20 ms·

Are you a late bloomer in work or love? Maybe you’re right on time

173 points by impish9208 3y ago

dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 3y ago
https://archive.is/QpZix https://archive.is/QpZix
mensetmanusman 3y ago
One of the interesting stats I learned recently is that if you are not a parent by the age of 30, there is a 50% chance that you will never be a parent.
- QuarterReptile 3y ago
  In the US? Genuinely curious who the dataset is for that.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I'd guess in the US, where the average age at first birth is 27. This is rather early by developed world countries; in most it's closer to 30, and in some it's above 30.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      there is no average US citizen, it makes no sense to assert based on that. Demographics are fundamentally groups of groups, that are different. People here on YNews would recognize quickly "overfitting" or other statistical errors, but this demographic human quality somehow eludes public conversation.
      - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        There is an average age that an American has their first child. No amount of 3+ syllable words negates that obvious fact...
        mistrial9 3y ago
        no - in real life, each person has a child at some age. An aggregate of those numbers is still showing individual lives. Similar reasoning for "2.5 children" .. that is "average" but exactly zero people out of millions have 2.5 children in reality.
        DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        I’m not claiming that’s there such thing as an average person, just that there is an average age that a person has their first child.
        dekhn 3y ago
        So what? You're just saying the mean of a list of integers can be a rational number. There are a number of other ways to synthesize "Average" people from summary statistics, but none of this is worth being pedantic about.
        mistrial9 3y ago
        no sorry, its a beginner mistake to think that there are average people at all. For example, people who are not adults.. there is no meaning to "average" for children at 2 years, 6 years, 8 years, 12 years.. they are different. Its not an average.. it is a collection of groups.. Human populations are collections of groups that overlap in characteristics.. there is no "average" person
        mistrial9 3y ago
        from the other side, a real number product of mean, average etc. is .. a number. You can do lots of math with numbers, and you will get consistent results in a number sense.. but the model is not the creation
        sethammons 3y ago
        On average, everyone has one testicle and one ovary. Cue the quote: there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statics
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  That's survivorship bias. You have eliminated from the sample all the people who wanted to have kid and already have one. It's unsurprising that people who don't want kids and will never have some are overly represented in the new sample.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    I don't think there is survivorship bias here. If you simply track the percentage of people having children over their lifetime you can build stats like this as a type of ground truth in relation to census data etc.
    - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
      The issue is not the veracity of the statistics. The statistic is correct (I have never implied otherwise by the way - no idea why I'm downvoted so much as what I wrote is perfectly true, the proportion of people who don't want kids is higher once you remove people who already had kids). The issue is in the interpretation. Your sampling is biased so the immediate conclusion is false. If you want kids and are over 30, your chances are better than 50%.
      - mensetmanusman 3y ago
        Related to this, the delta between those who want kids but will end up never having them is about 15% at the moment, which is a surprisingly large % of the population. You aren’t guaranteed what you want, especially when it comes to kids. The society that figures out how to properly overlap child rearing in an educational environment will survive. I’m fascinated with how much the world is going to change in the next century with most of the world set to shrink and be dominated by the elderly.
        DrThunder 3y ago
        For one, welfare and retirement programs won't work. Those require at least an equal replacement population. Either the younger generation will be paying a lot more in with no return in later life, or they just won't be able to support the system.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Your (or their) conclusion from that data is wrong. You could just as easily say that if you aren't a parent at age 30, there is a 50% chance that you decided you wanted to be childless at 20. There isn't enough data to conclude one way or another. We need to know how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed. You need a lot more data to come to the conclusion you did.
  - dheera 3y ago
    > how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed You're also missing some big ones: - people over 30 who have overly busy work schedules that prevent them from dating even though they want a partner and possibly kids - people over 30 who really want a romantic partner but can't find anyone who likes them, or lack the skills to engage in a healthy romantic relationship - people over 30 who for career reasons are stuck in a place that likely does not have any compatible partners within reasonable distance - people over 30 who want kids but aren't financially ready and voluntarily not having kids until/unless ready (but would if they suddenly make bank at 35).
  - morpheuskafka 3y ago
    > and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but why would adoption cost that much more than having a biological child? Just reducing it to numbers you already skipped thousands of pregnancy, delivery, early infancy doctor costs. On the other hand, adopted children may be more likely to need therapy or other care later in life. Besides, isn't the government desperate for children to be adopted? The state has to pay all their expenses until then, and obviously it's in the best interest of the community for them to be adopted. I don't see why they would have any incentive to charge a lot of fees.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Everything after having the kid is the same cost, but acquiring through adoption is very expensive. Most unwanted kids are aborted, so there are fewer left to adopt compared to a century ago when orphanages were a major part of the community.
- paxys 3y ago
  Maybe technically correct but societal changes happen so rapidly that any such collected data is useless after a decade or two. A bachelor at 30 in the 60s or 70s was likely to stay a bachelor their entire life. Today the average age of marriage for men has risen beyond that.
willcipriano 3y ago
> He became a dad at 51. In both the stories about men having children or dating later in life the age of the woman wasn't included for some reason.
- tekla 3y ago
  Well I suppose its for the same reason why the women in the article also didn't have the men in their lives mentioned/named Or did you not read past the first 2 paragraphs?
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Everyone knows a man can get a woman pregnant at 51, what would be surprising is a woman having a successful pregnancy without complications at that age. If that's what happened why not include it, if not and she was younger, I fear women make takeaway a false message here.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Yes but there is a real biological timeline for having children that is different between men and women.
  - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
    I imagine they were more interested in the age of the partner as men can produce offspring until very late in their life (see Al Pacino for a recent example) whereas women do undergo some physical changes that make them incapable after a certain age. If it was a 51 year old man but a 20 year old woman, that's a very different story than both of them being well over 40.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  Men can remain fertile well into their seventies and even into the eighties, with occasional random stories of a man in his nineties impregnating a woman. It does not happen the other way round, unfortunately.
lilboiluvr69 3y ago
