[HN Gopher] The window for great-grandmothers is closing
___________________________________________________________________
The window for great-grandmothers is closing
Author : yakkomajuri
Score : 100 points
Date : 2024-03-27 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (memoirsandrambles.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (memoirsandrambles.substack.com)
| binarymax wrote:
| I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your
| friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances
| to have children, there are _plenty_ of other families not
| thinking about this. They 're having kids in their late teens and
| early twenties.
|
| That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future,
| but it explains this blog post.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered
| massively classist in some quarters.
|
| I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who
| don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear
| outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have
| 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a
| generation.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Is it better to be one of those 0 to 1 kids, science valuing
| types who fear _insiders_? They 're not okay with a
| significant fraction of their peers, which does look
| maladaptive to me.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also
| misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for
| millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly
| and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done
| by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe
| the things you disparage it's because the governments and
| systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have
| utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved.
|
| Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve
| us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart
| as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue
| such that you're lifting up those people and not punching
| down.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _If they believe the things you disparage it 's because
| the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy
| have created have utterly failed at getting those people
| educated and involved._
|
| I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart &
| wealthy people.
|
| There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more
| than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to
| extract every last ounce of money and power.
|
| And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone
| and everything.
|
| There are of course altruistic people who are extremely
| wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is
| never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-
| level, who's willing to do anything.
|
| I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart &
| wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower
| class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the
| exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class
| keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth
| the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And
| they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class
| while they exploit the lower class.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was Mondays episode of the Daily Show
| that covered this pretty well in the intro. There are a
| lot of different groups out there, but the rich and
| greedy group does seem to lock up a huge amount of
| resources and propaganda.
| parpfish wrote:
| yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are
| having too many kids!" always has this assumption that
| class and values are perfectly presevred across generations
| and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children
| are capable of making their own path and not just following
| in their footsteps.
|
| children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-
| minded parents often rebel against their parents and
| espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that
| has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the
| parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a
| representative sample, but children challenging their
| elders views is not an anomaly.
|
| on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised
| being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning
| into spoiled, selfish brats.
| vel0city wrote:
| Of the big households I've personally experienced that
| most would consider closed-minded parents might have a
| few of their kids complaining about the backwards views,
| but not necessarily the majority of the kids. I'd be
| interested in seeing some actual statistics other than
| assuming the people ranting on reddit about their
| families are the majority of that population.
|
| The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents
| probably aren't going online to rant about it.
| parpfish wrote:
| yeah, that's why i said it wasn't a representative
| sample.
|
| the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a
| majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.
| kelipso wrote:
| But then you say "children raised in big families by
| uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against
| their parents and espouse different views". So non-zero
| proportion becomes often...
| danbruc wrote:
| _The poors have been doing this for millenia [...]_
|
| Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just
| strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past
| children were desirable as sources of additional income and
| for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise
| it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor
| because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it
| the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a
| deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse
| education because of poverty, how exactly would that work?
| How much education do you need to realize that additional
| children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms
| are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors,
| but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at
| first glance.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| The idiocracy thesis supposes that children will mirror
| their parents behavior and beliefs. As a former teenager
| and a parent that is very much not the likeliest outcome.
| It's also on the wider society to lift all the kids to
| roughly a level playing field
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Pointing out differences in age of first child for different
| groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's
| the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..."
| that causes offense.
|
| Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it
| all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up
| our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable
| possibility?
| titzer wrote:
| Because of ecological overshoot
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which
| is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-
| work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline
| through declining birth rates is the least jarring and
| least fascist way of getting human population down to
| sustainable levels.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| "Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on
| environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household
| with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world
| standards, has much less of an environmental impact than
| a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of
| magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't
| eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact
| than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to
| McDonald's a few times a week.
|
| Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids
| is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which
| are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one
| family can impact at all.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your
| eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how
| much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents.
|
| However, I don't know why you are comparing a single
| billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number
| of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_
| in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is
| not at all a strange place to focus on environmental
| impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Some see people as burdens, some as assets.
|
| I think this is a very important world view conflict.
| CalRobert wrote:
| The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not
| the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel
| they consume.
| hersko wrote:
| Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More
| humans is absolutely a net-good.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| For most of those things, people produce as much as they
| consume. So more people doesn't make things worse.
|
| Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the
| transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will
| be complete long before the oil runs out.
|
| Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings
| is a partial answer. Either way, we are _very_ far from
| running out of land.
| anonym29 wrote:
| A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet
| is so far below replacement-level fertility that human
| extinction is now closer than the ice caps being
| completely 100% melted.
|
| This has been the case for several years and is a trend
| that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per
| person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person
| are growing.
|
| Even with a handful of countries still breeding like
| rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to
| peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.
|
| Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia:
| "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made
| by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can
| provide through its capacity for renewal."
|
| Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is
| routinely increased by human activity.
|
| For instance, when humans switched from hunting and
| gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural
| resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-
| planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.
|
| Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food
| scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of
| the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet
| now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and
| demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative
| to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the
| renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now
| have an entirely different problem: for the first time in
| human history, there are more people consuming _too many_
| calories than there are people consuming too few
| calories. Clearly, food isn 't the problem.
|
| The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean
| on the planet hundreds of times over even with our
| current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates
| in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.
|
| While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've
| had fission for decades now. You can power the global
| electricity needs of twice the population of today's
| planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode
| Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed
| of continuously by launching it into the sun for
| something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.
|
| Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product
| of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively
| scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine
| using a bullet train to get from one side of the
| humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too
| long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.
|
| In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not
| kill it right after it started crawling.
|
| I must be missing something here because it seems like we
| have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the
| water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the
| current global population - just what demands are being
| made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of
| meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the
| stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that
| pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to,
| but continuing to expect more of?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > This has been the case for several years and is a trend
| that still accelerating.
|
| Of course it will continue to accelerate. There's a
| mechanism that causes this. Some conspiracy theorists
| mistake this for an active, purposeful goal, but it may
| be as simple as children growing up in environments where
| childlessness has become a norm, internalizing that same
| norm. Since there are fewer children with each successive
| generation, the norm is amplified for the next.
