17 ms·

The great cousin decline

169 points by thm 3y ago

light_hue_1 3y ago
> Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.
- mzi 3y ago
  In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.
  - ginko 3y ago
    What does that even mean? I assume you're referring to the cost of kindergarten? That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
    - AndrewDucker 3y ago
      Not here (UK), where it costs over £1,000 per child per month for care.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
      - constantly 3y ago
        In America my friends pay $3,500 per child per month. The grass is always greener I suppose.
        white_dragon88 3y ago
        wtf on???
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        $3,500 per month must be 99th percentile daycare cost in the US. Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
        mynameisash 3y ago
        Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo. [0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-age-care-setting https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
        midasuni 3y ago
        Hopefully that’s the infant:teacher ratio. 4 teachers per infant seems a little extreme, and means massive underpaid adults!
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        If I was the adult, I would need a 4 adult to 1 infant ratio. But yes, thanks for the correction.
        wharvle 3y ago
        Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
    - sevagh 3y ago
      You have to pay that fee to bring the kid back from the hospital.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - holoduke 3y ago
    The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
    - seszett 3y ago
      Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands? It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case. That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing. It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
      - holoduke 3y ago
        After school care is also a form of daycare in the netherlands. Called BSO. It rougly the same price. Less hours, but higher hourly rate.
        seszett 3y ago
        I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
    - Balgair 3y ago
      Is that 3kE per week? or per year? Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
      - brewdad 3y ago
        No one in the US outside of the billionaire/ultra high millionaire class is paying $150,000 a year for child care.
  - AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
    That's absurdly cheap... I pay about $900/mo per child.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds. Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
    - toyg 3y ago
      At least, some of what was available before (abuse and incest) is typically not recreated by labor.
      - argiopetech 3y ago
        Physical and sexual abuse are not exclusive (or even nearly so) to family...
        toyg 3y ago
        But they are overwhelmingly more likely to happen in the family.
        argiopetech 3y ago
        Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken. I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
- js8 3y ago
  If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
    - igetspam 3y ago
      Wait a second... this is starting to sound familiar. I swear there are policies that are too into place but I just can't my finger on it. Hmmm... /s
    - rayiner 3y ago
      I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self. I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world. Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals. Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
- cmilton 3y ago
  Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Perhaps fathers could.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
      - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
        igetspam 3y ago
        What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
        VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
        igetspam 3y ago
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"
  - Ntrails 3y ago
    I'm going to quote from a recent FT article that I felt was pretty succinct https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f1301ab https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f130...: >[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
  - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
    > "is this all I'm going to be?" Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
    - igetspam 3y ago
      Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it? Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
      - argiopetech 3y ago
        Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature. Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one. I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population. I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
- dalore 3y ago
  Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places. It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
  - dudul 3y ago
    Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities? Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities. People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
      - angmarsbane 3y ago
        It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
        kristjansson 3y ago
        Wow, I’ve lived here for years (without kids) without knowing that. That’s LAUSD, or other parts of socal?
        3y ago
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  Can you break down the aspects of childcare that are financially crushing?
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Not OP but: Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children. Median income in my area is ~$40k per year. There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual. Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue. Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think. But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow. Like, you know the 80/20 rule? Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future. The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
      - Balgair 3y ago
        Nah, I disagree. From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance. (Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment) Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have. From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same. That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    >but the reverse is true There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.
  - anon291 3y ago
    alternatively, make grandparenting a thing again.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        And if they aren’t grandparents are working anyway.
      - anon291 3y ago
        There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Maybe grandparents don't want to raise kids any more and want to slack off in a life of leisure.
  - digging 3y ago
    Or increase childcare funding ???
    - titanomachy 3y ago
- chongli 3y ago
  Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury. No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)? When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
  - titanomachy 3y ago
    The benefits to the children could take many years to realize, but the benefits to parents would be immediate. Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Whatever parents think of kids themselves the reality is the costs are high and have been rising.
    - chongli 3y ago
      I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way. What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care! And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      > Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
- jongjong 3y ago
  The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.
vr46 3y ago
My dad was one of 13, my mother one of 5, I had a huge family growing up, but most of my uncles and aunts didn’t have children, so I had fewer cousins. But still 11-12. Still big. Fast forward to 2023 and nearly all the older generation are no longer with us, families are stretched across Canada, America, UK, Germany, India, and barely anyone knows anyone else any more. One cousin who I hadn’t seen for, shit, 31 years, surprised me by arriving in London from Canada one day with her daughter and texting me from a UK number to triply-confuse me. We had an absolutely awesome week, two only children reconnecting after so long, and junior got to meet - even if do say so myself - a very cool uncle who knew all the best places to go. So my mission for the last five or six years has been to try and connect all my cousins’ kids to my own, so they can hopefully maintain a casual connection and come up with their own relationship. Maybe before I die I can organize a big family get-together of just the kids hanging out.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Sounds awesome. I can validate that this would be worth the effort you put in to make that happen.