I wish I realized this sooner. I spent years and years comparing myself against imaginary milestones, putting off my happiness for some constantly shifting goal instead of focusing on trying to cultivate daily moment to moment experiences that make me happy. I had a recent shro trip that really gave me perspective for how much of my life I've spent just being anxious, thinking I couldn't be happy because I wasn't living the /right/ life. There is no /right/ life. And you don't one day reach an expiration date on fullfilment.
- chasd00 3y ago
  Idk if I’m just hopelessly naive or what, I’ve never compared myself to others or pinned happiness on some sort of life timeline. I like the Porsche 911 gt3 but I’ll never have one but that doesn’t make me sad or depressed. Many people further up the corporate ladder at my job are younger than me but it doesn’t bother me for some reason. Again, maybe I’m just naive in a blessed way.
cgio 3y ago
In my newfound wisdom I came to realise that comparing is not a game you can win. The thing with smarts, success, money, etc. is there will always be someone that’s done better than you. There is value to playing the game, even if it is to appreciate its rules and give yourself enough experience to then go on your own. Late bloomers don’t really bloom late, they bloom all the way to being noticed. The important is to take their example and not wait to be noticed. They would keep on blooming regardless and we should too, even if our bloom is greyish, boring and subpar to others. Blissful ignorance may be easy, blissful knowledge is different, not better but blissful still.
- adql 3y ago
  Yup, be there to steal the ideas on why they become successful
scarface_74 3y ago
> He became a dad at 51. Now what are the chances that a woman would get pregnant at 51? It is what it is. While I’m an only child and will never have biological grandchildren (married and by choice), my aunt who is 82 years old has been able to see her two daughters get married and have six kids and between those six kids have four kids. The tradeoffs are real. > This time, quitting her job led to a debut solo album, television appearances and sold-out shows And for every one of her, there are thousands of singers in obscurity that are probably just as talented making $.0006 per play on Spotify and doing free gigs for tips at the local nightclub. Life is what it is, but not meeting those deadlines have real consequences. I’m no wunderkind. While I was on a perfect timeline up until I was 32 - graduated at 22, house and married at 28, etc - it’s probably because I did feel pressure that I had to start over between 32-34 (2006). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377647 So, yeah I was a late bloomer and while please play the smallest fiddle for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 But, myself and my best friend since high school were on similar paths through high school and college - top of our classes (we went to different schools), went to the same college on academic scholarships, etc. I know what the road not taken looks like. He got married at 26 and been married for 20+ years and didn’t give up half his stuff because of divorce at 32. He captured the upside from real estate and didn’t make as many dumb decisions before he was 35. Again, I’m not jealous nor have I ever been. While he has literally 6 times more saved than I do for retirement and he is one day younger than I am, I made the best of my situation of being an empty nester and a remote worker so I don’t have to retire to enjoy the life of a retired person (see the second link). You play with the cards you are dealt. I told him a long time ago that I realize that we aren’t on the same road and I’m always pushing for him. We are both in a good place now.
leoedin 3y ago
Some of these examples are great - a pattern I see so much with my parent's generation is that they get locked into the same pattern of life. The same group of people, the same routines and the same hobbies for decades. I think that it's the natural path as we age - and you have to actively make choices to fight it if you don't want that. However, there's only some aspects of life in which you truly have choice later in life. The cold hard truth of biology (especially female biology) is that probabilities of successfully having children start declining pretty quickly at a certain point. And if you don't start saving for retirement early enough? You won't have a pension. If you don't buy a house when you're (relatively) young? At some point you'll find it very hard to get a mortgage. It's great to write a relatively shallow piece about how you don't need to hit milestones so early - but that's a symptom of an underlying system which is increasingly disenfranchising young people and not giving them the opportunity to have ownership in society.
- liftsh 3y ago
  Expectations are important and are missing from the equation here. Not everyone needs children, a fat pension or a large house to be fulfilled. It is also perfectly fine to be with the same group of people, have the same routines and the same hobbies for your entire life. The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit. I used to think my dad was boring because he never really wanted to do anything. Worked the same mid-level job for 30+ years, had no friends--just took care of us. A couple years back he passed away, smile on his face. Told me he did everything he ever wanted. Told me not to work so hard. I think about this all the time whenever I'm stressed about claiming my "ownership in society."
  - leoedin 3y ago
    That's a good point. Trying to attain milestones because of some absorbed societal pressure is a recipe for unhappiness. But that's not really what this article says. If they had someone who said "I thought I needed kids, then I didn't and I'm totally happy with it" that would be aligned with that message. But to have someone who says "I didn't have kids until I was 50" is a bit dishonest, because biological realities make that almost impossible (for women, anyway). It's really uplifting to show lots of examples of people who took a different path and found happiness in a less conventional way. It's less uplifting to show lots of examples of people who did the conventional stuff, but later in life, because statistically that is unlikely to be possible for most people who leave those things until later. It feels more like building false hope.
lusus_naturae 3y ago
There's an implicit value judgement that having children means you have "bloomed". You may have indeed, just into someone who has children. There's nothing more to it than that. Intellectually I understand why society values breeders. I understand the need for fostering the betterment of humanity by having a future generation. I just disagree that it requires or merit biological birth unless we have a population crisis. As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem, so I won't judge someone for forgoing baby making. I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class. Maybe they're optimistic that somehow their children will become part of that? On average, that's simply not the case.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Historically, “breeders” have been useful or necessary. This is less true now, but perhaps only for now.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    See the change in Israeli politics for how useful breeders are in democracies.
    - no_time 3y ago
      Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with their politics but this seems interesting.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-ultra-orthodox-parties.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-u... https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/empowering-rabbinical-courts-in-israel-they-seek-to-set-women-500-years-backward/00000186-2686-dd37-add7-eee638550000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-ma... >The coalition agreement PM Netanyahu signed with ultra-Orthodox party Shas promises to broaden the reach of Israel’s rabbinical courts far beyond family law – and grant them a status equal to that of civil courts
switch007 3y ago
I’m convinced there has been a concerted effort recently by the media to gaslight us in to not desiring things like a home, money and possessions.
- jimmywatersabc 3y ago
