[HN Gopher] The window for great-grandmothers is closing
___________________________________________________________________
The window for great-grandmothers is closing
Author : yakkomajuri
Score : 264 points
Date : 2024-03-27 14:28 UTC (1 days 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Land for housing isn't the concern, land for livestock
| the person eats is.
| 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.
| skulk wrote:
| How does your second paragraph ("they design") not
| directly fly in the face of your first ("mistake this for
| an active, purposeful goal")?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Because the two aren't connected. They do want to design
| school curricula... "to make it better". But they're
| neither smart enough nor quite so self-aware that it's
| designed to deliberately lower fertility rates. One might
| say they're doing it subconsciously, but that seems more
| like mumbo jumbo to me.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Hanlon's Razor always seemed like the perfect cover for
| deliberately committing malicious acts without others
| being able to identify the activity as deliberately
| malicious. You do evil shit and then you just play dumb.
|
| How can anyone prove your intents if you fully conceal
| them?
|
| That said, I do find your argument here pretty
| compelling. Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason, at the
| end of the day.
| skulk wrote:
| > But they're neither smart enough nor quite so self-
| aware that it's designed to deliberately lower fertility
| rates
|
| So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing
| to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the
| same breath.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| No, you've confused my words. Happens in threads that
| stretch past a few hours.
|
| There is a _desire_ that humanity go extinct. But this
| isn 't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not
| actively working towards it, and they don't like to say
| it out loud.
|
| They do design curricula (they're in positions where
| that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't
| conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday,
| instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula
| to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-
| wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why,
| and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100
| answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get
| 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and
| there is no actual conspiracy.
|
| If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out,
| rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like
| quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple
| coordination can take place, they're all innocent.
| There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister
| mastermind.
|
| Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it.
| People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy
| theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak.
| Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like
| when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor
| [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple
| negation of that idea.
| 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
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Anybody who argues that "we're all going to die" is, from
| where I sit, clearly delusional.
|
| So that's not really a problem worth refuting.
|
| On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying,
| 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive
| migration causing chaos in our current understanding of
| "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment
| and destruction of many of the world's great cities ...
| these are actual likely problems. The human race will
| still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?
| anonym29 wrote:
| Hundreds of millions of people die from war, and avoiding
| war is a lot easier than what the (well-meaning) climate
| change evangelists/zealots want us to do. You don't need
| to destroy the entire modern economy and western
| civilization to avoid war.
|
| Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming
| about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and
| billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like
| Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to
| be underwater within their lifetime, if true?
|
| Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone
| else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough
| backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of
| their own country above those of non-citizens.
| 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.
| anonym29 wrote:
| question for you: how many species have already gone
| extinct without us really noticing because the impact on
| humanity was too small to measure? 100,000? 1,000,000?
| 10,000,000?
| RGamma wrote:
| It is unknowable by definition, how many undocumented
| species have gone extinct.
|
| All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't
| hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as
| we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to
| say.
|
| Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently
| they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North
| Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds
| are overfished.
|
| (1) these guys:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Well it's good that the world has stopped changing and we
| can rest assured on our assumptions about how children
| will obviously follow their parents in most things.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Well it's good that the world has stopped changing
|
| I'm not sure you're paying much attention to politics,
| but there are massive movements that want exactly that,
| if not to drag us back to the past kicking and screaming.
|
| I think the premise of we are like our parents is
| actually incorrect.... Our parents are like our culture
| would be the more correct assessment. In conservative
| more hierarchy based cultures you're much more likely to
| be like your parents, because if you are not you'll be
| shunned or worse.
|
| Western culture in general has more of a "make your own
| path" ideology that increases the chances you'll be
| different from your parents.
| 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.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Satire is a cathartic tool that helps us reflect on the
| absurdities of daily life. Critically, satire challenges us
| to introspect beyond the facile projection of its themes
| and subjects. Cynical acceptance and refusal to engage with
| the source material is another exercise in anti-
| intellectualism.
|
| That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me.
| It was funny and well made, but negligently validates
| emotional ignorance.
| 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)
| ako wrote:
| Wikipedia seems to suggest you might be wrong: https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...
|
| For example, for Ancient Rome it says " while the ~50%
| reaching age 10 could expect another 40 years of life".
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Hmm I'm surprised.
|
| But if 50% reaches an average age of, say 2, assuming it's
| right skewed for those who died before 10; then an average
| life expectancy of 50 for the remainder means the average
| life expectancy overall just 26. That squares with the
| numbers stated I suppose.
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| I think it was not just infants but young kids as well but
| yeah.
| bregma wrote:
| "Infant mortality" refers to the mortality rate for those
| under 10 years of age.
| tgv wrote:
| Not only. Check the mortality rates. They've gone down for the
| higher ages. People really live longer past childhood.
| 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
| jl6 wrote:
| > Maybe there's a better term for this.
|
| Seems to be the rule used in _Coco_.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.
|
| I really love this recording[0] from 1941 of a photographer
| born in 1843, talking about the American West. It's one of
| Youtube's many gems.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ab5nv4Suc (video)
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| There's also this video interview of Bertrand Russell,
| whose grandfather met Napoleon as a young member of
| Parliament.
|
| https://youtu.be/4OXtO92x5KA
| ajmurmann wrote:
| My grandpa's mother worked as a servant in a castle that I
| only know as a burned-out ruin and my grandpa fought in
| Stalingrad as a teenager. Unfathomable
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn't
| reflect reality
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Wait, given the age differences described here, the book
| very much reflected reality, no?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| No, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were
| very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some
| were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due
| to competition from men "of substance".
|
| EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI
| just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Isn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I
| mostly recall her having sex with much older men even
| before she enters prostitution
|
| I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea
| of romantic love taking over rather than older men
| becoming unavailable
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| (it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get
| back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per
| generation)
| 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.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Those sound like awful conditions.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| My grandmother was the 2nd youngest of 9 sisters, so they
| weren't that young when they had her, but I don't know the
| exact age. Her dad killed himself when she was a young
| child, alcoholism and war trauma among other things, and
| her mom passed from some illness.
| 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
| throwway120385 wrote:
| > I find the idea that people haven't considered downsides of
| waiting to have kids to be grating personally
|
| Why do you care about what other people do? It's not harming
| you.
| djur wrote:
| Why does anyone care about anyone else's opinions? I think
| it's pretty reasonable to take issue with others assuming
| that you made a particular decision because you hadn't
| fully thought through the consequences. Do you like having
| people second-guess your decisions, or does it annoy you?
| acover wrote:
| I think being judged feels bad. If someone thinks you
| haven't considered the obvious it feels pretty insulting.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Publicly asserting incorrect reasons why people do things
| is in fact harmful due the social dialogue it creates.
| 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
| Rury wrote:
| Increased mutations/mutation rate is not necessarily a
| downside. Mutations aren't inherently bad, they can be
| beneficial, and the vast majority actually have no effect
| whatsoever, as the majority of our DNA is never used. But yes
| increased mutations means increased chances of bad mutations
| happening even if it also means increased chances of good
| mutations happening. Anyhow, it may put evolutionary pressure
| for longer lifespans. Studies involving fruit flies, and
| selective breeding them as old as possible for successive
| generations, show that can be the case. And other studies
| involving natural selection show that high mutation rates are
| a good thing (ie they help species survive), when
| environmental change is high (but high mutation rates are
| detrimental if the environment remains stable).