|
| > In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not
| kill it right after it started crawling.
|
| There are some who seem to want to kill humanity. They
| don't come right out and say it, of course, that would
| sound weird and awkward. If you're oblivious to that
| widespread sentiment, they're perfectly ok with that. The
| curricula they design for your children in school will
| slowly be modified so that they aren't quite so fond of
| your Star Trek visions for the future.
| titzer wrote:
| I posted links because I've had this conversation many
| times over. The short version is: yeah, I used to be a
| techno-utopian too, 20 years ago. But none of those magic
| technologies are realistic, we aren't on the path to them
| being widely deployed, the population and emissions and
| resource consumption are all worse, as summarized in the
| conclusions of the experts who put together the Earth
| Overshoot Day report. If you want to argue about it, take
| it up with them.
|
| > the invention of fertilizer
|
| Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from
| natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is
| like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a
| vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the
| unfortunate massive externality of altering the
| composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a
| bad way.
|
| While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to
| the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to
| take realistic stock of where we are and where our
| trajectory is. Human population peaking _will_ happen--
| the question is whether it 's gradual or whether it's
| sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: htt
| ps://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer.
| ...
| analyte123 wrote:
| It's estimated that green ammonia costs between $800 and
| $1500 per ton today to produce [1]. While this is higher
| than conventional ammonia, it is _less_ than how much
| ammonia cost in the 2022 energy crisis [2] and likely to
| decrease further in the future.
|
| Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because
| it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back
| crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing
| microbes are an emerging technology [4].
|
| I am not convinced that we're all going to die.
|
| [1] https://itif.org/publications/2023/04/17/climate-
| tech-to-wat... [2]
| https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/09/fertilizer-
| prices-... [3]
| https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/07/nutrient-
| challeng... [4] pivotbio.com
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >I must be missing something here because it seems like
| we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the
| water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the
| current global population
|
| The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective
| action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical
| lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty
| easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO
| it.
| RGamma wrote:
| > 2100
|
| Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to
| have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong
| ones.
|
| Just a sidenote, I know.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I generally agree, but a key issue here is fairness.
| Telling someone in India they can't have three kids
| because Johnny techbro wants to feel ok about flying
| 100,000 miles a year isn't great.
| nemo44x wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with having 6 kids but I think more
| people used to because effective birth control didn't
| exist. People had lots of sex back then too and wife's were
| getting knocked up frequently and at a younger age when
| vastly more fertile. My mother had ~40 cousins. I have 12.
| My kids have 4. It's no shock that the birth control pill
| was invented between the time my parent were born and
| started a family. Throw in the 64,000,000 abortions in the
| USA (and the ~70 millions per year globally!) since it was
| legalized and this is why we don't have big families
| anymore.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes
| are that transmissible?
|
| My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a
| farm. What's that tell you about me?
| vel0city wrote:
| You may be pretty radically different from your
| grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are
| truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant
| cousins are more like your great grandparents?
| psychoslave wrote:
| You don't need to wait the answer to take into account
| that they most likely aren't farmer for most of them.
| Though of course it doesn't mean they all topped the
| social pyramid as it is by definition structurally
| unclimbable for most with its power distribution.
| vel0city wrote:
| "More like" not "exactly like". I'm not expecting them to
| all be farmers. But say, having similar-ish religious
| views, similar-ish social views, etc.
| psychoslave wrote:
| And how should we measure that?
| vel0city wrote:
| There are literally hundreds of ways to slice population
| statistics other than just primary occupation.
| Practically _any_ of those, maybe!
|
| Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines
| every aspect of yourself?
| psychoslave wrote:
| "yourself" is mostly nonsense illusion throw at current
| present attention. ;)
|
| The thing with statistics, is that you have to gather
| data which have some consistency before you apply any
| statistics tool and try to draw some conclusions.
|
| We can agree that any individual is more than the
| indefinitely various number of categories under which we
| can label this individual, but at the end of the day
| there only a limited amount of data we actually really
| have on any person that ever existed, and even less
| consistent set of data other many people under any
| category we can think of.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Less than 10%. The outliers are the ones who have stayed
| similar to our great-grandparents, not the ones who are
| different.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Well, it's about averages really. If scientists were having
| eight kid families and creationists having one kid families
| the same logic would apply. Most people have value systems
| reasonably close to their parents'.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Of course your great grandfather worked on a farm, a
| majority of people before mechanization worked on or around
| farm related tasks. Now, when it came to the 10 generations
| before your grandfather, it's pretty damned likely they
| worked on a farm.
|
| The industrial revolution shook things up.
| anonym29 wrote:
| What about the wealthy assholes that think climate change is
| fake, pay thousands of dollars to have the catalytic
| converter removed from their own vehicle to deliberately
| increase it's exhaust emissions, eat hundreds of pounds of
| top-grade beef per year, are flying around seemingly
| constantly on their private jet, but have zero children?
|
| Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of
| their sins solely from their decision to not have kids?
|
| Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor
| rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe
| than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding
| among us?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If you don't have children who will live in the future world,
| why would you deserve an opinion on how that future world
| should operate?
| keybored wrote:
| > I don't really think it's classist to say that if people
| who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear
| outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different
| have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy
| in a generation.
|
| "Classist" is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain
| socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe
| that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to
| [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by
| definition classist.
| nkozyra wrote:
| It's very anecdotal.
|
| There are countries where the average age of first childbirth
| is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland,
| where it's over 30.
|
| Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a
| mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50
| years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-
| grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's
| still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this
| figure.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Longevity plays a big role. My grandmother is 96 and
| grandfather 94, so even with a first child at 29 they've
| still had over a decade with their great grands. I had 6
| great grandparents still alive when I was growing up. My
| parents were young, so will probably be in their 70s for
| great grand kids and if they make it near 100, could see
| great-greats (wild!).
| hyperpape wrote:
| What you wrote sounds superficially plausible, but you're
| overcorrecting.
|
| It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely
| based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The
| average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US
| in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college
| education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in
| 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-
| bir....
|
| The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either.
|
| So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the
| future, though of course there still will be some.
