8 ms·

I agree completely with the premise that most people don't appreciate just how fleeting fertility can be, but I think rather than freezing eggs, the solution is

by ksdale 6y ago

I agree completely with the premise that most people don't appreciate just how fleeting fertility can be, but I think rather than freezing eggs, the solution is for people to normalize having children at a younger age and designing work and home life around children existing and even being present in certain work contexts. Obviously freezing your eggs is something that you can do as individual without society's input, and my preferred solution is a cultural overhaul... But economic productivity is only useful insofar as it leads to better lives for people, economic activity that increases well-being by one unit is pointless if it requires us to spend more than one unit of well-being (by say, freezing our eggs and not becoming grandparents until we're 80) to achieve it.

nappy-doo 6y ago
My MIL used to say, "there's a reason that they make mothers young," and it's because kids are exhausting. As a mid-40s male, I can't imagine bringing a child into my life again right now. I would die before 50 from sleep deprivation.
- krrrh 6y ago
  I just had my first at 45, and it is worth it, but I do now appreciate the wisdom of my friends who did this in their twenties.
nitemice 6y ago
But it's not just about work/home balance. It's also about being in a financially sound position, in a strong enough relationship with the "right" person, to be able to have a child. And that's increasingly hard for young people today, with the cost of living being higher than ever, wage growth hitting a wall, and attitudes towards relationships changing. Having a baby isn't as simple as deciding to do it. The problem is that society has been moving in basically the exact opposite direction for quite a while now. Anyone married under 25 is seen as weird and rushing into something, and anyone with a child at that age is assumed to have gotten themselves there by accident.
- raydev 6y ago
  > It's also about being in a financially sound position, I'll completely agree with your point about finding the right person, which is absolutely true. But honestly a lot of stable couples are less precarious than they think. Especially people in the tech industry. You're making more than 100k/year on your own, you're set. But from a bunch of conversations, they imagine sending their kids to a $200k/year college or read the worst possible stats about how much raising a kid costs, without understanding people make parenting work with so much less to no detriment of their kids. If anything, I'd argue being rich makes you more likely to mess up your kids but I should move on. Instead, I think people should consider whether they want to raise a baby when they have a fraction of the energy they had when they were in their 20s. They should consider whether they want to raise a toddler when just stepping out of their car weird tweaks their ankle, making it hard to walk for a couple days. Or whether they want to stress about their kids while they have to start taking blood pressure meds for the simple reason of "it's genetics and you're 50, this is just how your body works now." Obviously, if you can't pay your water bill, maybe don't have kids. But even then, if you're smart and kind, you could probably pull it off and the world would be better for it.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    It varies on your standard of living and region. If both partners are in tech or equivalent then there usually isn’t a struggle but as soon as one isn’t, it can be tough in some regions to find sustainable living for the traditional American dream. Where I live (SV - peninsula) and for my age (30), I have no hopes of having children anytime soon in my current circumstance unless FAANG finally takes me in or I can get another startup to IPO. (As it seems wasting years of your life for one startup IPO wasn’t sufficient enough, sadly) I couldn’t possibly imagine having kids earlier. Even now, it still seems like a pipe dream. And I have no interest in Ivy League schools or private elementary, etc.
- fy20 6y ago
  > being in a financially sound position As a newish parent (nearly two years), the only real costs I see are for childcare. Yes clothing and food costs something, but it's not that much (and plenty of people will give you old clothes if you ask). We share a bedroom, and it's not a problem. This can be solved by having the right support structures in place by the state. I live in an EU country, but my country doesn't do very well with this. Although my SO does not work (they were studying before our child was born), we do not have family living nearby that can help with childcare, which seems to be how most people cope here. Ideally the state would provide free childcare to all families, regardless of whether parents are working or not. It should be at a high enough standard, that state childcare is the norm (like schools), not the exception.
steve_taylor 6y ago
Amen. I really don’t understand the stigma around having children when you’re young. It should be the norm.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  Had my one and only child at 21 (wife is 10 years older than I am, mind), never once regretted it and my career never suffered (went from a $12/hr tech support job to being a decently paid DevOps engineer over a 4-year time span following our daughters birth). Am I on a more extreme end of the spectrum? Absolutely, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone; but I’m happy with the choice I made.
centimeter 6y ago
It's clear that, on so many levels, the gradual deferral of child-bearing to the 30s (even 40s!) has been incredibly costly and destructive to society. We need to figure out a way to reconcile having children starting in the late teens and ending in the mid-20s (which is by far the safest, cheapest, and easiest time to do it) with the modern economy (which prioritizes slavishly focusing on school/work until your fertility has mostly dried up and you're at massively increased risk of passing on genetic abnormalities). One strategy could be to have child-rearing skip a generation, with grandparents (in their 30s/40s) doing most of the work while the parents (in their teens/20s) go to school and start their career.
- SCUSKU 6y ago
  For a while I've been thinking about moving back in/near my parents so that if/when I decide to start a family, they can be around to help out so as dampen the career stunting effects of having children. I think this would especially be useful to my then wife, but of course such things sound great on paper but are much more difficult to execute in reality.
- cam0 6y ago
  How do you think it's been incredibly costly and destructive to society?
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Medical outcomes rapidly become much worse and more expensive for both mother and child as mothers age, as well as precipitously falling birth rates partially attributable to the increased difficulty of having marginal children as one gets older.
    - mycologos 6y ago
      I made a comment elsewhere in the thread trying to quantify the way outcomes change with the mother's age [1]. Using the data referenced in that comment, it looks like outcomes are quite stable for the entirety of a woman's 20s and still decent into her early 30s. The real change seems to occur in the early-mid 30s. In contrast, your parent comment prioritizes women having children at age 20-25. Looking at the data I just referenced, this seems unnecessarily aggressive from a medical standpoint -- do you have a different measure of maternal outcomes in mind? (And from a non-medical standpoint, I'm skeptical that late teens/early 20s are the best time for modern humans to choose the parent of their child.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26349221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26349221
notjes 6y ago
> the solution is for people to normalize having children at a younger age and designing work and home life around children 100% In ancient times mothers always worked with babys strapped to their stomachs. A baby needs a mother and it needs to be fed with nice milk constantly. I was really happy seeing a lady breastfeeding her child in the Australian parliament. An safe and sane environment where this is normality needs to be the goal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
golemiprague 6y ago
I am not even sure women at work improved the economic situation of the family that much. I am generalising here and I know there are exceptions but most of the work women do is a replacement to what a housewife used to do. They don't create new companies or businesses, they don't work in anything related to infrastructure or creation of actual physical value. They don't do engineering and even music creation and production is mostly done by men. Women concentrate in care taking, from teachers to social workers to nurses and services or value transfer like lawyers, marketers, HR and such. Those jobs don't create anything new or tangible and are basically the same jobs they used to do at home, caring for the family, some services and moving the husband money around. In some way they were more productive as housewives by doing in parallel and cheaply many jobs that are now outsourced. Their salary was just swallowed by land owners increasing rent and house prices in addition to all the house work they now have to pay for to other women. It is all a scheme that we suppose to believe is helping anyone while what actually is happening is that men still finance women as it was always was but now instead of the husband giving their wife the money directly they do it via their corporate accounting funnelling men hard work money to some women in HR to do another program about diversity and inclusiveness.

