.
>Church membership is down.
I mean church people love to think of this as a decline of society but this is more about the destruction of the church itself as an out of date institution that was using itself as a control mechanism and that broke the moment we discovered the world wasn't made on hocus pocus.
The thing is the essence of the church could still maintain a huge amount of social control because people need to socialize.
I agree and am very anti-religion across the board. That being said, it certainly had and has a place in modern society. As a form of third space community and as a mechanism by which to provide social pushback where the law is lacking or lagging.
> There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others.
My experience couldn’t possibly be more different.
Once we had kids it was like our world opened up to a whole new set of communities and other parents. Most of the other parents we’ve met have been very friendly and helpful, and we’ve tried to do the same for others.
This is absolutely not our experience, but we've been intentional about joining communities / activities that involve lots of in-person time together. Church is a huge one (especially joining small groups / service groups), but we also do 4H (they have them in urban areas too!), and my wife started an educational co-op with cool field trips, and we organize neighborhood events like caroling at retirement homes, a pre trick or treating party, and a New Year's party for kids.
Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.
Same boat, with 4 kids between church and co-op we barely have enough time for the amount of friends we have. Finding a good church might be a challenge for people but it’s worth the time and research, we just moved to be closer to a good one.
this really depends on where you live. i’m in an extremely safe family oriented suburb, there’s lot of community, kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids.
I'd say (and this is painful for many) that it really depends on who you are and how you act - if you're outgoing, or force yourself to pretend to be, and you talk, and you listen, and you don't immediately judge people (by whatever metric you come up with) - you can build community anywhere
Is it easier if you're in a group of tightly-knit people all nearly identical to you? Sure! But it's possible with work anywhere that has any population at all.
Social media and the Internet have let us self-select for "friends" who are as close to us as possible, there's ease because of the lack of friction, but that same lack of friction prevents our rough edges from being sanded off.
The number of people who could list what they want in a community, and when presented with a community that matches their list, cry that it votes wrong is way too high, just as an example.
It was a lot easier to get along with people who voted differently when it was about differences in fiscal policy and taxation.
It's hard to respect people who support mass racial profiling by unidentified masked secret police. My American friends of mexican descent have to go about every day knowing that they might get harassed or detained for the way they look. In my book white supremacy is outside the bounds of legitimate political opinions that I can look past.
> when it was about differences in fiscal policy and taxation.
It was never only about that. But they weren't saying the quiet part out loud.
ironically enough my community is inside of one of those scary red states lol
> kids have freedom to go outside, good friends with lots of neighbors and parents, my social life is busier than it was when i didn’t have kids
Don't have kids myself, but this aspect seems incredibly obvious just reflecting on my childhood in suburbs of Chicago through the 80s-90s.
But the causes for what's keeping the kids indoors now instead of literally running the neighborhood are manifold. In the 80s there were far fewer indoor forms of entertainment to occupy the kids without driving mom batshit insane and making a mess of the place. Now the kids have tablets and gaming consoles, the outdoors is such a scary place when it's not full of gangs of children who know all the backyards better than the parents ostensibly owning them.
It's all rather depressing and the longer I live the more convinced I am that not adding my own kids to this state of affairs was the right move.
If I'm being honest, this is the same as other times I've encountered people talk about community. I've noticed that a lot of people talk about this in a very "other people are like this" sense. I have noticed the opposite. Other people are not like this. In fact, the normies are out there living normie life in a way that is perfectly community oriented and not at all problematic.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-09/Community
I think the explanation for lack of children is much simpler, but one that most cannot really admit: there is an opportunity cost to having children. An entire class of lifestyle will no longer be available to you realistically. Children are not expensive for the value they provide, but there are things you cannot spend a large amount of your time on.
https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...
My experience having kids is that we walk around with our baby and people love her. Random people will look over and say "oh my goodness, what a cute baby"[0], people will hold doors for us, airlines let us transport car seats for free and discount a seat for the child. In fact, I'd say the actual reason for a lot of things is more structural.
e.g. home regulations like double-staircases, or height restrictions, and so on constrain the form factors of homes that can be built; car regulations and market demand in a few-child world emphasize form factors that constrain family size; things like that.
Besides there is a great deal of social contagion in this subject. A friend of my wife's texted her saying (paraphrased) "to be honest, after seeing how cute your baby is I changed my mind on wanting kids"[0].
0: And as the father, I definitely think my baby is exceptionally cute, but in reality this is likely everyone else's experience.
Its not boring being inside anymore.
Rewind the clock a few decades and there were a lot more reasons to go outside.
> being out for the group instead of just yourself
This is so far removed from present day US. A large portion of the country enthusiastically/fanatically/religiously supports someone who thinks exclusively of himself.
I’m a father of 4 and I’m overloaded with community, have you tried finding a good church? That’s where people have found community for thousands of years.
if they didnt come with the religion and discrimination i might be interested. alas.
We lived in one of those American planned communities shaped like a kidney. Our kid went to primary school just outside the HOA gates. He had been cutting through the bushes of our neighbor to get to school because it was faster than walking the 2.5 miles through the kidney shaped neighborhood. The one day the neighbor yelled at him and chased him all the way home. We started driving him to school after that and eventually left the neighborhood entirely.
I think we understatement just how hostile western society is to children these days. It's the small things, like an unwalkable and unbikeable neighborhoods, flights that force you to pay more to sit together, and the endless liability waivers.
There’s no evidence to suggest that any of this is true.
Yup, and the U.S. is a low-trust society as a whole.
You have hit the nail on the head completely.
There is no 'good' reason. It's anti-social media that is driving people apart, and it's not good at all.
Yeah I think the meritocracy pushed by America is at least in part responsible for this. Social validation for being a high-performing employee is much greater, than for being a member of the community.
It's not an either/or choice for nearly anybody.
There are plenty of volunteers at community events in my area that have prestigious jobs, and the strivers working to maximize opportunities for themselves actually seek these out as another opportunity for accolades and networking.
You just need to find people who actually have an interest in their community. You know who those people often are? Parents. I suspect the decline in birth rates, especially in urban areas, amplifies this in both directions.
I think the fear narrative in America is just completely out of whack. Besides gun shooting and ICE, there are no real threats.
The politicians have made it seem like there is a lot of there is so much threat but realistically normal people just exist. Stop filling for fox news and maga hate messaging.
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This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
Children are pensions, that's why poorer nations have lots of children because lots are needed to look after people in their old age. Thus, many of these comments on HN and elsewhere, "make the nation better", only have led -- and will lead -- to fewer children.
When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any.
But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity etc. are the barrier --- this isnt some "indictment of our culture" -- a sentiment no better than "we're being punished by god"-thinking which turns every weather event into a didactic lesson on people's pet peeves.
poorer nations have for the most part also slipped below replacement birthrate already, or will shortly. hell, Bangladesh is at ~ 2.1
You're implying that people incapable of planning next Thursday are thinking about their pensions. Poor countries reproduce a lot because they still have a lot of people functioning on the level of biological impulses rather than rational thought.
That...may be pushing it a lot. People in poorer countries are just as capable of rational thought as anyone else. The difference is in the education they've received, the resources they have access to, and the rights individuals have. Mentally, there's little difference - minus effects of things like malnutrition in severe cases.
I grew up in the rural South (America's Third World) (N. GA) in the late 80s / early 90s and tons of children were born out of wedlock because kids were bored and fooling around. Bored, horny kids like to have sex. Now there are so many way to occupy yourself digitally that I think these is happening less. It's not that poorer areas are dumber, it's that they had less access to entertainment and sex is free.
Everyone is talking about it like a problem that need correcting. Why? Less people seems like it could be better for everyone and everything already here, assuming "great social systems" are in place.
If there's no force that pushes it towards stabilization - then the eventual conclusion is extinction. And so far, it definitely seems like it doesn't trend towards equilibrium. People aren't like animals that reproduce based on availability of resources or predators. If the population drops, nothing forces it back up again.
And lower birth rate -> smaller young population -> higher ratio of retirees to taxpayers -> less free money to invest in new businesses/infrastructure/etc. That means a worse quality of life for everyone. Worse pay, higher taxes, less city/state/federal investment.
That's called a death spiral and eventually ends a civilization, if it goes uncorrected. There's no fancy monetary trickery that magically fixes it either. The only real hope is alleviating the burden completely - via something like incredibly advanced robots powered by real AI (not LLM garbage).
That would free up the resources to allow each new generation to do new things, instead of being less and less able to just maintain status quo.
I think it's that assumption is the problem. Most social systems are predicated on having enough net contributors to provide for net recipients, but with a declining population the ratio of contributors/recipients can get small. There may be solutions to this, but current social systems will likely fail if left unchanged. That doesn't mean the only solution is population growth, but we do need to do something
> it could be better for everyone
Unless the life-expectancy also falls significantly, the rising dependency ratio would become an even larger problem.
Yes, exactly. I think the real reason why we don't see aliens is that once the population reaches certain level of intelligence and awareness, it takes only one generation thinking "this is not worth it" to cause dramatic population collapse which might wipe out entire species. And the thing is, "life isn't worth it" might actually be true, as much as evolution does everything to convince us otherwise.
But now that I think of it, there might be solutions. The problem is, they're incompatible with individualism. Imagine passing a law that everyone is obliged to take care of a child. Sure, this would cause issues, but would instantly solve the population crisis. The problem is, such a law will never be passed in a democratic society, because everyone votes according to what they believe is their own best interest, not the best interest of the group. But an absolute regime could potentially do this.
Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
Following your argument, another solution would be simply to enact measures to revert that "certain level of intelligence and awareness", and it seems that some countries are doing just that, if not exactly for the sake of reproduction :-) . So there's hope for population growth I guess?
> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
This however is something I agree with, fully.
What you're proposing is awfully dystopian. If people don't want kids anymore, then let them not have kids. Society should adapt to the will of its members, not the other way around. And with all our technology we can live very decent lives even with declining birthrates. Maybe we'll have to do with less travel, less cheap garbage and so, but I'm fine with that.
"People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that."
I am 45. I have fairly big* chance of making the global population curve actually drop!
*OK, not really, but you get the point I hope....
All projections show world population growth until at least 2100, thanks to Africa birth rate above 4.
No, they don't. That's the UN prediction, because they assume that somehow, magically, all countries below replacement will simultaneously, near-instantly increase in fertility rate by huge amounts over the next couple of years. Look at the graphs, they're nonsensical.
If you look at the actual trends of those rates, peak population is ~2050, maybe sooner.
> near-instantly increase in fertility rate by huge amounts over the next couple of years
Nothing like this on Wikipedia. Do you have a better link?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
Many of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.
That is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.
The goal is to rile the base and distract from the fact that there is no improvement in cost of living, healthcare, education, etc... tourism is down, farmers are losing their farms en masse, etc... It was trans people yesterday, Somalians today, and it will be someone else tomorrow. If that wasn't bad enough, it's clear the president and other powerful men (of both parties) were engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring. It's all a distraction and there are enough hateful Americans for it to work for now.
It's not "a distraction". It's serving their constituents. No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town.
If anything, from a democracy angle it's almost admirable how committed to answering the demands of their base the Right is in America. Pedophile billionaires get their desires met, racist yokels from flyover states get their dreams delivered, the war hawks, all of them.
We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking "oh, the constituency on the right would be horrified if they just knew better". They wouldn't be them if they knew better. They are simply worse people, and the actions of the government are directly appealing to their worst desires.
OkayPhysicist wrote:
> No good people support the Republicans, their primary voter base are just a bunch of hopped-up xenophobes who hate people who aren't like them because they've never met anybody who isn't from their inbred town. ... They are simply worse people...
You should apply to the DNC to help with their messaging efforts, clearly they're missing an important voice!
There's like what, 15 to 20% of americans actively trying to trigger rapture? You've got a lot of religious nuts in your country, and they really are bad people.
Clearly you also learned the messaging principles so clearly demonstrated in the great Basket of Deplorables debacle of 2016. Maybe you can be GGP's deputy.
Anyway, do you have a source for that? My understanding of American evangelical protestant theology is that they don't view rapture as triggerable in nature. Not being one, I can't state that confidently, so I'd love to see your source for your stats, and understand your definition of what it is they feel they can do to trigger rapture.
> Self deportation is the goal.
Perhaps.
GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.
It doesn’t even matter anymore, being anything less than a full citizen puts you at risk. In my community, we have a bunch of Nepalese people whose TPS is going to expire and they are going to be deported. Not far away is Springfield, where a community of Haitians, who are mostly liked by the people in their community, and who even the Republican governor is asking the administration not to deport, have seen their TPS expire.
There are a lot of non-criminals who are here legally, but still very concerned about their future. If I were one of the Haitians in Springfield, I would be looking for another country to take me in.
Every one of them are legal permanent residents who don't feel welcome here anymore. Some are afraid they're one mistaken identity away from ending up black bagged and sent to El Salvador.
We're now heading in the same direction -- will take more time than I would like to work it out, for various reasons, but this is no longer a country where I want to raise my kids (despite us being citizens and having the "right" color skin), and as much as I want to be hopeful for change it's really hard to see the damage being undone any time soon.
I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.
I guess you don't live in Minneapolis, or another targeted metro area. It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in a city where 3000 masked and poorly trained people cos-playing special forces are specifically tasked with arresting as many people as they can and told that they have full immunity.
you haven't seen the effect on schools when federal agents enter school grounds and take kids away.
you haven't seen my parent's nursing home sending the senior leadership outside the building to look for patrols before they let the staff leave (the staff is all legal/greencard holders, but see note above -- ICE doesn't care).
It's not hysteria when it is your every day lived experience.
There have been several raids in my city, but it is definitely nothing like what is going on in Minneapolis.
For me, it's not just that -- I don't live in Minneapolis -- but it's the sinking realization that half the country literally voted for this and is either ok or indifferent, so long as we are maintaining our "true (WASP) American culture". Call me naive, but it has come as a pretty big shock to me that Trump has exposed just how rotten a good fraction of Americans are -- and that's before even getting into the removal of climate change action (something I care very deeply about because it concerns my children's future), cuts to science, healthcare and higher education, foreign policy (admittedly, the US has always been a bully, but it's even worse now), clear attempts to rig the upcoming elections, etc. etc.
Don't be ridiculous, talking about "partisan fear". They have taken away documented, American citizens without due process.
When armed men can take you out of your home or your car and whisk you away without a judicial warrant and without due process, it is very reasonable to be afraid.
It’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.)
Hysterical people think they are being rational and stuff like this is exactly what they say.
Their own data reports that they are holding tens of thousands of citizens who have committed no crimes.
They have murdered people in broad daylight and allowing many more to suffer and even die in their facilities.
People are not being hysterical, and the people who are downplaying or ignoring this are showing that they are in fact evil.
Tens of thousands of "citizens" or "residents"?
There's an important distinction here.
First they came for the "residents", and I said nothing, because there were important distinctions to be made...
