6 ms·

Why would anyone want to have kids today? Most couples in the western world can barely support themselves while getting into home ownership, let alone trying to

by FLT8 2y ago

Why would anyone want to have kids today? Most couples in the western world can barely support themselves while getting into home ownership, let alone trying to support multiple kids and put them through college while saving for retirement. The amount of capacity left in life for good child rearing is minimal. Add to that the fact that it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going, and even if there were jobs, previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up, and a surveillance advertising driven economy that's increasingly difficult to escape. Toxic social media driving toxic expectations etc. It just seems cruel bringing kids into a world like that.

mattpallissard 2y ago
Nah, it's actually a blast. We had our first kids when we're legitimately poor. We're fairly well off now and have had a few more. It was just as fun then as it is now. One's financial well being their childrens' happiness are not intrinsically linked. My oldest kids were just as happy as my youngest. They don't care if your rich or poor. They only care about how you treat them. Check your outlook friend. There is plenty of bad stuff in the world, but it's mostly good. Go out and enjoy life.
Jyaif 2y ago
> it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going Unless there's a robot revolution, there will be jobs. AI is not going to farm, provide elder care, or do maintenance. And that's assuming we get to AGI, and not get stuck on this LLM plateau.
CalRobert 2y ago
Add to that our increasingly lonely lives and fraying communities mean much less of a support network. Parenting is also exhausting now that “go outside and play, come back for dinner” is impractical (for various reasons good or bad).
- LeanderK 2y ago
  > “go outside and play, come back for dinner” why is this impractical? EDIT: I'm getting downvoted but I am seriously not sure. I don't have kids right now but its part of how I intend to raise them when I get them.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    People who are misinformed by watching too much news will call the cops on kids without grownups near by. This is somewhat rare, but it feeds into a real culture of misinformation where parents think this happens enough to fear letting them roam. The feedback loop self reinforces because of lack of education - many people don’t realize the more news they consume the less they know about the statistics on the ground. Also, cars are more dangerous now than before for kids to get crushed by.
    - averageRoyalty 2y ago
      The rarity here cannot be overstated. I enjoy stories like this - in the same way someone who enjoys true crime doesn't actually support murder - and they're heavily overreportd but quite uncommon. If you want to let your kids go out and play it's unlikely you'll have issue. I suspect for many it's just an excuse to plonk their kids in front of the iPad all day.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Screen time is also a symptom of a very different form of misinformation - complete lack of information. The human body is so much healthier with sufficient exposure time to the outdoor environment. Sitting is long term pain. If parents knew this more, they would pushback on screen time in the same way they don’t let their kids eat ice cream all day.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    In the US it will be because of other people, who will call child protective services, who will then come and destroy the family.
TOMDM 2y ago
People are wealthier and healthier today than almost any other point in history. Better times than now are a blip in the grand scheme of things. We have a huge number of social ills that contribute towards peoples reasons for not wanting children, but wealth and physical health are not among them.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  If anything, reality suggests the problem is in fact wealth. The poorest countries have the highest birth rates and throwing more money at this has produced quite literally zero success.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Wealthy countries pay women more to work and punish women financially if they have a baby due to the opportunity cost.
- locallost 2y ago
  The truth is for me somewhere in the middle. Happiness and satisfaction are not absolute, they can exist only in relation to your surroundings. Thus younger people in the US might be objectively better off than people in say India, but that doesn't matter. Their surroundings are as the OP described and that dictates how they feel about the present and future day. On physical health it's actually wrong for the US as people's physical health is deteriorating evident by the falling life expectancy. But with all that said, the actual idea in Japan is for me pretty stupid, as I consider dating apps to be one of the reasons people are connecting less and less. The choice is too large, it's very superficial, most people want the "best" thus large number of people are out of luck.
- CJefferson 2y ago
  If you are looking at "all of history", for most of history it was usual for one person in a couple to spend most of their time at home, which is very hard to do now while covering rent.
  - 2y ago
timr 2y ago
> previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up Please, folks, take a step back and realize that most of what you've read about this stuff in the pop media is based on extremely speculative data, usually from weak, observational studies, or small laboratory experiments in non-human animals. The threat to your life, individually, has been greatly exaggerated. You are far more likely to die of eating too much and getting too fat than whatever microplastics are supposedly doing to you. I'm not saying that there aren't issues here, but as someone else on this thread already noted, we're living longer than ever before. To the extent that human lifespans have declined, it's largely due to the fact that we're succumbing to diseases of lifestyle that are entirely within our control as individuals. Worry about that, not theoretical future concerns about chemicals.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  On microplastics I agree, but on climate change the issue is almost reversed. We have tons of high profile research coming out all the time that even our worst case models were too optimistic and we are bound for a shitshow of unimaginable proportions. This shouldn't come as a surprise for people who know how the IPCC reports are created (sort of a least common denominator between science, politics and lobbyists). So every time they say official "worst case" model, that is the worst case that the fossil industry is willing to admit. And that is already pretty bad. What we're actually going to experience could very well amount to a civilisation-ending event. Especially if oceans keep acidifying, which is a highly overlooked doomsday gun and could not just end modern civilisation, but actually kill us and most other land based oxygen breathing creatures. We even know this has happened once already, most likely from a combination of impact events and volcanism. But today's CO2 emission rate is an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    The worst case used to be 6.5 degrees. The worst case has been revised down to ~4 degrees.
