10 ms·

"Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care." I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trau

"Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care." I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawayz8182z 6y ago
Life isn't really that nice and tidy. It would be nice if it were, but generally people are mostly good and sometimes unplanned things happen. Intact families need to be a societal goal. My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs. If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now. Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation. Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats. Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
- geofft 6y ago
  The historic reason many religions/societies looked down on divorce is that it left the woman worse off - the man would be able to work and fend for himself but the woman would have few options. The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't. I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Most, not all, Kids with single moms I know have turned into horrible people. Giving them everything they want, making excuses, and Lack of discipline were primary reasons. The friend I know who did well had a strict non nonsense mom.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - loopz 6y ago
    Many of the laws and rules of societies in the past and most in the present, have always been about domination and control of women. Even women would join in on this, in order to subjugate younger females to societal order. It can be explained to survive hard times and trials, but is also mostly about injustice and inequality for different traits. Though the females are regarded as assets, they're not allowed agency, freedom and inherent value. This is the history and hurt that is behind most of feminism of today, and there are still remnants in Western societies. Not because the laws and rules today are inherently discriminatory, but the cultural expression still inhibits life for half the population in many cases. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what this may mean for BLM.
    - loopz 6y ago
      I can of course back it up past the HN filter: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laws+against+women&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laws+against+women&ia=web
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Breakdown of family and community seems to be the big trend of the past few decades. I'm saddened to say that I don't see a real solution, and I expect some kind of cultural collapse to occur as a result. We're already seeing some of the effects of this today.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce. There is a whole social infrastructure for helping people enter marriage with realistic notions and expectations, and counseling couples through rough patches. It's not perfect by any means, but strong family and community bonds make life tolerable in a desperately poor country. And of course, unlike the United States, we can't afford to just throw government money at the problems created by out-of-wedlock births, marriages dissolving over solvable problems, etc. It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      In Ireland, there were strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce, and all those other things. There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later. Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it. Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  I think the important thing to take out of this situation isn't so much, "Every family needs to have a father," as it is, "Every community needs to be able to respond to the realities of its constituent family situations." Women's liberation ends with a net positive for a modern economy, but whenever norms are roiled, you have people caught in the confusion who fall through the cracks. I was a victim of a similar situation, where the leadership and curriculum of my major at my alma mater was in "transition" while I was attending; this meant spending entire courses on outdated technology or learning current standards from older professors who barey understood them themselves. There was nothing wrong with the new paradigms, but getting caught between the old and new was what squandered the potential of a lot of us. Ideally, you forecast these shifts and make preparations, rather than being dragged into the future, as seems to be what happens with institutions responding to these civil rights social movements. But I agree that support systems, rather than "grit" or "personal agency", are almost always the most important aspect of healthy development, in pretty much any arena. Teaching, job training, child rearing, legislation development, entrepreneurship, on an on, the failures happen when people decide or are expected to go it alone.
- watwut 6y ago
  Kids who grew in foster care don't have dad nor mom. They are not product of divorce as much as lack of any parent at all.
  - batch12 6y ago
    The hard part usually is that you do have a Dad or Mom, but for whatever reason can't be with them.
- seneca 6y ago
  > Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. Raising kids IS hard in modern America. Agreed that it doesn't have to be, and that the disintegration of societal structures is a huge part of why. Unfortunately, all signs point to it getting worse, not better. I bring up his research a lot it seems, but Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, which is about the utter collapse of American Civil Society and social ties, in 2000. The statistics were daunting then, and I doubt many people would disagree that we're worse off today than we were 20 years ago. I'm old enough that I remember living in a US that still had plentiful communities. I worry about the children being raised in our modern transactional society. I take comfort in knowing old men have worried about these things since the dawn of civilization though.