So in other words your claim that they are holding tens of thousands of "citizens" is fabricated. cool, thanks for clearing that up.
I'm not the person you think you're replying to.
However, since you're here: etymological arguments are really not the win you should be chasing.
> Their own data reports that they are holding tens of thousands of citizens who have committed no crimes.
A source would be nice
> Define taken away.
You already did it:
> They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go.
That is taken away.
Someone in my network - a US citizen - was detained, taken to a city 3 hours away, and held for 10 days before being released. Was quite a while before her family knew where she was.
If you're an American who is visibly Hispanic, it's not at all hysterical. If you're in one of those cities, you do have to worry whether you'll return home when you leave your house.
> you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning
I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accordingly.
Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you. The likelihood of feds accidentally executing you in your hometown is on the rise, and we don't know when it will stop climbing.
> Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you.
That was fun.
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Do you really think you have a holographic sign floating above you that tells them you are a citizen? How are you sure you are above suspicion to be an undocumented immigrant? Could you prove you aren't if some goons decided to pick you off the street right now or next time you go for a walk?
All this is about expanding the reach and normalizing abuse of the power of law enforcement, just like back then after 9/11.
It's like Germany in the 1930s again when Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their clothes, but the other way round.
or just shoot you while you are in your car.
If one can't even aspire to use a small portion of their dual tech sector incomes to illegally underpay someone to ensure they must sacrifice neither sleep nor income in the raising of their own children, well, then, the American dream is well and truly dead for all.
What?
This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest...
As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr...
These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families.
My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle.
I get it that some of you don't live in places that are immediately impacted by this administration, but some of us have to confront this on a daily basis.
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I'm sorry but your summary of what I posted is so selective that I have to assume you're replying in bad faith.
I just read both articles and I think his summary is accurate enough to stand behind his claim that putting off having children (if you want them) because of a theoretical situation qualified as 'hysterical' (assuming everyone in your household is authorized). I don't think he was replying in bad faith, even if you two disagree.
People who are hysterical never think (and will not accept) that they are. They think their response is rational and everyone else it’s ignorant or stupid or evil. It’s the exact same as what goes on on the other side when people talk about how Dems want “trans for everyone”.
It’s an irrational, emotional response so it can’t be fought with logic. It seems 100% obvious to them since ICE is doing so much bad stuff (which I agree, they are) that anyone who doesn’t think it’s quite at Gestapo levels is crazy.
I don’t usually engage because what they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it, and even if I did I would assume you can’t bell a stranger in the HN comment section.
I was not replying in bad faith, I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it in here often. I’m sure if I read /r/kidrock I’d see it there too.
I also have just read both articles and think the opposite: We've got accountability-free, armed, masked, criminal thugs acting with impunity:
- Taking face scans of peaceful protestors and retaliating against them later;
- Racially profiling citizens and harassing them if they have the "wrong" skin color -- including local cops!
- Visiting the homes of citizens who have civilly and legally criticized ICE behavior online, to intimidate them;
- Invading homes without warrants and destroying evidence of their crimes (jamming wifi, covering up cameras, arresting and deporting witnesses, etc).
- Arresting people who came here legally, are here legally, and have not committed a crime in their lives, then unilaterally revoking their prior legal authorization and rapidly deporting them and their whole family;
- Raiding schools: kidnapping children and sending them off to torture prisons, while traumatizing the rest of the children (and assaulting some of the children too -- grown-ass men beating up children smh);
- Assaulting innocent, peaceful people for protesting them, whether citizen or not, whether legally here or not, including deploying chemical agents against them;
- Performing summary executions in the streets of unarmed citizens who are helping their community but do not support said masked, armed thugs;
- Etc etc etc
You'd have to be hysterical (or some other form of mentally unwell) to not let that affect your judgement of the wisdom of bringing young children into that world to be victims of it. Unfortunately, such hysterical, mentally unwell deniers never think (and will not accept) that they are. It’s an irrational, emotional dismissal, so it can’t be fought with logic. What they need is deprogramming, and I don’t know how to do it.
I just find it interesting that the brains of so many people in the minority, even intelligent ones, have been turned this way in recent years. I see it here somewhat often (roughly in proportion to the minority they represent). They just cannot process, much less accept, that most people do not agree with them, and are not hysterical and mentally unwell like them.
op had kids before the Nazis started taking over, but police were still performing routine executions, America had invaded several countries to execute their leadership, we live in a capitalist society...
Your views are inconsistent
> Your views are inconsistent
All people hold inconsistent views. We are squishy meatbags.
That said, is this an example of that? Instead of declaring it so, try posing a question like "what is different about this time?" to a member of the majority you believe are holding 'inconsistent views'. You might learn that your prior assumptions were reductive, for example.
Also beyond the hysteria, you can’t post two paywalled articles and then assume bad faith on the part of any reply. My summary is based on what little I can see, though I doubt a full examination would make any sane person rethink their fertility planning.
I am with you, it is a scary time. I have to remind myself that we have gone through worst times. My grandfather grew up in a ranch, at 22, along with his extended family and friends, they took arms and joined a revolution, they overthrew a dictator. They fought on the back of a horse for years. It was a rough life, but they endured, and here I am. Enjoying a life so comfortable that would be unimaginable for them. You cannot stop moving in life because things can go wrong.
Eh, my grandfather lived through World War 2 and he was a lot less confident that "we have gone through worse times" than you are.
Physical comforts are a small piece of the equation.
With all due respect, but this extremely biased and US-centric view. IT was not easier to have kids in 2024 or 2023, both in the EU or US. Childcare is expensive, pace of life today (and the past 20 years at least) implicitly treats kids as a liability and a detriment to career progression and financial security.
Yes, this article is about the US.
And I live in a place single digit blocks from multiple places where ICE agent behavior has made national headlines. I have no financial reservations.
Sure, and I understand that. My point was that it was hard financially to have kids even before Trump was elected. Moreover, there are plenty of places in the US with no/little ICE activity, and it is still hard to afford kids today, a year, or three years ago.
It has/had nothing to do with ICE.
Not to mention fear of a school shooting that would leave your kid traumatized at best and dead at worst.
School shootings are incredibly rare, and existed 25 years ago too.
> incredibly rare
312 shootings in the past 5 years [0]
that's an average of ~ 1 shooting every 4 school days (across ~ 120,000 schools)
that is not incredibly rare; you can try to rationalize it, but if you're a parent and your kid is going to school every day for 12 years, that's about 3000 opportunities for this rare event to happen to them
If I'm computing this correctly, that's approximately 4 * 120,000 = 1 / 480,000 chance of it happening on any given day, or a 1 / 160 chance of it happening to your child in the course of their lifetime; compare that with a 1 / 15300 chance of getting struck by lightening over your lifetime, or a 1 in 800,000,000 chance of dying in a plane crash (this is according to Gemini, I didn't research these numbers thoroughly).
And yet, look how much effort we put into airplane safety.
> existed 25 years ago too
sure, but it's so much worse: [1]
55 shootings in the '70s 80 in the '80s 157 in the '90s 121 in the '00s 260 in the '10s 312 so far in the '20s
the fact that we know this has been a problem for 50 years and instead of doing something about it, the problem is actually getting worse. All so that some grown men can play with their guns (please don't tell me that it's about 2A ability to "resist tyranny"; that hasn't been true for a very long time)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
That 300+ figure (60/year) is including things other than mass shootings people typically think of as school shootings (e.g., targeted gang violence).
There are ~74 million children in the US. Even taking your number at face value, it's 0.00000081 shootings per child per year. This is rare.
It's not shootings per child that matters, it's shootings per _school_.
I don't want my child to be traumatized by a school shooting on their school even if they themselves are not killed. That's pretty basic. If multiple people were shot and killed at your workplace, how would you feel about continuing to go there? You think that survivors of a plane crash where other people on the plane died are ready to get back on a plane the next day because "the chances of it happening again are small"?
And I don't care whether it's targeted gang violence or some other type of shooting, it's still an event where someone with a gun is on the school and kills one or more people.
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What a bizarre comment. Who cares about their genetic line? Are you evolution itself? Do you have stakes in making sure your genes make it to the future?
who cares about their genetic line? literally every human being who has wanted grand children
Hm, seems greedy to me.
A weird comment to make to someone who already has children, but I guess at least we can all be happy that my kids are being raised by parents that can read?
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what an insanely insulting reply. this site sucks now.
You are anonymous. Weird to take such offense.
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Given that I.C.E. has been allowed to stop people just for not looking white enough, and even white citizens have been shot for being "near" I.C.E. operations, I would suggest that it is not safe to assume someone is not a citizen, just because I.C.E. makes them feel unsafe in their neighborhood.
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> If you claim to be changing your life in any way in response to this then you're just putting a fig leaf on decisions that you've already made.
How insulting. Bad faith arguments have become way too prevalent on this site.
Agreed. You are not alone, all of us see what's going on, and it only takes a few bad actors that are highly motivated to cause the craziness you see on display here.
Regular, normal people are still in the majority, we just need to acknowledge each other and not let the propagandists flood the zone.
I will remove that accusation in the interests of not distracting from my main point. I don't know you and the particulars of your situation and apologize for an unsupported insinuation.
If someone sees the world around them getting worse, I think it's pretty logical to not bring a child into that society.
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You think only non-citizens are under assault? Are you familiar with “Kavanaugh Stops”?
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You link to an October 2025 article documenting 9 "Kavanaugh stops" to somehow claim that they don't happen?
You link to an article that is "We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days." and which has reporting inside that describes the 170 cases of ICE detaining citizens.
Note that detainment is more severe and different from the harassment of the 9 that you somehow claim refute Kavanaugh stops.
But even if the article were as you incorrectly describe it, it would be fallacious to say that because a single article doesn't describe something, it doesn't exist! That's a critical thinking and logic 101 error. And far far below the standards of HN comments.
If you read the footnotes in the article, it is apparent that somewhere between 0 and 9 of the incidents described are Kavanaugh stops. The article is trying to play up the situation in order to cater to their audience, but they have sufficient journalistic integrity to tell the truth amidst the spin.
Yes, there may be more of them, but in this particular article that was the most that they could find, and they were clearly trying to find them -- they even include 130 stops that they themselves say are of people who were obstructing or interfering with ICE operations. This is not good, but it's a pretty far cry from bystanders being harassed on the sidewalk for having an accent or the wrong skin color.
Link me a better source that describes or accounts the number of these stops and I'll update my comments and move my priors appropriately.
ICE threatens everyone, regardless of citizenship. They daily detain citizens without even bothering to ask "papers please". They menace and threaten and intimidate people just out and about in the neighborhood.
The ICE raids have little to do with immigration, they are a secret police force meant to cause terror in communities with their lawless violence. It is a politically driven attack on a state that had the audacity not to vote for Trump, nothing more.
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> They menace and threaten "people just out and about in the neighborhood"? It is hard to engage in good faith when you are baldly making statements that are completely unsupported.
There are no shortage of videos showing ICE agents on roaming patrols in Minnesota -- and elsewhere -- menacing anyone they come across who appears undesirable. All you have to do is not look away.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/880/what-is-your-emergency
Would you mind linking to some of the videos? You link here to an episode of This American Life featuring 911 calls.
While disturbing to listen to, without context, I don't hear anything to substantiate the claim of ICE agents menacing anyone they come across.
All the videos I've seen, [1], [2], [3], for example, from a quick check, are ICE reacting unprofessionally and with excessive force against people who are deliberately attempting to obstruct or interfere with them. Let's not play games here and say that they are menacing innocent people walking down the sidewalk. That's not to say that these assaults are justified or appropriate, but let's start the conversation in a good faith position, and not make up bullshit about ICE walking around menacing innocent bystanders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5aK7o6fEJg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5w05TcQIVQ
[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tOaJAd3lkdM
Go to /r/PublicFreakout or /r/EyesOnIce and take a scroll.
Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/s/TdTwBp13za
Edit 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/s/cLGFI5GXlv
I can't find an original source on the first one. To my eye it is ambiguous in the sense that he does appear to be taunting the officers or otherwise engaging with them. I may be mistaken here but without larger context it's hard to say. Taunting or insulting law enforcement is not a crime and does not warrant the notice of officers, much less confrontation or pursuit or detention. But what we are talking about here is whether people are in danger simply walking down the street.
There is a line where this becomes truly frightening behavior; where you have to keep your head down and avoid eye contact because they might fly off the handle for no reason, like crazy homeless people on the subway but with badges. So far I haven't seen anything approaching this.
The second one is [1] Jacelynn Guzman, age 23, who was mistakenly identified as part of a targeted immigration enforcement action. She fled the scene after agents approached her and identified themselves. A suspect who flees is likely to be chased -- this does not seem strange or off-putting to me at all. I think notable, for what its worth, is that they did not ask her father for ID or question his citizenship in any way; they were there for a targeted operation and he was not the target, so they left him alone while they attempted to verify the identity of the suspect that they were targeting.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-masked-bord...
For anybody looking on, this sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days. All that crazy stuff Europeans are seeing with JD Vance and Trump's Greenland behvaior is what everyday Americans experience on a wide range of topics.
Having somebody link to a source that directly refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is something I've experienced multiple times in the past week! It's quite shocking.
When the Trump administration went so hard on open lies that are directly contradicted by videos we all saw of ICE events, it was vice-signaling that started even greater amounts of bearing false witness. Openly lying seems to signal "in-group" status these days, like the sign in the green grocer's shop[1]. Get people to lie about the evidence they see with their eyes, and the become completely controlled, because to do so is to have total subservience to their master. No more eyes or ears except for those of their master. People that used to have values slowly abandon them, all in service to the lie that they are living. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
That is the state of the US at the moment. I have hope that we can return to our former sanity, or at least ensure that the reigns of power are in the hands of normal, centrist people instead of the extreme fringes, but it is in no way certain.
[1] As Carney recently referenced from Vaclav Havel; here's a recentish essay on it: https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...
For anybody looking on, THIS sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days.
Having a source that makes a false claim as a headline but refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is extremely common in a media landscape that wants to signal their "in-group" status.
ICE was arresting people whether they are citizens or not, whether they have legal status or not. They also beat people because they wanna.
They beat people because Trump and his regime want them to.
It’s nothing short of miraculous that medieval families raised their own children without cheap, brown labor to do all of the actual child raising.
My darwinian theory:
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
Real people are annoying, hard to deal with, unpredictable, dirty, smelly, all sorts of issues.
The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away.
What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone else.
>Real people are annoying
They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.
That's the point - real people are annoying because you are annoying. (Not you in particular, but me, you, everyone.)
Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.
In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.
One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.
I wouldn't take what they said as an actual insult. They're saying reality is dirty and social media is making us want to live in bubbles rather than deal with it. Thinking that was is to our detriment which I understand OP agrees with.
Exactly - the rough and tumble of life is a hassle, but it's a necessary one and without it we literally seem to go crazy.