  [flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  I'd say the opposite. There has been a massive, concerted, sustained effort to make us think we want more things that we actually want. A description I stole (I'd give credit where due, but I don't remember the source): Advertising is designed to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. That is, advertising attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you. Take cars, for instance. I have a car that drives just fine. Ah, but with the car in the advertisement, the girls look at me with interest. If I want that, I need to go buy that car. (Maybe those ads are the reason that the first sign of a midlife crisis is going out and buying a fancy new car.) The point of the ads is to make me want to buy a car when I don't actually want a car. Same, and equally obvious, with beer, soft drink, and potato chip commercials. It's more subtle with some other kinds of ads, but it's still there. This has been going on for decades - for all of our lives, in fact. (The difference now compared to the 1960s is that we don't have the same thing going on in cigarette ads.) What's happening now is that more and more people have maxed out, either financially or emotionally. Financially is "I can't make enough money or borrow enough money to continue to play this game." (The decline of the middle class may drive this, at least in part.) The emotional part of maxing out is when you realize: "I've tried that kind of thing a bunch of times. Buying this one isn't going to satisfy me. I don't actually have to buy it to find that out; I already know." A related phenomena is the realization that you can't actually have it all. You can't have the fulfilling job and the high pay and lots of vacation time and the nice car and the nice house and the boat and lots of money in the bank. Women can't have the nice career and be there with their kids (neither can men, but for most families, the women are the ones getting pinched on that particular front.) You have to choose what is more important, and try to get that, even if it costs you other things that you also want. "You can have it all" is a lie, and people are starting to see that.
mo_42 3y ago
I think this piece of writing is quite worrisome. I feel like the message of the text is: It’s the right time when you feel like it is. Certainly, true for many things in life. Having children later in life has risks for mother and child. It sounds more like a rationalization because the current situation is not in favor for having children. But I cannot accept this feel-good writing and leaving out the real issues that need to be fixed like student loans, housing etc.
- paxys 3y ago
  Having a child when you are not ready for one is a lot worse for the physical and mental health of everyone involved.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    I can't agree with this more. Starting a family should not be taken lightly as some kind of whimsical selfish destiny. When people have kids later, it's because they're not ready. Some people are never ready because they are needed more elsewhere. Family will consume all of your free time, money, and effort. It's a big sacrifice.
    - slily 3y ago
      I think a lot of people are simply anxious and have trouble making long-term commitments, and conflate that feeling with this abstract idea of readiness. No one is "ready" to do something for the first time including child-rearing.
- aetherson 3y ago
  I had my first child when I was 38. Not as part of a well-conceived strategy, just, like, that's how life turned out. My wife was 33. All in all, I'm happy that we did end up having kids, but if I could go back through my life and rearrange things in some godlike way that let me still marry the same person and have the same children, I'd definitely have kids earlier. I feel like it's hard in my 40s to have the same energy that I did 10 years ago, and raising kids is definitely something you have to pour energy into. Also, my mother died a year and a half ago, in her mid-70s, and I really feel like both she and my kids would have benefited from having longer together. My father is 80 now and while he remains healthy, it seems very unlikely that he'll actually see his grandchildren grow up. My father-in-law died when his first grandchild was an infant. I think it'd also be nice to have my late 40s as a time when I could really heavily concentrate on my career because my kids were old enough to handle a lot of the small day-to-day things by themselves, since this feels like probably my prime earning time. None of this is stuff that makes me say, "I screwed up, I should have made any sacrifice to have it different." Overall, life is great. But if you're 28 and you're thinking, "I could go either way -- wait a decade to have kids or have them now," I'd personally recommend "have them now."
Barrin92 3y ago
I think it's a good mentality for a lot of things, education for example, or starting a business. It's kind of terrible that we've decided that learning ends at 25 and a lot of people feel bad or out of place when they attend university at 40. Makes no sense at all especially in the current age. But having kids is the one thing where age matters. If you have a kid at 50, there's a good chance you are going to need assistance when they're barely in their twenties. I've had a few friends like this whose parents were very old, and they needed to take care of them when they didn't even have their own stuff together. I think it's better to either have kids early or not at all.
999900000999 3y ago
These types of articles always try to put a positive spin on life just getting harder for many. Less people are able to move out and start families due to student loans and wages not keeping up with cost of living. This isn't a matter of 'well , in time you'll have everything you want'. It's more like you may never have what your parents had.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  A friend started as a construction worker in the suburbs at 18 right out of high school. Now he is 40 and has a general contracting firm so large he grew out the local bank - they couldn’t write him more loans as it centralized risk. My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now. I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures. Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Can everyone run their own general contracting firm? Both of your examples require workers. Good for the outliers who are doing well, but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
    - coding123 3y ago
      have you seen the cost to build a building lately?
      - Scoundreller 3y ago
        In theory, the underlying land value should go down if only the cost of construction went up.
BizarreByte 3y ago
I've been quite successful in work so far and I've hit most of the traditional milestones like owning a car, buying a house, and what not, but love? Haha, I am so comically behind my peers that it has stopped hurting and almost become funny at this point. I've stopped believing it'll happen, hope just leads to suffering. I'm far too broken and messed up as a person.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  How many hours per day do you spend outside the home?
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    Now that the weather's nice? I try to spend a fair bit of time outside the house.
    - bashmelek 3y ago
      Can I ask what you do? I feel that it is hard to go outside and do many activities on my own without looking out of place, especially for someone like me.
- bckr 3y ago
  Are you in therapy? How are your other relationships?
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    No, I've tried it and didn't find it helpful. My relationships are good with my family and I have a small handful of friends I get along with well. This is unfortunately more complex than simple, easily fixed social issues and the like.
    - throwing_away 3y ago
      You're not crazy. The older you get, the harder it is to make new romantic relationships. You can sort of make up for this by having extensive experience younger in life, so you can more aptly navigate the fewer opportunities you'll have as you age. If you don't have that skill, good luck. I don't think therapy is capable of really teaching this either. You can read a book about how to play soccer, but you actually need to spend ten thousand hours with the ball. If you start playing soccer at 3yo, you'll be a natural. If you start at 30yo, well, it can be done but it's not going to look very traditional and it's going to be much harder. I think the "pickup artist" movement and the rise of people like Andrew Tate illustrate the problem well. Applying a deliberate strategy to engineer romantic relationships usually ends poorly, but I can see why so many men are attempting it.
testacct22 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Can you please not post in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we're trying for something else here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
thinkingkong 3y ago
