7 ms·

Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jo

by Kenji 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jobs.

_delirium 12y ago
Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar. A stable job today might not be stable in 5 years, if employment conditions change (as they seem to be changing in the case discussed here). I suspect in the medium-term future there will be very few stable jobs at all.
- Kenji 12y ago
  "Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar." No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
  - willismichael 12y ago
    "Finishing your degree" in no way guarantees employment.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      Nothing guarantees employment, but some factors almost guarantee a low income. You can't be sure if you'll be okay, but if you already know that you definitely won't be okay - well, then you probably can't afford to have kids.
      - GHFigs 12y ago
        if you already know that you definitely won't be okay This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      You are right it's not a guarantee, but unemployment is low among degree holders. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment. Perhaps child-bearing should be limited to people with at least $100k in the bank to cover emergencies, plus a STEM degree? Maybe a savings account and a STEM degree and N years of experience, to make sure they aren't one of those people with a CS degree who can't code? Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
    - aianus 12y ago
      For what it's worth I wouldn't have a kid without $1 million in liquid assets set aside for him. It seems evil to me to have a kid without enough money to feel confident he'll never have to work for money. But then most people think I'm nuts.
      - kasey_junk 12y ago
        What makes you think $1 million in liquid assets is enough to plan for the next ~100 years?
        aianus 12y ago
        Nothing's for sure but you can live pretty comfortably on ~$15k a year and it's pretty easy to earn 1.5% more than inflation on $1 million.
        kasey_junk 12y ago
        Without trying to poke holes in your economic assumptions (which I think I could), giving your kid 15K a year seems a lot less valuable than teaching them self reliance, logical reasoning, frugality, a love of education/learning, work ethic, etc. You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things. The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    No, it isn't common sense. It's a wise decision to make under a certain set of socio-economic conditions, which may not apply uniformly to everyone that you encounter. Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job. This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants. Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care. So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
You're not the only one; there are a great many people who have the same opinion. Not that you aren't entitled to your opinions, and this one in particular, but the fact is the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought.
- Kenji 12y ago
  "the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought." Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Sure. Your opinion includes implicit assertions regarding all the things that go into "sorting out education and jobs". In particular, the core assertion is that it's possible to do so and that it is something that's feasible or a reasonable expectation in all cases (hint: it's neither, in some cases and in particular cases involving poverty and families on the lower end of the income spectrum). You're implicitly asserting, almost to the point of making it tautological, that people who aren't born into privilege ought not have children. The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).
apalmer 12y ago
Yes, this is a true statement. It is also pretty irrelevant to the issue at hand.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  How is it irrelevant? Most of the lady's problems were because of her being a young single mother with a very young child. I didn't see the word "rape" in the article, and I assume the pregnancy wasn't an immaculate conception. Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.
kevinh 12y ago
Children aren't always intentional, and birth control isn't cheap, especially for someone who works near-minimum wage jobs. Add to that the general lessening of availability of birth control due to conservative influences in the United States, and you get an environment in which birth control is hard to effectively use—especially if you're on an erratic schedule, which this woman is.
- Retric 12y ago
  Not to mention the US, Japan, and most if Europe is already below the replacement rate. Without immigration we are a dying society suggesting we need even fewer kids is a great way to end up extinct. Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - mannkind 12y ago
    You state that as fact, but it seems highly unlikely. Please cite your source.
    - Retric 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate Global fertility rate is dropping so depending on other countries sending new immigrants is risky. US below replament rate: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-births-decline/1880231/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-birt... Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975. PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.
cobralibre 12y ago
Access and funding for reproductive health care and education have been cut severely by many U.S. state legislatures in the past several years. See, for example: https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women
swalsh 12y ago
Some people will never get the opportunity to have a stable environment... through no fault of their own. Does that mean they should never have the opportunity to be parents?
- smtddr 12y ago
  There are a bunch of people on HN who would say "Yes, people without X amount of money shouldn't be allowed to have children." And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
  - Roboprog 12y ago
    Sadly, fertility rates go down, and birth defect rates go up, as we age. Modern US society expects you to study, work and save until you are 30 to 40 before having kids (internet boy moguls aside). Soo... Why is autism on the rise?
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Any society that does not structure itself such that each adult can be biological parent to at least two children without significant penalty to their own quality of life is not going to be stable in the long term. That's not even a full replacement rate. I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
  - GFischer 12y ago
    It's really complex, and I can see where you're coming from, but I wouldn't call it a right. I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right. What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them. I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
datasmash 12y ago
It's obviously as not as simple as that if you didn't choose to have your child.
- astrodust 12y ago
  What if things were good when you had your child, then it all went to hell? Life is unpredictable.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  Having a child definitely is a choice. You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse). In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
  - ars 12y ago
    Sorry for the accidental downmod. I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)
mikeash 12y ago
So what? Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"? Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them. Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.
snowwrestler 12y ago
You're not alone; quite a lot of people think that. The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff. And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.

by Kenji 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jobs.