wintorez 3y ago
Not only Americans, I’m seeing this pattern everywhere in my age group peers. I’m mid-40 and in almost every gathering with friends and family, there are about 5 adults to each child. Most of the children have no siblings and no cousins.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Population growth across most of the world is over. India which had been used as an example of population growth for decades now has a fertility rate 2.05. And, China is well below Japan! Most people are going to be old for decades to come.
  - wintorez 3y ago
    How about Africa? Any projections?
    - acjacobson 3y ago
      Still growing and the main reason worldwide population continues to increase. That said it is projected to slow down over the next several generations like other areas.
      - wintorez 3y ago
        It's almost paradoxical, but it seems like as the quality of life increases, the reproduction rate decreases.
  - Yhippa 3y ago
    This is going to be a huge problem for society fairly soon and it's not something you can turn around in an instant.
DeathArrow 3y ago
https://archive.is/CKV7u https://archive.is/CKV7u
- ajdude 3y ago
  For those having issues , here is one that works with cloudflare dns: https://web.archive.org/web/20231219133912/https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-relationships-fertility-rate/676892/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231219133912/https://www.theat...
DeathArrow 3y ago
This reminds me of Cousin Vinny.
igetspam 3y ago
COVID led some of my family into being antivax and the ones who already were just went deeper and bought into QAnon. Ny partner is immunocompromised. Willfully making choices that are dangerous to the general population is where I had to draw the line. It's unlikely my kid will meet many of their cousins. I just can't trust their parents and the things they say are comic book level conspiracy. My story isn't unique. Geography isn't the only thing preventing interaction with extended family, some of it is the deterioration of family because the world has gone dumb.
- malablaster 3y ago
  > the world had gone dumb. Source?
  - igetspam 3y ago
    How many do you need? https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/anti-vaxxers-political-power-00116527 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/anti-vaxxers-politi...
    - hajile 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - jemmyw 3y ago
        What an ass. But here's a link to a Q&A on the DNA study https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/qa-covid-19-vaccine-study-gains-attention https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/qa-covid-19-vaccine...
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      Are you forgetting which site you're on? This is HN, which is a hotbed of anti-vax, QAnon, and various other crazy conspiracy theories. This shouldn't be a surprise: it's an American site, and most of the readers are American, and half the American population has become big believers of that stuff lately, so of course a sizeable fraction of the readers here are strong believers in such things.
WillAdams 3y ago
I have been trying to stay connected with a first cousin who recently had two children by sending her and her family books each year which I recalled having read and enjoyed and being formative (in a positive way) when I was their age.
spacebuffer 3y ago
I think my family has one of the biggest that cousin declines ever: my mother had 32 cousins, while I had only 1. I know that number for a fact because I've done my own genealogy. I guess the advantage is I have a huge number of second cousins that is one of the reasons I hope to have many children as I get older so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with.
- jimmyed 3y ago
  > so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with. That is a very weird reason to have lots of children, unless you were speaking in jest. If you do decide to have many children, I hope it'll be for more than the mirth of your nephews.
  - spacebuffer 3y ago
    Well there are obviously other reasons I want to have cousins, but that's indeed one of them. I think it's because I've experienced having not many cousins first-hand, even the one cousin I have is 10 years younger than me so I don't hang out with him much. Also my mom was the first of her cousins to get married and have a child (me) so I always felt like I was in a gray area when hanging out with her cousins because there was too little of an age gap between us for them to not take me seriously (and not treat me as a child) but also I wasn't old enough to connect with them and live through their family lore. few that was hard to write more fun context: The age gap between me and my mother's youngest cousin is only 3 years so I hope you can see how I am considered like the true youngest cousin between all the cousins.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    They said it was one of the reasons, not even one of the main ones
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    I don’t find this weird unless it’s really the only reason. Having more family seems like an obvious thing to value.
  - deleted 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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nonethewiser 3y ago
Simply a different, more humanist perspective on declining reproduction rates across much of the world. It’s really not news, just a different lens. And this particular symptom is not alleviated by immigration - if you import a bunch of people your existing population doesnt get more cousins.
rayiner 3y ago
This is one of the saddest things about American life. I still have intense memories of being surrounded by cousins, mostly living in the same city, as a small child in Bangladesh. My wife had the same experience growing up in Oregon. Very sad that my kids will never have the same experience.
- bricky101 3y ago
  I’m mixed race but have family from the other side of the border from where you are from, and I can’t stand my cousins. I feel incredibly happy not to be surrounded by my cousins. Brothers and sisters, like them or not, they are close family. Cousins for me are some sort of twilight zone where I feel nothing in common with them, don’t even like them, but have to be nice because they are “family”. I like the American way of treating cousins as essentially not real relatives. Be friends with them if you happen to get along, but otherwise they are just some random strangers
- martinky24 3y ago
  Alright, let's not get too hyperbolic. There are FAR more things sadder in American life than not having a bunch of cousins.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    I find the small families to be the saddest thing about America. It’s like extinction on the installment plan.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I have no idea why you are downvoted. My parents’ generation immigrated to the US and UK, and were generally not rich, not even middle class. We could not stay in hotels, but because of having big families, we got to vacation all over and save money on hotels because we would just sleep on the floor next to each other. That type of tight relationship is hard to form outside of family.
      - 3y ago
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Perhaps they should reframe as the end of the cousin bubble? People had many kids before and yet many died from disease, childbirth, accidents, war, etc. Inbreeding and limited resources also meant it wasn't a party for much of human existence. After antibiotics, before birth control, and before moving far away were practical, there was a glut for a few generations. Now things are correcting.
- pixl97 3y ago
  If you're talking pre-1890 or so, the people would still have had more cousins than the latest generations. The population was still going up at that time, just slowly. When looking at countries like Japan you're talking about rapid depopulation after the older generations die. Even in the US population growth is mostly caused by migrants within 2 generations.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Industrial farming is a relatively new invention. Yet it didn't immediately deliver equal rights, contraception, or education for women. Doubtful we'll roll back any of those, even if the future of antibiotics may be in doubt. And before industrialization population gains from agriculture were limited; albeit significantly more than the hunter-gatherers. Yet it was the that lifestyle which dominated most of hominids' existence. So I'd argue population is reaching a peak, and that's not a bad thing.