I watched this video a while ago that said something similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispyUPqqL1c
The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.
He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.
He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.
I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.
It's like Google, Meta, etc are not only siphoning money from peoples attention. They are siphoning human life force.
If you look at the top companies in America currently by market share, pretty much all are selling addictions while maybe a handful actually selling tangible products.
I dream of the day when people wake up to see TikTok and Instagram are as bad or worse than smoking.
Opium trade 2.0
Captain’s Log, Stardate 48492.1 We have entered orbit around Sol III-bis. Long-range scans suggested a pre-warp civilization at the peak of the Information Age. However, upon arrival, Lieutenant Uhura reports total silence across all hailing frequencies. No radio, no subspace chatter, not even leaking analog television waves. Yet, life sign readings are off the charts. It is a ghost town inhabited by eight billion ghosts.
[Surface - The Town Square]
The transporter beam hums and fades. Riker, Spock, and Counselor Troi materialize in the middle of a bustling intersection.
Riker immediately reaches for his phaser, expecting a reaction. A panic. A scream. Nothing.
A native walks straight through the space where Riker’s arm is raised, correcting their path by mere millimeters at the last second, eyes never leaving the blue glow of their palm.
"Captain," Riker taps his combadge, voice tense. "We've landed. We are... invisible."
Spock raises an eyebrow, scanning a nearby human with his tricorder. "Incorrect, Commander. We are simply irrelevant. Their optical sensors are registering our presence, but their visual cortex is filtering us out as 'non-content'. We are pop-up ads in a physical reality they have deprecated."
Suddenly, Troi gasps. She stumbles, clutching her temples. Her knees hit the pavement hard.
"Counselor!" Riker is at her side instantly.
"It’s... it’s too loud, Will," she whispers, her face pale, sweat beading instantly on her forehead. "It’s not voices. It’s not emotions. It’s... flashes."
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the tears leak out. "A billion images of felines. Dancing figures. Arguments without context. Tragedy mixed with absurdity. It’s a scream, Spock, but it’s a scream about nothing."
"Motion sickness of the mind," Spock observes, looking at his readings. "A precise description. You are attempting to find a focal point, Counselor, but there is none. The signal is not radiating from a central broadcast tower. It is a mesh network of pure dopamine."
He turns his tricorder to the crowd. "Fascinating. They utilize a tight-beam UHF protocol—what the archives call 'Bluetooth 17'. It ensures that no signal ever touches an unintended recipient. They have achieved perfect privacy, and in doing so, created perfect isolation."
"They could have warp drive," Riker mutters, looking at a mag-lev train passing silently overhead, filled with slumped, blue-lit figures. "Look at this infrastructure. The power efficiency alone..."
"They do not want warp drive, Commander," Spock says, closing his tricorder with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet street. No one flinches. "Space travel requires looking up. Warp drive requires a destination. This species has already arrived."
Troi looks up, her eyes bloodshot, trembling. "We have to leave, Will. Please. It’s... sticky. The thoughts... they want to be thought. They’re hungry."
Riker taps his badge. "Enterprise, three to beam up. Now! Lock on to my signal, not the ambient noise."
[The Bridge]
Back on the ship, Troi is in sickbay, sedated. Spock stands at the science station.
"Status on the planet, Mr. Spock?" Picard asks, looking at the viewscreen. The planet is beautiful, blue and green, peaceful.
"It is a tomb, Captain," Spock replies, his voice devoid of judgment but heavy with implication. "They have not been conquered. They have been optimized. They have traded the chaotic inefficiency of exploration for the streamlined certainty of simulation."
"The Great Filter," Picard murmurs.
"Indeed," Spock turns. "We often theorized that advanced civilizations destroy themselves with fire. It appears, Captain, that it is just as likely they destroy themselves with a warm bath."
Picard stares at the screen for a long moment. "Helm, engage. Warp 1. Get us away from here."
"Course, sir?"
"Anywhere," Picard says, adjusting his uniform. "Just... outward."
As much as I love this post, I have to be the one to point out that Uhura and Spock are from a different Enterprise than Picard, Riker, and Troi. Great work, though, I can practically hear Leonard Nimoy reading this dialogue.
Was this written by a human? It's far to entertaining to have been written by an LLM.
I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.
There are big economic differences and expectations between when I was growing up in the 60's and now.
My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.
My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.
I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.
Everyone should ask themselves why the working class and middle class can’t afford to have the same lifestyles that were possible 60 years ago,
While 0.1% of the population live like God kings.
Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sure as shit don’t feel the effects of “inflation”.
Everyone should ask themselves how much healthcare, and how high quality of healthcare, and how much defined benefit pensions old people received during prirun’s parents’ young days.
It’s 2/3rd of all federal government spend today, and doesn’t even included all the state and local government spend. There are cities and states spending double digit percentages on paying for pensions and retiree healthcare for labor that happened in the past.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
You can liquidate all the equity rich people have (which will cause its price to drop precipitously and so you won’t get as much you think it will), but it won’t make a lick of a difference, because the numbers show the wealth transfer from working to non working is far, far greater than it was when prirun’s parents were young.
That is one of the reasons prirun’s dad had much more purchasing power. The president just said the country’s goal is to make sure the people who own land are prioritized over those who don’t, by keeping house prices high.
https://youtu.be/ToJxd3HBviE
That would not have helped prirun’s dad buy a house out of high school. Everything we do is to benefit the asset owners and the old, at the expense of the young and yet to be born. And it’s happening all over the world.
We don’t want young people to have more fruits of their labor, we want the fruits of their labor to be eaten by old people to meet their expectations of quality of life because they are a bigger voting bloc.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
this is the issue. the US was easily addressing this problem with immigration before the current regime
Surely that meant that the problem was increasing in the coutries they came from?
Not necessarily. Those countries have enough growth to sustain both their population and ours.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
This is surely part of the story historically, but not recently. Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s in the US, while total fertility rate is down ~20% since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
There could be a rubber band effect, where it takes time to get a feel for things like paying for childcare. The reaction is going to come from those who are observing what's happening to the "early adopters".
The U.S. birth rate was falling from the late 19th century until after WWII, when the Baby Boom began. This historical fact generally invalidates appeals to post-WWII women’s liberation as the primary cause of falling birth rates. They were falling decades before it happened, during the exact time you are citing.
This seems like the type of argument that is possible to perform a data analysis to defend or refute. Lot of countries collect data on female participation in the workforce and birth rates. Many countries also collect data that could determine if this has an impact on the individual household level.
In my opinion, it's this, though I think it's a second-order effect. I believe that the issue isn't so much that women are working, but rather that there is a shortage of household labor. This labor pool is what was traditionally used for childcare needs. When you pair that labor shortage with (terrible) modern parenting standards, there just isn't enough time to raise kids without becoming a zombie.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G-p2hvebQAEkEBg?format=jpg&name=...
Edit: To be clear, I think there are multiple contributing factors. It's just that, in my view, the time/labor shortage is the core of the issue. Everything else feeds into it in some way. The factors eventually start stacking and problems that contribute to the time issue get exacerbated by their own contributing factors.
Economics pressures, for instance. Bad housing economics means couples work maximum hours to afford daily expenses, decreasing available household labor. It also fractures extended family systems when people have to relocate for cheaper housing or better jobs, eliminating the traditional labor-pooling arrangements for childrearing. Generally poor median household economics keep parents in constant anxiety too, which then requires time to be spent on coping routines.
Social atomization has further taken away the kind of pooled childcare labor that used to absorb overflow. Media has displaced churches, bars, parks, and bowling alleys with private screen time, shrinking social circles with scarce opportunities to rebuild them. Car-based infrastructure further reduces local community interaction and subtly dehumanizes neighbors into obstacles who steal parking and slow you down. Remote work and online shopping accelerate this deterioration. The result of all of this? Parents who already don't have extended family, also don't have friends, neighbors. or community to cover childcare needs. The sort of "Hang out at the neighbor's house while I go to my book club meeting." scenario has largely gone extinct because of this.
Even if a couple does better than the average bear in these areas, and they have options, ambient paranoia bottlenecks their outsourcing of childcare anyway. Our media environment has normalized constant fear. Fear that every blade of grass conceals a potential predator, so every adult is regarded as a serious risk to your kid(s). This compounds further because it's gotten to the point where children (and teenagers) can't play outside or otherwise exist independently without supervision. This increases the time parents must spend on daily childcare needs. So not only can they not decrease the time spent, but they now have to spend even more because of it.
On top of all of this, the fraying social fabric creates an effect similar to cellular breakdown. Where those who become disconnected from the larger biological system stop acting for the collective benefit and further prioritize the self, becoming cancerous. This leads to growing numbers of extremist, anti-social individuals with poor mental health. Individuals who both compound the scarcity and isolation of parents, and justify their media-sourced fear of other adults. This is an example of the contributing factors to the contributing factors.
You get the idea.
While I think I see myself in the chart, I am not exactly sure what it says, especially the "Controlling for children under 5" and the time.
This seems like a good place for a study using matched subjects. Do 23 year olds of a certain generation spend more time with 7 year old children than another generation? Etc., etc., then you can calculate the baseline and excess for each generation
I would guess it's a lot more to do with globalism and the increasing ability for work to be done remotely (offshore). The US actively encourages American companies using foreign labor, which I have no moral qualms with, but it does make the value of American labor plummet when we're competing with groups of people that will do similar work for 1/10th the price or less.
The proximate cause is Trump's crackdown on immigration. Immigration was responsible for 84% of the US's population gain in 2024.
Both immigration rates and population gain were halved between 2024 and 2025.
Honest question: why are we so afraid of population decline? For people on the left, it means less consumption, less environment impact, less carbon footprint, and in general fewer damn evil people who are destroying the mother earth. For the right, everyone is responsible for their own destiny including their retirement life so they worry about their retirement spending solely on their own anyway. In practice, Japan seems to be fine. In particular their young people have so many job openings to fill.
So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?
Mostly because when social security was designed there was a retiree to worker ration of 1:130. Today it is closer to 1:3. Soon it will be 1:2.
We already allocate immense resources to the elderly (over 50% of US federal budget is for old people + national debt, where debt accrues for fungible reasons but the biggest explosion is money transfers/healthcare to the old). We have a few levers we can pull there - we don't have to give money transfers to the wealthiest members of what are, in fact, the wealthiest generation by taking from younger people. We could maybe means-test some of it. But they are politically hairy and come kind-of late. All that debt is essentially already borrowing from people who don't yet exist to pay off the old of today.
So it would be somewhat nice to have more people in the future because we have already borrowed their money (or if you are 30, our money).
That makes things difficult. Even if we did not set up the entire USG to do this, having more retirees than workers makes it hard economically. You could imagine a decade where every 4th person is working in a nursing home, basically.
But other than the massive looming financial crisis and the care problem, yeah, its not so bad.
>In practice, Japan seems to be fine
Japan seems to be fine? Japan, which created its own lost generation [0]? Japan, which has a word for "death by overwork" [1]? Japan, which has 9 million abandoned homes in ghost towns [2], the highest public debt in the developed world [3], and healthcare system under strain because old people are being left there for no other reason than there's no one to care for them? [4]
In what way is Japan doing fine?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
[2]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/15/in-japans-ageing-co...
[3]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/123015/3-eco...
[4]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7533196/
+ The far right is rising there too.
I haven't been able to get a good answer to this, but gently asking this question of people around me, I've noted that even people who aren't usually tuned-in to social issues have an opinion on it (specifically that it's vaguely a bad thing). I suspect that there's a bit of latent tribalism inherent in people. People don't like to see their "tribe" get smaller. It just instinctively gives people anxiety. (I somehow dodged this sentiment, maybe a benefit of my neurodivergence).
Most of the developed countries are facing this.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
As a man who's never wanted kids, and is now getting to an age where it probably wouldn't be a good idea, those weren't really the big factors for me.
Having a kid is just an unfathomably large commitment. If you bring a kid into the world, I believe you're responsible for creating the conditions where that kid can grow into a healthy, well adjusted adult, and that's seemed like an increasingly impossible commitment for the past few decades.
It's not that hard. Sorry you missed out on a wonderful thing. You are not responsible for the world or its conditions. You just have to support the kid and be a good role model, that is 95% of the job.
You're definitely responsible for the environment you bring a kid into. It doesn't matter what is going on in the world. You're the parent and ultimately you're responsible for the environment where you raise your children. You're responsible for having the right resources to raise them trauma-free. Did you...not realize this when you made kids?
Is bringing a kid into slavery or a warzone ethical?
To enjoy this life you need free will aka be provided with options.
So there is definitely a lower bound of conditions that a parent should be able to satisfy.
Don't be sorry, I got what I wanted, and am content with my life. We have to miss out one one thing to enjoy something else.
I have a small child. It's awesome!
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Maybe all these things are true at the same time. More of a “is it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all” kind of dialogue.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
It's a lot easier if you live near either your parents or your in-laws. Having grandparents around to help is the cheat code to making parenting easier. We didn't have that until our oldest was 7 and it was life changing.
But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.
It's a tale as old as life itself. Some organisms succeed in coping with the environment they find themselves in. The genes and culture of these organisms gets passed on to the next generation.
Except not, since these stats are about organisms that are not succeeding in the environment and yet have reproduced.
yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.
Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.
> Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
I actually don't think I've ever read anything that made as little contact with reality as this. Its actually impressive. If you actually think this is in any way true, you need to deeply deeply reevaluate the way you perceive the world.
Much to do about nothing
Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?
The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non-productive population. At some point, they will simply choose to opt out and the whole thing collapses.
But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually. Maybe we overshot the maximum comfortable population by a bit and we are going to rebound for awhile.
Also an economy that requires an infinitely growing population feels like a pyramid scheme which is also an unsustainable system.
> But infinite population growth is unsustainable so it had to come to an equilibrium eventually.
Or not. It could be oscillatory and humanity could cyclically reverse-decimate itself while the descendants of the survivors get to enjoy millennia of the fun part of the pyramid scheme.
The big losers are whoever is part of the "perish in a holocaust" generations, and probably the first couple bootstrapper generations afterwards.
> But infinite population growth is unsustainable
Only if we don't explore and colonize the stars. From what we know, the universe is infinite.
How many years/generations are you willing to spend on a ship in the middle of space? Remember, Biodome didn't work. Are you going to join that prison for the off chance of your progeny occupying a land that we haven't even discovered yet?
And, before you suggest it, no, there will never be faster-than-light travel, and even relativistic travel is super unlikely.
The generation ship genre of science fiction is very interesting to me, but I've never read one that didn't seem absolutely horrifying. I don't think it is a realistic option. Especially if we aren't even capable of stabilizing our "closed system" known as Earth. A generation ship would be the same problem but 100 times more difficult.
I think it's inevitable, the model is unsustainable and going to fail. In a finite world we can't have social models that rely on infinite growth. I'm sure the changing demographic is going to cause pain (probably right when I'm getting ready to retire), but historically pain is the real catalyst for change so maybe some good will come out of it.