Perhaps I'm jaded but taking life advice from the WSJ seems a little odd. First of all, most of this piece is self-acceptance repackaged as 'everything is alright' style thinking. Everything is not alright for many people. Things are objectively worse for a lot of folks and suggesting things are just meant to be is just lazy. Self-acceptance though is totally good to practice. I would go back in time and do more work on myself so I could accept the good things in my life faster with more integrity. But I can't, so I have no choice to but to accept that maybe I'll be a slightly older father. I can't actually change that but I also am not under any illusions that being an older parent would be better, all else being equal. That's just absurd. All else isn't equal though. I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  The WSJ just want the plebs to stop complaining so wall street can keep the profits to themselves.
- nextworddev 3y ago
  Self acceptance is a decent advice - it’s emphasized in Shintoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. Obviously though, suggest a better option than self acceptance if you know one.
- sublinear 3y ago
  > I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent. I think most people would be far better parents if they waited until at least around 30. At 50, I think their only problems would be their health and lifespan, which is not as big of a deal in my opinion. If you know what you're doing as a parent and have your finances straight, your kids don't really need you after graduating from college anyway.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Some people (males) are better parents at 50, some are horrible at 20 and only slightly better at 25. I became father at 38, second time at 40. I am much better father than I would be 10 years ago. I've done some cool shit before this happened, reinvented myself few times, tons of extreme/adrenaline sports, backpacking around the world, bought house for parents, and I have very little left to prove to myself and absolutely nothing to anybody else. I understood exactly what makes me 'tick' and long term happy, understand myself and women much much better, so I could pick (hopefully) a lifetime partner and mother of our children more appropriately. All this takes time, for some like me a bit more to grok properly. Not even going into career and financial stability, those are obvious and not that important once you are above 'poor' threshold. Its fine for a guy to be parent a bit later, just be sure to use that extra free time to make yourself the best version of yourself, and not waste it on shallow stuff like couch binge watching or parties, grow out of such things since there are much much better things to do in life, like rock climbing. And recognize toxic/broken relationships, take a (hard) lesson and move away from them, unfortunately you can't fix broken people.
glitcher 3y ago
I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to career, and the beginning was very challenging to land my first junior developer position. I'll never forget the guy who hired me commenting something along the lines of "it's unfortunate you didn't start earlier, you could've gone so much further", or something similar. He ended up being a great mentor, but that comment always bothered me and is the thing I remember most about him. Now several years later and I'm very happy where I'm at. And I've come to the realization, if I had gone directly into CS in college, there is a fairly good chance I may have gotten burned out by now and moved on to something completely different. So the "right on time" idea resonates with me, but YMMV.
onetimeusename 3y ago
At least when it comes to love and marriage I definitely think settling that in yours 20s is best, or being on course to settle it. I think dating becomes very hard after 30 and there are big generational gaps and I think the fertility industry is not a good solution. I think its sub-optimal trying to find a partner as you get older. Ideally, the numbers Stanford listed (married at 26...) would have been preferable to me at least. It might be good to figure out why people miss that and figure out how to improve it rather than counting on the last resort of fertility treatments in your 40s.
- duderific 3y ago
  > It might be good to figure out why people miss that In Western societies at least, often it is women working on their careers, which may take at least into their 30s before they've reached the desired level. It is a choice that these women make, so I don't think it can be "improved" unless different choices are taken.
- neilv 3y ago
  > At least when it comes to love and marriage I definitely think settling that in yours 20s is best, Careful to read it as "settling that" -- no one should feel like they're "settling", for something other than what they want. :) (This can involve changing your mind about what you want, though.)
  - jprete 3y ago
    I understand the sentiment, but I think plenty of people do in fact need to "settle", because they have unrealistic expectations and are very unlikely to get what they want.
    - neilv 3y ago
      Will a relationship more likely be successful, if they're not still thinking of it as "settling" by the time that they commit?
      - deleted 3y ago
bradlys 3y ago
Neocon wsj writers decide that “waiting until you can afford to have kids when you’re old” is normal because they want you to slave away at your jobs all so that capitalists can accrue more and more. If bullshit like this becomes mainstream then they can justify extracting more and more out of you indefinitely until you die empty handed and completely unfulfilled. They’ll raise the retirement age, lower your benefits, and make sure you have no way to pass down any generational wealth. Forget your kids having grandma and grandpas! I’m on a plane across the country because my mother just died from a stroke at the age of 61. I’m 32. She’ll never see grandchildren from me (her only child) and she’ll never see what I amount to fully. There’ll be no reconciliation for the terrible childhood and whatnot. I figured maybe when I had kids that maybe things could be more fixed. It won’t happen now. My father will likely die soon because he doesn’t have a strong will to live on his own and is in much worse health than my mother. He should’ve died three years ago when he had a heart attack but he got very lucky that the ambulance came when it did. I would’ve had kids already but due to the insane market we’ve had going on in the USA - I couldn’t afford to start a family and had to divorce my ex wife due to financial issues. I’m an exceptionally well earning person - in the top 1%. But my wife wasn’t and so we couldn’t afford to start a family in the Bay Area and decided to move on. We didn’t want to be stuck with dealing with greedy landlords and no privacy. I hate articles like this because it tries to normalize what isn’t and should never be normal.
- neon_electro 3y ago
  I’m 31 now and lost my mother seven years ago. What you say resonates with me.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  So sorry for your loss. I was roughly your age when I lost my father and had to travel across the world to attend his funeral. Your comment resonated with me so much that I'm pretty much done for today wrt to work, I can't think of anything else. Thank you for sharing.
modeless 3y ago
Everyone's talking about declining fertility but nobody's talking about declining energy. Raising children is hard work, at least if you want to do it all yourself and do a good job. I wish every day that my body was 20 years younger. And I wish my parents were 20 years younger too, they'd be a lot more able to provide support and enjoy their grandchildren. By the same token I'll be quite old when my kids have children, if I even live to see it.
georgeobama 3y ago
Money is money. Most of us on this site can easily secure sufficient shelter, food, and transportation. However love can be so fragile and hard to find. I could master a dozen fields before finding love.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
The same crap has been pushed in China for a while, well we have the US versions of this BS now.
happyjack 3y ago
This is a really interesting comment thread. I see everything from "leave Seattle move to Indianapolis" to Europe's economy, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, etc. a lot of fair and interesting comments from all walks of life. I recently read Vaclav Smil's book, "The rise and fall of manufacturing in America." With the fall of manufacturing in America, I think America gave up on the one social agreement that makes capitalism work. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and give 40 hours solid work a week to an employer, you can and should have the means to support a family and have a modest life. In my opinion, that's the only thing that keeps capitalism afloat if the top 2% keep to that agreement. We're entering a new era of Victorian living. I think it's hard to argue against that. Politics are swaying each and every way to divide and conquer the majority.

