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The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+. I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’

The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+. I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird. Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle. This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places. For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it. In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.

deleted 1y ago
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anyfoo 1y ago
Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs. In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Yeah, this is exactly something to discuss early. My wife and I were on the same page from earlier in dating about having kids in our 20s.
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit. The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories. The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled. (Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.) We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism. The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family. Felt really awkward for small talk. My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone. I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap. At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract. You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family. I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
  - anyfoo 1y ago
    I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
    - gus_tpm 1y ago
      I think it would be hard to find someone that does not agree with you on the street. These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
  - theoreticalmal 1y ago
    Sounds like her biological clock was ticking very very loudly
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Society does kinda support this. People with low-paying jobs actually have the most kids. You just need more income if you want to have kids at a good time and send them to higher-end schools, including K-12.
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it. I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  What was the nature of her illness and was it directly related to the kids? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. That sounds like a very challenging thing all the best
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > What was the nature of her illness Psychosis, bipolar, BPD, NPD, pretty much all the *PDs. She switched it up. > was it directly related to the kids As in stemmed from? No. As far as challenge related to the kids, it was 1) keeping the them as safe as possible when she was not and 2) proving some semblance of parenting. Both were difficult-to-impossible, given that kids are trapped at home, thanks to eradication of free range areas.
wredcoll 1y ago
> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be? Obviously the answer is "1950s america". For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.
- wizee 1y ago
  People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.
  - watwut 1y ago
    All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.
    - mandmandam 1y ago
      In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness'). Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
      - _benton 1y ago
        You can still do this now, it's just called "being homeless" and it actually sucks.
        mandmandam 1y ago
        A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things. And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries. I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
kashunstva 1y ago
> this can lead people to pushing it till 40+ …which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us. Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this. > Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle. No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.
PaulHoule 1y ago
Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanation/dp/0745671071 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati... Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.
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giardini 1y ago
Society is not "broken" whatever that means. Half the population has an IQ less than 100. Do not expect the low-IQ group to ever get a masters or earn 300K as a couple, etc. Caveat- this may have to be amended due to the watering-down of educational standards in the USA.

deleted 1y ago

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anyfoo 1y ago

Nobody said you should wait that long. As for your anecdote, what’s wrong with figuring out early during dating whether you plan on having children or not? People should talk about those things early, since there is hardly anything that makes a relationship more incompatible long term, and leads to more (even mutual) heartbreak and sorrow than having to break up with a person solely because their most uncompromisable life plan differs. In my 20s, it felt indeed weird to bring that up early for me, because I wasn’t ready yet and didn’t even really know what I wanted yet. Later in life, when dating we always talked about potential family planning and general outlook on life early. (Unless it was never meant to be a serious relationship to begin with.)

frollogaston 1y ago
Yeah, this is exactly something to discuss early. My wife and I were on the same page from earlier in dating about having kids in our 20s.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit. The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories. The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled. (Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.) We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism. The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
999900000999 1y ago
This wasn’t even a first date, it was like she said hi to me at an event and just started taking about having a family. Felt really awkward for small talk. My point was the economy should support having a family in your 20s if that’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t need a well paid career, a quality lifestyle that supports a family should be available for everyone. I imagine universal health care, paid family leave ( for months not weeks) and affirmative (free?) childcare could bring that gap. At a point it isn’t even an age issue. A lot of people will never earn enough to really support a family, and that’s a failure of the social contract. You should be able to get a job as a Walmart clerk, have your partner work part time and still afford to have a family. I think I’ve muddled my own point here, but it should be easier. Maybe that Walmart clerk could own a house ?!
- anyfoo 1y ago
  I do agree with your point about society. The reason we waited are way beyond monetary issues, and we would have waited regardless, but people should be able to support a family without an “advanced” career if they choose so.
  - gus_tpm 1y ago
    I think it would be hard to find someone that does not agree with you on the street. These conversations should not need to happen but they do because of the current inequality that exists. A couple can't change the world so they talk about these things since it's their best option
- theoreticalmal 1y ago
  Sounds like her biological clock was ticking very very loudly
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Society does kinda support this. People with low-paying jobs actually have the most kids. You just need more income if you want to have kids at a good time and send them to higher-end schools, including K-12.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

> For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it. I hear ya. My spouse developed mental illness after sons 4,5 were born. A spouse can sabotage a lot of things when they set their mind to it - and their mind never stops. Not even at 3am. The first year was hard. The second was harder. After 5ys we run out of adjectives. After 15y we're using Dr.Seuss letters to spell out how things are.

DiggyJohnson 1y ago
What was the nature of her illness and was it directly related to the kids? If you don’t mind me asking, of course. That sounds like a very challenging thing all the best
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > What was the nature of her illness Psychosis, bipolar, BPD, NPD, pretty much all the *PDs. She switched it up. > was it directly related to the kids As in stemmed from? No. As far as challenge related to the kids, it was 1) keeping the them as safe as possible when she was not and 2) proving some semblance of parenting. Both were difficult-to-impossible, given that kids are trapped at home, thanks to eradication of free range areas.

wredcoll 1y ago

> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be? Obviously the answer is "1950s america". For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.

wizee 1y ago
People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.
- watwut 1y ago
  All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.
  - mandmandam 1y ago
    In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness'). Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
    - _benton 1y ago
      You can still do this now, it's just called "being homeless" and it actually sucks.
      - mandmandam 1y ago
        A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things. And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries. I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.

kashunstva 1y ago

> this can lead people to pushing it till 40+ …which is not necessarily problematic either. I was 43 and my wife 41 when our daughter was born. Our child has had a great life and so have we. While I’m 60 now and don’t have quite the same energy I had at 20-30’something, everything has worked out well for us. Everyone’s path, goals and priorities is different and as long as would-be parents consider the trade offs all around, it’s hard to be prescriptive about this. > Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle. No argument there. The complex socioeconomic forces that has created this dilemma are going to tough to unwind.

PaulHoule 1y ago

Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanation/dp/0745671071 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati... Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

giardini 1y ago

Society is not "broken" whatever that means. Half the population has an IQ less than 100. Do not expect the low-IQ group to ever get a masters or earn 300K as a couple, etc. Caveat- this may have to be amended due to the watering-down of educational standards in the USA.