- jasonfarnon 3y ago
  your premise that contemporary family sizes are approximating those pre-antibiotics is easily falsifiable.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Families may have been larger and smaller in various centuries, though before widespread agriculture it was significantly lower than the post-antibiotics generations in the 20th century. Natives in North America for example were known to wait 4+ years between children because their nomadic lifestyle demanded they be able to walk before having another. Regardless, doubtful we'll go back to hunting-gathering or to women without equal rights, education, or contraception.
wnolens 3y ago
Cousins are a really great way to be around role models who are in a next phase of life. Siblings are usually too close in age (or younger), parents are many many steps ahead and experienced your current phase in a different world. But if you're entering high school it's useful to have a connection with people entering college, or getting their first job. That rarely happens outside of the family.
- mouth 3y ago
  It was an older cousin who introduced me to computers, and sparked my passion for technology.
- Retric 3y ago
  That’s a function of smaller families and parents delaying children until ~30+, one of my siblings was in collage when another was born. Sure that’s an unusually wide range today, but if you trace family trees you can find many examples of aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews.
- pictureofabear 3y ago
  In a non-dysfunctional family. All of my cousins are bums! My wife's cousins are awesome though, and so are my brother-in-law's.
  - jzb 3y ago
    I think they’re just called functional?
  - wnolens 3y ago
    You at least get to see what's out there, and how to do it wrong. Perhaps role model has too positive of a connotation to use here.
- andrepd 3y ago
  Role-models yes, for sure. But good role models? That's the tricky part :)
neilv 3y ago
The writer's recent articles are largely about romance, the article subheading includes "But the weirdest family role is a vital one.", followed by the photo of the boy paying attention to the girl the same age... So I was wondering whether this article was heading towards Les Cousins Dangereux.
- standardUser 3y ago
  "Is there new legislation on this now?" Arrested Development aside, I had a crush on a cousin as a little kid and as an adult, I would absolutely date and/or have sex with a cousin. I really don't see the issue as long as procreation is firmly off the table.
  - footy 3y ago
    This is interesting to me. Did you grow up seeing your cousins often? I saw most of my cousins at least once a week growing up, and even went to the same middle and high school as some of them—meaning I spent more time with them than I did my siblings. As an adult, the idea of being romantic with one of them is as off-putting as the idea of doing it with a sibling. I wonder how much of that is from growing up together.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      > Did you grow up seeing your cousins often? I did not! Only occasionally as a young child and a handful of times as an adult. That is probably key.
      - satvikpendem 3y ago
        > The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that states that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived with like siblings before the age of six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891) as one explanation for the incest taboo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
lordnacho 3y ago
Cousins are my greatest lens into human interaction. Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people relating to their cousins. Let's start with me. My paternal grandfather had nearly 20 kids with two different women. Those kids then got scattered all over the world, and thus the grandchildren as well. My other grandfather had five and adopted another, and the same thing happened to them, war spread them all over. So I have two cousin networks that are massive and spread all over. I'm able to compare things like the French and Danish education systems by getting a first-hand impression. I can ask a Bay Area doctor how his experience is, or a Toronto accountant. I can compare humor across the Atlantic. Growing up, I could see cousins starting to date and get married, having kids. The younger ones are still observing, but are young enough to give an insight into what kids are like nowadays. In terms of studying people, it's hard to get better access. The emotional angle from the article is right, too. Cousins occupy this nice middle between seeing you all the time like your siblings, and not having to care about you, like strangers. When your parents die, the cousins are sad. But they are also not falling apart and are able to help out. They know common stories like what your grandparents did, how your parents met, and so on. But you also don't have to do much to maintain this, like you might with certain friends. With a large enough network you don't even need to talk to any particular cousin to get all the stories about them, whichever cousin is passing through will tell you news from his part of the network and you give them yours. In terms of other people, what is most striking to me is where on the near-far scale different cultures seem to put the cousins. Some societies seem to see cousins as basically friends: a relationship that's nice if it's good but if things so sour, no big deal. Others will think of cousins as basically siblings who live in another house: your aunt and uncle can tell you off just like your parents and nobody bats an eye. It seems to be common that birth/wedding/death news goes to all cousins though, regardless of what distance your society places on the cousin relation, and regardless of whether things have soured.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  If any startups are in this field, I'd pay at least $100 / month to have a substantially better family than I have now
felixnm 3y ago
I have 84 first cousins - 44 on my Dad's side, 40 on my Mom's. I lived in the Philippines for 3.5 years with my Dad's extended family and got to know almost all my cousins on that side. It was a great time and all my cousins were amazing. Our Christmas celebrations were the best and I still miss them, 40+ years later.
- rayiner 3y ago
  Wow. I’ve got probably 20, all on my mom’s side because she’s one of 13. My dad’s parents weren’t keeping up lol.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I stopped counting at 50. My number is "significantly more than 50". I asked ChatGPT; it didn't know. Too many for ChatGPT to count. (My mom has a Brady Bunch family that combined two large Irish Catholic households; I count 13 on my dad's (Slovak) side).
    - dadrian 3y ago
      I have 3. For about 14 years, I had 1.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        COUSIN COUNT THREAD
        pvg 3y ago
        replace https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders with cousin count
        tptacek 3y ago
        Silence, low-cousin!
standardUser 3y ago
As someone with a very small family I sometimes lament the fact that friendships, no matter how significant or long-lasting, are not held in the same regard as technical familial relationships. Maybe this will change as the demographics continue to change, but I feel like we lacking the language to acknowledge it. I have several friends who have kids that refer to me as "uncle", which I love, but it still feels like the wrong label because we traditionally restrict special nouns like that to blood or legal relations.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Part of the problem with that is that in the modern world, we use the word "friend" too quickly, too easily, and continue to use it even after that person has demonstrated that they are not friends. If you have acquaintances that you call friends, quite subconsciously you'll have less regard for them than for family. And that might actually color how you'd regard true friends. I've only ever had a handful of friends in my entire half-century life. An exceptional person might have 8 or 10 or something like that. I doubt that most people have had any at all. The modern world isn't very good at cultivating real friendships.