173 points by impish9208 3y ago

https://archive.is/QpZix https://archive.is/QpZix

One of the interesting stats I learned recently is that if you are not a parent by the age of 30, there is a 50% chance that you will never be a parent.

QuarterReptile 3y ago
In the US? Genuinely curious who the dataset is for that.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I'd guess in the US, where the average age at first birth is 27. This is rather early by developed world countries; in most it's closer to 30, and in some it's above 30.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    there is no average US citizen, it makes no sense to assert based on that. Demographics are fundamentally groups of groups, that are different. People here on YNews would recognize quickly "overfitting" or other statistical errors, but this demographic human quality somehow eludes public conversation.
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      There is an average age that an American has their first child. No amount of 3+ syllable words negates that obvious fact...
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        no - in real life, each person has a child at some age. An aggregate of those numbers is still showing individual lives. Similar reasoning for "2.5 children" .. that is "average" but exactly zero people out of millions have 2.5 children in reality.
        DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        I’m not claiming that’s there such thing as an average person, just that there is an average age that a person has their first child.
        dekhn 3y ago
        So what? You're just saying the mean of a list of integers can be a rational number. There are a number of other ways to synthesize "Average" people from summary statistics, but none of this is worth being pedantic about.
        mistrial9 3y ago
        no sorry, its a beginner mistake to think that there are average people at all. For example, people who are not adults.. there is no meaning to "average" for children at 2 years, 6 years, 8 years, 12 years.. they are different. Its not an average.. it is a collection of groups.. Human populations are collections of groups that overlap in characteristics.. there is no "average" person
        mistrial9 3y ago
        from the other side, a real number product of mean, average etc. is .. a number. You can do lots of math with numbers, and you will get consistent results in a number sense.. but the model is not the creation
      - sethammons 3y ago
        On average, everyone has one testicle and one ovary. Cue the quote: there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statics
WastingMyTime89 3y ago
That's survivorship bias. You have eliminated from the sample all the people who wanted to have kid and already have one. It's unsurprising that people who don't want kids and will never have some are overly represented in the new sample.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  I don't think there is survivorship bias here. If you simply track the percentage of people having children over their lifetime you can build stats like this as a type of ground truth in relation to census data etc.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    The issue is not the veracity of the statistics. The statistic is correct (I have never implied otherwise by the way - no idea why I'm downvoted so much as what I wrote is perfectly true, the proportion of people who don't want kids is higher once you remove people who already had kids). The issue is in the interpretation. Your sampling is biased so the immediate conclusion is false. If you want kids and are over 30, your chances are better than 50%.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Related to this, the delta between those who want kids but will end up never having them is about 15% at the moment, which is a surprisingly large % of the population. You aren’t guaranteed what you want, especially when it comes to kids. The society that figures out how to properly overlap child rearing in an educational environment will survive. I’m fascinated with how much the world is going to change in the next century with most of the world set to shrink and be dominated by the elderly.
      - DrThunder 3y ago
        For one, welfare and retirement programs won't work. Those require at least an equal replacement population. Either the younger generation will be paying a lot more in with no return in later life, or they just won't be able to support the system.
jedberg 3y ago
Your (or their) conclusion from that data is wrong. You could just as easily say that if you aren't a parent at age 30, there is a 50% chance that you decided you wanted to be childless at 20. There isn't enough data to conclude one way or another. We need to know how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed. You need a lot more data to come to the conclusion you did.
- dheera 3y ago
  > how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed You're also missing some big ones: - people over 30 who have overly busy work schedules that prevent them from dating even though they want a partner and possibly kids - people over 30 who really want a romantic partner but can't find anyone who likes them, or lack the skills to engage in a healthy romantic relationship - people over 30 who for career reasons are stuck in a place that likely does not have any compatible partners within reasonable distance - people over 30 who want kids but aren't financially ready and voluntarily not having kids until/unless ready (but would if they suddenly make bank at 35).
- morpheuskafka 3y ago
  > and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but why would adoption cost that much more than having a biological child? Just reducing it to numbers you already skipped thousands of pregnancy, delivery, early infancy doctor costs. On the other hand, adopted children may be more likely to need therapy or other care later in life. Besides, isn't the government desperate for children to be adopted? The state has to pay all their expenses until then, and obviously it's in the best interest of the community for them to be adopted. I don't see why they would have any incentive to charge a lot of fees.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Everything after having the kid is the same cost, but acquiring through adoption is very expensive. Most unwanted kids are aborted, so there are fewer left to adopt compared to a century ago when orphanages were a major part of the community.
paxys 3y ago
Maybe technically correct but societal changes happen so rapidly that any such collected data is useless after a decade or two. A bachelor at 30 in the 60s or 70s was likely to stay a bachelor their entire life. Today the average age of marriage for men has risen beyond that.

willcipriano 3y ago

> He became a dad at 51. In both the stories about men having children or dating later in life the age of the woman wasn't included for some reason.

tekla 3y ago
Well I suppose its for the same reason why the women in the article also didn't have the men in their lives mentioned/named Or did you not read past the first 2 paragraphs?
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Everyone knows a man can get a woman pregnant at 51, what would be surprising is a woman having a successful pregnancy without complications at that age. If that's what happened why not include it, if not and she was younger, I fear women make takeaway a false message here.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Yes but there is a real biological timeline for having children that is different between men and women.
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  I imagine they were more interested in the age of the partner as men can produce offspring until very late in their life (see Al Pacino for a recent example) whereas women do undergo some physical changes that make them incapable after a certain age. If it was a 51 year old man but a 20 year old woman, that's a very different story than both of them being well over 40.
inkyoto 3y ago
Men can remain fertile well into their seventies and even into the eighties, with occasional random stories of a man in his nineties impregnating a woman. It does not happen the other way round, unfortunately.

lilboiluvr69 3y ago

I wish I realized this sooner. I spent years and years comparing myself against imaginary milestones, putting off my happiness for some constantly shifting goal instead of focusing on trying to cultivate daily moment to moment experiences that make me happy. I had a recent shro trip that really gave me perspective for how much of my life I've spent just being anxious, thinking I couldn't be happy because I wasn't living the /right/ life. There is no /right/ life. And you don't one day reach an expiration date on fullfilment.