| 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.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Support networks are not necessarily limited to blood
| relatives.
|
| (in particular, I was never within 5 hours of gp or ggp
| until my teens, and born multiple TZ away. then again, I'm
| in the "come home before it gets dark" generation; ymmv)
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| No but its nice
|
| We have cheap daycare, maternity leave etc etc here in
| Sweden but having some another dropoff for the kids is
| still nice for parents
| vidarh wrote:
| I realised last year that I'd reached the age (48) that my
| mums dad was when I was born. I remember him "always" being
| "old", but I also know that I have memories of him from
| before he turned 55 (he took early retirement around then,
| and I remember clearly the discussions about what would
| happen to his workplace that led up to the offer of taking
| early retirement). He lived another 32 years after that, and
| all of my grandparents were young enough through most of my
| childhood and teens that not only were they around but they
| had the energy to have us stay for whole weeks during the
| holidays and take us all kinds of places...
|
| Meanwhile my son, at 14, has only one living grandparent, and
| it does feel weird.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| My mom's parents were relatively old when they had her, and
| my dad's parents were relatively young when they had him. I
| had a set of 'old' grandparents, and 'young' grandparents.
|
| My mom's parents were gone by the time I was 24 - I didn't
| really ever get a chance to interact with them as an adult.
| My dad's father passed away when I was 39, but I had many
| visits with them as an adult while he and my grandmother were
| still pretty active. My grandmother is now 94 and not in
| great health, but still with us, still mentally there. When I
| was in 5th grade, they came to 'grandparents day' at my
| school, and she won 'youngest grandmother', but wouldn't come
| up on stage to accept the award! ;)
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and
| motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have
| been indoctrinated to place career first and only.
|
| Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of
| a sneer if you want to understand this.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is it possible women could want financial independence
| without being indoctrinated?
|
| Or are they incapable of desiring power over their own
| lives, perhaps unlike men?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Of course a lot of people would like financial
| independence. Young working women (and men) of today
| normally have almost no financial independence, because
| they are indebted or renters. They have to work a salary
| job or be out on the streets.
|
| A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job
| had much more financial independence together with her
| husband than most working young people have today, even
| though they get fancy titles now.
|
| Basically the current elderly generation used
| indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some
| kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
|
| Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures,
| the wife in the family controlled the household's
| finances.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Young working women (and men) of today normally have
| almost no financial independence,
|
| A greater proportion of women today have more financial
| independence than they have ever had in the past.
|
| > A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job
| had much more financial independence together with her
| husband
|
| This is financial dependence, not independence.
|
| > Basically the current elderly generation used
| indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some
| kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
|
| Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to
| read that they could only be capable of wanting control
| of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
|
| > Also to remember is that traditionally in most
| cultures, the wife in the family controlled the
| household's finances.
|
| Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of
| time, women did not have power over the family's assets,
| much less the ability to earn enough to power a family.
| They were and are literally married off because they were
| liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of
| daughters. And umpteen other examples.
|
| This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms
| that provide women equal access to power as men, biology
| throws them a curveball every month with the effects of
| menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of
| pregnancy/childbirth.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > This is financial dependence, not independence.
|
| Do you really think that somebody who owns their own
| house and has supplementary income is less independent
| than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The
| first has the option to stop working, the second will be
| out on the streets if they do.
|
| > Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman
| to read that they could only be capable of wanting
| control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
|
| Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is
| massive to convince the young generations that they want
| to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity
| and still not afford to own their homes to have families.
|
| > Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all
| of time, women did not have power over the family's
| assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a
| family.
|
| Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is
| your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny
| this even if you read about it and find out. Just say
| "Nonsense!" and shut it out.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| We are simply living in different realities. In mine,
| women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to
| vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent
| discrimination against them in the labor market. And this
| is not even worldwide.
|
| In the world I live in, many or most women are still
| contending with uneven workloads in the home:
|
| https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/real-reason-south-
| koreans...
|
| >and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to
| family life, especially for women, who are still expected
| to do the bulk of housework and child care.
|
| >Do you really think that somebody who owns their own
| house and has supplementary income is less independent
| than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The
| first has the option to stop working, the second will be
| out on the streets if they do.
|
| False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their
| own house outright and have supplementary income. Either
| in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work
| outside the home, or they were expected to do all the
| housework. There was no option to stop working (housework
| is work).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think we are living in different realities yes. And
| also, none of us are living in the past to really know
| how things were. We can not rely too much on the
| testimony from the elderly generation, because they are
| known liars and cheats.
|
| But what we can do is try to look at things today in the
| most logical way possible. Why should young men and women
| work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For
| financial independence and freedom says you and others,
| and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But
| the fact is that young people are more broke than ever.
| They are working hard and are highly productive, but all
| their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land
| rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't
| get the financial independence they were promised. So
| they've sacrificed everything and become erased from
| history and from the genome in exchange for almost
| nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping
| all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.
|
| Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves?
| What sane person would forego taking care of their own
| family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their
| life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and
| unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who
| are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of
| young workers who are supporting them.
|
| It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly
| schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in
| a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put
| obedience to authority as the most important thing in
| life.
|
| > Either in laws own it
|
| Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is
| something crucial to the whole issue that the article
| brings up.
|
| > or they were expected to do all the housework.
|
| If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything
| the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is
| expected to do, I guess.
| arkey wrote:
| Independence is cool and all that, but I'd rather go with
| the teamwork of marriage and family.
|
| Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and
| women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning,
| idealistic one.
|
| If you want absolute power over your own life, and your
| goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but
| maybe marriage and family is not for you.
| havblue wrote:
| You can simply ask whether women really are financially
| independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs,
| credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping
| that job once you're "independent" of your family and
| significant other on the other hand. How independent are
| you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
|
| This is a useless measure of independence in the context
| of this discussion since it applies to men and women.
| When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are
| discussing one gender being able to achieve more
| financial independence than the other due to
| laws/customs/discrimination.
|
| > You can simply ask whether women really are financially
| independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs,
| credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping
| that job once you're "independent" of your family and
| significant other on the other hand.
|
| Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is
| irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and
| women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job
| thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.
|
| Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the
| world for 99% of history have never had or been in
| families with enough wealth such that they did not have
| to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no
| explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot
| at the decision making table.
|
| But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is
| does my daughter have the same opportunities available to
| her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice
| in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a
| high paying job?
| tuatoru wrote:
| It is possible to live well enough to raise children with
| "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year
| technical college training, instead of a four year
| college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for
| "a career". A job with flexible hours.
|
| Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a
| career" as preferable.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The sneer of "soccer mom" isn't that she's a mother busy
| raising children. It's that she's too busy shuffling the
| kids between enrichment activities to take the downtime
| to be their mother. That and her children are her
| personality.