  - anon291 3y ago
    Also friendship is way too atomized. My parents had friends we called aunt and uncle and the entire family was friends. It's not a relationship between individuals, but between families, like marriage.
  - c22 3y ago
    My cousins all died from meth and alcohol before any of them reached the age of fifty, but after bleeding my parents of significant sums of money. I hold my friends in much higher regard.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      So, your family held the cousins in such low regard that they self-medicated and fell off the edge of the world... somehow they're the ones that caused you to hold your friends in higher regard? You speak from bitterness that they've done you wrong, but did you ever do them right in the first place? Which of your friends would stick with you if things got tough? Which would let their lives go off the rails for a chance to put yours back on them? What norms would they flout to protect you, in other words, which of them could you call certain they'd help you get rid of the body? I'm guessing none.
Jun8 3y ago
On an interesting note, it’s been suggested that the medieval Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage was a major reason for the Great Divergence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_W...
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Interesting. Although, an opposite example would be Hindu cultures banning cousin marriages a very long time ago, but maintaining a relatively collectivist society until recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapinda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapinda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manusmriti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manusmriti
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
>American families are shrinking in general, but with cousins, that drop happens at a dramatic scale. Not sure why this is surprising. You have many more potential for cousins if mom or dad was one of six, than if they were one of two. If they're only children, there's no potential there at all. So as the fertility rate drops, cousin count drops as a power of that decrease.
decafninja 3y ago
I have about a dozen cousins, but only one in the US - and she is not nearby either. I basically grew up being strangers with them as a result. Obviously the means to reach out and connect are now available, but we’re still just too far apart. Plus now that we’re all grown up, mostly married, and some with kids, there’s less time for everything.
coldtea 3y ago
The "great cousin decline"? Hell, an inceasing number of people don't even care much for their parents, not to mention, according to polls, not even having a spouse or kids themselves later in life, or even a romantic partner. It's a general "connecting to another human being" decline.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  People are, generally, connecting fine. But forming a family is hella expensive and constraining, so that kind of entanglement is declining.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >People are, generally, connecting fine Are they? Because in the US for example, research, polls, and even the Surgeon General advisories, says people are connecting less than ever. And it's not like they're connecting, just without the marriage and kids part: they're not connecting, period. Of course some always are. Even the majority. But a huge number (not just something like 10%), reports not, and even reports (and is registered) as suffering mental health consequences from this.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      Of course they're suffering mental health consequences from loneliness and lack of connection. However, how does it compare to the past, when people suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out? Back in those day, "mental health" wasn't even a known phrase, and no one tracked this at all; people just put up with the misery. As a divorced person, I'll say from firsthand experience that being single can be very lonely at times, but it's 100 times better than being in an unhappy relationship with the wrong person. And my marriage wasn't even that bad, objectively speaking; I can only imagine the misery some married people have put up with.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        I get your angle, and hope you're in a happy place now. Though I'm not saying people are worse off today in comparison to the fifties or some past where people "suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out" and "mental health" wasn't a thing. I'm saying that within recent decades, and even within the current decade (not some past where they "couldn't get out"), the trends are worsening. It's no great consolation being "better than the 50s or the 80s" when you're worse than the 00s and 10s and getting worser year by year. It's also not people being alone because they're getting out of abusive relationships more. It's increasingly that people don't even get into a relationship to begin with. Heck, the statistics show that young people (18-30) even have way less sex. And they're not happy about it, as if they made a winning choice: they're reporting being more depressed and bitter.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
This week we pulled up the van to visit cousins and I got their attention flashing the brights. Suddenly they were all jumping and screaming on the couch by the christmas tree. Cousins are fun!!
jerrysievert 3y ago
I had a huge amount of cousins on my mom's side, and a small amount on my dad's. my siblings' kids had 2 cousins each, and I doubt any of them will have kids at this point - if they do it will be a dimisishing return. no real shock at this point: as the need for child workers has decreased, so has the birthrate.
exclusiv 3y ago
I'm closer in age to one of my cousins and I'm closer to him than my own brother. Some of my fondest memories are with cousins. And for many, cousins serve as drop in brothers/sisters. It's sad especially for only children. My kids live 2 doors from 3 of their cousins. We architected it because of all the benefits. It's good for the kids and for my wife and her sis. It's awesome. Both families always have someone to count on at any time when needed.
hydrogen7800 3y ago
I'll add my anecdote here. The framing at the beginning of this article is very interesting, and brought up my own relationship with my cousins. >Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family. This especially crystallized my thoughts. My aunt had 5 kids, and their family experienced a major traumatic event when I was too young to understand. They were all older than me, and the ripple effects of that event are still occurring ~ 40 years later. They all indeed had a completely different upbringing and class background than I. For a stretch of time into my adulthood it was hard to be around them, and we drifted apart, with apathy filling the space. We would avoid or ignore invitations and justify it by not wanting to experience the generally chaotic and haphazard experience of being in their company. Largely by the efforts of one persistent sibling, we finally attended one family event with low expectations. I left that gathering with a completely revised perspective, and a heaping pile of shame. We hit it off right away, as if no time had passed, with the deep rooted familiarity of growing up together, with the same patriarchal/matriarchal role models and propagated personality characteristics. My thoughts while leaving that night were "these are my people". They implicitly understand. Their roughness is endearing, with absolutely no pretension whatsoever. Being older than me, they knew my recently deceased father for longer than I had, and it was very therapeutic to talk about him with people who knew him so deeply. Now I'll actually read the rest of the article.
Projectiboga 3y ago
Both my parents were only children, their parents only had siblings for two out of 4. One of my Mom's second cousin was a retired NYPD cop from Ireland who took the time tracing the family tree. He went from a letter of condolence from my grandfather to his mom and tracked down my Mom. But those two branches being large we didn't click with any of them but him. Cool for my mom and fun to meet distant relatives. Thanks for jogging my memory, I should contact him and see who has kids around my kid's age (15) just to see. My wife, an only child too, is close with her second cousins and that is the extended family for us.