chasd00 3y ago
Idk if I’m just hopelessly naive or what, I’ve never compared myself to others or pinned happiness on some sort of life timeline. I like the Porsche 911 gt3 but I’ll never have one but that doesn’t make me sad or depressed. Many people further up the corporate ladder at my job are younger than me but it doesn’t bother me for some reason. Again, maybe I’m just naive in a blessed way.

cgio 3y ago

In my newfound wisdom I came to realise that comparing is not a game you can win. The thing with smarts, success, money, etc. is there will always be someone that’s done better than you. There is value to playing the game, even if it is to appreciate its rules and give yourself enough experience to then go on your own. Late bloomers don’t really bloom late, they bloom all the way to being noticed. The important is to take their example and not wait to be noticed. They would keep on blooming regardless and we should too, even if our bloom is greyish, boring and subpar to others. Blissful ignorance may be easy, blissful knowledge is different, not better but blissful still.

adql 3y ago
Yup, be there to steal the ideas on why they become successful

scarface_74 3y ago

> He became a dad at 51. Now what are the chances that a woman would get pregnant at 51? It is what it is. While I’m an only child and will never have biological grandchildren (married and by choice), my aunt who is 82 years old has been able to see her two daughters get married and have six kids and between those six kids have four kids. The tradeoffs are real. > This time, quitting her job led to a debut solo album, television appearances and sold-out shows And for every one of her, there are thousands of singers in obscurity that are probably just as talented making $.0006 per play on Spotify and doing free gigs for tips at the local nightclub. Life is what it is, but not meeting those deadlines have real consequences. I’m no wunderkind. While I was on a perfect timeline up until I was 32 - graduated at 22, house and married at 28, etc - it’s probably because I did feel pressure that I had to start over between 32-34 (2006). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377647 So, yeah I was a late bloomer and while please play the smallest fiddle for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 But, myself and my best friend since high school were on similar paths through high school and college - top of our classes (we went to different schools), went to the same college on academic scholarships, etc. I know what the road not taken looks like. He got married at 26 and been married for 20+ years and didn’t give up half his stuff because of divorce at 32. He captured the upside from real estate and didn’t make as many dumb decisions before he was 35. Again, I’m not jealous nor have I ever been. While he has literally 6 times more saved than I do for retirement and he is one day younger than I am, I made the best of my situation of being an empty nester and a remote worker so I don’t have to retire to enjoy the life of a retired person (see the second link). You play with the cards you are dealt. I told him a long time ago that I realize that we aren’t on the same road and I’m always pushing for him. We are both in a good place now.

leoedin 3y ago

Some of these examples are great - a pattern I see so much with my parent's generation is that they get locked into the same pattern of life. The same group of people, the same routines and the same hobbies for decades. I think that it's the natural path as we age - and you have to actively make choices to fight it if you don't want that. However, there's only some aspects of life in which you truly have choice later in life. The cold hard truth of biology (especially female biology) is that probabilities of successfully having children start declining pretty quickly at a certain point. And if you don't start saving for retirement early enough? You won't have a pension. If you don't buy a house when you're (relatively) young? At some point you'll find it very hard to get a mortgage. It's great to write a relatively shallow piece about how you don't need to hit milestones so early - but that's a symptom of an underlying system which is increasingly disenfranchising young people and not giving them the opportunity to have ownership in society.

liftsh 3y ago
Expectations are important and are missing from the equation here. Not everyone needs children, a fat pension or a large house to be fulfilled. It is also perfectly fine to be with the same group of people, have the same routines and the same hobbies for your entire life. The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit. I used to think my dad was boring because he never really wanted to do anything. Worked the same mid-level job for 30+ years, had no friends--just took care of us. A couple years back he passed away, smile on his face. Told me he did everything he ever wanted. Told me not to work so hard. I think about this all the time whenever I'm stressed about claiming my "ownership in society."
- leoedin 3y ago
  That's a good point. Trying to attain milestones because of some absorbed societal pressure is a recipe for unhappiness. But that's not really what this article says. If they had someone who said "I thought I needed kids, then I didn't and I'm totally happy with it" that would be aligned with that message. But to have someone who says "I didn't have kids until I was 50" is a bit dishonest, because biological realities make that almost impossible (for women, anyway). It's really uplifting to show lots of examples of people who took a different path and found happiness in a less conventional way. It's less uplifting to show lots of examples of people who did the conventional stuff, but later in life, because statistically that is unlikely to be possible for most people who leave those things until later. It feels more like building false hope.

lusus_naturae 3y ago

There's an implicit value judgement that having children means you have "bloomed". You may have indeed, just into someone who has children. There's nothing more to it than that. Intellectually I understand why society values breeders. I understand the need for fostering the betterment of humanity by having a future generation. I just disagree that it requires or merit biological birth unless we have a population crisis. As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem, so I won't judge someone for forgoing baby making. I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class. Maybe they're optimistic that somehow their children will become part of that? On average, that's simply not the case.

yieldcrv 3y ago
Historically, “breeders” have been useful or necessary. This is less true now, but perhaps only for now.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  See the change in Israeli politics for how useful breeders are in democracies.
  - no_time 3y ago
    Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with their politics but this seems interesting.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israeli_judicial_reform https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-ultra-orthodox-parties.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-u... https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/empowering-rabbinical-courts-in-israel-they-seek-to-set-women-500-years-backward/00000186-2686-dd37-add7-eee638550000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-ma... >The coalition agreement PM Netanyahu signed with ultra-Orthodox party Shas promises to broaden the reach of Israel’s rabbinical courts far beyond family law – and grant them a status equal to that of civil courts

switch007 3y ago

I’m convinced there has been a concerted effort recently by the media to gaslight us in to not desiring things like a home, money and possessions.