| binarymax wrote:
| 2016 looks almost binomial. We also need to take into account
| population size (significantly more in 2016 compared to
| 1980). It could be that there are just as many young women
| having children - but there are now more mothers >30. So
| maybe there won't be _less_ great grandmothers, just a lesser
| percent of the population.
| jofer wrote:
| If that were the case, then the demographics data would not
| show a major shift. It would just bias of a relatively small
| group.
|
| However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past
| several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics.
| E.g. here's data from the US:
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more
| dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see
| the same trend in most countries.
|
| On average, people are having their first children at a
| significantly older age than a couple of generations ago.
|
| That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at
| all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers
| (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago
| in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall
| population.
|
| This means that children knowing their great grandparents
| really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years
| ago.
| binarymax wrote:
| I don't think mean is a good measurement for this. It's
| probably also being skewed by new science and treatments
| enabling more mothers to have children in their mid 40's. I
| want to see distributions!
| nemo44x wrote:
| "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
|
| - Jesus
| pengaru wrote:
| > That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy
| future, but it explains this blog post.
|
| We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the
| film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is
| fast making our reality post-idiocracy.
| RGamma wrote:
| "Don't look up" is a sort of spiritual successor. Of course,
| as you said, there's room for more, now that half the
| population is TikTok'ed.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| There may be "many" people not thinking about it, but there are
| measurably and verifiably not _plenty_ , which has a definition
| something like "more than enough". Fertility rates in western
| countries, including the United States, are below replacement
| level. There is a far more disturbing dystopia waiting for us
| than Idiocracy.
| keybored wrote:
| I remember that scene. But I think it's more about neurosis
| bias: thinking that there will ever be a _perfect_ time to have
| children. Which never comes. So it just never happens. Contrast
| that with having children young. Maybe you might be financially
| worse off in the long run. But most people seem to make it
| work.
|
| So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young
| parents win.
|
| In any case. Shouldn't people be a bit embarrassed to embrace
| such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year?
| _Idiocracy?_ Christ.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and
| economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of
| other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in
| their late teens and early twenties.
|
| On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually
| everywhere on this planet over the last decades.
| cacheyourdreams wrote:
| Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant
| mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood
| statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a
| new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much
| lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the
| low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent
| at all, rather than the chances of parents living beyond 47.
| gampleman wrote:
| Exactly. While life expectancy from adulthood (say 20 yo) has
| increased (i.e. UK males have gone from expected average 60y to
| 80y between 1841 to 2011 [1]), it hasn't increased nearly as
| much as the life expectancy from birth (i.e. 33% vs 98%
| increase over that period).
|
| [1]:
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
| levocardia wrote:
| The increase for a 40 year old is still nearly 14 years of
| extra life, though. That's a big difference.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Pretty sure the probability of making it to adulthood has never
| been below 50% excluding war, plague, or famine (which were
| common, so hard to normalize)
| gmane wrote:
| I thought this as well, but I did a little research before
| responding, and it looks like even though this is broadly true,
| people still weren't living particularly long before the modern
| era. For example, in Ancient Greece, a man who lived to 15
| would expect to live to 37-41 years, in Rome if a man made it
| to 20 they could expect to live to 60, in the late medieval if
| you made it to 25 you could expect to live to ~48 [0]. You
| still need to make it to 60 to be a great grandparent, assuming
| you and your kids are having kids at ~15 years of age (edit:
| and that might be a friendly assumption given how high infant
| mortality was).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
| alex_young wrote:
| There's some uncertainty about this, and while not properly
| controlled for obvious reasons, a study of lives of men of
| renown in 5th and 4th century Greece found a median life
| expectancy of around 70:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/
| keybored wrote:
| This is such a rookie mistake to make (by the author). Can't
| believe that people who write about this topic still don't know
| this in this day and age.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Some of my relatives had told their toddler "we're going to
| granny of your grand-dad".
|
| Yep, that's 5 generations at once. That particular sub-branch has
| children later so they are a full generation ahead of my own
| branch, so I've told.
| CalRobert wrote:
| If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having
| kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents.
|
| My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in
| my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very
| grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother
| watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she
| was only in her late 40's herself and plenty mobile. I knew two
| of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.
|
| Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it
| is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's
| they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could
| a decade earlier.
|
| My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went
| to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in
| general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.
|
| I don't really have a single point here, except that I worry
| we've ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying
| childbearing until their mid 30's.
| titzer wrote:
| My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations
| for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per
| generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in
| their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly,
| both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew
| them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The
| idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in their
| 140s-150s today, is basically unthinkable for me.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Same.
|
| When my were in school and had friends who were visiting
| great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance
| great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was
| a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather
| (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the
| children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm)
| once. One of those children lived behind us when I was
| growing up, and if I'd paid better attention when helping him
| with his garden would have taught me how to plant by the moon
| and stars --- he did teach me how to gut and skin a squirrel.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| feel like it is questionable to describe yourself as a
| sharecropper if your daddy owns the entire farm
| WillAdams wrote:
| He married one of the daughters --- two different family
| branches here.
| CalRobert wrote:
| My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was
| born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids
| with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past
| than we think.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the
| 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845.
|
| His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9,
| 1928), is still alive today.
| jrussino wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, John died in 1862 and Harrison
| was born in 1928. So he never met his grandfather.
|
| It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known"
| person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean
| is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the
| person that one of them actually met who was born the
| earliest?
| ghghgfdfgh wrote:
| If you think about it, there are about a couple of
| hundred super-centenarians (110 or older) alive[1].
| Surely at least one of them met a very old relative when
| they were young - for example, when I was 9, I met a
| great uncle who was 100 years old. Taking into account
| life expectancy, if you assume at least one of them has
| met someone 85 years older than them, that means this
| oldest "directly known person" would have been born at
| least 195 years ago (1829). Which means there's a good
| chance someone alive has met someone born in the 1820's.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Inci
| dence
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New
| World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7
| generations, it was a little less, but they were in the
| colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less
| than 40 years per generation?
|
| My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended
| towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm
| in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe
| they'd also be on the longer side.