> The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.
But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.
> In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.
for a contrast, look at South Korea - https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/
That tells a quite grim story, with an outcome thats totally inevitable but will take 20 years to play out. the die is already cast, and I cant see how the country survives.
What does it mean for a country to not survive? There will be people there. There will be a system of governance. Sure, there will be hardship and suffering, but I don't see how this equates to extinction.
Yes, probably not people extinction. But economic extinction - the tiny amount of young supporting 10x the amount of elderly will lead to economic collapse. On top of the collapse in raw productivity. It’s not hard to imagine that level of disruption leading to a failed state scenario.
> At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.
But productivity for productive people is increasing. Is there an assumption that retiree spending is also going to increase to match?
Realistic solutions look something like: - we increase productivity of the working population - we lock or decrease the per-year, per-person spending on retirees - we decrease the % of their lives that people spend retired
Or decrease handouts to the non-working population. Maybe we cannot afford to keep seniors in their SFHs driving everywhere.
Cool where do I sign to opt out?
I am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing).
The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social interaction is very rich to me. I'll listen to them when they divest from the social corrosion machines.
Predicting population decline is safer than overgrowth. Since with low birth rates we know we need substantially higher than replacement rates to make up for the deficit. Which seems unlikely
Predicting numerical decline is easy and obvious. What is silly is predicting economic or social doom because of that population decline.
Safer in the sense that its better to be overcautious than under? I definitely agree! I'm just saying we could do without the finger wagging. Either we commit to fostering relationships or we commit to their substitutes. I'm just saying I call their bluff.
We need young people to pay for old people retirement (economically speaking, someone has to be working when someone else is just eating).
I really hope that automation and robotics will _finally_ allow us to invert the pyramid.
Don't know about inverting the pyramid but we may get more pyramid schemes. Like Google and Oracle doing 100 year bonds for AI.
I think the solution is in adjusting our ways of life. Simpler living, smaller houses and more density, being able to walk and bike, shared common areas, increase health span, being able to live independently for longer, simpler hobbies, not needing so much stuff, etc.
Despite the hype cycle around humanoid robots it's unlikely that they'll advance enough to be capable of replacing many human workers in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities within our lifetimes. Expect to see lots of really sad stories about elder abuse and neglect because as a society we simply won't have the resources to adequately care for them all.
I kinda expect nursing and people paid to give attention to the elderly to be the last job standing. very hard to replace or automate
Paid by whom? That's the problem. The people with money won't be willing to pay more taxes to fund workers to care for a growing indigent elderly population. It's already causing shortages today and will only get worse.
it isn't just about money, it is about production. Even if the money is evenly spread, if there isn't enough production (because not enough people providing goods and services) you'll just have inflation. But ya, if all the money is concentrated and billionaires are indulging in most of the production while the elderly starve, most of us are still screwed.
They don’t have to. If say robotaxis become widespread, you’ve freed up some portion of the labor market to do something else. They don’t have to automate all jobs, just some.
The evidence has shown that this thinking is flawed - disruption of jobs in an industry causes a slow, wrenching, scarring adjustment process that increases the load on welfare programs and makes quality of life broadly worse: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-47352/why-economists-got...
sure but after 3-5 generations it works out, like with farming and weaving. just gotta wait longer!
If only this was a game of Victoria 3
so ease the robotaxis in now then rather than waiting 30 years.
Increasing health span would be a big step forward. More specifically old age dementia.
It won't. The economic gains of automation will continue to be captured by the capital-owning class. It's simply too valuable to just give over to the masses.
Much more likely is that conditions for elder care will continuously degrade until MAID becomes most people's choice.
For those who don't already know this, like me. (MAID) Medical Assistance in Dying
If the benefits of increased productivity went to the people instead of the 1%, you wouldn't need a growing population.
If they were only eating there would be no problem. But they want fancy vacations. They want houses. They need drugs. They need MRI machines. And they need these things for decades for minimal cost irrespective of ability to pay. And, when they do die, they expect to pass estates tax-free to thier children. Supporting the retired population is one thing, but the day may soon come when we revisit what it means to be retired.
If you want to punch up try aiming higher than the upper-middle class. Other countries have MRIs and drugs as part of universal healthcare.
Ya but those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers. The ability to purchase shares in both the hospital that is treating you and the company that authorizes your treatment is a uniquely american priviledge.
You jest but to play devil's advocate every system has its supporters. One of the reasons we didn't get a public health plan option is because the Senator for Connecticut was representing his constituents such as Cigna and Aetna. If you provide an easier exit for the former death panel workers in the form of working at the public option administrator, re-training, etc. you might be able to assuage unemployment based opposition to reform.
People don't gloat at privatization but aforementioned wealthier retirees rely on corporations squeezing ever more money out of customers, employees, and vendors.
> those countries also do not enjoy private health insurance and for-profit care providers
I don't think anyone enjoys them per se.
Those other countries are still paying for those things somehow. (or they really have the alleged death panels critics talk about) You can shove the cost in different places, but somehow they still have to be paid.
Why? I understand that's how the system works now but does it have to? Productivity has never been higher.
Why though? All those old people paid in all their lives so surely that is sitting in a vault somewhere waiting for them.
We need young people to pay for the billionaire subsidies (economically speaking, someone has to accumulate all that profit and it's not going be us)
The main issue with population decline is the inability to depend on the growing younger population to fund the retirement of elderly people
That's the way the system is set up but basically it's not sustainable. You can have more young people now to fix the problem of funding older people. But what happens when these young people get old? Now you need even more young people.
Basically it makes people feel good. Growth is exciting and motivates people to do stuff. Shrinkage makes people sad, depressed and more likely to try to protect what they have. It's often irrational, but that's just the way it is.
Growth isn't sustainable, of course. If you're a gardener you get to experience the joy of growth every year, but you have to "pay it back" in autumn and winter as everything dies back and resets. The seasons force it on you in the garden, but we can't force it on ourselves. We'll just keep having summer after summer until it all goes boom.
This might be a really good analogy - we're in an endless summer and we have people who are now dying having lived in it their entire life - we don't even know what fall is like, let alone winter.
On a personal level it might be possible to "bring winter back" - I'll have think on what that might mean.
Look at the problems South Korea is having, where there are not enough young people to support and care for the elderly. Elders face economic hardship and the healthcare system is buckling under load.
and its going to get so so so much worse. Look at this pyramid. https://www.populationpyramid.net/republic-of-korea/2025/
The Social Security system relies on creating a debt of unborn children to older people based on those older people having already paid now dead people, so keeping it solvent requires more meat for the tax machine.
A pyramid inversion means the old keep voting for OPM from the young, using their numbers to crush them, meanwhile there are fewer and fewer young to actually pay it. Eventually creating instability, couple this with entitlement "I paid that dead guy, so that kid owes me!" (of course, abstracted, as "the government owes me" to hide the kinetics) and you are in a bad spot.
---------- edit: reply to below since I am throttled -----
yes under any system youth are needed. But SS creates a tragedy of the commons. Because retired get benefit obligation of children whether they have/adopt/foster the children or not. In most other systems, the link is more direct, so there is greater incentive to have or adopt child and provide investment in the child, as their success is directly linked to yours. In SS system you can reneg on most of the responsibility of creating the engines of the next generation but still simply scalp that investment off someone else, and indeed still get roughly the same share without making the investment. Obviously there is great moral hazard to simply scalp the benefit of children without having to make the investment yourself, and SS is all to happy to provide that.
Mentioning Social Security and government implies there is some other form of retirement that doesn't inherently depend on younger people still working, doesn't it? I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
The traditional approach to this is:
a) make younger female family members do all the work
b) make them invisible, politically and socially, so everything looks fine
Even if you don't go to that extreme, you look back only a few generations and even today at immigrants, and you see that the old people never stop working until they're literally bed-ridden.
They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
By demanding everything be reduced to the nuclear family (or smaller) we've created an unnatural situation on never seen before on a global scale.
> They might not have GDP-increasing jobs that show up on balance sheets, but grandma watches the kids (effectively working as daycare, off-books), grandpa fixes things, and so on.
Yes I believe this brings up one of the more poisonous elements of social security, even if it is worth it. It completely decouples the mutual assistance where the parent and grandparent form a symbiotic relationship in the interest of raising the child. Instead of a quid-pro-quo, the government violently enforces a one-way transaction and the older generation can simply tell the younger generation to kick rocks.
Obviously I don't think the elderly have any responsibility to do daycare or fix things, but the fact they can simply not do so while demanding the counterparty still keep up their end of the bargain -- has consequences. If the older generation can tell the younger generation to kick rocks, then the younger generation ought to be able to tell the older generation they can kick rocks back to whatever private savings/investment they have.
That's always been my deep unsettling feeling about the whole idea of "mass-market social security nets" of the type Americans call "social security" - it's one thing to provide for those who literally have nothing and nobody; it's another to blanket everyone with it and disrupt natural processes that are as old as time.
Of course, many actual families do NOT go to extremes, and in fact USE the social security they get to help fund the grandchildren, in all sorts of ways. But you have to actively fight against the status quo to do so.
It's interesting to note that even though everyone 'knows' you don't pay SS payments into some account somewhere that is drawn from later, it's transfer payments now - it is still marketed and sold as the former.
Forms of retirement that don't have the force of law can be adjusted on the fly to match the available resources. When the government forcibly requires that each elderly person be paid a fixed amount of resources yearly, it's possible for there to be literally zero surplus for the young people making the resources. That can't happen under systems where the transfers are voluntary.
As an aside, I haven't seen a street being swept in my area in nearly 25 years.
> I mean, who else going to grow the food and sweep the streets?
I'm not sure what the state of the art is with either of these, but I'm now imagining scaled-up Roombas stealthily cleaning the streets at night.
Or this, but self-driving: https://www.alamy.com/compact-kubota-bx2350-street-cleaning-...
More seriously, I think there is a before-and-after point with AI, before some point the automation is just a "normal technology" and we need humans for a lot of jobs, pensioners can only get meaningful pensions when a new generation is present to pay for it all, otherwise pension ages need to keep rising; after that point, automation is so good we can do UBI (AKA "set the pension age to birth")… well, provided the state owns the automation, otherwise good luck demanding free access.
(I am a social democrat, not a libertarian) All models require to some extent the youth working, but not all require a part of the youth's fruits of their labour being taken and put into social security. A libertarian might say that the onus is on the boomers to save enough money to fund their own retirement so that they're not reliant on the social security safety net.
It doesn't really matter on a macro scale if you have social security doing it, or "retirement accounts" doing it - at the base there is capital and value-add (work) and you're transferring from one to the other.
Now perhaps 401ks owning stocks is effectively "lending" capital to the working-class for a fee - but you'd have to argue that.
It absolutely does matter whether you're taxing wages or capital though.
Wages are constrained by the number of workers. Capital is constrained by total productivity.
The point is that money is still just an abstraction. When you take a step back and analyze things in terms of goods and services being the value, you end up with the same types of questions as when analyzing social security in terms of money.
Because progress and growth makes us wealthier and happier? It's pretty simple.
People say "Oh, but GDP isn't everything" - but it's correlated with almost everything good, so might as well be.
GDP is correlated only while good things are increasing - forcing every married family to divorce at gunpoint and become two family households would greatly increase GDP - but I don't think we'd agree that's good.
This. The prospect of a brighter future at least means capital and labor are fighting for slices of a bigger pie. If the pie per capita stays constant or shrinks there will be a lot more anti-social behavior to response to the zero-sum environment.
I think people really fail to understand the gravity of an inverted demographic pyramid, going from 2 young people supporting 1 old, to 1 young person supporting 2 old. That's .5 -> 2x, a 4x increase in burden (taxes / extra work).
Better for the environment though. I know people who chose not to have kids because they were worried about climate change and overpopulation.
What were these old people doing that they couldn't set up a sustainable system?
Sounds lazy to me
If you planted an apple tree and it never produced apples, you might start to wonder what's wrong with the tree. Maybe there's something wrong with the soil?
How do you know if an organism is thriving in its environment? You count the offspring over generations.
Because you are not prepared for the poverty that follows from an economy stalling.
humans are good. life is good. we should be trying to increase the number of conscious beings in the universe.
we have a diseased misanthropic culture. i dont know where it came from but its existential.
American capitalists and economic planners fret about "Japan Syndrome". To have more productivity and more consumption i.e. GDP growth, you need more people as a core driver. We don't actually need this, we could do fine with a stable population, but capitalism needs to grow or perish.
Declining populations are trickier for most economic concepts though. Less labor, less consumption. That said, a slight decline can leave more houses unoccupied which can be good. A major decline would mean so many unoccupied houses that you would have broken and abandoned houses though because it would be too costly to deal with the abandoned units.
If you or anyone you care about is or will be elderly and is not financially independent, you should care.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; it's a resource allocation problem. We spend inordinate amounts of money on end of life care, and any changes are currently unacceptable to voters.
You're talking about age structure, but overall population age-structure can be adjusted by immigration flows, births, deaths, etc. My point was about the total population number.
You can imagine a steady-state population where the age structure is stable and productivity is high enough to sustain the retirees, trainees, and disabled.
I can imagine one in theory, but not in practice without, at a minimum, a very painful transition that would need to occur in the near future.
A population decrease is not a stable population
Capitalist systems (even used in moderation by China) based on Keynesian economics relies on constant growth.
Why can't you have a steady state? Is it just undesirable, or actually mathematically impossible?
The line has to go up every year forever, even if it causes cyclical market instability and consolidation into mega conglomerates. Creating sustainable wealth across all sectors of society just isn't profitable enough in the short term.
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
Fully agree and I don't see why more people aren't talking about this.
World population in early 1800 was around a billion. As recent as 1928, it was only 2 billion. We added 3x that number in the last 100 years!
I see population decline as a good thing. Nations should focus on managing the decline gracefully. It's good for the environment. It's good for distributing our limited resources equitably.
It's not just numbers or speed. It's the shape of the population pyramid. Around the world except Africa, populations are aging. This means less taxes will come in, less workers of prime age, much more healthcare and elder care will be needed, and thus less of the valuable workers in other sectors.
That's only a bad thing if automation and AI don't increase productivity (shrink the number of workers needed). Otherwise, it's a benefit. Taxes are already unsustainable in the US.
New Yorker has a detailed article on this phenomenon that's a great read.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
What are some of the myths they bust in that article? For those of us who can't see past the paywall
One really common that myth this article busts is about child care.
"Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."
Childcare can be nice to have but it can also be a full-time job just getting the kids there if you have more than a few.
We certainly take advantage of things like free preschool; but if we look at it objectively (and ignore benefits to the child) it consumes more time than if we didn't use it - getting him ready, walking him to school, picking him up, etc. Since it's free, we look at "time spent" and it's something like 2-3 hours spent to "get" 3 hours.