by ksdale 6y ago

nappy-doo 6y ago

My MIL used to say, "there's a reason that they make mothers young," and it's because kids are exhausting. As a mid-40s male, I can't imagine bringing a child into my life again right now. I would die before 50 from sleep deprivation.

krrrh 6y ago
I just had my first at 45, and it is worth it, but I do now appreciate the wisdom of my friends who did this in their twenties.

nitemice 6y ago

But it's not just about work/home balance. It's also about being in a financially sound position, in a strong enough relationship with the "right" person, to be able to have a child. And that's increasingly hard for young people today, with the cost of living being higher than ever, wage growth hitting a wall, and attitudes towards relationships changing. Having a baby isn't as simple as deciding to do it. The problem is that society has been moving in basically the exact opposite direction for quite a while now. Anyone married under 25 is seen as weird and rushing into something, and anyone with a child at that age is assumed to have gotten themselves there by accident.

raydev 6y ago
> It's also about being in a financially sound position, I'll completely agree with your point about finding the right person, which is absolutely true. But honestly a lot of stable couples are less precarious than they think. Especially people in the tech industry. You're making more than 100k/year on your own, you're set. But from a bunch of conversations, they imagine sending their kids to a $200k/year college or read the worst possible stats about how much raising a kid costs, without understanding people make parenting work with so much less to no detriment of their kids. If anything, I'd argue being rich makes you more likely to mess up your kids but I should move on. Instead, I think people should consider whether they want to raise a baby when they have a fraction of the energy they had when they were in their 20s. They should consider whether they want to raise a toddler when just stepping out of their car weird tweaks their ankle, making it hard to walk for a couple days. Or whether they want to stress about their kids while they have to start taking blood pressure meds for the simple reason of "it's genetics and you're 50, this is just how your body works now." Obviously, if you can't pay your water bill, maybe don't have kids. But even then, if you're smart and kind, you could probably pull it off and the world would be better for it.
- bradlys 6y ago
  It varies on your standard of living and region. If both partners are in tech or equivalent then there usually isn’t a struggle but as soon as one isn’t, it can be tough in some regions to find sustainable living for the traditional American dream. Where I live (SV - peninsula) and for my age (30), I have no hopes of having children anytime soon in my current circumstance unless FAANG finally takes me in or I can get another startup to IPO. (As it seems wasting years of your life for one startup IPO wasn’t sufficient enough, sadly) I couldn’t possibly imagine having kids earlier. Even now, it still seems like a pipe dream. And I have no interest in Ivy League schools or private elementary, etc.
fy20 6y ago
> being in a financially sound position As a newish parent (nearly two years), the only real costs I see are for childcare. Yes clothing and food costs something, but it's not that much (and plenty of people will give you old clothes if you ask). We share a bedroom, and it's not a problem. This can be solved by having the right support structures in place by the state. I live in an EU country, but my country doesn't do very well with this. Although my SO does not work (they were studying before our child was born), we do not have family living nearby that can help with childcare, which seems to be how most people cope here. Ideally the state would provide free childcare to all families, regardless of whether parents are working or not. It should be at a high enough standard, that state childcare is the norm (like schools), not the exception.