|
| (NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI
| ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which
| seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation
| for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)
|
| * Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn
| in the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- not that anyone in this
| august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of
| OnlyFans worked.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or
| unfounded things about couples with relatively small age
| gaps 7-15 years. It's the norm, not the exception.
|
| And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own
| age.
| rdlw wrote:
| Many things were historical norms, with current practices
| being the exception.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| I got fairly unlucky in the great grandparent department. My
| grandmother had my mom at 15, and my mom had me at 19, and all
| my great grandparents were already dead!
| em-bee wrote:
| oh wow, talk about having the best conditions to have your
| great grandparents around for quite a while, and still no
| luck. at what age did they have your grandmother? i am sorry
| they had to leave so early.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| Conversely even people who start young don't necessarily end up
| having living great grandparents let alone grandparents. My
| parents were both the youngest of 6 and 7 kids so my
| grandparents who started having kids in their early 20s had
| already passed or were quite old by the time I was born.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The economic situation of your mom having a great career is not
| the same as the economic situation of today; appeal to her hard
| work considered. People cannot afford to have kids like they
| used to. And yes, the older grandparents make this much worse
| because they're now a costly liability rather than a useful
| child watcher.
|
| I find the idea that people haven't considered downsides of
| waiting to have kids to be grating personally
| xico wrote:
| One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in
| mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of
| mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance.
| There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal
| age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase
| of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, ....
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502822...
| ralusek wrote:
| Probably a good thing to speed up the evolutionary landscape
| during these rapidly changing times.
| seanhunter wrote:
| It would not speed up evolution at all.
|
| I remember seeing a talk by Steve Jones[1] where someone
| asked a question like this and he said the human species
| has basically not evolved at all for I forget how long he
| said but it was at least hundreds of thousands of years. He
| said specifically if you took the children of someone like
| this dude[2] and put them in a modern school system they
| would not perform noticeably differently in any way from a
| modern child as long as they had decent food etc all the
| other benefits of modern society.
|
| [1] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7056 (emeritus professor of
| human genetics and evolution at university college London
| and the author of a fantastic book on the subject called
| "In the Blood")
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
| Merad wrote:
| It's not just great grandparents, but the family calculus on
| grandparents changes significantly as well. If my parents were
| 35 when I was born, and I don't have children until 35, my
| parents are 70. With a life expectancy of 80, my children never
| really get a chance to know my parents. Whereas if each
| generation is having children at age 25, my children will
| likely be able to know their grandparents for 30 years.
|
| I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to
| think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger
| people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct
| connection to the past.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Its bad. Ofc course its bad to have a smaller support
| network.
| mrbgty wrote:
| Good points to think about. One I consider is that traditions
| and family roots are often good for people to feel connected
| and find meaning although traditions should be questioned from
| time to time.
|
| I think having family members of varying ages alive at the same
| time does help people feel connected, safe, and confident in
| having meaning and purpose. (Not that people can't have those
| things otherwise, it's just without that support)
| Afton wrote:
| The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s,
| completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I'll leave
| it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I'd
| expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and
| increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really
| critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of
| sleep and a colicky baby (for example).
|
| Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids
| earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be
| bleak if they do.
| myko wrote:
| I am so glad I waited until my late 30s to have a kid. It
| sucks not being as physically capable as I would've been, but
| being calmer and more understanding I think is a big help in
| child rearing.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid
| at 22 would've been a mess to say the least. Looking back at
| that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn't much
| more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk
| into a bar who wouldn't get his head screwed on quite right
| for another 6 years or so at minimum.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think a potential problem (depending on ones point of
| view) is that when parents wait till they are responsible
| they tend to have one, maybe two kids, which is below
| replacement rate. When coupled with things like costs, you
| end up with a rapidly shrinking population.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Cost and support networks are both big factors here.
| 30-somethings are probably more likely to have
| replacement rate or more if it's affordable to do so and
| there's family/friends around to lend a hand, but few
| enjoy such circumstances.
|
| Things like remote work could've helped here, allowing
| couples to live near family instead of wherever the best
| employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push
| prevented that.
| em-bee wrote:
| add that waiting longer also increases the replacement
| rate.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Don't worry, there's plenty of irresponsible people out
| there still. And the planet is thankful for a bit of
| steady decline in population.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| The planet doesn't care either way. The question is
| what's best for the humans - and those things or beings
| that humans value.
| em-bee wrote:
| the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in
| other cultures is still more present is that grandparents
| play an active role in helping the young parents to raise
| their children. in chinese culture for example the young
| couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so
| grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
|
| when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the
| grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help
| and to show us how things are done.
|
| oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa
| from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not
| remember him now.
|
| and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely
| remember his parents.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > the component that is getting lost in our culture,
| which in other cultures is still more present is that
| grandparents play an active role in helping the young
| parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for
| example the young couple moves in with the husbands
| parents, and so grandparents are always around to give
| advice and help.
|
| That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so
| much if they aren't.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This retort is true of literally everything involved in
| raising kids.
|
| Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach"
| &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still
| true for the domain for the children. It's true that with
| grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but
| you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from
| either.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Yeah, same here. I don't think I was mature enough to have
| a kid at 22, apart from the fact that I was still studying,
| and when I started working I had low salary and needed to
| work long hours to fight for job stability in a competitive
| sector. However, it would likely have worked at 30, and
| reading through all this makes me think that it would have
| been better than waiting until 36 as I did.
|
| Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done,
| though.
| munificent wrote:
| It's complicated. It's definitely true that we're less mature
| in our 20s than we are in our 30s. But, also, maturity
| doesn't just accumulate on us like growth rings. You can
| easily be a completely immature thirty-something if you don't
| have the kind of challenging life experiences that _cause_
| maturity.
|
| Probably the number one life experience that increases
| maturity is _having kids_. If you 'd had kids younger, you
| would have grown up faster too and earned some of the
| maturity needed to raise them well earlier.
|
| Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one
| should deliberately have children as a tool for their own
| person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you
| can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in
| it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long
| improv scene and do your best.
|
| I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But
| I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture
| today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no
| one should have children until they're perfectly prepared,
| but that's just an impossible bar.