Minus the commute you had to do most of that anyway though, right? We get my four year old ready and walk her to school (city free pre-k a few blocks away, plus paid aftercare).
It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.
Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.
You got 8 hours out of it, we get maybe three - because of how it works out.
Add in infants and toddlers, and the fact that many places seem to do childcare for a very particular age range, and it can get hectic.
Workable, of course, anything is, but hectic. It can be understandable why people look at it from the outside and say "wow, that's a lot of kids, too many for me."
Yeah, haha fair. Even my friends with two look noticeably shell shocked most of the time. Good luck =)
Two kids are exponentially harder than one. Apparently it gets easier with three, but definitely not worth checking that out.
I don’t think the evidence either way is strong enough to call that one a myth. There are lots of other differences between the two countries that could offset the impact of Austria’s childcare subsidies.
There are plenty of longitudinal studies from various geographies, which I would summarize as “childcare subsidies increase birth rates in some contexts, but the effects are complex and depend on program specifics.” E.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2917182/ and https://clef.uwaterloo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CLEF-07...
Just to expand a bit on Zurich and comparing with Slovenia (another "very socialist" country).
Childcare in/around Zurich is (was 2 years ago) 2500 - 3000 CHF / month (lower prices after ~18 months). This is and isn't expensive. The list prices are high, but so are salaries (and taxes are low), and this is cheaper than rent (for 1 kid). Not subsidized.
In Slovenia, the full price is about 700 EUR / month, subsidised up to 77% by the government (i.e. by high-earners, effectively a double-progressive taxation with already high taxes).
What you get for that price in Zurich? A lot! Kindergarten starts at 3 months and can take care of kids for the whole work day (7am-18pm). Groups are tiny and lots of teachers - 3 adults per 12 kids. Groups are mixed age as well, which I think are preferable. You also get a lot of flexibility - e.g. half-days (cheaper) or only specific days per week (e.g. Mon-Thu). Jobs are equally adaptable, a lot of people work 80% (so Friday free, spend with kid(s)).
In Slovenia, the situation is much worse. 2 teachers per 12 or even 20 kids (after age 4), age-stratified groups, childcare finishes at 5pm (but start at 6am, if someone needs that...). Children are only welcome after 11 months of age. No flexibility at all. This is all for public childcare - we also looked at private, but generally you pay more (1000+ EUR) but get ... not much more. Maybe nicer building (not even), but groups are equally large (IMO biggest drawback).
So as far as childcare is concerned, Switzerland is IMO much better.
But where Switzerland fucks you, is elsewhere. As mentioned, tax is low, so that's a plus. But there's minimal maternity leave (hence kindergarten starts at 3 months). If women can, they take more time off work, but not everyone can. What I wrote above about "kindergarten" only applies until 4 years of age, after which "preschool" starts, which is government-funded and hence free. Well, "free". It ends at 12pm after which you need to move your kid back into private childcare if you have a job. After that, school starts, which has a lunch break around 12pm as well - children are supposed to eat lunch at home - which again isn't really compatible with 2 working parents.
I'm not in Switzerland any more so I don't know how people actually manage when kids start school...
In the USA there's a definite "kid gap" around 4k-1st grade - before that, childcare if used is "open late" and flexible (if you have the cash) - and after 1st the kid is often mature enough to do simple movements on their own if school doesn't go long enough (walk to the library, or get into extra curricular activities, etc).
At 4k-1st you often have shortened hours, so if you're a working parent you need to arrange for transportation or be able to take long lunches, etc to move children from one place to another.
This "gap of annoyance" happens right about when you'd naturally be looking at a second or third kid as a possibility - I wonder how much effect it has on people.
I can only speak for myself, but 2 was a good number for me. This amounts to somewhat less than a replacement rate. My wife and I had enough time and energy to give the kids what they needed, and still have some for ourselves at the end of the day. And if either of the kids needed extra resources or attention, we were able to do it without neglecting the other one.
I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.
Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.
I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.
(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)
TL;DR: the article argues we cannot fix the population crisis with small tax breaks or traditional values because the modern world has made the cost of raising a child being too high for most people to want to try.
---
The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life.
1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to have kids.
Reality: It’s not about hedonism. Instead, people are avoiding parenthood because the life has become such a grind. In places like Korea, young people feel that bringing a child into such a hyper-competitive, expensive world is unfair to the child.
2. Myth: It’s a biological problem (low testosterone/chemicals).
Reality: There is no evidence that people can’t have kids physically. The issue is a lack of desire. It is a social and economic choice, not a medical one.
3. Myth: Women working is the cause.
Reality: Data show birth rates are actually higher in countries where women have more jobs and support. In countries where women stay home more (like parts of India), birth rates are still crashing. Work isn't the enemy; lack of support is.
4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
5. Myth: The government can just pay people to have babies.
Reality: South Korea spent $280 billion on this effort and the birth rate still hit record lows. Cash doesn't work if the overall culture is too stressful and the difference in culture between men and women remains fixated on old roles.
e: moved TL;DR to the top.
> lack of support is
This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.
You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.
Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)
> 4. Myth: Immigrants will replace the population.
> Reality: Newcomers quickly adopt the habits of their new country. Within one generation, immigrant birth rates drop to match everyone else’s.
That doesn't address the "myth". You can keep bringing more migrants and eventually replace the population.
https://archive.is/bmlll
I am at work and didn't have time to read the full article. Here's Gemini summary:
The article "The End of Children" (published in The New Yorker, March 2025) explores the global phenomenon of plummeting fertility rates, examining why traditional explanations and policy solutions are failing to reverse the trend. Here is a summary of the key points: * Economic Support Isn't Enough: The article challenges the popular liberal argument that fertility decline is primarily caused by economic insecurity or a lack of childcare. It points out that Nordic countries like Finland and Sweden—which offer generous parental leave, "baby boxes," and flexible work cultures—still face declining birth rates similar to or lower than the U.S. Even in places where childcare is free (Vienna) versus expensive (Zurich), fertility rates often remain identical. * The "Achievement Culture" Trap: The definition of "affording" a child has inflated significantly. In many wealthy, educated circles, raising a child now implies providing a suite of expensive advantages—individual bedrooms, travel sports, private lessons, and organic diets. This "intensive parenting" model means working mothers today actually spend more time on active childcare than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations, making the prospect of parenthood feel overwhelming. * Political and Educational polarization: There is a widening fertility gap based on politics and education. Democrats and those with higher degrees are significantly more likely to be childless. This is partly attributed to the extended time required for education and career establishment, pushing childbearing to later years when it is biologically more difficult. * Failed Government Interventions: The author highlights various aggressive attempts by governments to boost birth rates, such as Hungary's tax exemptions for mothers of four and South Korea's numerous "happiness projects" and subsidies. Despite spending fortunes, no modern nation has successfully reversed a low fertility rate back to replacement levels. * A Shift in Meaning: The article concludes with a philosophical reflection on how children have transformed from a natural part of life into "variables" in a high-stakes lifestyle choice. They are increasingly viewed through the lens of identity and personal fulfillment, leading to a culture where parents fear judgment and non-parents fear being seen as selfish, intensifying the anxiety around having children at all.
Wow, I never thought id see the day on HN.....
I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
Hard to believe that people who suffered the atrocities of the first half of the 20th Century were tremendously optimistic about the future, yet birthrates were MUCH higher across the world.
The birth control pill wasn’t on the market in the first half of the 20th century (1960) and there was more religious pressure not to use contraception (e.g. how many women faced significant external pressure to be married housewives and mothers and weren’t even allowed to pursue careers?). Lack of choice masked true preferences – but as we could see from things like the big spike in divorces when it was legalized, there were costs to that.
I've read many, many science fiction books of that era and they were brimming with an optimism that vanished in contemporary books.
There used to be an underlying theme of "humanity will figure it out, even if we make mistakes".
While acts of war separate couples and would confound the analysis a bit, I think there is typically a big spike in births following wars. Baby boomers most notably being born after WWII. Optimism is dynamic and not a set threshold, wrapping up wars leads to new found optimism about the future. How terrible the recent past was is not all that relevant as it is about the trajectory.
If anything having a terrible past may make the bar lower for experiencing optimism, as it's easier to expect a better future when the overall bar is lower. Hopefully explaining that well enough and it's certainly not the only issue, but I believe we see the same thing on the stock market when large class action settlements are reached with a corp and the stock then rises as it is forward looking and optimistic now that the 'awful past' is settled. First-gen immigrants tend to have larger families as the impetus to move countries is an optimistic endeavor itself.
And while a reach, I think through this lens you can make an argument as to why lower classes tend to have more children than middle classes (currently in the US). It's easier to expect better for your children when you are at the bottom of the barrel (no where to go but up), whereas the middle class is in an increasingly precarious position.
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
Agree with the statement,
Don't agree with the supporting statements though.
Parenting is just really hard, families need two parents working, birthing itself is expensive, even with good insurance, day care is 2k a month and it's not a good idea to skip it. Houses are expensive, raising a kid in a tiny apartment is hard, renting brings instability to your life. There is no serious parental leave for new parents.
> The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
I have seen what women go through to bring about a baby, and I would never do it more than 2 times, and that is only to give the 1 kid a sibling.
I also would not partner with the bottom 20% of the population (as a man or a woman), for myriad reasons.
If enough people think like me, then this results in a sub replacement total fertility rate, as the number of people with 3 or more kids will not be significant enough to outweigh the zero and ones.
The only “solution” that seems like it could increase TFR to replacement rate, without violating people’s rights, is getting rid of all old age benefits.
I've wondered if massive one time payments would be a solution. Like 100k for the first kid, 90k for the second, etc. Obvious moral hazard around having kids just for the payment, but if population decline is actually a big problem, it isn't necessarily worse.
Fixing the rest of what you mentioned is obviously a good idea too, but what better way to increase society's value on children than giving them a literal value?
ive seen similar things like no income tax if you have 3 kids. i think that give you slightly better alignment because you still want to be productive.
As a parent, I genuinely question why I continue to participate in a society that tolerates traffic deaths and firearm violence like the US. If there's a large chunk of people who won't lift a finger to keep kids from being shot at school, there's a large chunk of people who value my child's life at zero.
One of the ways the Netherlands made streets safer for dismounted people was by framing it as stopping killing kids with your cars. Yes this is "think of the children" logic but since kids are generally healthy the top causes of kid death in the US are gunfire and cars.
The USA had those same protests a decade before the Netherlands, but collectively decided that they preferred to blame the parents more than they wanted to restrict car drivers:
From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidde...:
> "all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses." ...
> "Many demonstrations—particularly the biggest ones—were triggered by the injury or death of a child. Against any tendency to blame the parents for permitting their children to have a life of their own beyond home and school, demonstrators consistently demanded streets that local children could use safely. And while the demonstrations were nearly always nonviolent, they were vocal and insistent, and sometimes confrontational. They included some degree of traffic obstruction, sometimes even full blockades that barred all motor vehicles." ...
> "Women bearing signs picketed streets and intersections, or set up folding chairs across the breadth of streets and sat in them. Children often participated. A mainstay of the demonstrations was baby carriages, occupied or not, which rhetorically associated the demonstrations with motherhood and with the safety of children. The technique was common enough to give the demonstrations a name: Some newspapers called them “baby carriage blockades.”" ...
> "the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was the mother’s fault."
FWIW "gunfire" as a killer of children (under 18) is mostly inter-gang violence, not school shootings or anything else. Cars dominate. Guns are mostly a risk factor you have some control over as a parent (don't have guns at home, don't raise your kids into gangs), whereas car culture really isn't.
FYI this is like telling poor people that they just should move to a better neighborhood. This advice is about as practical as telling people to move to Manhattan to reduce car accident injury risk for your teen driver.
In constant dollars, we're spending double per child on schooling than we did in the '70s. There's no "publicly divest from schools".
and also there is the deeply ingrained attitude that your kids are your problem. there is very little help from the government to offset the negative effects and opportunity costs of having and raising children.
https://archive.ph/LdA0d
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
If the US wants to increase its population, maybe it should stop sending masked agents out to kick in doors, directly reducing the population.
The US doesn't want indiscriminate population growth. It wants white people that were born here to reproduce more.
"The US" as a whole definitely does not want that, just the deeply unpopular white nationalists who have their hands on the levers of power at the moment.
As an aside, it's hilarious that they try to brand themselves as "Heritage Americans" since "Native American" is already taken.
Does it? It sure costs a whole helluava lot. I mean, there's tax credits and things, but it's not at all cheap!
I think capitalists just want cheap labor. The US itself doesn’t have a unified position on population. Plenty of people want a population decrease because they feel everything is overcrowded.
Well, when I say "US" I mean the current administration and the people that have power within it. Maybe that's not their actual intention or desire, but that is the story their policies and actions are telling.
It's interesting how the sides flipped. Left was strongly anti-immigration because it saw it as a tool of capitalism to drive down wages and just general abuse of working-class rights. Now Left is pro-immigration, and the right is against for the same reason the Left was. When did this change happen?
I'm on the left and am anti-immigration. Always have been. I think pulling the cream of the crop is objectively good for the country, but bad for the places they come from. Liberal low skilled immigration is just bad for everyone except the handful of people that actually employ them.
Globalists have been taking over liberal institutions since the 90s (they have control of the DNC for longer). Media, academia, education are aligned with the globalist agenda. And the left dare not speak out against it, or they get mobbed.
When the “left” started becoming more about social wokeist policies than about economics and fiscal policy.
I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.
The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…
It's amusing. The left is always accused of "woke" but the ones constantly crying about it are those on the right. The right will even vote against their own economic interests to "stick it to the woke."
Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).
The US has endless backlog of people waiting in line to legally enter the country. It doesn’t need to keep any illegal aliens to meet its immigration goals.
This logic would fly a couple of years ago.
Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
> Since then, we have seen indiscriminate violence against people and families following the rules.
I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate". For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law. But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
> And a bizzare hate campaign against H1B.
There's nothing bizarre about workers being angry at a system that is being abused to drive down wages. The reality is that there are segments of workforce in the USA that will only hire H1Bs workers because they know they can treat them illegally. This happens all over the place but is particularly prevalent at larger orgs (both in tech and finance). The behavior is implicitly authorized by the companies as they outsource the "being the jerk" to those managers.
The non-H1B workers rightfully feel angered by this because it directly lowers their wages. It's like scabs flooding a union shop. Only worse as the scabs are scared of not only losing their jobs, but their visas.
> And court judgements explicitly enabling masked government agents to target someone solely on the basis of skin color.
If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate"
Ok, let me make you aware of it and then you'll be unable to continue to use this excuse.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26871634-19-ts-of-02...
> Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect, it is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The individuals affected are people. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this Court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country.
Quit burying your head in the sand of what is happening around you. I urge you to actually read the reality in the court records of what is actually happening.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
> I'm not aware of any such thing, especially anything "indiscriminate".
You are wilfully unaware.
> For sure there are causalities when protests go from speech to violence or directly interfere with the ability of law enforcement to enforce the law.