_delirium 12y ago

Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar. A stable job today might not be stable in 5 years, if employment conditions change (as they seem to be changing in the case discussed here). I suspect in the medium-term future there will be very few stable jobs at all.

Kenji 12y ago
"Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar." No. Finishing your degree before you have a child is not a high bar. It's common sense.
- willismichael 12y ago
  "Finishing your degree" in no way guarantees employment.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    Nothing guarantees employment, but some factors almost guarantee a low income. You can't be sure if you'll be okay, but if you already know that you definitely won't be okay - well, then you probably can't afford to have kids.
    - GHFigs 12y ago
      if you already know that you definitely won't be okay This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    You are right it's not a guarantee, but unemployment is low among degree holders. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm
- _delirium 12y ago
  Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment. Perhaps child-bearing should be limited to people with at least $100k in the bank to cover emergencies, plus a STEM degree? Maybe a savings account and a STEM degree and N years of experience, to make sure they aren't one of those people with a CS degree who can't code? Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
  - aianus 12y ago
    For what it's worth I wouldn't have a kid without $1 million in liquid assets set aside for him. It seems evil to me to have a kid without enough money to feel confident he'll never have to work for money. But then most people think I'm nuts.
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      What makes you think $1 million in liquid assets is enough to plan for the next ~100 years?
      - aianus 12y ago
        Nothing's for sure but you can live pretty comfortably on ~$15k a year and it's pretty easy to earn 1.5% more than inflation on $1 million.
        kasey_junk 12y ago
        Without trying to poke holes in your economic assumptions (which I think I could), giving your kid 15K a year seems a lot less valuable than teaching them self reliance, logical reasoning, frugality, a love of education/learning, work ethic, etc. You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things. The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  No, it isn't common sense. It's a wise decision to make under a certain set of socio-economic conditions, which may not apply uniformly to everyone that you encounter. Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job. This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants. Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care. So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

You're not the only one; there are a great many people who have the same opinion. Not that you aren't entitled to your opinions, and this one in particular, but the fact is the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought.

Kenji 12y ago
"the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought." Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Sure. Your opinion includes implicit assertions regarding all the things that go into "sorting out education and jobs". In particular, the core assertion is that it's possible to do so and that it is something that's feasible or a reasonable expectation in all cases (hint: it's neither, in some cases and in particular cases involving poverty and families on the lower end of the income spectrum). You're implicitly asserting, almost to the point of making it tautological, that people who aren't born into privilege ought not have children. The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).

apalmer 12y ago

Yes, this is a true statement. It is also pretty irrelevant to the issue at hand.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
How is it irrelevant? Most of the lady's problems were because of her being a young single mother with a very young child. I didn't see the word "rape" in the article, and I assume the pregnancy wasn't an immaculate conception. Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.

kevinh 12y ago

Children aren't always intentional, and birth control isn't cheap, especially for someone who works near-minimum wage jobs. Add to that the general lessening of availability of birth control due to conservative influences in the United States, and you get an environment in which birth control is hard to effectively use—especially if you're on an erratic schedule, which this woman is.

Retric 12y ago
Not to mention the US, Japan, and most if Europe is already below the replacement rate. Without immigration we are a dying society suggesting we need even fewer kids is a great way to end up extinct. Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mannkind 12y ago
  You state that as fact, but it seems highly unlikely. Please cite your source.
  - Retric 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate Global fertility rate is dropping so depending on other countries sending new immigrants is risky. US below replament rate: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-births-decline/1880231/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/12/us-birt... Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975. PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.

cobralibre 12y ago

Access and funding for reproductive health care and education have been cut severely by many U.S. state legislatures in the past several years. See, for example: https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women

swalsh 12y ago

Some people will never get the opportunity to have a stable environment... through no fault of their own. Does that mean they should never have the opportunity to be parents?

smtddr 12y ago
There are a bunch of people on HN who would say "Yes, people without X amount of money shouldn't be allowed to have children." And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
- Roboprog 12y ago
  Sadly, fertility rates go down, and birth defect rates go up, as we age. Modern US society expects you to study, work and save until you are 30 to 40 before having kids (internet boy moguls aside). Soo... Why is autism on the rise?
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Any society that does not structure itself such that each adult can be biological parent to at least two children without significant penalty to their own quality of life is not going to be stable in the long term. That's not even a full replacement rate. I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
- GFischer 12y ago
  It's really complex, and I can see where you're coming from, but I wouldn't call it a right. I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right. What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them. I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).

datasmash 12y ago

It's obviously as not as simple as that if you didn't choose to have your child.

astrodust 12y ago
What if things were good when you had your child, then it all went to hell? Life is unpredictable.
PeterisP 12y ago
Having a child definitely is a choice. You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse). In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
- ars 12y ago
  Sorry for the accidental downmod. I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)

mikeash 12y ago

So what? Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"? Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them. Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.

snowwrestler 12y ago

You're not alone; quite a lot of people think that. The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff. And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.