- chasd00 6y ago
  "Raising kids is not hard.." non-parent typing detected. :)
moocowtruck 6y ago
I've adopted two special needs orphans from another country.. and the childhood trauma is by and far the worst thing for a child. I could ramble on for a long time about this! What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. The problem is everyone says it's a problem but not enough people want to do it because it would be an inconvenience to their daily lives or some other excuse. It is easily doable for all the worlds orphans to be adopted by good families, if only we could get people to see the good they could be doing Money does not help, people help!
- JustSomeNobody 6y ago
  > What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. We do need this, but we also need loving, caring people to foster. We've been fostering for over 6 years and every one of our kids have gone home to family. That should be the goal. People like to think, "oh I'd be able to provide for this kid much better than their family." Maybe that's true financially. But family is family and if there's ANY way to reunite the family, that should be the way forward.
  - moocowtruck 6y ago
    Sure if they can get back to family that is fine, but that is a small fraction of the issue, most of my work is in international adoption with special needs kids that rot tied to a crib with the occasional porridge in a bottle shoved down their throat.. honestly leaving them like this is for sure a human atrocity, I have to ask myself quite often if most are better off dying than sitting for years slowly dying. Those are the types of kids I'm advocating for that people pick up the ball and do what you can, obviously i support any sort of adoption or fostering! The reality is, any ounce of love anyone can give is better than what they get, bring them home, feed them 3 times a day clean them! that's like heaven for these kids
- croissants 6y ago
  My personal response is that it seems like raising your own biological offspring, even with all of the lizard-brain this-will-eventually-pass-on-my-genes bonus, is already hard for a lot of people --- look at all of the internet threads asking if people regret having kids --- so subtracting off the biological offspring bonus and adopting seems like it would be very difficult. Add in the trauma already experienced by children in the foster system, and it gets even harder. Then I wonder if I'm the kind of person who can love a difficult child, and I wonder how good it is for a child to grow up with a parent who deep-down sees them as an object of responsibility rather than love. Of course, strong bonds between adopted parents and children are certainly possible, but it is in the end harder, right? I admire your pragmatic embrace of working on this problem; I also think chalking up the cost of adoption as "an inconvenience to...daily lives" is...underselling it?
krona 6y ago
Having the father present in the raising of a boy basically solves the problem. Having a job helps.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I think you might be mistaking correlation with causation. Are men raised by lesbians entering the prison system at the same rate as men raised by single mothers? I doubt it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - draugadrotten 6y ago
    > Are men raised by lesbians entering the prison system at the same rate as men raised by single mothers? Now that is a question that researchers won't ask nor tell.
    - danbolt 6y ago
      Why do you feel that's the case?
  - NDizzle 6y ago
    Not enough data yet, as that's a recent thing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    My understanding, from a long-ago report which I cannot find, was that the children of lesbian couples do better than average: higher college admission rates, lower prison rates. It was thought that the relative difficulty of having children as a lesbian couple (including, in the case of adoption, which is understandably more prevalent among such couples, state approval) means that they're better prepared for child-rearing.
JustSomeNobody 6y ago
My SO and I are foster parents. I, too, wish more people were trauma informed. We live in a "just suck it up" society, but kiddos in care, because of the trauma they've experienced, have brains that have developed physically different to kiddos who've grown up in a nurturing and caring environment. They can't "just suck it up". I think we have to be careful when we say "be financially stable before having kids" though. Not that we shouldn't be, but we can't just let certain classes of people have kids. Also, those who are stable now are one accident or emergency or job loss, etc. away from being unstable. Edit: I think what I said might be unclear. IOW, having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.
- geofft 6y ago
  (I assume you mean "we can't just not let certain classes of people have kids"?)
  - JustSomeNobody 6y ago
    I mean, having a kid should not depend on one's financial state.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Almost everyone is just one job loss away from being unstable. If you have kids then it's 10x more likely. What you're suggesting is just impractical. Even the professional classes have instability issues. E.g. just look at how stable a high flying banking executive was in 2008. Or tech workers in the 2000s. We should make it cheaper to have kids, rather than expecting people to wait until they're millionaires.
  - JustSomeNobody 6y ago
    I edited my comment, I think it may clear up what I mean.
  - bigfudge 6y ago
    Agree wholeheartedly. In addition, young parents have lots of advantages over older ones which we miss if we wait until career 100% sorted. The sleep deprivation alone would have been much easier in my 20s!
