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It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did. An out
by beaned 3y ago
It isn't a more difficult undertaking. It was never easy, we've just been raised softly and do not value children the same way previous generations did.
An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.
- dalyons 3y agoYes, nevermind the most expensive housing, education and healthcare ever, even in inflation adjusted terms. No it’s the children who are wrong. you might look at the birth rates in china or almost any other Asian country, and see how your vague rant holds up.
- haimez 3y agoLet’s be a little charitable here- having and raising children has been a much, much more dangerous proposition health wise even at your parents generation to say nothing of your grandparents generation.
- dalyons 3y agoThere’s not a lot to be charitable about in the parent comment. Some poorly researched race replacement bs? You personally are right, it has never been safer health wise to have children. It has never been more expensive either, win some, lose some.
- ekianjo 3y agomore expensive than when? people had nothing 150 years ago and still had kids, mind you
- dalyons 3y agoYes they, and especially women, had absolutely no choice due to lack of birth control and various repressions. A relevant and useful comparison.
- vidarh 3y agoExpensive relative to expectations. Not in terms of what most people could provide. That's not bad. It's fine that people expect more and want to be able to provide more before having children (and I do agree the commenter who argued this is somehow confined to the Western world is way out there). But we need to understand that across most of the developed world - there will be exceptions in pockets here and there - it is not the ability to afford children that has dropped, but that we're not willing to give up what we have to have children at a living standard that was considered good before. E.g. when I grew up we always had food, but the food we had was dictated by cost in a way I never think about, and wouldn't want to deal with. We lived in less space, and I want more space, not less. Our living standard when I was a kid was fine; far above average for most of the world, about average for where I grew up. But if what it took to have more kids was to go back to that, I wouldn't. The commenter above can call that soft all they want - I don't feel bad for wanting to enjoy life more than I want more children (I have one son; I might well have another child, but because I'm at a stage where my girlfriend and I can afford it without sacrificing our standard of living and that does place me in a privileged position)
- Aeolun 3y agoI’m fairly certain this is just misaligned expectations. You can absolutely live in a 30sqm (or less) space with 5 children, raising them on plain rice, and send them to whatever public school you can get for free. And they’d very likely still have a better life than just 100 years ago. It’s just that nobody wants to do so because the standards are so much higher.
- em-bee 3y agoi agree with this. in a world where everyone (except a very few) has the same kind of life, it all just seems normal so you would not consider changing that. but as some people have less kids, more and more people learn from that, so the idea spreads (as does the education around how to avoid having kids).
- somenameforme 3y agoIn the past, if you could not afford to feed your family, you could literally starve to death. And people saved money by doing things like crafting clothes out of feed sacks. [1] It became common enough that companies would start selling their feed in sacks with floral designs, specifically with the intent of then being reused as clothing. And that's just one among a vast array of lifestyle differences. Now a days the worst case scenario is that you end up on government assistance and have a less pleasant life. As for Asia, don't make the mistake of conflating Asia with just China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Asia's big, and those places are outliers in terms of fertility, with China's issues being entirely self inflicted. The average fertility rate across Asia is 2.3 [2], which is not great - but at least sustainable. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress [2] - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c416afed-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/c416afed-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c416afed-en/index.html?i...
- dalyons 3y ago2019 data is fairly out of date. 2023 shows India is below replacement now (2.1 and dropping). china drastically so (1.2 and dropping). Those are the biggest populations by a large margin. Projections for the region show continued declines, not sustainable at all.
- Rapzid 3y agoThat would have aged like milk if you'd said it when the stats were fresh. The point here being the rate is actively crashing pretty much globally. The outliers would be anywhere it's not.
- DharmaPolice 3y agoFirst generation immigrants (in Europe) have higher birth rates than second generation immigrants despite being poorer. It's not just about costs - it's about cultural expectations.
- smallmancontrov 3y ago> Only in the Western first world is this now normal It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman: 1.64 USA 1.34 Japan 1.28 China 0.84 Korea > we've just been raised softly and do not value children Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reaping all of the benefits no longer functions. We have two paths: dust off the shitty exploitative playbook of yesterday, or build a new playbook for tomorrow.
