5 ms·

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a yo

by Aeolun 1y ago

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
>> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs. > I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place. For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone. Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.
- fwsgonzo 1y ago
  Yep, we are new parents and we are almost 40. There just wasn't any moment before where it was possible to start a family. We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. Also, with the expectation that outside is for cars. So, there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us which is largely cleaning and de-stressing. If anyone had laid this fully out for us before we made this choice, it would have been an easy heck no.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. This is how we started out too (mid 20s). Isolated rural area and no family. Both of us were youngest children and had never lived around babies. Not the highest odds to start with. We birthed at home and did cloth diapers - so that tells you a bit about our mindset then. In our favor: This was >30years ago. It was possible to work multiple entry level jobs and scrape by. That's far from possible now.
  - ponector 1y ago
    >> there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us Not so bad! I feel like "time for us" is all hours you can cut from 8h sleeping time.
Larrikin 1y ago
Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?
- nappingcat 1y ago
  > Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
- Aeolun 1y ago
  You say that as if having children is a disease. If you are old enough to have a child, you are very likely old enough to successfully raise one. Otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Having a child under a certain age has all the health risks of a serious disease putting the life of the mother and child at much higher risks. Why shouldn't it be treated as such? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5965834/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5965834/
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      A 5% chance of your child dying when you give birth at age 15 and lower seems pretty reasonable to me? At least I’d have expected those number to be far higher. At 16-17 it’s 4% and at 18-19 it’s 3%, which makes it even better, but 19 out of every 20 children surviving longer than 28 days is pretty good.
      - 1y ago
npteljes 1y ago
>There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable. But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that. Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity. *https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...
- navane 1y ago
  And now, while preventing and tabooing teen pregnancy, society is about to collapse on itself by lack of reproduction. We coddled our kids to extinction. > Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Raises the moral question of what kind of living is worth it, and on what level is it okay to impose on one another. Looking at how families from teen pregnancies fare*, I'm absolutely positive that mitigating these is far from the biggest contributor to "societal collapse". Doing anything to raise this number is not going to do society any good, even if it results is a larger number of children on paper. Taking proper care of this situation is not any kind of coddling, more like basic human decency. * https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002018/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002018/
coldtea 1y ago
People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child". Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
- sebmellen 1y ago
  I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us. Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
  - CMCDragonkai 1y ago
    Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult." I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers". Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
    - kelipso 1y ago
numpad0 1y ago
I don't understand why population studies people don't even mention this: we're technically wild animals, competing for survival. In absence of a specific and effective imperative stipulating population must grow, we must subconsciously modify societal frameworks exactly to impede reproduction. It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.

by Aeolun 1y ago

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

>> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad Except for the negatively impacting the ability to get the education needed for basic jobs. > I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. During most of human history there was a broad support system already in place. For modern new parents, that experience extended support varies from mostly gone to totally gone. Exasperating that: In markets with jobs, rents are 1mo typical wages.

fwsgonzo 1y ago
Yep, we are new parents and we are almost 40. There just wasn't any moment before where it was possible to start a family. We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. Also, with the expectation that outside is for cars. So, there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us which is largely cleaning and de-stressing. If anyone had laid this fully out for us before we made this choice, it would have been an easy heck no.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. This is how we started out too (mid 20s). Isolated rural area and no family. Both of us were youngest children and had never lived around babies. Not the highest odds to start with. We birthed at home and did cloth diapers - so that tells you a bit about our mindset then. In our favor: This was >30years ago. It was possible to work multiple entry level jobs and scrape by. That's far from possible now.
- ponector 1y ago
  >> there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us Not so bad! I feel like "time for us" is all hours you can cut from 8h sleeping time.

Larrikin 1y ago

Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?

nappingcat 1y ago
> Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
Aeolun 1y ago
You say that as if having children is a disease. If you are old enough to have a child, you are very likely old enough to successfully raise one. Otherwise the human race wouldn’t exist.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  Having a child under a certain age has all the health risks of a serious disease putting the life of the mother and child at much higher risks. Why shouldn't it be treated as such? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5965834/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5965834/
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    A 5% chance of your child dying when you give birth at age 15 and lower seems pretty reasonable to me? At least I’d have expected those number to be far higher. At 16-17 it’s 4% and at 18-19 it’s 3%, which makes it even better, but 19 out of every 20 children surviving longer than 28 days is pretty good.
    - 1y ago

npteljes 1y ago

>There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable. But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that. Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity. *https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...

navane 1y ago
And now, while preventing and tabooing teen pregnancy, society is about to collapse on itself by lack of reproduction. We coddled our kids to extinction. > Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
- npteljes 1y ago
  Raises the moral question of what kind of living is worth it, and on what level is it okay to impose on one another. Looking at how families from teen pregnancies fare*, I'm absolutely positive that mitigating these is far from the biggest contributor to "societal collapse". Doing anything to raise this number is not going to do society any good, even if it results is a larger number of children on paper. Taking proper care of this situation is not any kind of coddling, more like basic human decency. * https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002018/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002018/

coldtea 1y ago

People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child". Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.

sebmellen 1y ago
I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us. Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
- CMCDragonkai 1y ago
  Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult." I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers". Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
  - kelipso 1y ago

numpad0 1y ago

I don't understand why population studies people don't even mention this: we're technically wild animals, competing for survival. In absence of a specific and effective imperative stipulating population must grow, we must subconsciously modify societal frameworks exactly to impede reproduction. It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.