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Arguably you can chose other teachers and coaches and
| daycare
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| What about crappy parents?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Exactly. That's the distinction. While you can chose
| other people in most roles for your kids, you cannot pick
| their grandparents.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You have up to 4 grandparents to choose from (in the case
| where all 4 are still living, but separated).
| sublinear wrote:
| The best part about being a mature parent is that you
| have much more control over how you raise your kids. No
| way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents,
| coaches, etc. over my actual parents.
|
| My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their
| skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on
| people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed
| off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have
| no problem showing their kids the reality of the world
| early on.
|
| Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could
| convince all these people stuck in the past. This world
| will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality
| parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've
| been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents
| weren't the only ones thinking this way.
| rayiner wrote:
| The notion that parents have much to do with how kids
| turn out is a myth: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl
| og/blueprint/201809/par.... It's just something old white
| guys said in the 1960s without support, like Jungian
| archetypes and things like that. Somehow it's become part
| of the unexamined truth of society.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's just something old white guys said in the 1960s
| without support, like Jungian archetypes and things like
| that.
|
| It is that, but it's not just that; the concept is
| attested farther back.
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola#Disputed
|
| > Give me the child for the first seven years and I will
| give you the man.
|
| If Voltaire invented it from whole cloth, that's still
| the 18th century.
|
| Though on your topic, Piaget is an amazing example of
| someone just inventing a completely ridiculous theory,
| doing experiments that fail to support it, and getting it
| enshrined as wisdom anyway.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Oh man Piaget. Responsible for bad information on kids
| for both Object permanence, and abstract reasoning.
|
| His views on egocentrism at least seem not as obviously
| wrong as those two; not sure what modern studies have to
| say.
| visarga wrote:
| Can confirm, have 3 kids. Parenting doesn't have much to
| do with how kids turn out. The genetic factor is more
| important. Not just genes of the two parents, but also
| how they recombine and surface various traits. Best thing
| to do is to let the kid discover who they want to be.
| Observe and support their explorations.
| baq wrote:
| Yeah, have 4 and 90% of my psychological strength is
| spent in making them not do bad things like punch their
| siblings in the face for looking the wrong way. I'm now
| resigned to the Sun Tzu principle: if you cannot lose,
| you'll win - just want to make sure I'm eliminating the
| obviously losing paths and they'll need to walk the
| successful paths themselves or I'll end up in an
| institution.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I 100% disagree.
|
| On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in,
| you will see a bunch of problems.
|
| For example:
|
| - kids turning out really poorly if they have bad
| parenting. Magnitude matters too.
|
| - I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally
| died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids
| counted?)
|
| - some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie
| kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those
| from older parents may not be impacted at all)
|
| In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up
| to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is
| so deficient, things go bad, fast.
|
| My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on
| average, except that when it does, it's the main
| determinant for outcome.
|
| And further, i posit that this parenting variable is
| increasingly worse over time.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > It's just something old white guys said in the 1960s
| without support
|
| Oh please. You think the nature versus nurture argument
| was invented in the 60s? You think that a pop psych
| article from a behavioral geneticist is the last word in
| the matter?
| program_whiz wrote:
| Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this
| thinking. The main argument of the article is that our
| experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher,
| getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much
| difference in our personalities and genetically
| determined proclivities in the long term. Although the
| article says only half of personality / psych traits are
| genetically determined, which is still substantial imo,
| so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't
| matter" even by the arguments in the article.
|
| >> Research shows that inherited DNA differences account
| for about half of the differences for all psychological
| traits -- including personality.
|
| >> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids
| turn out is a myth
|
| This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not
| support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental
| development, emotional support, getting a good education,
| avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents
| facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out".
| Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about
| sports if they aren't, but having good parents that
| foster interests and development is a huge difference in
| "how a kid turns out".
|
| Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have
| equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to
| resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement
| is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy
| article you reference, and contradicted by all available
| evidence. Just one small one:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Have you found any studies that show that shared
| environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a
| kid turns out? I haven't seen any.
|
| And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any
| of those studies it's all correlational. So they have
| literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by
| genetics vs shared environment.
| arkey wrote:
| > The notion that parents have much to do with how kids
| turn out is a myth.
|
| This is honestly fascinating. It's obviously not true,
| just by taking into account the consequences of it being
| actually true.
|
| Am I missing something? The study says, at some point "We
| would essentially be the same person if we had been
| adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
|
| Are they limiting this to the genetic composition of a
| person? It seems they refer to the character, behaviour,
| overall identity... which to me sounds unbelievably
| absurd.
|
| I mean, being raised by a single mom vs. being raised by
| an Army dad MUST introduce some differences, right? And
| what about all the studies about the consequences of
| father absence? Oh, all criminals were going to be
| criminals regardless?
|
| Come on.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| > "We would essentially be the same person if we had been
| adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
|
| If you look at twins that are raised apart this is
| freakishly true. Twins raised apart have outcomes that
| are far closer than 2 unrelated kids raised together.
|
| > And what about all the studies about the consequences
| of father absence?
|
| If you look at children with an absent father vs children
| with a dead father you find that 80% of the effect
| disappears in the second group. And that still doesn't
| entirely eliminate the genetic component because genes
| influence behavior that can lead to death. This strongly
| suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse
| for you than not being raised by a father.
| arkey wrote:
| > This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a
| deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a
| father.
|
| I find that the implications of this being true are very
| troubling.
|
| Maybe you could attribute the outcomes to the difference
| between your father abandoning you vs. your father
| unfortunately passing away? I'm sure both cases would
| have different effects on a person.
|
| I have the hope that someone with a deadbeat dad being
| adopted by a caring family will have a better prospect
| than someone thrown into the system.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not
| so much if they aren't.
|
| This is specious. If they are particularly awful, their
| kid probably won't want anything to do with them raising
| his/her kids.
| em-bee wrote:
| you can't choose your parents obviously, but having
| parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is
| not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your
| experience.
|
| for most people the problem is not that they don't want
| their parents around, but that the parents don't feel
| like helping as much as their kids would need it. and
| here the culture makes a difference.
|
| my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were
| always treated as secondary. and according to their
| tradition we should have been living with my parents.
| they favored their son and his wife in everything, and
| yet they did what they could to help their daughter,
| because that is simply what what grandparents in china do
| regardless of how well they relate to each other.
|
| but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are
| willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the
| relationship to their kids
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Additionally, in generational cycles where you can
| maintain or exceed your parent's class status without
| moving away.
|
| Whole swaths of the US don't have enough good jobs to
| maintain a middle class lifestyle for kids of middle
| class parents.
|
| And parents are working longer as well, meaning that
| overlap is less likely to happen.
|
| I went to my grandparents every Wednesday. My mom just
| retired, my kids are 12 and I didn't have kids until my
| 30s.
|
| There's so much about life that has changed the fabric of
| families in the last few decades
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about
| mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.
|
| Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money
| herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in
| laws who are expecting the deference they had to give
| their in laws when they were young are going to have
| trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.
| tuatoru wrote:
| But only 20% of Indian women are in the workforce, due to
| culture--family honor concerns.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is due to those Indian women not having the
| opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women
| who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much
| higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining
| higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other
| developed countries).