| BirAdam wrote:
| A very close friend of mine was murdered at 18, his sister
| was a year younger and she matured very quickly as a result
| of this experience. She's now in her early 20s and you'd
| assume she's 35 by her personality and view points.
| angarg12 wrote:
| The wording here is a bit odd, almost like blaming people for
| delaying childbearing. The world is complicated and a number of
| factors have produced this outcome in the developed world.
|
| My parents were factory workers and they encouraged me to study
| a university degree as a sure way to a successful career. I
| finished my degree well into my 20s, but then the economic
| collapse of 2008 happened and I spent several years living
| paycheck to paycheck, lucky me who at least had a job.
|
| In my late 20s I finally broke from economic stagnation by
| moving abroad. Then I spent the next 12 years moving countries
| every 2-3 years, which isn't good for stability. In fact I
| didn't meet who would become my wife until my mid 30s.
|
| Now I approach 40 and have a good paying job in tech. However
| I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa and my company has done
| waves of layoffs that I luckily survived. We are seriously
| considering having a child, but the prospects don't look great.
| Everything else aside, we don't really know anyone or have a
| support network here.
|
| I know most of this is moaning and if we "really wanted" we
| could make it work. But it doesn't discount the fact that it's
| easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a
| support network.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I don't blame people, just noting that at least in my own
| youth all I heard were reasons to wait.
|
| Good luck! Funny enough my wife and I are from the US and we
| waited until we knew our kids would have EU citizenship
| before having them. And raising kids without a support
| network sucks, I can't pretend otherwise.
| lukan wrote:
| "But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a
| family for someone with a stable job with a support network."
|
| Definitely. Still, sometimes you have to take risks, as you
| are not getting younger. Maybe moving again somewhere, where
| you could have a support network, even though pay is lower,
| might be an option?
|
| We had grandparents around, that definitely helped. No idea,
| what other people do without that. If both parents get sick,
| the child still needs lots of care .. and you don't want some
| stranger to take care of your baby.
| tombert wrote:
| I only got to meet one of my great grandparents, my great
| grandmother, though she died when I was five years old so I
| don't remember her terribly well. I am the oldest kid in my
| family, and my mom had me when she was 25. My oldest sister
| also got to meet my great grandmother, but my two youngest
| sisters never did.
|
| I still have two living grandparents as well, both
| grandmothers, one I won't talk to, and one that I like a lot.
| My oldest sister had a kid almost three years ago, and he got
| to meet his great grandmother last October for her 90th
| birthday.
|
| That grandmother is still in pretty good health for her age, so
| I certainly hope she lives a lot longer, but realistically she
| probably doesn't have _that_ much time left. I 'm not having
| kids, but my other sisters are planning on it and it seems
| unlikely that they'll get to meet their great grandmother.
| enobrev wrote:
| My story covers both ends of this.
|
| Mom had me at 21 (dad was 30). I knew both my grandmothers and
| neither of my grandfathers. One was left behind when my mom's
| family immigrated. The other died not too long after my dad's
| family immigrated - just before my dad was born
|
| I had my son (now 4) when I was 41. Both his grandmothers are
| around, and neither of his grandfathers. My dad died last year
| and my son barely remembers him. My wife's dad died when she
| was two.
|
| I'm glad to say my son and my mother are very close - they
| spend every other weekend together. His other grandmother and
| my wife aren't close and so my son doesn't know her very well.
|
| Not sure if there's much here - except to say that having kids
| in our thirties should still be young enough that healthy
| grandparents can be around for the formative years. And
| regardless of age, life happens, and a multi-generational
| family unit isn't guaranteed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Except grandparents in their 40s are still working, so not a
| great choice for childcare.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet
| your great grandparents.
|
| It really depends.
|
| When I was born my youngest grandma was 50. She already had
| three grandchildren.
|
| I already had only 3 grandparents, one had died when my father
| was young, having survived two world wars, ironic ain't it?
|
| At the age of 10 only one grandma was still alive, but she
| lived to the age of 95 and managed to meet 4 great grand-
| children.
|
| My cousins had children late in their lives, their parents were
| average for their times.
|
| I would say that meeting your grand parents is a benefit that
| has become a given only for the past 2-3 generations, when life
| and work conditions improved so much that it became the norm.
| bloak wrote:
| Although life expectancy was a lot lower in the past than today
| that was mostly due to infant mortality. It's true that a lot of
| women died during childbirth, which meant that the life
| expectancy of women was less than that of men (I think), but I
| would guess that a woman who survived giving birth to at least
| one child who survived probably had a "reasonable" chance of
| surviving to 60 or 70. So I don't think great-grandmothers would
| have been that unusual in the past.
| bluedino wrote:
| My wife is only a few years younger than I am, but she still has
| all of her grandparents. They are around age 80.
|
| I didn't have my first child until I was almost 40, and my
| grandmother on my father's side died the week we were going to
| tell everyone that we were having a kid. My other three
| grandparents all died in the 1990's.
|
| Also, many of my cousins had kids before they were 20, some of
| them became grandparents before I even became a parent. And
| likewise, I ended up with aunts/uncles that became great-
| grandparents before my dad became a grandparent.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Some of my high school friends (a married couple, for the
| obvious reason) were grandparents before I had my first child.
| The great grandmother in this story was 50. Getting knocked up
| at 17 runs in families. I just checked the CDC stats and
| Oklahoma still has the 2nd-lowest age of mother at first birth
| for non-Hispanic whites, which is because that state has way
| too many churches and nowhere near enough sex education in
| schools.
| epolanski wrote:
| At this rate even grandparents...
|
| Most of my (37) friends in Italy does not have children. Some of
| us are late children so the parents are between 70 and 80.
| parpfish wrote:
| i think an interesting orthogonal trend is how changes in family
| size affect grandparent relationships.
|
| my grandparents were in the generation that had lots of kids,
| which leads to lots of grandkids. that meant that family
| gatherings were huge crowds where they served as a figureheads
| and i didn't really develop a one-on-one relationship with them.