The protests and other resistance to the crackdowns have been amazingly disciplined in maintaining nonviolence. Shockingly good at it.
Almost all of the violence that's actually happened has been both started and finished by ICE/CBP/etc.
Not to mention the fact that the structure of the operations, and the organizational culture in which they are conducted, are obviously intended, at a command level, to create conditions for violence on both (all?) sides. And, yes, Those In Charge are absolutely responsible for that.
When Noem, Bondi, Homan, Miller, Trump, and friends talk about "violent riots", "domestic terrorism", "ramming agents with cars", or whatever, they are lying. It's not a difference of interpretation. They are intentionally lying (except maybe Trump, who probably doesn't have enough of a sense of reality to be strictly lying). They have lots of allies who systematically spread their lies and add more. Don't believe anything they say unless you have personally seen and authenticated video. You have to authenticate it, because one of their favorite tricks is to use video of things that happened years ago, sometimes in other countries, and claim it's what their agents are reacting to. AI video isn't quite good enough yet, but they'll use that where they can. And of course they're also all about selective editing. And after all that they still ask you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
If you are failing to be skeptical of notorious baldfaced liars, that's motivated ignorance on your part.
> But your framing makes it sound like roving bands of beat down squads.
In Minneapolis, yes. But those squads are mostly aimed at intimidating anybody resisting the agenda, not at actual potential deportees.
The more on-topic problem is revoking every completely legal status in sight, and then acting as though the people whose status got revoked had done something wrong.
> If there was not a concerted effort to interfere with law enforcement or dox the people that work at those places, the masks would not be necessary.
You know, normal cops frequently deal with actual violent criminals who may be inclined to violent vengeance. But they don't wear masks.
ICE agents are just going to have to deal with the fact that, so long as they keep doing what they're doing, decent people who find out who they are are going to shun them. They might even get heckled on the streets. Comes with the territory. Does not justify trying to conceal your identity.
Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?
This already happened in 1986.
"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."
"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."
"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here
I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....
State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.
It creates a huge moral hazard to reward those who illegally entered/overstayed visas
Only in theory - they went through years and decades of hell already so it's not like people are going to try to emulate it just in case it works. Anyway, countries like America "contain multitudes" and there can and will always be seemingly contradictory paths chosen at the same time.
> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?
Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.
How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.
What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.
'flooding'??
The vast majority taken up in these dragnets are legal residents of the united states.
The attorney representing ICE to the courts in MN admitted it directly, admitted that ICE does not believe it needs to honor orders of the federal court system, and that they do not comply with orders to release legal residents of the united states.
You should educate yourself. Here's commentary that directly references the lawyer's responses and judge's commentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o-_2thaI8
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
It's not a guarantee that we'll import more food - though that may be a good thing in the long run to help other countries - we could also switch what kinds of food we eat.
Not everything needs manual labor to harvest like strawberries, crops like corn and wheat and others are quite capable of being harvested in bulk by machinery.
Net calories per employee/farmer would be an interesting metric.
Eating only corn and wheat will leave you with nutrient deficiencies. You can be obese and still malnourished if all the veggies you eat are a slice of tomato and lettuce in your burger and half a potato with the same volume of frying oil.
facilitating the free movement of labor across borders by... abducting and abusing all the laborers coming across our borders? very curious
I think you missed the sarcasm.
I did, sorry
Necessity is the mother of invention. Americans like to invent things - we'll be fine.
a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
Maybe if young folks could afford housing they'd have kids...there's a thought.
I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong, and not even plausible (anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings, and they could not even afford proper sunday shoes for all of them, much less current living standards).
I think the biggest impact is from kids being obsolete/net negative as both workforce (when young) and retirement scheme (when the parents are old). But there is no reverting that development.
Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too, though.
Animals have "r/k selection": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory ; some have huge numbers of offspring (e.g. spiders, most fish), some carefully nurture a single egg per year. Humans are already at the smaller number of offspring compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but what I think is happening is that social pressure has simply pushed the tradeoff hard into "quality".
That is, the message is "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Certainly the main victory against birthrate worldwide has been the long process of eradicating teen pregnancy.
> Easy access to contraceptives probably makes a significant difference too
This is so basic as to be an axiom of the whole thing. The politics of going back to forced childrearing through suppression of healthcare are horrific, but some of the US is pushing for that.
> "unless you can give your children a perfect life, you shouldn't bother".
Except in real life, income is negatively correlated with fertility. Meaning, those most able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the least likely to have kids, while those least able to give their kids the "perfect life" are the most likely to have kids.
Yes - because they have high standards! Higher than achievable standards, and more income to give up if they start trading off time from work to actually raising their own children.
I'm not going to find sources right now, but from my understanding the research shows that the greatest impact on number of children is education of girls. Once women have more options, staying home their whole life popping out babies seems less desirable.
There will no doubt be a push by some of the most conservative idiots to stop educating girls.
I'd argue that the minimum education level rising in general is already strongly correlated itself, because it indicates that "uneducated" children are economically worthless (=> parents need to pay more to educate and children take longer until self-sustainable and economic "worth" of adolescents is relatively lower).
Flash news - todays people have higher standards and expectations of living than your grandma and grandpa. In particular - most people want college education for their kids. College education comes with tens of thousands in expenses and people are like "how am I gonna put 2 kids in college? I think I will have 1"
Another flash news for people who haven't had kids in daycare for a while - pricing for daycare means that for the first kid the mom could work and come ahead money wise. Second kid is about neutral (depending on location and salary, in some cases the mom comes ahead money wise, in other case she does not). Daycare pricing made us decide to have 1 kid - if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Access to contraceptives make a significant difference as well.
The college explanation cannot be the full or even the main driver, because countries with free college (+ scholarships) have the same issue. Same for daycare pricing.
> if we had 2 kids in daycare my wife would have been better off staying at home (which we could not afford and she did not want to do anyway).
Why the sexist idea that only your wife you could stay home? There are a growing number of men who are staying home to raise their kids - still a minority, but a good trend to encourage.
Of course I have no idea what your personal situation is. You may have made the best choice for your situation - but you implied you didn't even consider one of your options and that is bad.
Because I was making more money than my wife. Get it?
So? money is nice, but it isn't everything. many people have demoted themselves because something other than money was important to them.
"Many people have demoted themselves...." you must travel in very selective circles, my friend. (or more likely, arguing for the sake of arguing.)
The vast vast majority do not do that. However there are so many people in the world that the remainder is still many people.
Money is objectively needed to take care of children to any decent standard. Choosing to shoot yourself in the foot to be seen as less sexist is dumb
Leave him alone. He will find another reason why you are wrong and he is right. (I mis-used his pronouns probably.)
In my opinion, it mostly comes down to contraception and changing lifestyle choices. Most child-free people I know simply prefer not to have kids.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few decades, the dominant concern swings back toward "overpopulation" as major advances significantly slow or reverse aging.
>I think the "cost of living" explanation for low birthrates is just wrong
If you're demanding it be all-or-nothing, then sure it is "wrong". It obviously isn't the only reason. As countries get richer, people have fewer kids.
Is it a factor? Of course it is. Children are incredibly expensive if you subscribe to modern norms and expectations. There are many, many, many people who want kids but can't afford it, and if they do have a kid it's prohibitive having more than 1. Two is basically financial suicide for many. And to be clear, I have four children which is a luxury of being in a financially rewarding career at the right time, but even still it was unbelievably tough making it happen.
"anecdote: my grandmother had 17 siblings"
Standards change. You understand that, right? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago. People generally aren't keen on having six kids sharing a room these days. Even bunkbeds are considered poor by many. Now since both parents will have to work, account for childcare, massive vehicles, education savings, and so on.
>? If you're middle class in 2026, the expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago.
I think this is it. Watching children bore me to death. I enjoy it for about an hour and that is it. The child doesn't appreciate having someone hover over them and the parent has better things to do than play children's games all day.
When I was a kid kids would walk home by themselves, spend all day either at school or playing outside, basically parents are there to provide general guidance, food, housing, a few luxuries, and protection. But none of this insanity where it is negligent if someone is not watching the child 24/7.
The biggest regret I have about parenthood is I envisioned it as it was when I was a child, and failed to take note that nothing that was allowed when I was a child is allowed anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split. This mean the child gets little of the independence and neither does the parent get a chance to give it to them. It's made me horribly, horribly sad on so many occasions to the point I've begged my spouse to let us move to another country where children can actually experience a childhood without the busybody enforced-by-law-helicoptering nonsense.
If I could parent children under the standards of the 1960s, or in most foreign countries with more liberal standard on the age appropriate independence of children, I would happily have a few more.
> anymore, someone will rat your ass out to CPS lickity split.
They will, but CPS will investigate and then close the case. It is still annoying, but they mostly understand some people think if you are not there 24x7 you are neglectful.
It doesn't always work out that way, but mostly it does.
I'd argue that those higher standards/costs for raising children are the effect and not the cause.
We (need to) invest more into their education because uneducated children/adults have little or even negative value as workers (especially to their parents), this was not the case two centuries ago.
Children appear to be a "luxury" nowadays because there is no longer any expectation that they "net contribute" to their family economically (might be a positive change ethics-wise, but this is a huge shift in incentives for parents).
> expectations around having and raising a child are very, very different from someone sixty years ago
This is at the root of "it's too expensive" - what are in the "needs" column has vastly changed.
It is very likely that if you want a large family, one spouse (usually the mother) is going to have to stay at home, or at most work very part time - at least until all kids are into school. The costs otherwise simply don't work out unless you have "free childcare" from grandparents or other family members - which used to be quite common.
The easiest thing to do is unsubscribe from modern norms and expectations - but this is a personal decision and too hard for many.
I suspect few women are willing to give up all their other options to stay home and make babies their whole life.
What is happening is what you'd expect if that is true, and it seems to be.
Your post implies that costs for raising kids stop when the kids are in school. Your post did not include costs for college - which is becoming a norm for a lot of people. Un-subscribing from the idea of giving your kids college education is a bad decision.....
> my grandmother had 17 siblings
Another anecdote. Nobody in my extended family has more than 3 kids. My grandmothers from both sides had more. But the trend is pretty clear. Fewer kids for the modern generation. Regardless of the level of education and income. In fact, the lower education/income ones in my extended family have fewer kids.
Contraceptives will be harder to get. Project 2025 is also about stopping the "senseless use of birth control pills".
Well, they can do whatever they want in their red-states. Blue states are already moving healthcare away from federal non-sense standards [0] and [1]
[0] https://governor.wa.gov/news/2025/washington-california-and-...
[1]https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-mdhhs/newsroom/2026/01...
That's what nationalizing elections is for, make blue states turn red.
I can't agree with you enough. I am so sick and tired of the cost of living argument. Back in the 1800s people were living in tiny cramped places and having 5-6 kids while barely able to afford necessities.
People then also largely worked on family farms and having kids was the economically sensible thing to do. Times change and people expect differently for both their own lives as well as the lives of their children.
FWIW I have one child and financial strain is a big reason I don’t have more.
I would absolutely start looking for an actual wife if I had any certainty I would not be renting at some point, and my parents sold the detached house they raised my brother and myself in to move into a condo closer downtown, so they didn't even profit. But with rent very nearly doubling from 800 to 1400 for a single bedroom apartment since covid, my savings is evaporating and not even going into something I can sell, so I intentionally got with an infertile girlfriend instead.
See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960624#46961124
How many kids do you have?
This is often a commonly blamed reason, but I think the data at this point pretty strongly suggests that the more affluent a country is the less kids they have.
You look at some of the most third world places in the world without strong economic security, yet somehow they manage to have babies at a higher rate than Western countries do.
Seems like when you give women the choice, many elect to have fewer kids than replacement level.
Hell, in many countries in Europe, they basically throw money at anyone having kids and their birthrate has plummeted which would indicate that economics is not only reason.
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
You've missed my point... Those allowances and subsidies don't remotely cover the cost of having children. Especially in the US with the wild costs of hospital childbirth itself.
Those who qualify for welfare usually qualify for Medicaid when pregnant - if you’re poor enough, hospital births are free!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Parental_Glory - Russia tried this, not sure how successful it is.
There needs to be a societal change where motherhood is not only respected but celebrated - why we are now in a society where it's looked down upon (not verbally but by actions) could be pondered.
Yes, the "cost of having kids" argument is 100% bunk. Africans in abject poverty are having 6-7 kids, while individuals living in the richest countries are having 1 or none even though they clearly can afford many more.
Even within Western countries income is negatively correlated with fertility - those most able to afford kids are having the least number of kids.
This comes up in every discussion about demographics. But counterintuitively, there are no examples of financial incentives actually fixing this problem.
For example, in 2022 Hungary was spending 6.2% of GDP on such incentives[1], but this only managed to bring total fertility rate up to about 1.6 [2].
It is the same everywhere else. The real reason fertility has declined since the sixties is because people have access to effective birth control. Nobody wants to be a baby factory.
[1] https://abouthungary.hu/news-in-brief/hungary-to-spend-6-2-o...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/hun/hun...
Back of an envelope suggests that to really make this work you'd need most women in the 20-40 range to have the job title of "parent" and a lower middle class or more salary paid by the state, so .. 10-20% of GDP? Nobody wants to contemplate just how expensive this is going to be, including the fact that now you have a short-term labour shortage (because they're out of the regular workforce as well!)
If that were true then we would expect to see a positive correlation between income and family size, but households making 500k are basically the same size as households making 50k.
Your specific claim may indeed be true, but it's misleading. The relationship between income and children is U-shaped. From middle incomes to higher incomes, fertility rises. It is also important to point out that income is tied to other factors in America. You're going to disproportionately find your $500k earners in a handful of superstar coastal cities. Those things need to be controlled for if you want to isolate the effect of income on family size.
More that young(er) folks could afford to live on a single income for the pre-school years. Or, I guess, that there's extensive parental leave and support for the parent doing primary caregiver.
Mixed in with all this, and possibly preceeding all this, is declining marriage rates. It's significantly riskier, financially and relationally, to have kids without getting married.
There are many solutions to different aspects of the problem - if we define the problem something like "people get together older, and have kids older, and have fewer."
But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids.
The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight children.
The Amish aren't on the consumer treadmill. They have amazing social support from their community. They tend to be "traditional families" so there's no question re: child rearing. So I guess that satisfies both of the original conditions... But I figure people would prefer a more commercial lifestyle. Particularly on places like HN.
By all estimates, they have also fairly high rates of domestic violence and abuse rates. Which to be fair, traditional families also frequently featured.
The Amish aren't becoming scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As a society I don't think the Amish lifestyle is something we would embrace.
I disagree. I think there is a lot we can learn from Amish society. Main of the 'ills' of modern society don't exist in their community. I believe that we can learn and apply aspects of what they do well without losing our ability to support entrepreneurs and engineers.