|
| But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in
| India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to
| get as good of an education as they can and secure as
| good income earning opportunities as they can.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Children of immigrants rapidly absorb the core culture of
| their new country. Especially when in grants them greater
| independence.
|
| The upper classes in India are a rounding error, maybe
| the population of Spain at most.
|
| Edit: you are right that it's a trade-off. In Bangladesh
| keeping women at home may mean starvation, so they are
| grudgingly allowed to work.
| triceratops wrote:
| 28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education.
| The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the
| US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than
| men).[2] Since they're from different sources the
| participation rates might not be directly comparable
| _shrug_ but the gender stats should still be applicable.
|
| At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a
| great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on
| over in India.
|
| 1. https://opportunities-
| insight.britishcouncil.org/news/news/i...
|
| 2. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-
| enrollment-sta...
| tuatoru wrote:
| Sure, they go to college. Which makes the low labor force
| participation rate even more of a tragedy for them and
| the country.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese
| culture is that the young couple lives separately from
| their parents, and the child is raised by the
| grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I thought you were going to say it for a minute there -
| the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is
| missing in our US culture during the younger years is
| 'duty'
|
| I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up
| to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt
| really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the
| issue.
|
| Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is
| solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is
| a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me
| and I can see why. Our values today are very different
| from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think
| that's the big difference.
|
| Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad
| leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss
| of community time due to diminished economic opportunity
| locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and
| even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking
| family ties, all certainly played a role.
|
| it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled
| frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the
| frog to jump out
| everforward wrote:
| > Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc
|
| I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of
| news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly
| worse so much as that were all just much more aware of
| their failings than we were in the past.
|
| There are no secrets these days.
|
| I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda
| breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a
| clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so
| far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good
| at convincing people to believe they have a duty.
|
| We also have a lot of infighting between political and
| cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared
| obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to
| someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate
| your whole life.
| danparsonson wrote:
| I personally think it stems from a strong focus on
| individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the
| wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own
| needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if
| necessary to achieve that.
| 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.
| ein0p wrote:
| As someone who had his first kid at 23, you grow up real
| quick once you become a parent. Moreover I doubt it's even
| possible for a person to fully mature if they don't have
| kids. Or to really understand their own parents for that
| matter.
| ddsf wrote:
| I often see people settled into being more financially
| responsible, and it's good. But not in term of
| personality maturity.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I was 24 and still in college. This thread is full of
| people saying "I was a mess" or "I wasn't mature enough".
|
| When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a
| gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck
| with my friends yelling things at people walking by on
| the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.
|
| Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I
| needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time
| to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and
| make less because it was easier.
|
| So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being
| responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to,
| and a kid has that effect.
| digging wrote:
| > Moreover I doubt it's even possible for a person to
| fully mature if they don't have kids.
|
| This is my favorite of the lies parents tell, it's so
| obviously nonsensical
| ein0p wrote:
| I take it you don't have kids.
| 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.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I wonder if you'd mind sharing some examples of her
| viewpoints? It's not obvious to me what sort of maturity
| a sibling murder would induce. She moved to the suburbs
| already?
| nyokodo wrote:
| > no one should deliberately have children as a tool for
| their own person growth
|
| I'm not suggesting you're saying this, but there seems to
| be an idea floating around that any motivation to have
| children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is
| absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an
| _ancillary_ benefit to having children or from any other
| relationship for that matter. Yes, if it's your primary
| goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a
| right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own
| sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate
| your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one's
| good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part
| of the equation of forming relationships and having
| children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human
| experience across cultures and times.
| munificent wrote:
| _> there seems to be an idea floating around that any
| motivation to have children that incorporates your own
| good is evil. _
|
| This is a really good observation.
|
| Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that
| if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then
| you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It
| seems like there are a lot of people out there today who
| believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have
| kids or pets.
| r00fus wrote:
| > The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s,
| completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.
|
| You see, in a proper early childrearing situation, you would
| be a) near your parents and inlaws ideally b) they would
| share in the burden of child-rearing.
|
| We had kids later in life (33-ish) and I think if I were to
| do it again, I'd have moved quicker to having kids earlier
| (waited 2 years to marry and 3 years before having first
| kid).
|
| More and more people are living closer to their parents -
| which opens up this possibility.
| bradlys wrote:
| A lot of this assumes so many things that I think people
| who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most on HN)
| take for granted.
|
| Even if I lived close to the family I was born into, I
| would never let them get near my children. The years of
| neglect and child abuse are reason enough that they should
| never see them - let alone be caregivers.
|
| Similarly, you're assuming that your marriage would have
| gone smoothly still and so would the childbearing if you
| hadn't waited. I was with someone for five years and we
| never got legally married. We talked a lot about kids and
| marriage. I still felt like we had years to go before we
| were ready for marriage and kids. We separated over
| financial differences once it became clear they were never
| going to resolve. Imagine we had ignored our intuitions and
| married and had kids based on arbitrary deadlines? It would
| have been terrible. The differences wouldn't have solved
| themselves with marriage or kids - we would've gone
| separate ways and both would experience truly insane
| hardship due to such poor decisions.
|
| Living near people who can take care of your kids sounds
| lovely if you grew up where all the jobs are. Not uncommon
| for many SV types here who grew up in Palo Alto and such
| but it's farfetched for so many more.
|
| We need better regulations to give better paid leave and
| lower the cost of housing so I'm not homeless when my
| spouse decides to stop working to take care of the kids.
| r00fus wrote:
| I'm not denying your experiences - I was reasoning using
| my own. I did not have a typical upbringing - I'm felt
| like an outsider and went to a different school for like
| 7 years in a row.
|
| Clearly your circumstances dictated your options.
| Nowadays, in this truly oligarchic economy, most young
| people simply don't feel they'll ever be able to afford a
| home or family either (which is a massive regression).
| Perhaps the future means - you raise your family in your
| parents house (with their help)... if you trust your
| parents.
|
| Agreed about better support for families and housing.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Housing affordability has little to do with an oligarchic
| economy and everything to do with policy decisions we
| made to make housing expensive.
| rayiner wrote:
| > A lot of this assumes so many things that I think
| people who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most
| on HN) take for granted.
|
| You don't have to be "UMC" to take those things for
| granted. All those things are normal in the third world
| village where my dad grew up.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Right, it's less about economic class, more about
| cultural values.
| crimsontech wrote:
| I had my first daughter when I was 20 and grew up very
| quickly, I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus
| that I was now wholly responsible for a human.
|
| She is an adult now and I couldn't be any prouder of all she
| has achieved in life so far.
|
| I also had two more kids in my 30s. It's harder when you are
| older, but I'm financially better off so they can have things
| I couldn't afford in my 20s. I do have more work
| responsibilities but it's balanced by working from home so I
| get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school,
| here when they get home, etc.
|
| There are benefits either way, but I think if you are
| committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has
| more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more
| of lives too.
| serf wrote:
| >I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I
| was now wholly responsible for a human.
|
| the problem of course being that some individuals never hit
| upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the
| matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to
| come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and
| mentally well.
|
| > It's harder when you are older, but I'm financially
| better off so they can have things I couldn't afford in my
| 20s.