|
| but when i look just one generation removed, i see smaller family
| sizes so grandparents have far fewer grandkids. and they're
| developing _actual relationships_ with their grandchildren in a
| completely different way.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Our children had several years with their great-grandmother. We
| treasured that time for them and even arranged for her (my wife's
| grandmother) to live with us for a few days a week after she
| could no longer stay in her home alone. We were able to keep this
| arrangement for a few years. Our children aren't adults yet, so
| we don't know if our children will have children young enough
| that our parents could meet their great-grandchildren, but we're
| glad we didn't prevent the possibiliy by starting our family
| late.
| modeless wrote:
| > this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped
| from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022
|
| I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more
| than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number
| of great grandmothers that much.
|
| Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and
| individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was
| 15 years younger and my parents were too. It would be a huge
| difference in our energy levels and that's so important when
| you're hanging out with young kids. And it's 15 years less time
| that we will be able to spend together with our kids.
| jobigoud wrote:
| When kids die as infants they don't have time to have any
| meaningful interactions with their great-grand parents so the
| point of the article still stands somewhat. The age of great-
| grandmothers is low infant mortality + parents making kids
| early.
| modeless wrote:
| People had more kids (and then some) to compensate for the
| infant mortality, so I don't think it reduced the number of
| great grandmothers much.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, the thing that kinda annoyed me about the article is that
| it even acknowledges this fact ("even though life expectancy at
| birth as I've used here isn't the best proxy for this"), but
| then for some reason refuses to make the next rational leap
| that there were plenty of great grandmothers in previous
| generations, totally invalidating the article's main thesis.
|
| Obviously there have been huge changes in family size, parental
| age at first birth, etc. over the last few decades. I'd argue
| the lack of great-grandmothers is going to be the least
| consequential of these changes.
| kevinpet wrote:
| Good on you for giving us the update that he does acknowledge
| it. I confess I stopped reading as soon as that stat was
| given.
| aetherson wrote:
| My mother died unexpectedly when she was 73, a couple years
| ago, and it's one of my big regrets that she didn't get more
| time with my children, which were the great joy of the last few
| years of her life.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's interesting to compare this some research which says that
| children of older fathers and grandfathers live longer. If I
| understand this article correctly, it's saying that if the
| paternal grandfather was also older when becoming a father,
| that's even better.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/health-18392873
| silverquiet wrote:
| Huh, anecdotal as heck, but my great-great grandfather (the
| only one I know about) had the line that led to me in his 50's
| after his first wife succumbed to Spanish Flu. I buried his
| youngest daughter at the foot of his grave 154 years after he
| was born; she lived to be 94 and so did my grandfather.
|
| Thinking about it even more, the women on that side of my
| family also had no problem having kids into their 40's.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Heh. I knew a guy in his late thirties that was already a
| grandfather (do the math). I would bet that there's a good chance
| he's still around (I knew him about 40 years ago).
| ilamont wrote:
| Research confirms a narrowing of families with fewer children and
| fewer cousins, but it also notes it's more likely for people to
| know their ancestors:
|
| _In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made
| three major predictions about family structures, also called
| kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely
| decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will
| narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer
| close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings
| and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-
| grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as
| people increasingly have children later in life._
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shrinking-family-...
|
| Another thing to keep in mind: there is a lot of variability
| depending on the community and social standards. People in Utah
| will have a different experience than folks in the Bay Area. In
| rural northern New York and Ohio, the Amish population has
| exploded with couples marrying in their early 20s and families
| typically having at least 5 or 6 kids, sometimes more than 10.
|
| My spouse had our kids in her late 30s, but they have no first
| cousins on either of the side of the family (of the 6 people in
| our generation, we're the only two who had kids). Of all of our
| kids' dozens of friends growing up, only one had more than two
| siblings and they were an immigrant family.
|
| OTOH, my wife works with people who had kids in their late teens
| and early 20s and are grandparents by the age of 40, and that's
| typical in the community.
| juujian wrote:
| The article got one thing wrong. Life expectancy of 45 doesn't
| mean that people drop dead at that age. High infant mortality is
| one main reason for low life expectancy. That's why you have many
| people of old age even in the middle ages when life expectancy
| was abysmal. So I am not convinced that great-grand parents is
| such a recent thing.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Not necessarily false, but the author jump a bit quickly to the
| conclusion with the data it takes for granted. It's well known
| that life expectancy was far lower before due to high rate of
| child mortality. This means that the main cause of the life
| expectancy is more people reached adulthood.
|
| All the more, great-grand _mothers_ always had far less chance to
| die early by being turned into a cannon fodder or driven to
| suicide through toxic masculinity social pressure (though it's
| not like having more chance to be raped by invaders or beaten
| /abused/repudiated by your own relatives was much more fun).
| Still to this days, on the average women have generally a higher
| life expectancy in most countries.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| My kids got to meet four of their great grandparents, although
| they were still very young when they did pass away - I have
| pictures of them with their great-grandparents, but they don't
| have any memories of them. Mine were all long gone before I was
| born... I don't know that anything is being "lost" in the sense
| that it was something we used to have. Meeting one's great
| grandparents was very rare in generations past and continues to
| be.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'm 47. My grandparents were born in 1908. My father was born in
| 1939, and I was born when he was 38. I have no kids, but we
| didn't get around to trying IVF until I was over 40 (my father
| would have been 78)
| lanstin wrote:
| Count everyone on earth as your relative.
| keybored wrote:
| > It's slightly paradoxical -- in the past, I've thought about
| how since life expectancy is increasing, there probably will be
| more great-grandmothers. But on the other hand, people are having
| children much later too.
|
| Apparently two or more independent variables create a paradox.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Just a little point that the life expectancy given there is "at
| birth" and unless I'm mistaken, it's the mean. Which means infant
| mortality contributes enormously to this figure. It's a
| misconception that in the past you would only rarely see someone
| much older than 50. I'm not sure how this would affect the
| analysis. But it's worth bearing in mind. I'm sure there were
| plenty of great grandparents before 1900. That usage of great
| seems to stem from the 1500s.