geofft 6y ago
There will always be parents who aren't, for whatever reason. Apart from all the usual reasons you'd think of - you can get a sudden illness and die. You can be a victim of a major crime. A novel coronavirus combined with incompetent government response can wreck your job prospects (unlikely as that may be). Your employer can go bankrupt, or the markets can crash and take your savings with it. A natural disaster can destroy your house and everything in it. You could be drafted. "Financially stable" is a pretty temporary state for the vast majority of the world. The realistic question is - what is the considerate, prepared, and loving response of a financially stable society when these things inevitably happen?
throwaway2a02 6y ago
> I hope parents can be considerate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children. That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive. However, what is possible, is having the government rethink social support, making sure that each member of society has a safety net, and doesnt need to worry about getting his basic needs met (food, water, shelter etc). Basic income seems to be the best fit here. This won't completely solve the problem, because food, shelter will not heal the attachment problems of some people (people also need companionship), but it will provide a stable base, that is a radical improvement on today's status quo.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive What about this sentiment isn't ethical?
samoa42 6y ago
as a parent i can tell you that _NOONE_ is prepared before having children and that there will be times when your consideration and love leave you alone and you gonna fuck up. but dont read this too negative, kids are the best there is! and while a lot of the hn audience may think like: > I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children. if you wait til everyting is "perfect", you loose to the despicable retards that dont care.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  Problem is that children suck up all the time. So I would pretty much wait until I want to spend time on children and not on my stuff or my partners stuff. I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    Somehow rings hollow to me. There's never time unless we prioritize. Plenty of people are great parents despite being busy. My rabbi has ten kids. Ten. And he is still able to run the congregation which is probably not less demanding than whatever you do (statistically speaking). This kind of thing is common in certain communities. So it's possible just a question of what's important to you. If kids fall behind brunch and posting on HN then yes we are too busy :)
    - watwut 6y ago
      Families with many kids do less well tho statistically - boys have more behavioral problems and girls do less good in school. There is simply less time for parents to be able to give the kids individual attention. It is possible that rabbis congregation leaves enough time to give individual attention to kids. But I bet his wife is the one who does overwhelming majority of leading kids and care. Because with standard 40 hours and 6 kids he would already be impossibly stretched.
      - samoa42 6y ago
caeril 6y ago
Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, family, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this. Now we're running around tearing down Chesterton's fence every time we see it, without bothering to ask why it was erected in the first place. As an atheist, it's becoming increasingly evident that atheism has done great damage to society at large. We're foolish to think that social technology that has worked for thousands of years was only built (and replicated independently across hundreds of disparate societies) because we were too stupid/evil/backward to see real enlightenment.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this. You may want to look at the long history of severe abuse perpetrated by the Church in their pursuit to "combat this". We've just seen the Irish Laundry report released and it's fucking horrific. https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylum-abuse https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylu... https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-second-pregnancy-at-tuam-home-were-sent-to-magdalene-laundries-1.4456516 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-seco... https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-mothers-in-homes-absolutely-horrific-survivor-1.4456735 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-...
  - rayiner 6y ago
    I don't want to minimize those abuses, but we have to be cognizant of the destructive effects of hyper-focusing on negative impacts on a small minority. Our outrage at the mistreatment of the few drives us to tear down institutions and social structures that might be serving critical functions for the many.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      20% of kids ages 10-15 in 1900 were working. Many in horrible conditions and many probably died young as a result. That's a lot more than the foster system nowadays. Sending societies marginal people to an early death after extracting some productivity out of them was the historical solution to these problems as I see it. Looking at the past with rose colored glasses is dangerous.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dr-detroit 6y ago
All the stable millennial are past the age where they can produce children. Its a madhouse.
LocalH 6y ago
I also really wish people understood that it's time society stops shrugging its collective shoulders and saying "not my problem" when it comes to stuff like that. I don't have any solutions, but there is a dire need for more institutional compassion.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawayz8182z 6y ago