169 points by thm 3y ago

> Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.

mzi 3y ago
In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.
- ginko 3y ago
  What does that even mean? I assume you're referring to the cost of kindergarten? That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    Not here (UK), where it costs over £1,000 per child per month for care.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
    - constantly 3y ago
      In America my friends pay $3,500 per child per month. The grass is always greener I suppose.
      - white_dragon88 3y ago
        wtf on???
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        $3,500 per month must be 99th percentile daycare cost in the US. Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
        mynameisash 3y ago
        Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo. [0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-age-care-setting https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
        midasuni 3y ago
        Hopefully that’s the infant:teacher ratio. 4 teachers per infant seems a little extreme, and means massive underpaid adults!
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        If I was the adult, I would need a 4 adult to 1 infant ratio. But yes, thanks for the correction.
      - wharvle 3y ago
        Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
  - sevagh 3y ago
    You have to pay that fee to bring the kid back from the hospital.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- holoduke 3y ago
  The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
  - seszett 3y ago
    Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands? It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case. That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing. It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
    - holoduke 3y ago
      After school care is also a form of daycare in the netherlands. Called BSO. It rougly the same price. Less hours, but higher hourly rate.
      - seszett 3y ago
        I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Is that 3kE per week? or per year? Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
    - brewdad 3y ago
      No one in the US outside of the billionaire/ultra high millionaire class is paying $150,000 a year for child care.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  That's absurdly cheap... I pay about $900/mo per child.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds. Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
  - toyg 3y ago
    At least, some of what was available before (abuse and incest) is typically not recreated by labor.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      Physical and sexual abuse are not exclusive (or even nearly so) to family...
      - toyg 3y ago
        But they are overwhelmingly more likely to happen in the family.
        argiopetech 3y ago
        Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken. I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
js8 3y ago
If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Wait a second... this is starting to sound familiar. I swear there are policies that are too into place but I just can't my finger on it. Hmmm... /s
  - rayiner 3y ago
    I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self. I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world. Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals. Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
cmilton 3y ago
Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.
- igetspam 3y ago
  Perhaps fathers could.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
    - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
      >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
      - igetspam 3y ago
        What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
        VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
        igetspam 3y ago
shortrounddev2 3y ago
It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"
- Ntrails 3y ago
  I'm going to quote from a recent FT article that I felt was pretty succinct https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f1301ab https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f130...: >[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  > "is this all I'm going to be?" Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it? Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature. Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one. I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population. I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
dalore 3y ago
Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places. It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
- dudul 3y ago
  Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities? Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities. People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
    - angmarsbane 3y ago
      It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
      - kristjansson 3y ago
        Wow, I’ve lived here for years (without kids) without knowing that. That’s LAUSD, or other parts of socal?
        3y ago
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Can you break down the aspects of childcare that are financially crushing?
- Balgair 3y ago
  Not OP but: Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children. Median income in my area is ~$40k per year. There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual. Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue. Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think. But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow. Like, you know the 80/20 rule? Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future. The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
    - Balgair 3y ago
      Nah, I disagree. From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance. (Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment) Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have. From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same. That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  >but the reverse is true There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.
- anon291 3y ago
  alternatively, make grandparenting a thing again.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      And if they aren’t grandparents are working anyway.
    - anon291 3y ago
      There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Maybe grandparents don't want to raise kids any more and want to slack off in a life of leisure.
- digging 3y ago
  Or increase childcare funding ???
  - titanomachy 3y ago
chongli 3y ago
Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury. No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)? When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  The benefits to the children could take many years to realize, but the benefits to parents would be immediate. Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Whatever parents think of kids themselves the reality is the costs are high and have been rising.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way. What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care! And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    > Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
jongjong 3y ago
The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.

vr46 3y ago

My dad was one of 13, my mother one of 5, I had a huge family growing up, but most of my uncles and aunts didn’t have children, so I had fewer cousins. But still 11-12. Still big. Fast forward to 2023 and nearly all the older generation are no longer with us, families are stretched across Canada, America, UK, Germany, India, and barely anyone knows anyone else any more. One cousin who I hadn’t seen for, shit, 31 years, surprised me by arriving in London from Canada one day with her daughter and texting me from a UK number to triply-confuse me. We had an absolutely awesome week, two only children reconnecting after so long, and junior got to meet - even if do say so myself - a very cool uncle who knew all the best places to go. So my mission for the last five or six years has been to try and connect all my cousins’ kids to my own, so they can hopefully maintain a casual connection and come up with their own relationship. Maybe before I die I can organize a big family get-together of just the kids hanging out.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Sounds awesome. I can validate that this would be worth the effort you put in to make that happen.

wintorez 3y ago

Not only Americans, I’m seeing this pattern everywhere in my age group peers. I’m mid-40 and in almost every gathering with friends and family, there are about 5 adults to each child. Most of the children have no siblings and no cousins.

pixl97 3y ago
Population growth across most of the world is over. India which had been used as an example of population growth for decades now has a fertility rate 2.05. And, China is well below Japan! Most people are going to be old for decades to come.
- wintorez 3y ago
  How about Africa? Any projections?
  - acjacobson 3y ago
    Still growing and the main reason worldwide population continues to increase. That said it is projected to slow down over the next several generations like other areas.
    - wintorez 3y ago
      It's almost paradoxical, but it seems like as the quality of life increases, the reproduction rate decreases.
- Yhippa 3y ago
  This is going to be a huge problem for society fairly soon and it's not something you can turn around in an instant.

DeathArrow 3y ago

https://archive.is/CKV7u https://archive.is/CKV7u

ajdude 3y ago
For those having issues , here is one that works with cloudflare dns: https://web.archive.org/web/20231219133912/https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-relationships-fertility-rate/676892/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231219133912/https://www.theat...