jimmywatersabc 3y ago
[flagged]
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
I'd say the opposite. There has been a massive, concerted, sustained effort to make us think we want more things that we actually want. A description I stole (I'd give credit where due, but I don't remember the source): Advertising is designed to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. That is, advertising attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you. Take cars, for instance. I have a car that drives just fine. Ah, but with the car in the advertisement, the girls look at me with interest. If I want that, I need to go buy that car. (Maybe those ads are the reason that the first sign of a midlife crisis is going out and buying a fancy new car.) The point of the ads is to make me want to buy a car when I don't actually want a car. Same, and equally obvious, with beer, soft drink, and potato chip commercials. It's more subtle with some other kinds of ads, but it's still there. This has been going on for decades - for all of our lives, in fact. (The difference now compared to the 1960s is that we don't have the same thing going on in cigarette ads.) What's happening now is that more and more people have maxed out, either financially or emotionally. Financially is "I can't make enough money or borrow enough money to continue to play this game." (The decline of the middle class may drive this, at least in part.) The emotional part of maxing out is when you realize: "I've tried that kind of thing a bunch of times. Buying this one isn't going to satisfy me. I don't actually have to buy it to find that out; I already know." A related phenomena is the realization that you can't actually have it all. You can't have the fulfilling job and the high pay and lots of vacation time and the nice car and the nice house and the boat and lots of money in the bank. Women can't have the nice career and be there with their kids (neither can men, but for most families, the women are the ones getting pinched on that particular front.) You have to choose what is more important, and try to get that, even if it costs you other things that you also want. "You can have it all" is a lie, and people are starting to see that.

mo_42 3y ago

I think this piece of writing is quite worrisome. I feel like the message of the text is: It’s the right time when you feel like it is. Certainly, true for many things in life. Having children later in life has risks for mother and child. It sounds more like a rationalization because the current situation is not in favor for having children. But I cannot accept this feel-good writing and leaving out the real issues that need to be fixed like student loans, housing etc.

paxys 3y ago
Having a child when you are not ready for one is a lot worse for the physical and mental health of everyone involved.
- sublinear 3y ago
  I can't agree with this more. Starting a family should not be taken lightly as some kind of whimsical selfish destiny. When people have kids later, it's because they're not ready. Some people are never ready because they are needed more elsewhere. Family will consume all of your free time, money, and effort. It's a big sacrifice.
  - slily 3y ago
    I think a lot of people are simply anxious and have trouble making long-term commitments, and conflate that feeling with this abstract idea of readiness. No one is "ready" to do something for the first time including child-rearing.
aetherson 3y ago
I had my first child when I was 38. Not as part of a well-conceived strategy, just, like, that's how life turned out. My wife was 33. All in all, I'm happy that we did end up having kids, but if I could go back through my life and rearrange things in some godlike way that let me still marry the same person and have the same children, I'd definitely have kids earlier. I feel like it's hard in my 40s to have the same energy that I did 10 years ago, and raising kids is definitely something you have to pour energy into. Also, my mother died a year and a half ago, in her mid-70s, and I really feel like both she and my kids would have benefited from having longer together. My father is 80 now and while he remains healthy, it seems very unlikely that he'll actually see his grandchildren grow up. My father-in-law died when his first grandchild was an infant. I think it'd also be nice to have my late 40s as a time when I could really heavily concentrate on my career because my kids were old enough to handle a lot of the small day-to-day things by themselves, since this feels like probably my prime earning time. None of this is stuff that makes me say, "I screwed up, I should have made any sacrifice to have it different." Overall, life is great. But if you're 28 and you're thinking, "I could go either way -- wait a decade to have kids or have them now," I'd personally recommend "have them now."

Barrin92 3y ago

I think it's a good mentality for a lot of things, education for example, or starting a business. It's kind of terrible that we've decided that learning ends at 25 and a lot of people feel bad or out of place when they attend university at 40. Makes no sense at all especially in the current age. But having kids is the one thing where age matters. If you have a kid at 50, there's a good chance you are going to need assistance when they're barely in their twenties. I've had a few friends like this whose parents were very old, and they needed to take care of them when they didn't even have their own stuff together. I think it's better to either have kids early or not at all.

999900000999 3y ago

These types of articles always try to put a positive spin on life just getting harder for many. Less people are able to move out and start families due to student loans and wages not keeping up with cost of living. This isn't a matter of 'well , in time you'll have everything you want'. It's more like you may never have what your parents had.

monero-xmr 3y ago
A friend started as a construction worker in the suburbs at 18 right out of high school. Now he is 40 and has a general contracting firm so large he grew out the local bank - they couldn’t write him more loans as it centralized risk. My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now. I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures. Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Can everyone run their own general contracting firm? Both of your examples require workers. Good for the outliers who are doing well, but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
  - coding123 3y ago
    have you seen the cost to build a building lately?
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      In theory, the underlying land value should go down if only the cost of construction went up.

BizarreByte 3y ago

I've been quite successful in work so far and I've hit most of the traditional milestones like owning a car, buying a house, and what not, but love? Haha, I am so comically behind my peers that it has stopped hurting and almost become funny at this point. I've stopped believing it'll happen, hope just leads to suffering. I'm far too broken and messed up as a person.

missedthecue 3y ago
How many hours per day do you spend outside the home?
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  Now that the weather's nice? I try to spend a fair bit of time outside the house.
  - bashmelek 3y ago
    Can I ask what you do? I feel that it is hard to go outside and do many activities on my own without looking out of place, especially for someone like me.
bckr 3y ago
Are you in therapy? How are your other relationships?
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  No, I've tried it and didn't find it helpful. My relationships are good with my family and I have a small handful of friends I get along with well. This is unfortunately more complex than simple, easily fixed social issues and the like.
  - throwing_away 3y ago
    You're not crazy. The older you get, the harder it is to make new romantic relationships. You can sort of make up for this by having extensive experience younger in life, so you can more aptly navigate the fewer opportunities you'll have as you age. If you don't have that skill, good luck. I don't think therapy is capable of really teaching this either. You can read a book about how to play soccer, but you actually need to spend ten thousand hours with the ball. If you start playing soccer at 3yo, you'll be a natural. If you start at 30yo, well, it can be done but it's not going to look very traditional and it's going to be much harder. I think the "pickup artist" movement and the rise of people like Andrew Tate illustrate the problem well. Applying a deliberate strategy to engineer romantic relationships usually ends poorly, but I can see why so many men are attempting it.

testacct22 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Can you please not post in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we're trying for something else here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

thinkingkong 3y ago

Perhaps I'm jaded but taking life advice from the WSJ seems a little odd. First of all, most of this piece is self-acceptance repackaged as 'everything is alright' style thinking. Everything is not alright for many people. Things are objectively worse for a lot of folks and suggesting things are just meant to be is just lazy. Self-acceptance though is totally good to practice. I would go back in time and do more work on myself so I could accept the good things in my life faster with more integrity. But I can't, so I have no choice to but to accept that maybe I'll be a slightly older father. I can't actually change that but I also am not under any illusions that being an older parent would be better, all else being equal. That's just absurd. All else isn't equal though. I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent.