|
| I'm a second child with after a large age-gap. My brother
| was born when my mother was 16, I was born twenty years
| later. My parents routinely told me how much harder it was
| with my brother -- lack of cash and profession, the party
| lifestyle that comes with youth and college-life, constant
| moving for opportunity and cheaper housing, and an overall
| lack of time to dedicate to the kid due to the instability
| and struggle to keep afloat financially.
|
| I was born at a time of great stability for them. They had
| professions, they could make their own schedules. They had
| time to participate in my schooling and extracurricular
| stuff. I had good food, good toys, good clothing, and a
| stable house. They let me voice my decisions because they
| had the time and freedom to consider options other than
| pure survival. I was told that I was the 'easy' one -- not
| because of my personality but because "The 70s sucked.",
| which is code for "We were young, poor, un-established and
| struggling."
|
| So, after the anecdote I feel compelled to ask : Why do you
| think it is harder when you're older? You have more money,
| you have the power of flexibility within your scheduling
| that allows for participation in your childrens' growth and
| development -- is it simply a 'strength of youth' kind of
| thing?
|
| I have no kids, I have no plans for them, so I ask just as
| a curiosity. The opinion varies wildly from person to
| person, and I think it's fascinating what kind of
| 'diversity of parenting' exists.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| For one, grandkids. If I live as long as my dad, I'll
| have 7 fewer years than he did with me and my wife and
| son.
|
| My family brings me great joy.
| dgacmu wrote:
| We had our first kid when I was about 37, and our second
| when I was about 43.
|
| The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm
| just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's
| not drastic, but I notice it.
|
| The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I
| won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd
| love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc.,
| but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost
| my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring
| some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose
| me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never
| easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My
| kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still
| had two.
|
| The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is
| pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years
| of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and
| have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids.
| We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high
| quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency
| mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or
| medically, or whatnot.
|
| Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time
| with them while they're still young. There's no clear
| answer on the balance other than doing one's best.
| ulfw wrote:
| This is exactly why I decided not to have kids. My mum
| had me at 40. I lost my dad when I was 23 and my mum at
| 44. I'm 47 now and it's frankly too late for me (I'm
| male, so theoretically I could father some) to have
| children now.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm sure you're still a cool uncle and good influence to
| the youngins.
| ulfw wrote:
| That's super sweet of you. Thank you. I do try my best.
| nickd2001 wrote:
| As someone who's had kids at a similar age to you, yeah
| its not a nice thought not being around for them as long
| as you'd like to be. Especially the thought of them
| having lost their parents when still relatively young
| (e:g in their 30s). Your life expectancy estimate sounds
| possibly a little pessimistic to me. With modern
| healthcare, barring bad luck, trying to live to 85-90
| might be not a crazy ambition? That'd involve being
| somewhat focused on not eating cr*p and trying to get a
| decent amount of exercise, nothing crazy but just a
| little bit of prioritisation. That's my approach anyway.
| I wonder if in time older parents will be found to have
| longer life expectancy because they have an extra
| incentive to look after their health?
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I
| won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd
| love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc.,
| but statistically, I don't think it's too likely.
|
| This bothers me a lot, too (although I had my kids a
| couple of years earlier than you). Not just the physical
| presence, but also being physically and mentally fit when
| they're adults. I'd like to do sports, travel with them,
| help them move between apartments. I'd like to be
| mentally on the same page, not an old grumpy fart not
| understanding what they're thinking about. All of that
| can be done, but it simply gets more difficult with a
| larger age difference.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Another thing not yet mentioned is that it literally
| becomes physically more difficult to have children as you
| age. Female fertility starts to rapidly drop in their
| thirties, and many will hit menopause in their 40s. The
| exact age is somewhat random, and some women will even
| enter menopause in their 30s.
|
| Before I had children I thought it would be relatively
| easy - that's why you use birth control after all. But
| when you actually have children you learn things like at
| best you're looking at, at best, a 10-30% probability per
| month _if_ you hit the ~48 hour ovulation window just
| perfectly. That doesn 't sound so bad - because a month
| isn't such a long time, and ovulation is pretty
| predictable. But when you start late each month matters,
| and then if you want to actually have multiple children,
| then you're already looking at a years long process.
|
| And then add in that as you age, all sorts of birth
| defects and disorders like Down Syndrome become _much_
| more likely, and you can 't effectively test for them
| until about halfway through the pregnancy. It's just not
| a great idea to start late. I'd also add that for us to
| have a sustainable population, everybody needs to be
| having more than 2 children on average. This is going to
| take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and
| culture, or our society and culture will simply go
| extinct.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of
| society and culture, or our society and culture will
| simply go extinct.
|
| It won't. You can't extrapolate the short-term recent
| trend to centuries. In the past,
| social/cultural/religious norms forced you to have
| children even if you didn't really have a great desire
| for them. This changed and now there will be selection
| pressure on personality traits which desire children.
| brabel wrote:
| I've been trying to convince my wife to have at least one
| child, but I'm afraid it's too late already. She's 43.
|
| You've just made me think it would be a bad idea anyway
| at this point :(.
|
| Oh well, at least I have many nieces.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think it's more like start early > start late > start
| never. There's more hurdles, and less chance of success -
| but I definitely wouldn't say it's a bad idea. The worst
| that happens is nothing happens. I sincerely hope you two
| at least try. Good luck.
| erispoe wrote:
| It seems like she just doesn't want to have kids.
| Marsymars wrote:
| In a kinda similar boat, though less "trying to convince"
| and more "trying to decide if we want a kid". (Because
| really, the boat for multiple kids for us has sailed.) My
| wife's five years younger, but we only met three years
| ago, so it feels like we've been speed-running our
| relationship while simultaneously dealing with life and
| career stuff.
|
| I live across the country from my nephew, but if I end up
| not having kids, he can look forward to notably more
| visits and funtime with the uncle.
| jwalton wrote:
| I thought about replying with something exactly like
| this, but generally this sentiment gets downvoted to
| oblivion.
|
| I'll add that we waited longer than we should have, and
| while it's hard to conclusively say we would have had an
| easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of
| thousands in fertility treatments.
|
| You always think you have more time, but as they say
| "it's later than you think."
| timeon wrote:
| > the problem of course being that some individuals never
| hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding
| the matter make it look like that revelation is more
| likely to come to an individual who is older, financially
| secure, and mentally well.
|
| For some it is really _never_.
| darkerside wrote:
| Do you mind sharing how your brother and you turned out
| in terms of career, family, and general life happiness?
| Sorry for an overly personal question, but I'm very
| curious as a parent myself with my own theories about the
| craft.
| bgroat wrote:
| Everyone's life is completely different, and their choices
| are their own. It seems you made the right choice for
| yourself, and I hope your kids agree.
|
| I will say though, I think there's a chicken and egg element
| in this line of thinking.
|
| A part of my thinks that being childless in twenties provides
| space that facilitates being a basket-case.
|
| I think that having a child immediately makes most people at
| least 50% more responsible, and 85%+ within a year.
|
| Again, there's a huge range here for people who: - Never get
| better - Their 85%+ still isn't really responsible enough.