DeathArrow 3y ago

This reminds me of Cousin Vinny.

igetspam 3y ago

COVID led some of my family into being antivax and the ones who already were just went deeper and bought into QAnon. Ny partner is immunocompromised. Willfully making choices that are dangerous to the general population is where I had to draw the line. It's unlikely my kid will meet many of their cousins. I just can't trust their parents and the things they say are comic book level conspiracy. My story isn't unique. Geography isn't the only thing preventing interaction with extended family, some of it is the deterioration of family because the world has gone dumb.

malablaster 3y ago
> the world had gone dumb. Source?
- igetspam 3y ago
  How many do you need? https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/anti-vaxxers-political-power-00116527 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/24/anti-vaxxers-politi...
  - hajile 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      What an ass. But here's a link to a Q&A on the DNA study https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/qa-covid-19-vaccine-study-gains-attention https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/qa-covid-19-vaccine...
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Are you forgetting which site you're on? This is HN, which is a hotbed of anti-vax, QAnon, and various other crazy conspiracy theories. This shouldn't be a surprise: it's an American site, and most of the readers are American, and half the American population has become big believers of that stuff lately, so of course a sizeable fraction of the readers here are strong believers in such things.

WillAdams 3y ago

I have been trying to stay connected with a first cousin who recently had two children by sending her and her family books each year which I recalled having read and enjoyed and being formative (in a positive way) when I was their age.

spacebuffer 3y ago

I think my family has one of the biggest that cousin declines ever: my mother had 32 cousins, while I had only 1. I know that number for a fact because I've done my own genealogy. I guess the advantage is I have a huge number of second cousins that is one of the reasons I hope to have many children as I get older so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with.

jimmyed 3y ago
> so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with. That is a very weird reason to have lots of children, unless you were speaking in jest. If you do decide to have many children, I hope it'll be for more than the mirth of your nephews.
- spacebuffer 3y ago
  Well there are obviously other reasons I want to have cousins, but that's indeed one of them. I think it's because I've experienced having not many cousins first-hand, even the one cousin I have is 10 years younger than me so I don't hang out with him much. Also my mom was the first of her cousins to get married and have a child (me) so I always felt like I was in a gray area when hanging out with her cousins because there was too little of an age gap between us for them to not take me seriously (and not treat me as a child) but also I wasn't old enough to connect with them and live through their family lore. few that was hard to write more fun context: The age gap between me and my mother's youngest cousin is only 3 years so I hope you can see how I am considered like the true youngest cousin between all the cousins.
- lukas099 3y ago
  They said it was one of the reasons, not even one of the main ones
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  I don’t find this weird unless it’s really the only reason. Having more family seems like an obvious thing to value.
- deleted 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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nonethewiser 3y ago

Simply a different, more humanist perspective on declining reproduction rates across much of the world. It’s really not news, just a different lens. And this particular symptom is not alleviated by immigration - if you import a bunch of people your existing population doesnt get more cousins.

rayiner 3y ago

This is one of the saddest things about American life. I still have intense memories of being surrounded by cousins, mostly living in the same city, as a small child in Bangladesh. My wife had the same experience growing up in Oregon. Very sad that my kids will never have the same experience.

bricky101 3y ago
I’m mixed race but have family from the other side of the border from where you are from, and I can’t stand my cousins. I feel incredibly happy not to be surrounded by my cousins. Brothers and sisters, like them or not, they are close family. Cousins for me are some sort of twilight zone where I feel nothing in common with them, don’t even like them, but have to be nice because they are “family”. I like the American way of treating cousins as essentially not real relatives. Be friends with them if you happen to get along, but otherwise they are just some random strangers
martinky24 3y ago
Alright, let's not get too hyperbolic. There are FAR more things sadder in American life than not having a bunch of cousins.
- rayiner 3y ago
  I find the small families to be the saddest thing about America. It’s like extinction on the installment plan.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I have no idea why you are downvoted. My parents’ generation immigrated to the US and UK, and were generally not rich, not even middle class. We could not stay in hotels, but because of having big families, we got to vacation all over and save money on hotels because we would just sleep on the floor next to each other. That type of tight relationship is hard to form outside of family.
    - 3y ago

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Perhaps they should reframe as the end of the cousin bubble? People had many kids before and yet many died from disease, childbirth, accidents, war, etc. Inbreeding and limited resources also meant it wasn't a party for much of human existence. After antibiotics, before birth control, and before moving far away were practical, there was a glut for a few generations. Now things are correcting.

pixl97 3y ago
If you're talking pre-1890 or so, the people would still have had more cousins than the latest generations. The population was still going up at that time, just slowly. When looking at countries like Japan you're talking about rapid depopulation after the older generations die. Even in the US population growth is mostly caused by migrants within 2 generations.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Industrial farming is a relatively new invention. Yet it didn't immediately deliver equal rights, contraception, or education for women. Doubtful we'll roll back any of those, even if the future of antibiotics may be in doubt. And before industrialization population gains from agriculture were limited; albeit significantly more than the hunter-gatherers. Yet it was the that lifestyle which dominated most of hominids' existence. So I'd argue population is reaching a peak, and that's not a bad thing.
jasonfarnon 3y ago
your premise that contemporary family sizes are approximating those pre-antibiotics is easily falsifiable.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Families may have been larger and smaller in various centuries, though before widespread agriculture it was significantly lower than the post-antibiotics generations in the 20th century. Natives in North America for example were known to wait 4+ years between children because their nomadic lifestyle demanded they be able to walk before having another. Regardless, doubtful we'll go back to hunting-gathering or to women without equal rights, education, or contraception.