Life isn't really that nice and tidy. It would be nice if it were, but generally people are mostly good and sometimes unplanned things happen. Intact families need to be a societal goal. My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs. If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now. Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation. Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats. Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.

geofft 6y ago
The historic reason many religions/societies looked down on divorce is that it left the woman worse off - the man would be able to work and fend for himself but the woman would have few options. The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't. I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Most, not all, Kids with single moms I know have turned into horrible people. Giving them everything they want, making excuses, and Lack of discipline were primary reasons. The friend I know who did well had a strict non nonsense mom.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- loopz 6y ago
  Many of the laws and rules of societies in the past and most in the present, have always been about domination and control of women. Even women would join in on this, in order to subjugate younger females to societal order. It can be explained to survive hard times and trials, but is also mostly about injustice and inequality for different traits. Though the females are regarded as assets, they're not allowed agency, freedom and inherent value. This is the history and hurt that is behind most of feminism of today, and there are still remnants in Western societies. Not because the laws and rules today are inherently discriminatory, but the cultural expression still inhibits life for half the population in many cases. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what this may mean for BLM.
  - loopz 6y ago
    I can of course back it up past the HN filter: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laws+against+women&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=laws+against+women&ia=web
throwaway3699 6y ago
Breakdown of family and community seems to be the big trend of the past few decades. I'm saddened to say that I don't see a real solution, and I expect some kind of cultural collapse to occur as a result. We're already seeing some of the effects of this today.
- rayiner 6y ago
  It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce. There is a whole social infrastructure for helping people enter marriage with realistic notions and expectations, and counseling couples through rough patches. It's not perfect by any means, but strong family and community bonds make life tolerable in a desperately poor country. And of course, unlike the United States, we can't afford to just throw government money at the problems created by out-of-wedlock births, marriages dissolving over solvable problems, etc. It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    In Ireland, there were strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce, and all those other things. There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later. Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it. Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt. I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
bsanr2 6y ago
I think the important thing to take out of this situation isn't so much, "Every family needs to have a father," as it is, "Every community needs to be able to respond to the realities of its constituent family situations." Women's liberation ends with a net positive for a modern economy, but whenever norms are roiled, you have people caught in the confusion who fall through the cracks. I was a victim of a similar situation, where the leadership and curriculum of my major at my alma mater was in "transition" while I was attending; this meant spending entire courses on outdated technology or learning current standards from older professors who barey understood them themselves. There was nothing wrong with the new paradigms, but getting caught between the old and new was what squandered the potential of a lot of us. Ideally, you forecast these shifts and make preparations, rather than being dragged into the future, as seems to be what happens with institutions responding to these civil rights social movements. But I agree that support systems, rather than "grit" or "personal agency", are almost always the most important aspect of healthy development, in pretty much any arena. Teaching, job training, child rearing, legislation development, entrepreneurship, on an on, the failures happen when people decide or are expected to go it alone.
watwut 6y ago
Kids who grew in foster care don't have dad nor mom. They are not product of divorce as much as lack of any parent at all.
- batch12 6y ago
  The hard part usually is that you do have a Dad or Mom, but for whatever reason can't be with them.
seneca 6y ago
> Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. Raising kids IS hard in modern America. Agreed that it doesn't have to be, and that the disintegration of societal structures is a huge part of why. Unfortunately, all signs point to it getting worse, not better. I bring up his research a lot it seems, but Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, which is about the utter collapse of American Civil Society and social ties, in 2000. The statistics were daunting then, and I doubt many people would disagree that we're worse off today than we were 20 years ago. I'm old enough that I remember living in a US that still had plentiful communities. I worry about the children being raised in our modern transactional society. I take comfort in knowing old men have worried about these things since the dawn of civilization though.
chasd00 6y ago
"Raising kids is not hard.." non-parent typing detected. :)

moocowtruck 6y ago

I've adopted two special needs orphans from another country.. and the childhood trauma is by and far the worst thing for a child. I could ramble on for a long time about this! What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. The problem is everyone says it's a problem but not enough people want to do it because it would be an inconvenience to their daily lives or some other excuse. It is easily doable for all the worlds orphans to be adopted by good families, if only we could get people to see the good they could be doing Money does not help, people help!