|
| Unsolicited 2 cents from a guy who had a kid in his twenties
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| To borrow terms from RFC 2119, "having a child makes people
| more responsible" is a SHOULD, but statistically, turns out
| to be a MAY. (#survivorBias: people are likely to
| acknowledge this, if they did turn out to actually be more
| responsible - "turned out GREAT for ME", emphasis added.
| The other case, not so much.)
|
| However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure
| - but it's not an overwhelming factor...
| dheera wrote:
| Emotional maturity is important, but there's also financial
| readiness.
|
| People don't have extended families and villages to be
| nannies-on-demand anymore, so older parents have a lot more
| financial resources to raise kids and more likely to give the
| kid a comfortable life.
|
| Especially when housing prices have gone up much faster than
| salaries in the past 30 years, and that is reflected not only
| in one's own mortgage/rent but also that you have to
| indirectly pay the rent increases of every Chipotle worker
| you interact with.
| ip26 wrote:
| I think the optimal strategy depends partly on your genes.
| Challenging kids seem to run in families, and it's probably
| easier to succeed as a very young parent if your kids are
| naturally the quiet & obedient sort.
|
| It's not politically correct, but we all know a few little
| hellions, and they are obviously difficult to parent.
| rayiner wrote:
| > The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s,
| completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.
|
| How common is it that people are incompetent to raise kids in
| their 20s, versus people who may not presently have
| everything together because nobody expects anything from or
| depends on them?
| brabel wrote:
| Great point. Most people are perfectly capable of raising
| to the occasion, but while there's no occasion they just
| stay in the comfort of their responsibility-free lives... I
| say, enjoy it while it lasts!
| jimbokun wrote:
| Interesting how until recently people in their early 20s were
| perfectly capable of raising children, but today they're not.
| pooper wrote:
| They just didn't know any better. The whole idea that
| everyone has to have children is frankly asinine. I want
| people to have fewer children. I want fewer people to have
| children. I want nobody to have more than two children.
|
| The whole idea that population must grow and keep growing
| is silly. It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
| mycologos wrote:
| > I want nobody to have more than two children.
|
| > It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
|
| The first idea is way more extreme than the second idea.
| yaomtc wrote:
| They didn't say "Nobody should be allowed to have more
| than two children". They simply have an opinion that
| people shouldn't, purposefully, have more than two
| children. Seems reasonable to me.
| pooper wrote:
| Yes, thank you. I'm not Mao. People should choose to have
| either no children Or ideally one or two children And not
| no children.
|
| Ideally, we as a society should support people who choose
| to have one or two children, prioritizing these families
| over people who have half a dozen or more children. But
| that's because in my opinion people who have dozens of
| children have something wrong in their heads. If you
| choose to have a dozen children, you better be able to
| afford to raise them all on your own dime.
|
| That being said, I really dislike means testing of any
| kind so I'd be ok with a social safety net for the wackos
| and their unfortunate children.
| Thorrez wrote:
| The way the trend is going, the population is going to
| shrink. South Korea is already down to 0.84 (2.1 means
| population stays the same).
| pooper wrote:
| That is good and I'm all for it but a problem is now is
| that fundamentalists still have a lot of children and at
| some point, they will have too much political power.
| mycologos wrote:
| A high school education doesn't go as far as it used to,
| women have more life paths that don't involve being a stay-
| at-home mom, houses are harder to come by, average age at
| first marriage is almost a decade higher than it was in the
| 50s ... notable, sure, but interesting, I dunno.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It used to be that the average person at 25 already had
| worked a full-time job for 5-7 years. Now a college
| education is much more important and at 25 many haven't had
| a full-time job at all yet and in a way haven't been
| exposed to the real world. I sometimes think about Robert
| M. Pirsig's point that young people should work and then
| get further education to see better where the value comes
| from. I do wonder if that would push children even further
| back though.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't think anyone really thinks that. The vast majority
| of people in their 20s are perfectly _capable_ of raising
| children, it's just not _desirable_.
|
| I don't think it's a bad thing (why not spend your 20s
| exploring?) but it's also easily explained by financial
| burdens that didn't used to exist. Housing is now very
| expensive, can you blame people waiting until they have the
| right size home before they have kids?
| B-Con wrote:
| There were a lot of incompetent parents, but they pushed
| ahead blindly.
|
| Today can recognize when they'd bee a pie parent and choose
| not to do it anyway.
| bell-cot wrote:
| True. Though until recently, children were usually allowed
| some adult-level duties and responsibilities before their
| early 20s, so they _could_ actually grow up. My mother did
| all the cooking for a family of 6, on a wood stove, before
| she was 12 years old. In an era (and economic
| circumstances) when "we need more bread" meant "check that
| there is enough flour in the bin, and get some water from
| the well...".
| The_Colonel wrote:
| The standards of what's "acceptable parenting" shot up
| greatly in the past decades. In the 60s, you were a great
| father if you passed out drunk only sometimes, didn't beat
| your kids too much and brought enough income to feed/house
| the family.
|
| My childhood was all about spending the whole day outside
| roaming the streets with very little involvement from my
| parents. I didn't have any after-school (organized)
| activities, and I don't remember a single time that my
| father would drive me anywhere just because I needed it.
| That was all just normal, but today might get social
| services called on you.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| I think a lot of these "20s" lessons and better emotional
| regulation you learn before the child is old enough to
| remember, i.e. by your late twenties.
|
| Although, I think going through that learning process +
| raising a baby + recently newly wed is a contributing factor
| to divorce.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s,
| completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. ...
| Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more
| maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate,...
|
| This is exactly why I don't think anyone should have children
| until they're at least 50 years old, and better yet 75-100.
| We just need to solve this "aging" disease problem first.
| 20-somethings just aren't emotionally mature enough to be
| good parents.
| rglullis wrote:
| And somehow we've done it through hundreds of generations.
|
| > just need to solve this "aging" disease.
|
| Oh, please stop. This is the rhetoric of stunted men with
| Peter Pan syndrome. If you are too scared to face this type
| of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion
| just fine.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >If you are too scared to face this type of
| responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion
| just fine.
|
| According to the most recent fertility statistics,
| they're not.
| rglullis wrote:
| You are trying to make a point against old values using
| "most recent statistics". Do you realize how illogical
| this is?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| You seem to not be living in the real world, instead
| pining for "old values" which obviously not many people
| still live by.
| rglullis wrote:
| Your "solution" to the problem that adults now are
| claiming to be unable to become parents is, literally,
| "cure aging".
|
| Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and
| have them at a age where _your parents can still help
| you_. "
|
| The fact that people are forgetting these "old values" is
| what is bringing to this unsustainable state, and instead
| of accepting the reality of our limited lifespans and
| that people have managed to start having kids in the
| early 20's (or before that) for centuries just fine, you
| want to double down on the idea that "no one should have
| kids before their 50s"?
|
| Who is "not living in the real world"?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and
| have them at a age where your parents can still help
| you."
|
| If people wanted to do that, they would. They obviously
| don't want to do that, for various reasons. What's your
| solution now, genius?
|
| >Who is "not living in the real world"?
|
| You, because you're the one telling people to go back to
| the "good old days" and then shaking his fist because
| they aren't.