wnolens 3y ago

Cousins are a really great way to be around role models who are in a next phase of life. Siblings are usually too close in age (or younger), parents are many many steps ahead and experienced your current phase in a different world. But if you're entering high school it's useful to have a connection with people entering college, or getting their first job. That rarely happens outside of the family.

mouth 3y ago
It was an older cousin who introduced me to computers, and sparked my passion for technology.
Retric 3y ago
That’s a function of smaller families and parents delaying children until ~30+, one of my siblings was in collage when another was born. Sure that’s an unusually wide range today, but if you trace family trees you can find many examples of aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews.
pictureofabear 3y ago
In a non-dysfunctional family. All of my cousins are bums! My wife's cousins are awesome though, and so are my brother-in-law's.
- jzb 3y ago
  I think they’re just called functional?
- wnolens 3y ago
  You at least get to see what's out there, and how to do it wrong. Perhaps role model has too positive of a connotation to use here.
andrepd 3y ago
Role-models yes, for sure. But good role models? That's the tricky part :)

neilv 3y ago

The writer's recent articles are largely about romance, the article subheading includes "But the weirdest family role is a vital one.", followed by the photo of the boy paying attention to the girl the same age... So I was wondering whether this article was heading towards Les Cousins Dangereux.

standardUser 3y ago
"Is there new legislation on this now?" Arrested Development aside, I had a crush on a cousin as a little kid and as an adult, I would absolutely date and/or have sex with a cousin. I really don't see the issue as long as procreation is firmly off the table.
- footy 3y ago
  This is interesting to me. Did you grow up seeing your cousins often? I saw most of my cousins at least once a week growing up, and even went to the same middle and high school as some of them—meaning I spent more time with them than I did my siblings. As an adult, the idea of being romantic with one of them is as off-putting as the idea of doing it with a sibling. I wonder how much of that is from growing up together.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    > Did you grow up seeing your cousins often? I did not! Only occasionally as a young child and a handful of times as an adult. That is probably key.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      > The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that states that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived with like siblings before the age of six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891) as one explanation for the incest taboo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

lordnacho 3y ago

Cousins are my greatest lens into human interaction. Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people relating to their cousins. Let's start with me. My paternal grandfather had nearly 20 kids with two different women. Those kids then got scattered all over the world, and thus the grandchildren as well. My other grandfather had five and adopted another, and the same thing happened to them, war spread them all over. So I have two cousin networks that are massive and spread all over. I'm able to compare things like the French and Danish education systems by getting a first-hand impression. I can ask a Bay Area doctor how his experience is, or a Toronto accountant. I can compare humor across the Atlantic. Growing up, I could see cousins starting to date and get married, having kids. The younger ones are still observing, but are young enough to give an insight into what kids are like nowadays. In terms of studying people, it's hard to get better access. The emotional angle from the article is right, too. Cousins occupy this nice middle between seeing you all the time like your siblings, and not having to care about you, like strangers. When your parents die, the cousins are sad. But they are also not falling apart and are able to help out. They know common stories like what your grandparents did, how your parents met, and so on. But you also don't have to do much to maintain this, like you might with certain friends. With a large enough network you don't even need to talk to any particular cousin to get all the stories about them, whichever cousin is passing through will tell you news from his part of the network and you give them yours. In terms of other people, what is most striking to me is where on the near-far scale different cultures seem to put the cousins. Some societies seem to see cousins as basically friends: a relationship that's nice if it's good but if things so sour, no big deal. Others will think of cousins as basically siblings who live in another house: your aunt and uncle can tell you off just like your parents and nobody bats an eye. It seems to be common that birth/wedding/death news goes to all cousins though, regardless of what distance your society places on the cousin relation, and regardless of whether things have soured.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
If any startups are in this field, I'd pay at least $100 / month to have a substantially better family than I have now

felixnm 3y ago

I have 84 first cousins - 44 on my Dad's side, 40 on my Mom's. I lived in the Philippines for 3.5 years with my Dad's extended family and got to know almost all my cousins on that side. It was a great time and all my cousins were amazing. Our Christmas celebrations were the best and I still miss them, 40+ years later.

rayiner 3y ago
Wow. I’ve got probably 20, all on my mom’s side because she’s one of 13. My dad’s parents weren’t keeping up lol.
- tptacek 3y ago
  I stopped counting at 50. My number is "significantly more than 50". I asked ChatGPT; it didn't know. Too many for ChatGPT to count. (My mom has a Brady Bunch family that combined two large Irish Catholic households; I count 13 on my dad's (Slovak) side).
  - dadrian 3y ago
    I have 3. For about 14 years, I had 1.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      COUSIN COUNT THREAD
      - pvg 3y ago
        replace https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders with cousin count
        tptacek 3y ago
        Silence, low-cousin!

standardUser 3y ago

As someone with a very small family I sometimes lament the fact that friendships, no matter how significant or long-lasting, are not held in the same regard as technical familial relationships. Maybe this will change as the demographics continue to change, but I feel like we lacking the language to acknowledge it. I have several friends who have kids that refer to me as "uncle", which I love, but it still feels like the wrong label because we traditionally restrict special nouns like that to blood or legal relations.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Part of the problem with that is that in the modern world, we use the word "friend" too quickly, too easily, and continue to use it even after that person has demonstrated that they are not friends. If you have acquaintances that you call friends, quite subconsciously you'll have less regard for them than for family. And that might actually color how you'd regard true friends. I've only ever had a handful of friends in my entire half-century life. An exceptional person might have 8 or 10 or something like that. I doubt that most people have had any at all. The modern world isn't very good at cultivating real friendships.
- anon291 3y ago
  Also friendship is way too atomized. My parents had friends we called aunt and uncle and the entire family was friends. It's not a relationship between individuals, but between families, like marriage.
- c22 3y ago
  My cousins all died from meth and alcohol before any of them reached the age of fifty, but after bleeding my parents of significant sums of money. I hold my friends in much higher regard.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    So, your family held the cousins in such low regard that they self-medicated and fell off the edge of the world... somehow they're the ones that caused you to hold your friends in higher regard? You speak from bitterness that they've done you wrong, but did you ever do them right in the first place? Which of your friends would stick with you if things got tough? Which would let their lives go off the rails for a chance to put yours back on them? What norms would they flout to protect you, in other words, which of them could you call certain they'd help you get rid of the body? I'm guessing none.