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/great-grandfather#etymonline...
| ffitch wrote:
| I once read that the significant growth of life expectancy could
| be attributed to lowering rate of child mortality, and that life
| expectancy for adults has changed less dramatically. If that's
| the case, the point that overall life expectancy going from 47 to
| 72 affected the "grandmother window" is probably inaccurate.
| voisin wrote:
| With the economy as it is, grandparents tend to work longer and
| both work, so the early retirement and single-wage of yesteryear
| are largely gone. This trend seems to be increasing. The value of
| intergenerational bonds and knowledge transfer will be lost as a
| result.
| pimlottc wrote:
| For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your
| very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this:
|
| > A friend and I were talking about our families today when I
| realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma
| (not my grandma) at 45.
|
| I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why
| his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing
| to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this
| grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline
| link.
|
| > A friend and I were talking about our families today when I
| realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.
|
| Much clearer!
|
| 0: I _think_ he meant that his grandmother 's first grandchild,
| who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so
| technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he
| didn't actually exist yet.
| enobrev wrote:
| I no longer read anything in parentheses for this exact reason.
| It seems people tend to write their "live-edits" and "related
| thoughts" in parentheses rather than spending a moment to
| figure out what they want to say and writing it clearly. I've
| found skipping anything within parentheses tends to improve my
| understanding while reading.
| ironmanszombie wrote:
| Really? You don't read anything in parentheses? I think that
| would be harder to do (I'm joking, don't take it seriously)
| than actually reading the parenthetical information.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I think that would be harder to do than actually reading
| the parenthetical information.
|
| You must be joking, right?
| thiht wrote:
| This is my take on writing as well, I consider everything in
| parentheses as optional. If I want to write something in
| parentheses, I try to reconsider: either drop it, or write it
| without parentheses.
| em-bee wrote:
| i would have said it like this:
|
| _my grandmother became a grandma to my cousin at 45_
| JackeJR wrote:
| Append to that "x years before I was born"
| stevage wrote:
| I would have been more distracted wondering where the link
| went.
|
| I kind of enjoyed the riddle.
|
| I'd just move the parenthetical to a separate sentence, or
| leave it out.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| How is this unclear from what he wrote?
| tqi wrote:
| For a substack called "memoirs & rambles", I think writing in a
| style that conveys a bit of the writer's own personality is
| fine, even if it comes at the expense of clarity. Not
| everything has to be an Argument Paper.
| a3w wrote:
| Some people still get pregnant with 14, and the next generation
| makes the same "mistake", as that led to not an ideal family
| situation and wise parenting. (German here, so no foul play /
| illegal intercourse happening in most of such cases.)
| adverbly wrote:
| Later, fewer kids. Another more prominent trend is the death of
| the cousin:
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...
| trey-jones wrote:
| It's a very parochial article I think. Sure, there are some
| numbers for the trends and such, but I suspect that people will
| continue to have kids both when they are younger and when they
| are older to some extent. Which is more likely for you is
| probably heavily influenced by your socioeconomic status. This is
| just going to vary significantly from person to person. Examples
| from my own family:
|
| A great grandmother to my children died last year. Her oldest
| great grandchild at the time was 13. She missed meeting the
| youngest by a couple of months.
|
| This same oldest great grandchild also has a living great
| grandmother still, and one that died in 2003 and one that died in
| 2005. So even within the same family, and even for the same
| person, the experience of having a great grandmother can be quite
| different.
| hilux wrote:
| US Rep. Lauren Boebert is a grandma at 37, and her mother (if
| alive - I don't know) will turn 56 this year.
| chasd00 wrote:
| one of my childhood friends is a grand father at 47. He'll
| probably make it to great-great grandfather to someone if those
| trends continue.
| alex_young wrote:
| My grandfather was born in 1904, his son (my father) was born in
| 1941, I was born in 1979, my son in 2020. Great-grandparents have
| been out of the picture for awhile on my side of the family.
| munificent wrote:
| If you ever sit down and really think about it, it is _absolutely
| wild_ how profoundly the invention of the birth control pill has
| changed the course of human history, our cultures, and human
| society.
|
| It's gotta be up there with, like, writing and fire, in terms of
| shaping the destiny of our species.
| al_borland wrote:
| I sometimes wonder what society would look like today without
| it. It would be vastly different.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Why that and not other contraceptives?
| kelnos wrote:
| My last-living great-grandparent died when I was about a month
| old. I hope he got to meet me, though of course I wouldn't
| remember. The odd thing is that my parents (to my recollection)
| never spoke of him.
|
| My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's
| parents died when I was around 10 years old. With the exception
| of my great-grandfather, my other great-grandparents died in the
| 1940s and '50s. They barely got to know their own grandchildren
| before they passed.
|
| My parents were unusual for their generation in that they waited
| until their mid 30s to start having kids (despite having been
| married for 9 years already). On my dad's side, he was the final
| child of my grandmother's third marriage; she was 42 when my dad
| was born (again, unusual for the time).
|
| No real point to this post, I guess. I just think it's
| interesting that people's experiences can differ so much. I only
| knew half of my grandparents, and even then only as a child; the
| idea of people being able to meet their great-grandparents wasn't
| even something I ever considered when I was younger. I don't
| recall for sure, but I don't think many if any of my grade-school
| friends had great-grandparents around either. I've always had a
| very small extended family, and hearing stories from friends as a
| kid about family gatherings always made me feel like I was
| missing out.
| stevage wrote:
| Standard comment about how one shouldn't use raw life expectancy
| in this kind of argument. Here you should use the life expectancy
| of people with at least one child. It's irrelevant to the
| argument how many people die before having children or at what
| age they die.
|
| In my case, my grandfather did become a great grandfather, even
| though he, my parents and my sister all had children pretty late.
| He just lived a very long time.
| zachmu wrote:
| Still think about this essay on the topic I saw on twitter a few
| years back:
|
| https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/18/your-real-biological-clock-i...
|
| > If you intend to have children, but you don't intend to have
| them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is
| still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from
| the time you will share the world with your children.
| decafninja wrote:
| Alternately, you could be giving both them and yourself a
| better quality of life by waiting until you're more ready.
|
| Obviously you don't have forever to do this.
| zachmu wrote:
| I think this is the story people tell themselves, but as far
| as I can tell it's mostly just a story. Kids are resilient
| and don't need the material wealth college educated people
| tend to assume they will to have a good childhood. And as for
| parents, there's really a lot to be said for raising kids
| while you're young and energetic, it's just easier.