steve_taylor 6y ago

Amen. I really don’t understand the stigma around having children when you’re young. It should be the norm.

snuxoll 6y ago
Had my one and only child at 21 (wife is 10 years older than I am, mind), never once regretted it and my career never suffered (went from a $12/hr tech support job to being a decently paid DevOps engineer over a 4-year time span following our daughters birth). Am I on a more extreme end of the spectrum? Absolutely, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone; but I’m happy with the choice I made.

centimeter 6y ago

It's clear that, on so many levels, the gradual deferral of child-bearing to the 30s (even 40s!) has been incredibly costly and destructive to society. We need to figure out a way to reconcile having children starting in the late teens and ending in the mid-20s (which is by far the safest, cheapest, and easiest time to do it) with the modern economy (which prioritizes slavishly focusing on school/work until your fertility has mostly dried up and you're at massively increased risk of passing on genetic abnormalities). One strategy could be to have child-rearing skip a generation, with grandparents (in their 30s/40s) doing most of the work while the parents (in their teens/20s) go to school and start their career.

SCUSKU 6y ago
For a while I've been thinking about moving back in/near my parents so that if/when I decide to start a family, they can be around to help out so as dampen the career stunting effects of having children. I think this would especially be useful to my then wife, but of course such things sound great on paper but are much more difficult to execute in reality.
cam0 6y ago
How do you think it's been incredibly costly and destructive to society?
- centimeter 6y ago
  Medical outcomes rapidly become much worse and more expensive for both mother and child as mothers age, as well as precipitously falling birth rates partially attributable to the increased difficulty of having marginal children as one gets older.
  - mycologos 6y ago
    I made a comment elsewhere in the thread trying to quantify the way outcomes change with the mother's age [1]. Using the data referenced in that comment, it looks like outcomes are quite stable for the entirety of a woman's 20s and still decent into her early 30s. The real change seems to occur in the early-mid 30s. In contrast, your parent comment prioritizes women having children at age 20-25. Looking at the data I just referenced, this seems unnecessarily aggressive from a medical standpoint -- do you have a different measure of maternal outcomes in mind? (And from a non-medical standpoint, I'm skeptical that late teens/early 20s are the best time for modern humans to choose the parent of their child.) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26349221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26349221

notjes 6y ago

> the solution is for people to normalize having children at a younger age and designing work and home life around children 100% In ancient times mothers always worked with babys strapped to their stomachs. A baby needs a mother and it needs to be fed with nice milk constantly. I was really happy seeing a lady breastfeeding her child in the Australian parliament. An safe and sane environment where this is normality needs to be the goal.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

golemiprague 6y ago

I am not even sure women at work improved the economic situation of the family that much. I am generalising here and I know there are exceptions but most of the work women do is a replacement to what a housewife used to do. They don't create new companies or businesses, they don't work in anything related to infrastructure or creation of actual physical value. They don't do engineering and even music creation and production is mostly done by men. Women concentrate in care taking, from teachers to social workers to nurses and services or value transfer like lawyers, marketers, HR and such. Those jobs don't create anything new or tangible and are basically the same jobs they used to do at home, caring for the family, some services and moving the husband money around. In some way they were more productive as housewives by doing in parallel and cheaply many jobs that are now outsourced. Their salary was just swallowed by land owners increasing rent and house prices in addition to all the house work they now have to pay for to other women. It is all a scheme that we suppose to believe is helping anyone while what actually is happening is that men still finance women as it was always was but now instead of the husband giving their wife the money directly they do it via their corporate accounting funnelling men hard work money to some women in HR to do another program about diversity and inclusiveness.