Jun8 3y ago

On an interesting note, it’s been suggested that the medieval Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage was a major reason for the Great Divergence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_W...

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Interesting. Although, an opposite example would be Hindu cultures banning cousin marriages a very long time ago, but maintaining a relatively collectivist society until recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapinda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapinda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manusmriti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manusmriti

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

>American families are shrinking in general, but with cousins, that drop happens at a dramatic scale. Not sure why this is surprising. You have many more potential for cousins if mom or dad was one of six, than if they were one of two. If they're only children, there's no potential there at all. So as the fertility rate drops, cousin count drops as a power of that decrease.

decafninja 3y ago

I have about a dozen cousins, but only one in the US - and she is not nearby either. I basically grew up being strangers with them as a result. Obviously the means to reach out and connect are now available, but we’re still just too far apart. Plus now that we’re all grown up, mostly married, and some with kids, there’s less time for everything.

coldtea 3y ago

The "great cousin decline"? Hell, an inceasing number of people don't even care much for their parents, not to mention, according to polls, not even having a spouse or kids themselves later in life, or even a romantic partner. It's a general "connecting to another human being" decline.

shadowgovt 3y ago
People are, generally, connecting fine. But forming a family is hella expensive and constraining, so that kind of entanglement is declining.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >People are, generally, connecting fine Are they? Because in the US for example, research, polls, and even the Surgeon General advisories, says people are connecting less than ever. And it's not like they're connecting, just without the marriage and kids part: they're not connecting, period. Of course some always are. Even the majority. But a huge number (not just something like 10%), reports not, and even reports (and is registered) as suffering mental health consequences from this.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Of course they're suffering mental health consequences from loneliness and lack of connection. However, how does it compare to the past, when people suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out? Back in those day, "mental health" wasn't even a known phrase, and no one tracked this at all; people just put up with the misery. As a divorced person, I'll say from firsthand experience that being single can be very lonely at times, but it's 100 times better than being in an unhappy relationship with the wrong person. And my marriage wasn't even that bad, objectively speaking; I can only imagine the misery some married people have put up with.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      I get your angle, and hope you're in a happy place now. Though I'm not saying people are worse off today in comparison to the fifties or some past where people "suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out" and "mental health" wasn't a thing. I'm saying that within recent decades, and even within the current decade (not some past where they "couldn't get out"), the trends are worsening. It's no great consolation being "better than the 50s or the 80s" when you're worse than the 00s and 10s and getting worser year by year. It's also not people being alone because they're getting out of abusive relationships more. It's increasingly that people don't even get into a relationship to begin with. Heck, the statistics show that young people (18-30) even have way less sex. And they're not happy about it, as if they made a winning choice: they're reporting being more depressed and bitter.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

This week we pulled up the van to visit cousins and I got their attention flashing the brights. Suddenly they were all jumping and screaming on the couch by the christmas tree. Cousins are fun!!

jerrysievert 3y ago

I had a huge amount of cousins on my mom's side, and a small amount on my dad's. my siblings' kids had 2 cousins each, and I doubt any of them will have kids at this point - if they do it will be a dimisishing return. no real shock at this point: as the need for child workers has decreased, so has the birthrate.

exclusiv 3y ago

I'm closer in age to one of my cousins and I'm closer to him than my own brother. Some of my fondest memories are with cousins. And for many, cousins serve as drop in brothers/sisters. It's sad especially for only children. My kids live 2 doors from 3 of their cousins. We architected it because of all the benefits. It's good for the kids and for my wife and her sis. It's awesome. Both families always have someone to count on at any time when needed.

hydrogen7800 3y ago

I'll add my anecdote here. The framing at the beginning of this article is very interesting, and brought up my own relationship with my cousins. >Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family. This especially crystallized my thoughts. My aunt had 5 kids, and their family experienced a major traumatic event when I was too young to understand. They were all older than me, and the ripple effects of that event are still occurring ~ 40 years later. They all indeed had a completely different upbringing and class background than I. For a stretch of time into my adulthood it was hard to be around them, and we drifted apart, with apathy filling the space. We would avoid or ignore invitations and justify it by not wanting to experience the generally chaotic and haphazard experience of being in their company. Largely by the efforts of one persistent sibling, we finally attended one family event with low expectations. I left that gathering with a completely revised perspective, and a heaping pile of shame. We hit it off right away, as if no time had passed, with the deep rooted familiarity of growing up together, with the same patriarchal/matriarchal role models and propagated personality characteristics. My thoughts while leaving that night were "these are my people". They implicitly understand. Their roughness is endearing, with absolutely no pretension whatsoever. Being older than me, they knew my recently deceased father for longer than I had, and it was very therapeutic to talk about him with people who knew him so deeply. Now I'll actually read the rest of the article.

Projectiboga 3y ago

Both my parents were only children, their parents only had siblings for two out of 4. One of my Mom's second cousin was a retired NYPD cop from Ireland who took the time tracing the family tree. He went from a letter of condolence from my grandfather to his mom and tracked down my Mom. But those two branches being large we didn't click with any of them but him. Cool for my mom and fun to meet distant relatives. Thanks for jogging my memory, I should contact him and see who has kids around my kid's age (15) just to see. My wife, an only child too, is close with her second cousins and that is the extended family for us.