foobarbecue 2y ago
> Why would anyone want to have kids today? I'm gradually learning through experience and anecdotes that most women seem to have an innate biological drive to procreate, which is separate from sex drive. I think that's the main reason.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  The drive to procreate is the sex drive, we only recently decided to decouple them in abstraction due to technology.
  - GordonS 2y ago
    I'm not sure that's true; it's possible for a woman to desperately want a baby, but still have a low libido and have little interest in sex just for fun.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Low libido is evolutionarily informed to also signal that now is not the right time to procreate. In this light, it’s not surprising that hormonal birth control, which tells the body it can’t have a baby now, very often reduces libido.
      - GordonS 2y ago
        Even without female birth control pills, it can be the case.
    - Detrytus 2y ago
      Yes, but usually one baby is enough to satisfy that drive, which is not enough to keep the population from shrinking. And recently some women decide to have 0 babies, and settle for a dog or cat instead. I've heard them using terms like "dog-child" or "cat-child", or "cross-species family" :)
      - 2y ago
throwaway6734 2y ago
for a few reasons:children allow you to fulfill a whole new role in life, its a duty to pass on the gift of life, and family is important. people have lived through much worse
bamboozled 2y ago
If you think about it, there has never been a good time to have children. In 1920 I could’ve said why have kids, they might die from an infection. 1820s, famine or war etc.
Tycho 2y ago
Snap out of it. The standard of living has never been so high. It’s your attitude that’s toxic.
glimshe 2y ago
The world has never been safer and humanity has never been better equipped to support the survival of a child than now. I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon, but it's certainly not the horror reasons you mention.
- Vvector 2y ago
  Wealth and fertility have an inverse relationship. This is true worldwide, and through recent history (~50 years). Just one of many reasons, women are going to college and having careers at historical highs. And the same women are punished for having kids. "This decreasing relationship between fertility and income is well known to economists and demographers alike. In addition, it holds true over time: Rich countries, such as the U.S., have experienced a remarkable decline in their fertility rate as they became rich. Also, the relationship holds at the individual level, as rich families tend to have fewer children than poor families." from: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
- gravescale 2y ago
  I think it's just as simple as when you're already poor, having children doesn't fundamentally change things. Children don't actually cost that much when you have nothing much to give them anyway, and quickly turn into free labour if anything. If you're very lucky, they can get a job in the city/abroad and send money home. But for generations, having children and having them continue much the same, generation after generation, is just how is always been. It's often also required by religions, because religions that encourage children grow, and so it's self-reinforcing. The problem is in modern "wealthy" society, everyone is allowed to work (to be clear I'm not saying that's not a problem in itself), and the Red Queen effect means that within a couple of generations¹, most couples are both in full-time work just to afford rent and the "basics" of a modern lifestyle. Children are now a huge opportunity cost, one that might cost you your home. Then, because the couple would have prospects to offer the child, the common human instinct is to invest everything in them or their future, spurred on by the social expectations and the Childhood Industrial Complex. Vitamins and private healthcare into expensive high chairs, a "safe" car and a top-line car seat, toys, computers, clothes, experiences, holidays, housing near good schools, tutoring, a degree etc. Plus the fairly modern sentiment that you should spend as much time as possible with the child, which may inhibit large families even for those who can financially afford them. The expectations around what a "minimally non-negligent parent" must provide children are so high that many people think "I quite literally cannot be sure to provide that, so I should not have children". Of course in the background, "don't have children if you can't afford them" has been the tabloid "anti-scrounger" slogan for at least a generation now, and religious adherence is way down in wealthy societies. It's a hell of a catch, as Heller would say. Be poor and offer your children almost nothing material in life, and so have them, or be rich and be unable to offer your children far more in an absolute sense than the poor person could, but still far below what you would want to, and so forgo them. ¹ After a couple of generations of taking up the slack in the middle classes (e.g. go-getter Yuppies giving their children unthinkably luxurious childhoods with their new dual incomes, plus the productivity revolution initially paying out as worker wages), the Millennial generation was the first to really notice en masse that they really could not provide to their children what their parents provided to them. Certainly I can't give my children what my parents gave me, and I'm in roughly the same income decile.

by FLT8 2y ago

mattpallissard 2y ago

Nah, it's actually a blast. We had our first kids when we're legitimately poor. We're fairly well off now and have had a few more. It was just as fun then as it is now. One's financial well being their childrens' happiness are not intrinsically linked. My oldest kids were just as happy as my youngest. They don't care if your rich or poor. They only care about how you treat them. Check your outlook friend. There is plenty of bad stuff in the world, but it's mostly good. Go out and enjoy life.