|
| If people had listened to people like you throughout
| human history, we'd still be living in caves.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Is this sarcasm or a joke? I honestly can't tell, but I
| hope it is.
| Tutitk wrote:
| Suggesting people to have child in their 20ties, to avoid
| health problems, is sexist and not based in reality. This
| is just extrapolation of this trend.
|
| People can totally freeze relevant body parts, and have
| child in their 70ties. Saying anything else would be
| sexist! Natural selection in action...
| quantified wrote:
| Few are really prepared to have kids, until they have their
| second kid. Everyone I know who had kids shortly after
| college (which skews the parents a bit economically, I know,
| but not necessarily emotionally or in maturity) had great
| family lives and outcomes.
| kingkawn wrote:
| It is arguable that the increased emotional regulation of
| older parents is responsible for the higher incidence of adhd
| as the kids have to fill the emotional void
| navane wrote:
| I'm sure you could handle nights with little sleep fine in
| your early twenties. Being up all night. Dealing with
| childish drama. Vomit.
| 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.
| bombcar 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.
|
| It is easier, but people have been having kids in all sorts
| of various situations for, well, as long as the human race
| has been around.
|
| Kids are way more resilient than we think.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The kids will stay alive, but they would certainly prefer
| stability, and their parents would've just as much loved to
| give their children a better life. For most of human
| history the parents didn't really have much control over
| improving their circumstances, nor did they have effective
| means of birth control, so they just had kids whenever. I
| don't think it's reasonable to just put that aside as "kids
| are way more resilient".
| vidarh wrote:
| It's not that it has gotten harder to have kids, but that
| people come to expect and want to provide more.
|
| I had a perfectly decent living standard growing up, but I
| also remember very clearly in retrospect the economic
| uncertainty and the things my parents did to save money, and
| no uncertainty I've faced has been anywhere near that. Of
| course it's not like that for everyone, but overall, living
| standards are up massively, yet fertility rates are down, and
| the two are firmly correlated.
|
| If I were to budget like my parents did, I could afford many
| kids. But I don't want to budget like that. Not because I
| resent how we had it, but because I don't want to go back to
| that just for the sake of having lots of kids.
| dalyons wrote:
| But it has gotten harder in some important ways, housing
| costs as a % of median income have risen by multiples since
| then. Shelter being thing that probably makes people feel
| the most insecure
| vidarh wrote:
| Housing costs have increased as much as they have because
| people can afford to bid them up because _other things_
| do not take up as much of income.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Those 'other things' are generally more optional than
| shelter, so you'll bid up shelter until you get it while
| sacrificing those other things. Inelastic demand and
| inelastic supply is a bad combo.
|
| We see affordability and population growth in places that
| allow housing.
| vidarh wrote:
| We don't see population growth without immigration
| _anywhere_ but third world countries any more, and
| consistently dropping there too as living standards
| _increase_.
|
| While I agree it's a bad combo and could be better,
| there's nothing to support any notion that cheaper
| housing will be enough to increase fertility rates.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I wonder if other parents waiting till they can offer the
| kids more creates pressure. Not only on the parents but the
| kids as well. I frequently couldn't get what I wanted as a
| kid, but that was the norm and in fact several kids I went
| to school with were clearly poorer. However, if I look at
| kids around me today, they have seemingly everything they
| could want. If I imagined the majority of the kids around
| me had had as much stuff, fancy vacations, expensive after-
| school activities etc. and I had what I had in actuality I
| would have felt much poorer. Just the after-school
| activities alone would ruin everything. My friends and
| family's kids now are always out at clubs and classes and
| that's where they see their friends. This would put poorer
| kids at a disadvantage.
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| My parents had me in their early 20s and I only met one of my
| grandparents. We had our kid in our late 20s and my parents
| aren't healthy enough to help at all. Take it from someone who
| never had the opportunity. If you have healthy parents do
| yourself and them a favor and if you're gonna have kids have
| them sooner.
| sublinear wrote:
| Isn't the ultimate goal of parenting that your kids shouldn't
| have to trust anyone but themselves?
|
| Parents who don't have a plan and need help shouldn't have had
| kids. The grandparents and great grandparents would just get in
| the way of these goals. There shouldn't be anything magical
| about getting to know your family. If you got to meet them,
| great, but you're your own person and developing that is so
| much more important.
| RayVR wrote:
| Is this a joke?
| rfrey wrote:
| This reads like a parody of American individualism that a
| Chinese government newspaper might write.
|
| The ultimate goal of my parenting is for my kids to realize
| they're part of a community that gave them tremendous
| advantages, and to which they have a duty to give back.
| sublinear wrote:
| Not sure what bubble you're describing, but the sense of
| community anywhere at any time in human history is
| ultimately an illusion.
|
| I'm not saying the kids should grow up to be selfish, but
| that the more they can do for themselves the more they can
| also do for others. _That_ is a leader. We really don 't
| need another generation of guilt ridden cogs.
| rfrey wrote:
| It's "rugged individualism" that is the bubble, both in
| time and in space. Community and duty exist everywhere
| and have at every time, despite what it is like in 2024
| America.
| rayiner wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Starting having kids in our 20s is the best decision my wife
| and I ever made. When my daughter was born, my parents (then in
| their early 60s) got a decade younger overnight. I wish we
| hadn't spaced them out so much (27-37) because indeed my
| parents are not able to keep up with the littlest one like they
| could with the first two.
| anon291 wrote:
| Same. Easiest decision we made. I don't understand the
| comments about maturity. I fully agree that at 25 I would be
| unable to raise a 16 year old. Luckily I've never met someone
| who gave birth to one of those.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| My mother had me when she was 20. I am not yet in my forties,
| but I lost my last grandparent many years ago.
|
| :(
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| We just had our first child at 33 and I wish we had done it at
| 24 or 25, although it's hard to predict if we'd be as happy as
| we spent those years changing jobs, going back to graduate
| school, and traveling
| jxramos wrote:
| I've had a similar thought about marriage, late marriage means
| you forgo the likelihood for big wedding anniversaries.
| arkey wrote:
| Reading all these comments I just keep thinking it's all a
| matter of priorities. If you really want to do something, the
| sooner you do it the better. Responsibly, of course.
|
| What "responsibly" means in any case might also be influenced
| by your priorities. For instance, a lot of people say "We're
| not financially ready to have kids" but they really mean "We
| can't keep up the fancy holiday trips if we add a kid". If
| your priority is to have a family, you might cut on holidays
| and have the kid.
|
| That applies to some, even plenty, of cases, but I
| acknowledge that not for all. At least where I'm from, it
| often feels everything is set up to make it difficult for
| people to build a family.
| gleenn wrote:
| It would be nice if our life expectancy got longer at the same
| pace (instead of doing exactly the opposite).
| jd3 wrote:
| I'm in my late 20s, but my mom had me when she was 42. My Dad's
| father died 32 years before I was born and my Mom's father died
| 22 years before I was born, so I've always wondered what it
| must have been like to grow up with grandfathers, let alone
| great grandfathers or grandmothers.
|
| On the plus side, in the early 60s, my recently windowed
| grandmother put herself through night school while raising 4
| teenage kids, one of whom eventually worked on the national
| security council and traveled the world; all these years later,
| I still wonder how she managed it all without having a nervous
| breakdown. Life is strange like that, sometimes.