You need a positive life affirming story in your life to set up kids and the current core does not have that. "You will be either a concentration camp guard or a prisoner, in a apocalyptic war" is not a life narrative, its a contraceptive.
Lots of people are doing the math and explaining why what the people who aren't having kids are saying is wrong. They have their math and the people still don't have kids.
Is housing really that expensive? When you price out a loan on a starter house it really ain't that bad. I'm a recent first time homebuyer and I don't understand why people think they aren't affordable. There were plenty of cheaper homes that I looked at and even with rates at their highest would be cheaper than my rent.
Do people expect a palace? Are there more unmarried people today who can't afford it alone?
Based on your lower comment, Rhode Island.
Median family income $87k
Cost-of-living ~$36k excluding housing
With your example of a $350K home, someone making the median (presumably not 20-30 year olds but more like 40-45 year olds...) they could save up the $70k down payment in under 2 years.
P & I payment of ~$2k / month. Maybe $1k more for escrow of taxes and insurance.
So $72k total cost of living on $87k, assuming you've made it to median income.
Of course, if you're making less than $72k, buying a $350k house would simply be... untenable.
Also, based on rough guideline of "30% of income on housing", you'd definitely want to keep your mortgage under $2200 / month.
Census link indicates median home values are closer to $404K though, too.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/RI/LFE046224
https://livingcost.org/cost/united-states/ri
> Cost-of-living ~$36k excluding housing
When you say housing, are you excluding utilities or just not direct rent / mortgage / property taxes?
Either way, that's a good example of how different things are without kids and maybe why folks are choosing not to have them.
As someone without kids who lives in NY (not NYC), I couldn't even imagine spending 36k / year (minus rent). Even if I took a 3 week international vacation every quarter I wouldn't come close to that amount after factoring in my normal costs.
From the link I posted, a "family of 4" in R.I. has a cost-of-living of $3090 / month (without rent.) It then line items "rent & utilities" as $2644 / month.
In general the “housing is too expensive” people mean “I looked at every available house in both San Francisco and New York City, and didn’t find anything cheap!”
When picking a city, pick two:
-Good job market
-Not high cost of living
-Good quality of life (commute, amenities, etc.)
Many industries are concentrated in high cost of living cities or very high cost of living cities. Not everyone is a nurse who can work anywhere. Big cities generally have bigger salaries.
such annoying pedantry to point out that "akshually houses are cheap in southern missouri"
I mean, sure. but then there are 0 jobs and 0 community.
the housing shortage is a shortage of housing in the same places that there is industry and opportunity. the fact that there are ample plots of land upon which one could theoretically erect a tent is irrelevant
I'm an hour from the gentrified black hole of Boston.
That's what it feels like to me. Hey I checked all the houses in a jet set fart sniffing town and there's nothing!
the cities mentioned account for nearly 10% of US GDP by themselves. That's not exactly what I would describe as a "jet set fart sniffing town." maybe you misread and thought the OP said Jackson or Sun Valley or something?
Housing for the boomers used to cost 3x the median salary. Now it's more like 6x the median salary. These are nationwide numbers. Wage growth isn't keeping up to pace with housing prices
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
How much cost do you consider a first time home as costing?
God forbid paying the masses a living wage or allowing them access to things their forebears had. They will own nothing and they will be thankful for it.
[/s just in case it goes over someone's head]
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
I think it's clear that the reduction in teen pregnancy is indeed a big contributor to the decreasing fertility rate. I would guess the reason this doesn't get brought up in discussions about how to _increase_ the fertility rate is that reversing the trend on teen pregnancy is just really not a palatable solution to many people. Although there are some, usually on the religious right, who advocate for banning contraception, teaching abstinence-only sex education, etc., which would most likely have the effect of reversing the teen pregnancy trend.
I think not talking about it skews the conversation towards incorrect remedies - the discourse is about what has changed about the economy, communities, family life, etc, that makes people want fewer kids and then trying to derive solutions from those things as the assumed problem. It makes too much of the discourse a question of “how do we go back to the previous conditions?”
If instead we say this is a biological imperative that we have interrupted and many people don’t rationally want children no matter how perfect those conditions are, then instead of looking back to previous states, we can ask what new conditions must occur to change this behavior.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Agreed!
For me, it was choosing between having kids or caring for my aging parents. With social security probably getting cut in the next 5-10 years, I just couldn't swing it. So I prioritized the already living over the potentially living. Hopefully we'll have robots for when I get old.
Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self. My sister and her husband get 1-2 hours of time for themselves per day, and then they are too tired to do anything but watch TV. They've ceased to exist as individuals, basically. To them, work and the office are their places of relaxation.
They're not on HN to explain this to anyone because they just don't have the time.
> Becoming a parent is basically a destruction of the self.
I am a parent and have definitely felt very stressed on account of children. But as for feeling like my "self" was destroyed, I can't really say I ever experienced that; and I'm not even sure about the idea of a fixed immutable self anyway. I'm not advocating for having children, or against having children; but I don't think I was crushed as a human being because of my choice.
My last child is graduating from high school this year. She's a violinist and I'm a pianist. I've always accompanied her since she was 3; and we do a lot of musical collaborations. I definitely feel like my sense of self is expanded by all of this. But maybe I just got lucky.
I should have made clear that being a parent _of young children_ is destruction of the self. I'm sure once the kids are all old enough to use the toilet independently and otherwise entertain themselves it will be different. But right now their situation reminds me less of a lifestyle and more some kind of punishment.
Arranging society in such a way that women would rather have a career than be a mother will have profound consequences. The value of motherhood needs to be properly valued in society's collective mind.
No view on fatherhood? Quelle surprise
That is also important, but I think it is a step separate from the birth rate.
They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like government-provided childcare are good societal investments.
The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split. I do not think government provided childcare is a good idea since it would incentivize children to spend time away from their family.
> The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split.
Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.
Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.
I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.
An unsolvable problem that will correct itself homeostatically. Also: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
I don't get what the fence metaphor has to do with the problem
I have yet to see anyone, my family included, that actually seemed to enjoy parenting. I know for a fact my father was ready to run to the middle east shortly after I was born, my brother was a total accident and not terribly wanted either. As a result we’ve never been close my parents and I…why would I want to be a parent after that? I have no desire to live a life a child would require either.
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
(Comedy writing mode ON: )
"We need to flatten the curve..."
(Comedy writing mode OFF: )
You know, to re-quote the powers-that-be and the mainstream news media...
What, no takers?
You know, "flatten the curve... of population increase?" -- what, still not funny?
Hey, I'm just re-quoting what other people said... (a whole lot of people, incidentally!) but in the context of the article, above!
What, still no takers?
You people have no sense of (dark, very dark, let's be completely honest about that!) humor!
:-)
What's the problem? The US is simultaneously flirting with potential AI. If the AI proves to be productive, we won't need as many workers. The economy can shift from a human worker only base to a human + AI base. The solution is merely to tax the AI part too!.
We should ask ourselves a question, if the system we're living in is not rewarding having kids, is a good system at all?
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
It's only a short term solution, as all countries around the world (even those third-world ones, with current fertility rate above 4.0) are experiencing lower birthrates every year. See the movie birthgap
As long as people from those countries want to come to the USA, it would be a problem for those countries and not the USA.
However, "those third-world ones with current fertility rates above 4.0" probably have a ways to drop before it actually becomes a problem for them, couple few generations or so. In that time, the context for all of this could change (50 years ago, people were more worried about too much reproduction? Who knows in another 50).
In fact, for whatever reasons, the most predictable trend seems to be that fertility rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. As standard of living goes up, fertility goes down and vice versa. if those "third world ones" actually drop their fertility to "first world" levels, it would probably mean that their standard of living is such that immigration to the USA won't be so appealing either.
At that point, it seems the global social political context is changed enough that we will have an entirely different set of problems and solutions that are hard to predict now.
This inspired me to make https://poputrend.clodhost.com/
You can mess with assumptions and see how it projects out the population of any country/continent/the globe (based on 2024 data and trends).
Robots may fill the gap. Really. It seems silly now, but give it twenty years. The developed world may end up with a modest human population and a large robotic population. Asimov explored that idea in SF decades ago.
The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.
I don't see why there has to be a "gap" at all. The country had half as many people in 1950, and it got along fine. The world is different now, but I don't see why it takes 300 million people to run the country today.
If the US gets back to 150 million people, it will look different, but I don't see why it has to be any worse than it is now. And I can think of a lot of reasons why it might be better.
Get rid of Medicare and Social Security, and the transition would be fine. The problem will be in transferring more and more wealth from the working and giving it to the non working, resulting in an everlasting loss of quality of life for the working (absent sufficient advances in automation).
That sounds like a horrible way to flirt.
Is this a stupid question? Why do we want high fertility rates anyway? Isn't the world overpopulated?
Yes the world is overpopulated. However a lot of developed societies based their framework for budgets on permanent growth, for example the idea that the young paying tax will always pay for the benefits of the elderly. However with the population rate decreasing, suddenly there is lots of older population expecting things like healthcare and pensions to be paid for them. With less and less young people to cover the cost in tax, there is a looming defecit which is very worrying to a lot of economists.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
Pulling out is pretty effective when you do it right, they can't really ban that. In very catholic Quebec up to the 1950s priests would get involved in couple's marital lives and apply pressure when wives weren't getting pregnant for just that reason.
I think you're the closest to being right, but assuming that dystopia can actually arise is a stretch. A proper understanding of the world incorporates the understanding that there the population and leadership are a fluid, with people moving back and forth all the time. Maybe with a robot army the rulers can impose a dystopia for the rest, but at that point we also would have infinite robot labor, so it's kind of a cop-out.
As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
Not to take away from your fear but women have been having children since the dawn of time.
Especially with modern medical care and support, it's relatively low risk (assuming you are of an healthy young age without prior conditions).
Pregnancy is not classified as a disease and within a year the body recovers quickly (Tokophobia exists however).
>> Especially with modern medical care and support, it's relatively low risk
Low risk of death, sure. But ripping pelvic floor and getting diabetes is not a low risk.
Childless women don't age well. If they are saved from the effects of a never-pregnant climax on their arteries/metabolism, they will face a dementia cared by nieces. Not that mothers don't have these but physically and psychologically they are much less burdensome. The hormone flooding of pregnancy is a health blessing.
Needs citation for your argument. All I read today on this subject claims the contrary:
"Associations between number of children, age at becoming a parent, and dementia risk were similar for both sexes. Lifestyle and socioeconomic factors are more likely to explain the observed associations than normal pregnancy-related physiological changes."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9976501/
The article doesn't compare 0 with N children.
Caring for elderly depends on the role of family in society. In my country family still plays a huge role so having no direct descendants has it's impact.
I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.
How many other people did your parents independently date before settling down with each other if you do not mind me asking?
Too bad the rest of the world is no longer in shambles due to war and has other options than buying American
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
The recent episode of The Daily gives a prime example of this,
I was seeing people getting hired and getting paid a lot less than me. And when I inquired about it, my boss would say, well, they’re less expensive. I don’t have to pay workman’s comp on them. I don’t have to pay general liability insurance on them. If they get hurt, they’ll go to the emergency room. No sweat off my back. And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them... It’s illegal, by the way. But people are getting away with it and I’m competing against them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/podcasts/the-daily/why-tr...
I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
Wanting them gone isn't the same as putting the blame on them. It isn't a personality conflict or a troubled relationship; immigrants shouldn't feel guilty for wanting to stay and the people competing with them should feel guilty for wanting them to go. Or rather, who cares? Shouldn't people be allowed to have their inner states to themselves? Can't we own anything? How did a discussion about labor exploitation turn into a discussion about feelings?
And why is it a discussion about some workers' feelings vs. other workers' feelings? How did the boss manage to completely recuse himself?
>I think he unfairly places the blame on the immigrants themselves, when the true culprits are the employers and system of black market employment.
The same thought formed in my head listening to that the other day. He even talked about how, as an independent contractor with his own business, he couldn't hire help. He refuses to pay undocumented immigrants under the table (kudos to him), and recognizes that hiring people legitimately would raise his costs too high above the competition. But then he latches onto the idea of deporting the immigrants instead of punishing businesses violating labor laws.
It's not that he apologized for the shady business owners. He didn't seem to ever consider it an option.
I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to give it back, but otherwise did not have to face prosecution.
Because what can an illegal immigrant do? They could in theory just rely on social services and entitlements, but I don't think anyone (including the immigrants themselves, for the most part) really wants that. They want to work, and to make money, and the law makes it very hard to do so legally, so they work illegally.
All the barriers you mention are things that we put in place to "protect" workers, but at the same time create a black market that undercuts those very workers.
As for the employers, sure, they are culprits here, but would you rather have them let the immigrants starve? That also does not seem to serve any social good. As for not paying workman's comp, for example, there is already enough paperwork and bureaucracy involved in hiring a legal worker where there are systems that support and administer those programs. If you wanted to offer a workman's comp lookalike for illegal labor as a social service, then that would multiply the effort and cost by a huge factor.
There are such deep contradictions in these thoughts. You think that the illegal immigrant is going to starve without the criminal employer? When just a second ago you were saying they should be deported, and that "most" people think that's OK?
We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's families and lives.
What can I say, I contain multitudes.
I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.
If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.
My thoughts on this have always been a blend of your two 'they should not be deported' scenarios, with a slow, measured rollout.
Sudden changes cause too much chaos, and you don't always know what works until you try it. Avoiding entitlement abuse is always going to be part of the conversation, and it seems to me the fix for this (and nearly any other issue) needs to be approached carefully from both the supply and demand sides until what's effective is more clear.
I guess where we differ is that I believe that we've tried the other side and found it wanting. You can say that the Biden asylum catch-and-release policies did not include entitlement reform or worker protections so they don't count, but what it shows me is that too many moving parts mean that only the worst aspects of the worst solution are what get implemented. The simplest solution is securing the border and deporting illegal immigrants.
> extend labor protections
This would also solve the "competition" problem, because it would tend to equalize wages.
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Mass human behavior in regards to fertility, climate destruction, and social decay is much more sensical if you frame it as species-wide suicidality.
Suicidality seems rather overdramatic. It'd take a lot of halvings of the population to reach species viability threshold.
All it takes is a demographic trend to make the entire population a bunch of crackpots! Behold.
I believe the trend of population decline coupled with the wave of retirees when coupled with "AI" will produce a net benefit for everyone.
I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.
I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.
Every single other previous advance that could have done that has NOT produced the less stressed part - imagine taking an 1800s subsistence farmer and arming him with modern equipment and tooling; he'd be ecstatic.
The key is always internal, personal, once you right yourself, the world starts feeling much better.
Let's reiterate:
* kids are and were always born in severely underdeveloped places like Africa and during hard times like famines or wars
* worldwide in the last 100 years and maybe throughout all history the education level and social freedom of woman severely impacts her fertility
Draw your own conclusions about the causes and solutions of the demographic problem
None of those arguments are supported by the article.