JustSomeNobody 6y ago
> What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. We do need this, but we also need loving, caring people to foster. We've been fostering for over 6 years and every one of our kids have gone home to family. That should be the goal. People like to think, "oh I'd be able to provide for this kid much better than their family." Maybe that's true financially. But family is family and if there's ANY way to reunite the family, that should be the way forward.
- moocowtruck 6y ago
  Sure if they can get back to family that is fine, but that is a small fraction of the issue, most of my work is in international adoption with special needs kids that rot tied to a crib with the occasional porridge in a bottle shoved down their throat.. honestly leaving them like this is for sure a human atrocity, I have to ask myself quite often if most are better off dying than sitting for years slowly dying. Those are the types of kids I'm advocating for that people pick up the ball and do what you can, obviously i support any sort of adoption or fostering! The reality is, any ounce of love anyone can give is better than what they get, bring them home, feed them 3 times a day clean them! that's like heaven for these kids
croissants 6y ago
My personal response is that it seems like raising your own biological offspring, even with all of the lizard-brain this-will-eventually-pass-on-my-genes bonus, is already hard for a lot of people --- look at all of the internet threads asking if people regret having kids --- so subtracting off the biological offspring bonus and adopting seems like it would be very difficult. Add in the trauma already experienced by children in the foster system, and it gets even harder. Then I wonder if I'm the kind of person who can love a difficult child, and I wonder how good it is for a child to grow up with a parent who deep-down sees them as an object of responsibility rather than love. Of course, strong bonds between adopted parents and children are certainly possible, but it is in the end harder, right? I admire your pragmatic embrace of working on this problem; I also think chalking up the cost of adoption as "an inconvenience to...daily lives" is...underselling it?

krona 6y ago

Having the father present in the raising of a boy basically solves the problem. Having a job helps.

elliekelly 6y ago
I think you might be mistaking correlation with causation. Are men raised by lesbians entering the prison system at the same rate as men raised by single mothers? I doubt it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- draugadrotten 6y ago
  > Are men raised by lesbians entering the prison system at the same rate as men raised by single mothers? Now that is a question that researchers won't ask nor tell.
  - danbolt 6y ago
    Why do you feel that's the case?
- NDizzle 6y ago
  Not enough data yet, as that's a recent thing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsanr2 6y ago
  My understanding, from a long-ago report which I cannot find, was that the children of lesbian couples do better than average: higher college admission rates, lower prison rates. It was thought that the relative difficulty of having children as a lesbian couple (including, in the case of adoption, which is understandably more prevalent among such couples, state approval) means that they're better prepared for child-rearing.

JustSomeNobody 6y ago

My SO and I are foster parents. I, too, wish more people were trauma informed. We live in a "just suck it up" society, but kiddos in care, because of the trauma they've experienced, have brains that have developed physically different to kiddos who've grown up in a nurturing and caring environment. They can't "just suck it up". I think we have to be careful when we say "be financially stable before having kids" though. Not that we shouldn't be, but we can't just let certain classes of people have kids. Also, those who are stable now are one accident or emergency or job loss, etc. away from being unstable. Edit: I think what I said might be unclear. IOW, having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.

geofft 6y ago
(I assume you mean "we can't just not let certain classes of people have kids"?)
- JustSomeNobody 6y ago
  I mean, having a kid should not depend on one's financial state.
throwaway3699 6y ago
Almost everyone is just one job loss away from being unstable. If you have kids then it's 10x more likely. What you're suggesting is just impractical. Even the professional classes have instability issues. E.g. just look at how stable a high flying banking executive was in 2008. Or tech workers in the 2000s. We should make it cheaper to have kids, rather than expecting people to wait until they're millionaires.
- JustSomeNobody 6y ago
  I edited my comment, I think it may clear up what I mean.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly. In addition, young parents have lots of advantages over older ones which we miss if we wait until career 100% sorted. The sleep deprivation alone would have been much easier in my 20s!