Jyaif 2y ago

> it's looking increasingly unlikely that there'll be jobs for their children anyway given the way AI is going Unless there's a robot revolution, there will be jobs. AI is not going to farm, provide elder care, or do maintenance. And that's assuming we get to AGI, and not get stuck on this LLM plateau.

CalRobert 2y ago

Add to that our increasingly lonely lives and fraying communities mean much less of a support network. Parenting is also exhausting now that “go outside and play, come back for dinner” is impractical (for various reasons good or bad).

LeanderK 2y ago
> “go outside and play, come back for dinner” why is this impractical? EDIT: I'm getting downvoted but I am seriously not sure. I don't have kids right now but its part of how I intend to raise them when I get them.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  People who are misinformed by watching too much news will call the cops on kids without grownups near by. This is somewhat rare, but it feeds into a real culture of misinformation where parents think this happens enough to fear letting them roam. The feedback loop self reinforces because of lack of education - many people don’t realize the more news they consume the less they know about the statistics on the ground. Also, cars are more dangerous now than before for kids to get crushed by.
  - averageRoyalty 2y ago
    The rarity here cannot be overstated. I enjoy stories like this - in the same way someone who enjoys true crime doesn't actually support murder - and they're heavily overreportd but quite uncommon. If you want to let your kids go out and play it's unlikely you'll have issue. I suspect for many it's just an excuse to plonk their kids in front of the iPad all day.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Screen time is also a symptom of a very different form of misinformation - complete lack of information. The human body is so much healthier with sufficient exposure time to the outdoor environment. Sitting is long term pain. If parents knew this more, they would pushback on screen time in the same way they don’t let their kids eat ice cream all day.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  In the US it will be because of other people, who will call child protective services, who will then come and destroy the family.

TOMDM 2y ago

People are wealthier and healthier today than almost any other point in history. Better times than now are a blip in the grand scheme of things. We have a huge number of social ills that contribute towards peoples reasons for not wanting children, but wealth and physical health are not among them.

Dalewyn 2y ago
If anything, reality suggests the problem is in fact wealth. The poorest countries have the highest birth rates and throwing more money at this has produced quite literally zero success.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Wealthy countries pay women more to work and punish women financially if they have a baby due to the opportunity cost.
locallost 2y ago
The truth is for me somewhere in the middle. Happiness and satisfaction are not absolute, they can exist only in relation to your surroundings. Thus younger people in the US might be objectively better off than people in say India, but that doesn't matter. Their surroundings are as the OP described and that dictates how they feel about the present and future day. On physical health it's actually wrong for the US as people's physical health is deteriorating evident by the falling life expectancy. But with all that said, the actual idea in Japan is for me pretty stupid, as I consider dating apps to be one of the reasons people are connecting less and less. The choice is too large, it's very superficial, most people want the "best" thus large number of people are out of luck.
CJefferson 2y ago
If you are looking at "all of history", for most of history it was usual for one person in a couple to spend most of their time at home, which is very hard to do now while covering rent.
- 2y ago

timr 2y ago

> previous generations are leaving them a burning hellscape full of toxic forever chemicals and microplastics that the kids will need to clean up Please, folks, take a step back and realize that most of what you've read about this stuff in the pop media is based on extremely speculative data, usually from weak, observational studies, or small laboratory experiments in non-human animals. The threat to your life, individually, has been greatly exaggerated. You are far more likely to die of eating too much and getting too fat than whatever microplastics are supposedly doing to you. I'm not saying that there aren't issues here, but as someone else on this thread already noted, we're living longer than ever before. To the extent that human lifespans have declined, it's largely due to the fact that we're succumbing to diseases of lifestyle that are entirely within our control as individuals. Worry about that, not theoretical future concerns about chemicals.