- beaned 3y agoI will admit that I was a bit off-the-cuff in terms of the Western aspect of my comment. There are lots of factors, of course, and the trend isn't limited to only the west. Though it has certainly become a more normal trend in developed and developing countries than those with a higher level of poverty and poor. I still contend however that it has never been easy. My grandparents had four children starting at age 20. My grandfather's first job was sweeping floors in a factory at age 13, making $0.30 an hour. When he asked for a raise, he was fired. He said he didn't have two nickels to rub between his fingers. His father before him went into World War 1 at 15 years old. And his father (my great-great grandfather) falsely signed the documents affirming that he was 18 years old, to allow his own 15 year old son to go to war. They struggled, but didn't complain. Some part of it is cultural expectation, and that has changed greatly over time. In spite of all odds my grandparents raised four fairly middle class children in these circumstances, but had a good few decades of strife. Whether or not they would create a family and procreate was taken for granted. It was assumed, at their own economic expense. But long-term family wise, today my grandfather has a tree of descendants who love him. I think today we are more conscious of the economic equation. We ask whether or not we can afford to provide for children, rather than letting them exist and then asking how we can provide for them. There is an aspect of this that I appreciate, but I worry that it's mixed with some amount of narcissism. Though I am an atheist, there is some unreason to our existence in the first place, and there is hope in the continuance of ourselves that we should value beyond economics. There is a romance and some type of spiritual value in being able to put aside the cost-benefit analysis and simply bear new life that is part you, to have and to hold, to love, teach, and reciprocally learn from. We have so much bounty today that the idea of "sacrificing" ourselves for something that only has potential value is an alien concept. As our material wealth has increased, and as our understanding of personal economy has evolved, I think we've lost a bit of our primal, but beautiful, nature that wants ourselves to persist at a biological, cosmic level. You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years. Can you believe that? Every time I consider that, I think of my parents. And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me? I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and, I will confess that I got a little tipsy for the super bowl. Don't judge me too harshly. But life is beautiful, and beauty is always difficult to sustain. We do it because beauty contains a truth and a promise for the future. And I think that's something we need to put effort into re-evaluating, and re-valuing, in our current world. One line of inquiry might be why there is a correlation between bounty and the general wealth of an economy, and the fertility rate. Many parts of the world that are poorer are more fertile, and reproduce more unquestionably. Korea is rich and the rate is 0.84. In the Congo the rate is 6.21. It is not about economics. And if you counter that it is about poor education or care, I don't believe that's the reason either. It's culture, and values. Paul Revere had 15 children. 5 of them died young, and he still had 10. He had a horse and a rifle and a small wooden house you can still tour in Boston. Today we have DINKs, and people who are in what is considered to be the low-income range with multiple rooms in big cities, an education, and combustion-engine vehicles who say it's too expensive to have children. Maybe your tastes are too expensive. Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself. One of the other comments said I ranted so I thought I'd actually provide one. Sorry HN, I hope I made some sense here.
- vidarh 3y agoSub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where the fertility rate is still over replacement (~2.1 children per woman), and it's rapidly dropping there too. The first African country has dropped below replacement (Mauritius), with 10 more (of 55) having dropped below 3 already as of 2020. China is seeing a population decline not caused by famine for the first time in modern history. India's fertility rate is at or below replacement at this point, and India is a couple of decades from population contraction unless they increase immigration. Having 3 children at a young age is an outlier in the vast majority of the world at this point.
- somenameforme 3y agoScroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates. And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9. The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5). For those who don't understand why 1.5 is so much worse than 1.9, it's because fertility is an exponential system. Every generation's (~20 years) size is (fertility_rate / 2) times as large as the one prior that gave birth to them. So after 5 generations (~1 century), a fertility rate of 1.9 would see the next generation's size go from 100 to 77 (100 * (1.9/2)^5). A fertility rate of 1.5 would go from 100 to 23. South Korea, at 0.78, would go from 100 to 0 - extinct, in a century. And most people, across the world, do have children at what you'd call "young" ages. Female fertility rates start to decline rapidly as they age, obviously hitting zero at menopause which tends to happen in their 40s. Even when successful, an older parent results faces exponentially increased odds of seeing a variety of issues with the child, such as Down Syndrome. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
- vidarh 3y ago> Scroll down the World Bank's fertility numbers on this page [1] to get to data by region. You can add the entire Arab World, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as having sustainable fertility rates. You can use metrics from different groups and slice and dice sections and find ways of getting above 2.1 (replacement), sure, but it's not affecting my main point at all, which was that it's not contained to the Western world, and that 3 kids is now an outlier in most of the world. To your specifics: South Asia is listed as 2.2. But India has hit 2.1 and is declining, and Bangladesh and Nepal are even further below replacement - the World Bank metric is I presume buoyed by Pakistan, which has hit 3.1 (3.47 in the 2021 numbers on Wiipedia), and is declining, and Afghanistan, which is in even steeper decline - the other countries in the region are mostly rounding errors in terms of population. It's a difference of whether it's already hit replacement as a region already, or will within 2-3 years at most. I'm perfectly happy to accept the World Bank numbers for the sake of this argument, as it's not relevant to the argument. With respect to MENA and the Arab World, you're double-counting. The bulk of the countries that are part of the Arab World vs Middle East /North Africa are the same. The largest non-Arab MENA countries are Iran, which is well below replacement (1.7) and Turkey, at 1.9. The Arab World also includes several countries considered sub-Sarahan by some or all of other groups (Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan) which pulls it up, and MENA curiously includes Sudan in some statistics, even though it's considered sub-Saharan and/or East Africa by other groupings. Once you actually exclude the sub-Saharan countries from those groups, the rate lowers significantly. Taking Sudan alone out of MENA brings MENA close to replacement. If you choose to look at the Arab World alone, then, sure, even excluding the sub-Saharan countries they're still above replacement. I'm again, fine with choosing to slice the numbers that way - they do not affect the argument I was making in any meaningful way, because then the remaining MENA countries are below instead. What we're left with no matter how we slice it, is that roughly half the worlds countries are below replacement, accounting for well above half the worlds current population (but that balance will shift rapidly), and leaving the world average at ~2.3 and declining even by World Bank numbers. > And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9. There's no "being saved" here. Short of economic collapse, we don't know of any reliable measure to drive these numbers back up again, and they've been consistently trending down since the 1960's. China appears to be poised to be the country likely go hardest in trying, now recommending 3 children per family, and given an extremely restrictive immigration policy. That's fine - they don't need to be "saved". > The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5). I was not, and is not, and will not be, arguing any "catastrophic collapse" - to me at least that notion is meaningless to most people other than "great replacement" type people. The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth, and a period of decline, but no "catastrophic collapse" in population. But we are headed for a fairly dramatic shift in politics and economic development as this happens and the countries facing the steepest drops become more dependent on actually courting immigration as a consequence. There will still be enough growth to do that for decades to come.
- epolanski 3y agoTrue.