spacemadness 3y ago
The WSJ just want the plebs to stop complaining so wall street can keep the profits to themselves.
nextworddev 3y ago
Self acceptance is a decent advice - it’s emphasized in Shintoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. Obviously though, suggest a better option than self acceptance if you know one.
sublinear 3y ago
> I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent. I think most people would be far better parents if they waited until at least around 30. At 50, I think their only problems would be their health and lifespan, which is not as big of a deal in my opinion. If you know what you're doing as a parent and have your finances straight, your kids don't really need you after graduating from college anyway.
saiya-jin 3y ago
Some people (males) are better parents at 50, some are horrible at 20 and only slightly better at 25. I became father at 38, second time at 40. I am much better father than I would be 10 years ago. I've done some cool shit before this happened, reinvented myself few times, tons of extreme/adrenaline sports, backpacking around the world, bought house for parents, and I have very little left to prove to myself and absolutely nothing to anybody else. I understood exactly what makes me 'tick' and long term happy, understand myself and women much much better, so I could pick (hopefully) a lifetime partner and mother of our children more appropriately. All this takes time, for some like me a bit more to grok properly. Not even going into career and financial stability, those are obvious and not that important once you are above 'poor' threshold. Its fine for a guy to be parent a bit later, just be sure to use that extra free time to make yourself the best version of yourself, and not waste it on shallow stuff like couch binge watching or parties, grow out of such things since there are much much better things to do in life, like rock climbing. And recognize toxic/broken relationships, take a (hard) lesson and move away from them, unfortunately you can't fix broken people.

glitcher 3y ago

I was a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to career, and the beginning was very challenging to land my first junior developer position. I'll never forget the guy who hired me commenting something along the lines of "it's unfortunate you didn't start earlier, you could've gone so much further", or something similar. He ended up being a great mentor, but that comment always bothered me and is the thing I remember most about him. Now several years later and I'm very happy where I'm at. And I've come to the realization, if I had gone directly into CS in college, there is a fairly good chance I may have gotten burned out by now and moved on to something completely different. So the "right on time" idea resonates with me, but YMMV.

onetimeusename 3y ago

At least when it comes to love and marriage I definitely think settling that in yours 20s is best, or being on course to settle it. I think dating becomes very hard after 30 and there are big generational gaps and I think the fertility industry is not a good solution. I think its sub-optimal trying to find a partner as you get older. Ideally, the numbers Stanford listed (married at 26...) would have been preferable to me at least. It might be good to figure out why people miss that and figure out how to improve it rather than counting on the last resort of fertility treatments in your 40s.

duderific 3y ago
> It might be good to figure out why people miss that In Western societies at least, often it is women working on their careers, which may take at least into their 30s before they've reached the desired level. It is a choice that these women make, so I don't think it can be "improved" unless different choices are taken.
neilv 3y ago
> At least when it comes to love and marriage I definitely think settling that in yours 20s is best, Careful to read it as "settling that" -- no one should feel like they're "settling", for something other than what they want. :) (This can involve changing your mind about what you want, though.)
- jprete 3y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but I think plenty of people do in fact need to "settle", because they have unrealistic expectations and are very unlikely to get what they want.
  - neilv 3y ago
    Will a relationship more likely be successful, if they're not still thinking of it as "settling" by the time that they commit?
    - deleted 3y ago

bradlys 3y ago

Neocon wsj writers decide that “waiting until you can afford to have kids when you’re old” is normal because they want you to slave away at your jobs all so that capitalists can accrue more and more. If bullshit like this becomes mainstream then they can justify extracting more and more out of you indefinitely until you die empty handed and completely unfulfilled. They’ll raise the retirement age, lower your benefits, and make sure you have no way to pass down any generational wealth. Forget your kids having grandma and grandpas! I’m on a plane across the country because my mother just died from a stroke at the age of 61. I’m 32. She’ll never see grandchildren from me (her only child) and she’ll never see what I amount to fully. There’ll be no reconciliation for the terrible childhood and whatnot. I figured maybe when I had kids that maybe things could be more fixed. It won’t happen now. My father will likely die soon because he doesn’t have a strong will to live on his own and is in much worse health than my mother. He should’ve died three years ago when he had a heart attack but he got very lucky that the ambulance came when it did. I would’ve had kids already but due to the insane market we’ve had going on in the USA - I couldn’t afford to start a family and had to divorce my ex wife due to financial issues. I’m an exceptionally well earning person - in the top 1%. But my wife wasn’t and so we couldn’t afford to start a family in the Bay Area and decided to move on. We didn’t want to be stuck with dealing with greedy landlords and no privacy. I hate articles like this because it tries to normalize what isn’t and should never be normal.

neon_electro 3y ago
I’m 31 now and lost my mother seven years ago. What you say resonates with me.
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
So sorry for your loss. I was roughly your age when I lost my father and had to travel across the world to attend his funeral. Your comment resonated with me so much that I'm pretty much done for today wrt to work, I can't think of anything else. Thank you for sharing.

modeless 3y ago

Everyone's talking about declining fertility but nobody's talking about declining energy. Raising children is hard work, at least if you want to do it all yourself and do a good job. I wish every day that my body was 20 years younger. And I wish my parents were 20 years younger too, they'd be a lot more able to provide support and enjoy their grandchildren. By the same token I'll be quite old when my kids have children, if I even live to see it.

georgeobama 3y ago

Money is money. Most of us on this site can easily secure sufficient shelter, food, and transportation. However love can be so fragile and hard to find. I could master a dozen fields before finding love.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

The same crap has been pushed in China for a while, well we have the US versions of this BS now.

happyjack 3y ago

This is a really interesting comment thread. I see everything from "leave Seattle move to Indianapolis" to Europe's economy, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, etc. a lot of fair and interesting comments from all walks of life. I recently read Vaclav Smil's book, "The rise and fall of manufacturing in America." With the fall of manufacturing in America, I think America gave up on the one social agreement that makes capitalism work. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and give 40 hours solid work a week to an employer, you can and should have the means to support a family and have a modest life. In my opinion, that's the only thing that keeps capitalism afloat if the top 2% keep to that agreement. We're entering a new era of Victorian living. I think it's hard to argue against that. Politics are swaying each and every way to divide and conquer the majority.