sigmoid10 2y ago
On microplastics I agree, but on climate change the issue is almost reversed. We have tons of high profile research coming out all the time that even our worst case models were too optimistic and we are bound for a shitshow of unimaginable proportions. This shouldn't come as a surprise for people who know how the IPCC reports are created (sort of a least common denominator between science, politics and lobbyists). So every time they say official "worst case" model, that is the worst case that the fossil industry is willing to admit. And that is already pretty bad. What we're actually going to experience could very well amount to a civilisation-ending event. Especially if oceans keep acidifying, which is a highly overlooked doomsday gun and could not just end modern civilisation, but actually kill us and most other land based oxygen breathing creatures. We even know this has happened once already, most likely from a combination of impact events and volcanism. But today's CO2 emission rate is an order of magnitude greater than it was back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  The worst case used to be 6.5 degrees. The worst case has been revised down to ~4 degrees.

foobarbecue 2y ago

> Why would anyone want to have kids today? I'm gradually learning through experience and anecdotes that most women seem to have an innate biological drive to procreate, which is separate from sex drive. I think that's the main reason.

mensetmanusman 2y ago
The drive to procreate is the sex drive, we only recently decided to decouple them in abstraction due to technology.
- GordonS 2y ago
  I'm not sure that's true; it's possible for a woman to desperately want a baby, but still have a low libido and have little interest in sex just for fun.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Low libido is evolutionarily informed to also signal that now is not the right time to procreate. In this light, it’s not surprising that hormonal birth control, which tells the body it can’t have a baby now, very often reduces libido.
    - GordonS 2y ago
      Even without female birth control pills, it can be the case.
  - Detrytus 2y ago
    Yes, but usually one baby is enough to satisfy that drive, which is not enough to keep the population from shrinking. And recently some women decide to have 0 babies, and settle for a dog or cat instead. I've heard them using terms like "dog-child" or "cat-child", or "cross-species family" :)
    - 2y ago

throwaway6734 2y ago

for a few reasons:children allow you to fulfill a whole new role in life, its a duty to pass on the gift of life, and family is important. people have lived through much worse

bamboozled 2y ago

If you think about it, there has never been a good time to have children. In 1920 I could’ve said why have kids, they might die from an infection. 1820s, famine or war etc.

Tycho 2y ago

Snap out of it. The standard of living has never been so high. It’s your attitude that’s toxic.

glimshe 2y ago

The world has never been safer and humanity has never been better equipped to support the survival of a child than now. I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon, but it's certainly not the horror reasons you mention.

Vvector 2y ago
Wealth and fertility have an inverse relationship. This is true worldwide, and through recent history (~50 years). Just one of many reasons, women are going to college and having careers at historical highs. And the same women are punished for having kids. "This decreasing relationship between fertility and income is well known to economists and demographers alike. In addition, it holds true over time: Rich countries, such as the U.S., have experienced a remarkable decline in their fertility rate as they became rich. Also, the relationship holds at the individual level, as rich families tend to have fewer children than poor families." from: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link-fertility-income https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...
gravescale 2y ago
I think it's just as simple as when you're already poor, having children doesn't fundamentally change things. Children don't actually cost that much when you have nothing much to give them anyway, and quickly turn into free labour if anything. If you're very lucky, they can get a job in the city/abroad and send money home. But for generations, having children and having them continue much the same, generation after generation, is just how is always been. It's often also required by religions, because religions that encourage children grow, and so it's self-reinforcing. The problem is in modern "wealthy" society, everyone is allowed to work (to be clear I'm not saying that's not a problem in itself), and the Red Queen effect means that within a couple of generations¹, most couples are both in full-time work just to afford rent and the "basics" of a modern lifestyle. Children are now a huge opportunity cost, one that might cost you your home. Then, because the couple would have prospects to offer the child, the common human instinct is to invest everything in them or their future, spurred on by the social expectations and the Childhood Industrial Complex. Vitamins and private healthcare into expensive high chairs, a "safe" car and a top-line car seat, toys, computers, clothes, experiences, holidays, housing near good schools, tutoring, a degree etc. Plus the fairly modern sentiment that you should spend as much time as possible with the child, which may inhibit large families even for those who can financially afford them. The expectations around what a "minimally non-negligent parent" must provide children are so high that many people think "I quite literally cannot be sure to provide that, so I should not have children". Of course in the background, "don't have children if you can't afford them" has been the tabloid "anti-scrounger" slogan for at least a generation now, and religious adherence is way down in wealthy societies. It's a hell of a catch, as Heller would say. Be poor and offer your children almost nothing material in life, and so have them, or be rich and be unable to offer your children far more in an absolute sense than the poor person could, but still far below what you would want to, and so forgo them. ¹ After a couple of generations of taking up the slack in the middle classes (e.g. go-getter Yuppies giving their children unthinkably luxurious childhoods with their new dual incomes, plus the productivity revolution initially paying out as worker wages), the Millennial generation was the first to really notice en masse that they really could not provide to their children what their parents provided to them. Certainly I can't give my children what my parents gave me, and I'm in roughly the same income decile.