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
> Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Yes, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
Hill climbing algorithms. We were warned about those in undergrad classes. Others were not.
Maybe they should have a look to what other countries are doing. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
Meanwhile, in Denmark:
Why have Danes turned against immigration?
...
In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). Data on immigration’s fiscal effects were what “changed the Social Democrats’ point of view”, says Torben Tranaes of the Danish Centre for Social Science Research.
Muslims are at the core of the issue. This year was the first time the ministry reported separately on the contributions by people from 24 Muslim countries. They account for 50% of the non-Westerners, but 77% of the drain. Alongside that worry are fears that Muslims bring notions about democracy and the role of women that Danes find threatening. Muslims are welcome, says Mr Tesfaye, but, “We can’t meet in the middle. It’s not half sharia and half the Danish constitution.”
...
https://archive.is/kXMi7
Heck, they could just make it easier for documented immigrants to live here.
There are other plans now:
https://baptistnews.com/article/remember-the-first-goal-of-p...
The ever-advancing big tech dystopia where individuals are pervasively tracked, quantified, and siloed. A destroyed economy squashing mobility, making the basic necessities uncertain, and future wealth questionable. Terrorist gangs abducting people in their homes based on what AI says, and executing people in the streets for protesting about it. All things that make for warm fuzzy feelings about bringing children into this world!
As a parent, I will say that the reelection of destructionists has basically guaranteed that my son's life will be markedly worse than my own. This was our chance to pull up out of the death spiral, but instead we chose full speed ahead, downward. The only sane way to analyze the fascist movement is as the death throes of our society, rather than latching on to any of their conflicting purportedly-constructive plans they chum out to fool the gullible.
Holy shit that article invokes explicit nazi policy without a shred of shame.
https://baptistnews.com/article/trump-admin-continues-to-lie...
The interesting thing is this is Spain's second wave of doing this, and the economic studies on the first wave of it showed visibly positive results. Spain's economy moved in growth, and with a size larger than many other European nations in similar background conditions of flat to negative population growth, but tighter immigration allowances.
Horrible fiscal ticking time bomb that ignores the fact that regularization means naturalization over the next 10-15 years and so access to EU healthcare system.
The biggest drag on government budgets in EU are socialized healthcare and retirement costs. At this point we know healthcare costs are severely backloaded, with most spending coming out of the last 10 years of someone's life. Regularizing now allows them to show a fiscal boost now and for next 4-5 years(edit: maybe even like 10-15 years) and accumulate a massive liability as they age.
Think about it this way: If you regularize a 30 year old illegal migrant right now with a path to citizenship over next 10-15 years, the government NPV is positive over a 15 year horizon(whilst he works) and then will go flat to negative as he starts using the healthcare system whilst retired.
How much do 0-15 year olds contribute to the economy?
They contribute to GDP spend, but from the fiscal point of view they are a drag. As for actual percentages per country, I think it heavily varies. In EU i think family spending is like 3% of GDP.
The hope is that this drag will either generate higher cash flows later (i.e money spent on education now will allow them to create value for economy later) or reduce outflows later (i.e a child that gets braces and dental health care now won't spend their whole adult life dealing with teeth issues on taxpayer's dime).
The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers. Its even higher value for the economy when wages do a catch up slowly over their time. I think it is politiczed fear mongering to suggest that the economic balance is negative in that kind of exchange.
>The latter half of careers, and certainly 30-55 is generally the period of highest productivity of working careers.
For illegal immigrants though? They are not regularized to the C-suite but to Uber Eats and construction work.
A good construction worker can make more money than a bad web developer and certainly more money than an e-mailer that can barely use excel.
Legal immigrants if this change goes through - and if the minimum wage of these nations doesn't support any citizen living through their life perhaps the minimum wage should be increased and non performant businesses that can't support it will be shed
Spains youth is everywhere in europe but in spain? That economy sounds like a warzone from what they tell..
You're mentally stuck in 2009-2015. The world has moved on and Spain is now significantly outperforming Germany in growth (obviously not yet in wealth, which is the integral of growth over much longer time periods). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YZeqk8NCQ&t=456s
I have no doubt that this has positive effects on the national economy as a whole (you get workers, on demand, without really paying for raising, educating, training them), but it is not really sustainable because population growth is low/negative pretty much everywhere, and it also leads to significant pushback from cultural friction and local workers (that dislike competition).
You could argue that the whole rise of somwhat radical rightwing parties all over Europe is mainly the result of policies like this during the last half century...
As I see it, the root of unhappiness in voters is nonperformant housing markets and unaddressed growth of inequality where wages are not sharing in growth of profits. This creates a raft of difficult issues. And the rightwing indeed has an effective playbook to exploit these unaddressed shortfalls while blaming immigration. And the center left parties seem unwilling or unable to address the root problems.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
Total Fertility Rate (births per woman) un US:
2015 | 1.83
2016 | 1.80
2017 | 1.75
2018 | 1.71
2019 | 1.68
2020 | 1.62
2021 | 1.63
2022 | 1.67
2023 | 1.62
2024 | 1.62
2025 | 1.62
2026 | 1.61
Politizacion of long term trend wont help here.
And yet, birthrates jacked up for 2 decades after communism collapsed, stayed high until the bank crisis, tanked both times Trump came into office, recovered a couple years into Covid.
Meanwhile in Niger, fertility rate per woman is 6.3. It's not about politics.
All the comments are about having babies but as the article points out the actual proximate reason the US population is declining right now is the immigration enforcement approach taken by the Trump administration. Fewer people are coming the the US (including legally), and more people (including legal residents) are being deported or are leaving, and as a result there is net outflow of people from the country. The situation will only worsen with the incipient war on H1B and other visas.
We decided that brain drain wasn’t something we wanted to do anymore. We also have an uptick of expats as people worry this is 1937 all over again.
After a brief look at this discussion I am surprised that little reference is made of the evolutionary aspects of having children. Posts tend to center on "It's all about me!" rather than "it's all about the genes!"
Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).
Poor people. Start pumping out kids to be future wage slaves in this corpo dominated country. Carls Jr loves you.
I approve. The population shrinks until we build more god damn housing in these major cities where all the fucking jobs are!!
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
I'm struggling to see why this is a problem.
Marvelous.
Good? Population can't grow forever. We're not even fucking close to going extinct, and if we did start trending that direction countries like the USSR demonstrated that simple objectives like promising a medal to anyone who pops out 7 kids solves that problem overnight.
Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
I ask this of basically everyone on here who posts something like this, and never get a reply, but I'll try again:
Why would you expect income increases to track productivity gains?
ICE works :0
I don't think the ideas linking immigration to population growth or decline are productive. It hides the root cause of potential population decline. Why aren't people who are raised in the US having children? I think it's because most of us are lonely and miserable.
Perhaps we can try and take care of each other, and many other things will show signs of improving? There needs to be more access to things like healthcare, childcare, education, entertainment, leisure, arts, recreation, and so much more. There needs to be more love in our societies and the numbers that indicate well-being will follow. After all, what is the point of all of this? To get a promotion?
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¿Por qué no los dos?
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I suspect anyone using wikipedia do justify their inability to find a partner is generally undesirable.
go back to the incel corners pls and keep this kind of misogynist rhetoric out of here
But it's objective!! You can objectively measure the value of people. We could just plug people's value into a database and let AI do the match-making. People don't have to be involved in the decision-making. Especially not female people!
/s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy
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maybe you're just undesirable
I didn't realize incel rhetoric had spread to hackernews. God we're doomed.
The fall of this site after 2016 has been sad to watch. Basically turned into low-volume reddit.
Isn't reddit infested by people complaining about "incels"?
What could explain the OnlyFans content creators gender ratio?
that, but also men in their 20s and 30s refusing to settle down, and wasting with gaming, entertainment, and porn (and caling women that are objectively their equal, or even much superior "mid").
i know almost zero men that dont want a girlfriend, many are trying
My only advice to you is: clean up your grooming, spend some time getting in shape, treat women as equals, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. It also doesn't hurt to have a sense of humor. Guys who are funny will always have girlfriends. Even when I was poor as dirt I always had girlfriends.
Get a job, make your bed, clean yourself, read, walk, and talk to everyone.
If you think you can't do any of those things, figure out how. If you're scared to try, start by talking to old people - and really listen.
Stop thinking about yourself, think about others, and don't get fixated on "one girl" or otherwise drive yourself insane.
If you've done all of the above for a few years, then you may be in a position to complain - and change something drastic about your life (move, change jobs, travel, etc).
But the root of it all is treat everyone as a person worthy of respect, not just "hot girls" as trophies to be won. It ain't no video game.
I have a close male friend in their mid-thirties that has struggled dating since I've known him (~10 years). He is attractive, dresses well, goes to the gym, eats well, has a few hobbies, and isn't emotionally stunted nor suffer from any arrested development issues. My girlfriend thinks he might be cursed since we don't have any single friends to match-make him with.
He moved to a different city a few years ago and reported more hookups, but serious dating is just as bad. I'm starting to notice him becoming tired of it all, even though he hides it quite well.
Given it's not realistic to keep moving to different cities as it's financially and socially expensive to do so. What should I suggest?
Tell him that the option he wants is simply not available on the menu anymore.
He is free to chose some other options, just not that one.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Menu-Life-Without-Opposite-Sex/dp/B...
Fucking this! Jesus I want to love men but the vast majority of them aren't doing themselves any favors
Many are trying to get some punani, many have given up and live in the setup I described (some openly incel-y, others expecting the girlfriend to fall from the sky), way fewer are trying to settle. At best they want to settle after 35+.
interesting how HN downvoted this one, but not previous :P
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Do you really believe that "women/DEI" folks have ever had more political power than white males? Seems weird to me to put blame on them instead of the wealthy and ruling class.
>Do you really believe that "women/DEI" folks have ever had more political power than white males? Seems weird to me to put blame on them instead of the wealthy and ruling class.
YES!!!
Let me bring your knowledge up to speed.
The Australian group Collective Shout went after Steam because of games "exploring kids". Steam didn't do anything.
CS went after Visa and Master Card and because of CS political influence, Visa and Master Card went after Steam: You either comply or you can no longer use the only payment system used worldwide. CS has done the same in the past, they have massive political influence and the group is composed of 100% feminists only who hate men in any way and form, check their X account.
The same week that happened, the UK pushed age verification, everything went to shit from there which brings us to the mess things are right now, all in the name of "protect the kids", all started by one group with enough power.
All it took was a feminist group with political influence to create a domino effect that isn't stopping any time soon. Services are rushing to comply causing personal information of millions of people to be for sale on the dark web :)
But hey, you don't have to believe on me. I gave you the names and order of how things happened. Feel free to cross-check them.
You have given an example of a group which affected change on a $10+ billion estimated valuation company, in a ~$43 billion PC gaming market.
You then insinuated that it was connected to age verification in the UK because it happened in the same week - not very convincing evidence. Isn't it more likely that age verification is another attempt by tech oligarchs to stockpile more of our personal data?
I think you may need to take a few steps back and widen your perspective beyond the gaming world. US GDP was $31+ trillion which puts the PC gaming market at .0014% of US GDP. So some small company used their collective power to force some larger company to do something they didn't want to do. Form your own company and do the same thing then. It's quite weird that you blame all women and DEI for this, and not the bean counters and wealthy/powerful people.
I challenge you to question WHY so many women hate men - they weren't born hating them. Maybe numerous men did something vile enough to them and earned their hatred? Generalizing that hate onto all men would merely be a survival tactic if that were true, don't you think? Sort of similar to how you seem to hate women because perhaps you were physically or emotionally hurt by them in the past.
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
It's actually not a good trade at all, you need a balanced population pyramid if you want a functional economy in the future. The housing stock is behind due to financial crisis in 2007, as well as lots of other factors, and population decrease won't solve most of those.
In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.
Sounds hellish.
"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."
I wish there were more reasoned debate and distinguishing between legal immigration including tech workers (H-1B visas) versus illegal immigration for eg food truck workers, DoorDash scooter drivers.
Also the lack of knowledge about the existence of the fantastic and generous H-2A visa for farm workers is maddening.
H1B is just a cheap labour scam unless you think there aren't any Americans that could do the jobs on the jobs.now website that reposts the H1B re-advertisements.
H-2A is expensive and prone to abuse. It is generally considered a failure by both employers and workers who participate in it. So I’m guessing your use of fantastic and generous is either sarcasm or uninformed?
I've read opinions from farmers who say they wouldn't be able to operate without H-2A.
The stipulations are incredibly generous with unlimited renewals though have to leave the country for 60 days every 3 years.
There's also a pathway to citizenship for specializations in agriculture such as the dairy industry. And they can bring family members too. It's an uncapped program too.
At least on paper it's an incredibly generous visa compared to other types of visas with more restrictions for family sponsorship and immigration.
I agree it's expensive though, that's a big reason why there so many illegal immigrant farm workers. A few reforms and that can be legalized through H-2A
Nobody cares.
Why a debate - we are not allowing enough immigrants, VISA class is just hiding that fact.
“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force" - amazing that you can get people to believe that. There is a massive shortage of labor and the labor force participation rate is already dangerously high.
There is no labor shortage. Look at layoffs and job openings - lowest since 2020.
Yes, Trump is also successfully destroying the demand side of the labor economy at the same time. Is that what his supporters imagined that sentence means? It is nevertheless the case that the prime-age labor force participation rate is bouncing off 85% and getting it any higher than that is impossible.
LOL. There is no labour shortage. There is only a shortage at a particular price point.
If there is such a labour shortage, what explains the layoffs?
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
Deporting hundreds of thousands of people might have something to do with that. Economic contraction seems to be a certainty.
Most men can’t even get a date anymore, but we’re not allowed to talk about the reasons why.
this is the quietest crisis in the us right now. our entire insurance and social safety net system (especially ltc and social security) is mathematically dependent on a forever growth pyramid.
once that population curve flattens or flips, the risk pooling math just breaks. you can’t underwrite a 30-year health or life liability for a cohort when the generation behind them is 20% smaller. we’re looking at a fundamental failure of the actuarial models we've used since the 50s.
Every country will have to figure out how to deal with this. Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap? It's impossible. The only question is whether or not countries can retain their culture and population or whether they will be replaced by outsiders.
> Once India and China go negative who is going to fill that gap?
Take a look at the fertility rates and population growth rates in African countries.
Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable.
For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.
The economics of infrastructure actually improve for stable or shrinking populations because funding can shift from raw capacity buildout (extremely expensive) to maintenance and value-add services (profitable). Observe that the best infrastructure in the world is in nations with slow population growth, like Western Europe, Japan, and more recently the U.S. and China. Whereas nations with very high population growth struggle to deliver capacity for even basic needs like clean water or paved roads.
Slow population growth or even stable population is dramatically different from population decline. Usually slow growth is the ideal. But even a modest decline shifts extreme burdens onto wage earners. OTOH, it’s great for buying up property.