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People will not like this, but the reason populations are shrinking is because women don't want to have many kids. Ask any modern woman, the majority view child
by hsn915 4y ago
People will not like this, but the reason populations are shrinking is because women don't want to have many kids. Ask any modern woman, the majority view child rearing as a huge burden, and most would think three kids is way too much.
For perspective, my grand grand mother had 16 kids. All her grand grand children who are my generation that I know of have either two or three, with no apparent plans to have any more.
- nonethewiser 4y agoWell this is obviously true. You can argue that its OK, or even good, but there is no questioning that women (and men even) are less inclined to want kids than before.
- ceejayoz 4y agoDid your great grandmother want to have 16 kids, or is that just what happened?
- hsn915 4y agoDoes she sound to you like a modern woman?
- ceejayoz 4y agoConsider the possibility that women a hundred years ago didn’t necessarily want that many kids either. How many would have opted for birth control were it more readily available and effective?
- hsn915 4y agoI consider your question/objection offensive. Consider that your projections don't apply to people from a 100 years ago.
- ceejayoz 4y ago[note: OP changed their comment while this was typed up.] Again, not the question. If you went back in a time machine, and said “here’s some medicine, take it if you wanna stop at three kids” and changed nothing else societally, would everyone who had 16 kids still opt to have 16? I think it’s unlikely every single woman would make the same choice given an alternative. Modern or otherwise.
- adaml_623 4y agoThe question was, "What did she want?"
- hsn915 4y agoDid she commit suicide after the 4th kid because it was too much on her? That should answer the silly question. She's not a character from a novel written by a modern day feminist about how hard and traumatic life is in a Middle Eastern country because she has to carry the burden of raising children.
- bombcar 4y ago16 is a bit of an outlier but you can find women today who have that many kids, so someone somewhere chose to do so.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThe number of people who choose to have 16 is non-zero. The number of people who had 16 and didn’t want 16 is also non-zero. Availability of birth control coinciding with a fall in number of children per family suggests what the balance between the two might look like.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoMany women would like to have more children, but they don't because child rearing is a huge burden. And if you ask any mother with >4 children she will tell you that 3 children is the maximal burden in terms of work. Once you have more than 4 children the job gets easier, not harder. Experience, older children pitching in, being forced to drop what's not important, et cetera. One father described it as "zone defense" rather than "man-on-man defense". But the dollar cost does not go down. Time off work + $250K per child mean that only the rich can have more than 2 children.
- bombcar 4y agoThe dollar cost does go down because the fixed costs are fixed. Very few families with 4+ kids will have a room for each kid, for example, but even so five bedroom+ houses level off in price. A fifteen passenger van is less than double the price of a minivan, but holds twice as many people, so that levels off, too. Even things like private schooling levels off (many have a “all kids after three or four are free). The biggest one that doesn’t level off would be college. Many health insurance plans charge for up to two or three kids and then stop increasing. I know families with 8+ kids and none have made more than $150k a year and some are way below that.
- goethes_kind 4y agoI ask many women already since I'm looking and that's a question to ask. I did not make your impression at all. Many say they want 2 or 3, but some say they want a big family. But maybe I am pre-filtering anyone who would say they want none. What I would say, though, is that many women want to have kids later in life, and then this probably has an effect on the number of kids they get to have.
- bombcar 4y agoLater in life greatly affects it, especially since if you start having kids in your 30s you are more easily tired out chasing after them. Many people have a "I'll have kids after X" where X keeps changing until suddenly they realize they're running out of time.
- fennecfoxen 4y agoI do like that in this piece they call that out specifically and highlight the magnitude of what it would take to really move the needle on that (spending a double-digit percentage of GDP to actually compensate these women for their opportunity costs).
- adaml_623 4y agoSounds like you're also implying that populations are shrinking because modern men aren't prepared to make that extra burden bearable.
- hsn915 4y agoIt seems that's what you're hoping I'd agree to. It's not the man's job to help with child rearing. It's the exact opposite: it's the woman's job to take care of the house so her man can go out there in the world and build up his business or career (or whatever it is), because that is how he fulfills his role in the family. That's how it has always been done. This is common to all societies with high fertility.