geofft 6y ago

There will always be parents who aren't, for whatever reason. Apart from all the usual reasons you'd think of - you can get a sudden illness and die. You can be a victim of a major crime. A novel coronavirus combined with incompetent government response can wreck your job prospects (unlikely as that may be). Your employer can go bankrupt, or the markets can crash and take your savings with it. A natural disaster can destroy your house and everything in it. You could be drafted. "Financially stable" is a pretty temporary state for the vast majority of the world. The realistic question is - what is the considerate, prepared, and loving response of a financially stable society when these things inevitably happen?

throwaway2a02 6y ago

> I hope parents can be considerate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children. That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive. However, what is possible, is having the government rethink social support, making sure that each member of society has a safety net, and doesnt need to worry about getting his basic needs met (food, water, shelter etc). Basic income seems to be the best fit here. This won't completely solve the problem, because food, shelter will not heal the attachment problems of some people (people also need companionship), but it will provide a stable base, that is a radical improvement on today's status quo.

whimsicalism 6y ago
> That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive What about this sentiment isn't ethical?

samoa42 6y ago

as a parent i can tell you that _NOONE_ is prepared before having children and that there will be times when your consideration and love leave you alone and you gonna fuck up. but dont read this too negative, kids are the best there is! and while a lot of the hn audience may think like: > I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children. if you wait til everyting is "perfect", you loose to the despicable retards that dont care.

knuthsat 6y ago
Problem is that children suck up all the time. So I would pretty much wait until I want to spend time on children and not on my stuff or my partners stuff. I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Somehow rings hollow to me. There's never time unless we prioritize. Plenty of people are great parents despite being busy. My rabbi has ten kids. Ten. And he is still able to run the congregation which is probably not less demanding than whatever you do (statistically speaking). This kind of thing is common in certain communities. So it's possible just a question of what's important to you. If kids fall behind brunch and posting on HN then yes we are too busy :)
  - watwut 6y ago
    Families with many kids do less well tho statistically - boys have more behavioral problems and girls do less good in school. There is simply less time for parents to be able to give the kids individual attention. It is possible that rabbis congregation leaves enough time to give individual attention to kids. But I bet his wife is the one who does overwhelming majority of leading kids and care. Because with standard 40 hours and 6 kids he would already be impossibly stretched.
    - samoa42 6y ago

caeril 6y ago

Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, family, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this. Now we're running around tearing down Chesterton's fence every time we see it, without bothering to ask why it was erected in the first place. As an atheist, it's becoming increasingly evident that atheism has done great damage to society at large. We're foolish to think that social technology that has worked for thousands of years was only built (and replicated independently across hundreds of disparate societies) because we were too stupid/evil/backward to see real enlightenment.

DanBC 6y ago
> Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this. You may want to look at the long history of severe abuse perpetrated by the Church in their pursuit to "combat this". We've just seen the Irish Laundry report released and it's fucking horrific. https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylum-abuse https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylu... https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-second-pregnancy-at-tuam-home-were-sent-to-magdalene-laundries-1.4456516 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-seco... https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-mothers-in-homes-absolutely-horrific-survivor-1.4456735 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-...
- rayiner 6y ago
  I don't want to minimize those abuses, but we have to be cognizant of the destructive effects of hyper-focusing on negative impacts on a small minority. Our outrage at the mistreatment of the few drives us to tear down institutions and social structures that might be serving critical functions for the many.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    20% of kids ages 10-15 in 1900 were working. Many in horrible conditions and many probably died young as a result. That's a lot more than the foster system nowadays. Sending societies marginal people to an early death after extracting some productivity out of them was the historical solution to these problems as I see it. Looking at the past with rose colored glasses is dangerous.

deleted 6y ago

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dr-detroit 6y ago

All the stable millennial are past the age where they can produce children. Its a madhouse.

LocalH 6y ago

I also really wish people understood that it's time society stops shrugging its collective shoulders and saying "not my problem" when it comes to stuff like that. I don't have any solutions, but there is a dire need for more institutional compassion.