|
| The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a
| childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their
| life. It's something you have to experience firsthand to
| understand. That's why social norms and defaults are so
| important here.
| silverquiet wrote:
| And yet...
|
| > The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-
| national variation in the association between parenthood
| and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels
| of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced
| industrialized societies.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
|
| I'm sure it is meaningful, but not everyone is willing or
| able to take on the stress of raising children. Seemingly
| less and less are as fertility declines across developed
| (and even developing) world. And you can say they don't
| need much, but without rigorous education, their future
| looks pretty grim to me. Won't you encourage your kids to
| attend the best college they can?
| zachmu wrote:
| IMHO opinion you have to take happiness surveys like this
| with a grain of salt. For one thing, there is no such
| thing as a happiness ruler, this is all based on survey
| responses and subjective ideas of what it means to be
| happy. The effect sizes are small and inconsistent. The
| same surveys frequently show industrial countries
| significantly less happy than developing countries, and
| yet few people would choose to live like a Guatemalan
| instead of a Canadian.
|
| And despite what they may say to surveys like this, it's
| pretty difficult to find parents who are willing to admit
| they wish they hadn't had kids. Most consider their
| family the most important aspect of their lives.
|
| More importantly, "happiness" is a poor metric to
| optimize one's life around, and hardly anyone does. Most
| people search for purpose and meaning, which children
| supply in spades.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I used to take these with a grain of salt indeed, but
| this is a meta study that finds effects that seem
| consistent.
|
| I think that happiness probably includes meaning for a
| lot of people and furthermore it's a hard sell telling
| them that they shouldn't want to be happy.
|
| I'd also turn around the statement about parents who wish
| they hadn't had kids (though I did at one point
| accidentally date a woman who was married with children
| who clearly didn't want any of that) to say that I also
| suspect that those who avoided having children on purpose
| also rarely regret that decision; some people are just
| different ultimately I suppose.
| decafninja wrote:
| Of course you can raise kids just fine without being
| wealthy.
|
| But... you can give them an even better quality of life if
| you have wealth.
|
| Yes I'm aware that spoiled rich brats are a thing.
| crote wrote:
| It's not just a matter of giving your kid a new laptop
| every year vs. every couple of years, or not being able to
| pay for college out-of-pocket.
|
| There are plenty of people out there who can't afford to
| live in anything larger than a one-bedroom apartment, who
| can't afford to clothe their children, or who can't even
| afford to _feed_ them. Telling them to have kids because
| they are "resilient" and parenthood is "meaningful" isn't
| very helpful - it's far better to wait a few years until
| they're financially stable. A parent's love can't fully
| compensate for childhood poverty trauma.
| zachmu wrote:
| To accept this view is to accept the idea that most of
| our ancestors had "childhood poverty trauma". I just
| don't see how it's a useful frame.
|
| And really, it's not the actual poor who are delaying
| having kids into their mid-30s: it's the college educated
| who make way, way more money than them!
| cogman10 wrote:
| > how meaningful parenthood will be to their life.
|
| Parenthood is very obviously not meaningful to every
| parent's life. There are plenty of people that just don't
| make good parents (and who may never make good parents).
| Saying "you should have kids because of how meaningful it
| will be!" is a bad thing to say to a narcissist or someone
| that's overly self involved. Kids need time, attention, and
| love. Not everyone can or wants to give that. Yes it's sad,
| yes it's wrong, but it's also a fact.
|
| I have family members in this boat, the kids greatly suffer
| as a result.
|
| Social norms and defaults have a tendency to shame people
| into bad positions. Sure, some may benefit, but others will
| flounder and take their kids/family down with them.
| poszlem wrote:
| Reading this reminded me of the feeling I had when I first
| understood what it means for spacetime to be four-dimensional
| and how an object that appears stationary is actually moving at
| the speed of light, but in the direction of time.
|
| So, in reality, nothing's ever just sitting still, everything's
| always moving at speed c. You can't just "stop". We just have
| to choose how we're moving that speed around--through the x, y,
| z, or t direction.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too
| young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time
| you will share the world with your children
|
| It's obviously both?
| ninju wrote:
| There's a saying (Chinese proverb maybe) regarding a having a
| healthy family tree
|
| * May you live to see seven generations *
|
| Which I took as mean grandparents to grandkids (with one "great"
| on either side)
|
| Good luck all
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Its sad and a crisis. However I have money saved and a comfy job.
| Yet I am exhausted. Domapnied burned out mess adhd riddled
| anxiety kissless virgin
| deadbabe wrote:
| We need more good examples of what "old parents" look like in
| modern society. Having a first child in your 40s is often painted
| as a pessimistic, undesirable situation to be in, where you will
| "lack energy" and patience to take care of a small child.
|
| But why? If we're serious about extending lifespans the average
| age of parents should be going up. People should be using their
| younger years to establish themselves in society and build a
| sustainable lifestyle. By the time you are 40, the costs and
| demands of a small child should be effortless, easily solved with
| the riches you've accumulated. By the time you hit 60s, your
| child is graduating college and getting on with life. If you're
| lucky maybe you live to 90 and even see them reach well into
| middle age. This doesn't sound like a bad timeline.
| dividefuel wrote:
| This sounds horrifying to me. If everyone has their first child
| at 40, then grandparents are always 80+ years old, leaving
| little (if any) overlap in time and rarely good overlap as
| those usually aren't high quality of life years. I think many
| people find the grandparent relationship very important, and
| diminishing it so strongly seems pretty harmful.
| danielodievich wrote:
| My great-grandfather was widowed and remarried in late 1940ies to
| a woman who was his university-age daughter's friend (that
| daughter was my grandmother). Yeah, he was considerably older
| (late 40ies/early 50ies?) than her (like 23?). That lady is my
| great-grandmother (sure, she's not blood related to me but they
| had children and they are all my various uncles/aunts and
| cousins). When I brought in my children to see the family, they
| got to meet their both of their great-grandmothers, great-
| grandfather, and on top of that their great-great-grandmother.
| Now THAT's rare.
| racl101 wrote:
| Yeah, that is a pity.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-27 23:00 UTC)