| sroussey wrote:
| Oh, don't kid yourself. There are areas of the country where
| knowing a great grandmother is common, and even great great
| grandmother.
|
| If you have kids at 15, it tends to be generational.
|
| Same way as having kids in your 30s+ is generational.
| jzb wrote:
| It weirds me out a lot when people talk about parenting and
| family planning like this. Like, having kids should be planned
| around strategically based on factors like "are my parents
| young enough to be supplemental child care" over "do I have the
| mental and financial readiness to be responsible for raising a
| human being? And do I even _want_ to do that? "
|
| If people want earlier parenting, then create a society that
| supports it. One with living wages, universal health care, and
| programs to provide childcare for working people. Because those
| are reasons people hesitate to have kids, and those situations
| are not improving.
| rendang wrote:
| Do you have evidence for the second paragraph? The wealthiest
| countries are generally those with lower birth rates,
| although the very lowest fertility is in upper-middle income
| regions like Eastern Europe and E Asia
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Sweden doesn't have exactly the things that was mentioned,
| but it is far more supportive of parents than the United
| States: https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/parental-
| benefit-swede...
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| And how does their fertility rate compare? Actually I'll
| tell you, Sweden's is 1.66, the USA is 1.64.
|
| South Sudan, the poorest country in the world, is 4.54
| resource_waste wrote:
| >"are my parents young enough to be supplemental child care"
|
| My first kid(late 20s) didn't get my parents watching the kid
| because they were working.
|
| My next 3 kids (early 30s) got grandparents attention because
| they were retired.
|
| Although I feel like the baby/kid thing has lost its magic on
| the grandparents. But on the flip side, the kids are
| basically old enough to take care of themselves(4+ yr old).
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Creating a society that supports it is an intractable
| problem. Instead, the problem that we are faced with (as
| organisms) is how can we raise as many successful children as
| possible? This problem is workable, and hopefully involves
| support from ones grandparents.
|
| I'm curious how many children you have.
| jzb wrote:
| I refuse the idea that I need to solve the problem of
| raising as many successful children as possible. If a
| person chooses to have children, then raising them
| successfully is a problem they need to face. I totally
| refuse the idea that having children is mandatory,
| necessary, or even desirable for a lot of people. The world
| would be a happier place if we stopped placing that
| expectation on everyone.
|
| I have two step-children. Having children of my own
| (biologically) was never something I wanted to do for a lot
| of reasons. Without getting into TMI territory, I'll just
| say it was apparent (no pun intended) that one of my
| parents never wanted the responsibility + resented it, and
| the other wanted to "be a parent" without actually doing
| the work. So I did not have the desire or background that
| lends itself to being a good parent early on -- whether
| I've made a good showing or a mess of it later in life is
| something that my kids would have to answer...
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| They very clearly did not put that much thought into it, not
| sure why you are making this up.
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Personally when people make mistakes like that I stop
| reading.
|
| Not even the next word. I'm gone.
| burnished wrote:
| That is exactly what I did. I want to read things from
| people who have thought more about a topic than I have, not
| less.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah that article was really thin, and at a guess I'd say
| that the age of great-grandparents has probably been
| declining since at least around the 50s or 60s and we're
| certainly not at peak-great-grandparent. This article
| reads like a young Millennial thinking they're the first
| one in the world to not know their great grandparents.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I've also adopted that policy after getting really annoyed
| that 90% of the time when someone mentions historical life
| expectancy, they make that exact same mistake and
| completely ignore infantile mortality.
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > And it's 15 years less time that we will be able to spend
| together with our kids.
|
| You say that like it's a bad thing.
| morepork wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like great grandmothers at least would have been
| reasonably common as women had children so much younger than
| today. If women have children at 18, you could be a great
| grandmother in your 50s. There would probably have been the odd
| great-great grandmother as well.
| tuna74 wrote:
| "Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my
| parents were too."
|
| All people over 30 with they were 15 years younger. Age, miles,
| diseases and injuries gradually makes the body worser.
| modeless wrote:
| Of course everyone wishes they could stay young longer. The
| point is that some people over 30 already have 10 year old
| kids, while others are just starting with newborns even at
| 40.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Accepting that, I'd offer that _more_ is a value somewhere
| above 50%. That leaves a lot of modern people who aren 't dying
| in their 20s-50s.
|
| I look at a lot of death certs (genealogy) and and realize
| we've had a lot of advances in treatment (pneumonia),
| regulation (black lung) and health practices (tuberculosis,
| dysentery). Many routine killers from 80+ years ago are less
| common/less deadly now.
|
| Last night I ran across a death from Tuberculous Meningitis and
| my take was - What even the frak? How did our ancestors survive
| millennia where life just sprayed death at us?
| pard68 wrote:
| Yes the average age stat drastically skews our perception of
| how old people were in prior centuries because it includes
| infant and childhood deaths. This is valid for an average, but
| it doesn't relate life expectancy for someone who made it to
| 18.
| 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.
| omoikane wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2608/
| 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.
| sundalia wrote:
| Not everything has to be clear and to the point. The sentence's
| murkiness adds emotion to the text. I'm not a native speaker
| (just like the writer isn't) and maybe that's why we're not so
| bothered.
|
| But this comment is exactly what I expected from HN.
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because it is used. Others are easy to forget or use wrong.
| Many are enough worse from a pleasure standpoint that I
| rather obstain then use them. (of course I'm married so I
| have an easy outlet without worrying about stds)
| brailsafe wrote:
| The pill is also easy to misuse, I think it just has a
| higher tolerance for misuse in terms of continued
| effectiveness, but it does change if you're inconsistent
| munificent wrote:
| 1. Scale of adoption.
|
| 2. Consistent effectiveness.
|
| 3. Able to be unilaterally adopted by women without consent
| of men (aside from systemic legal prohibition).
|
| The pill, to a greater degree than any other contraceptive,
| enables the people who are most responsible for the
| consequences of pregnancy to have the most control over
| pregnancy.
| wil421 wrote:
| Farming machines changed it more so than birth control. Also
| farming practices like using fertilizer.
| munificent wrote:
| The Green Revolution is top five, definitely.
|
| But farming is an incredibly long series of incremental
| improvements since prehistoric times: agriculture, selective
| breeding, crop rotation, etc.
|
| The pill was like a technological and societal step function.
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| I guess the litmus test is would you make the same
| argument if the results of the study had been the
| opposite? If they had said industrial life and being a
| parent increased happiness would you be just as
| skeptical?
|
| I doubt you would say woah woah there people are sleeping
| on Guatemala, does being childfree get the same
| treatment?
| 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!
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| > To accept this view is to accept the idea that most of
| our ancestors had "childhood poverty trauma".
|
| I 100% accept this idea. Most of my ancestors lived the
| miserable, short lives of impoverished alcoholics. They
| and their children absolutely experienced trauma from
| their miserable hunger and disease-ridden lives.
|
| If I can't see myself giving my child a good life I'm
| more than happy to wait until I'm able to. Bringing a
| child into the world isn't an intrinsic moral good.
| bradlys wrote:
| The college educated also live in very expensive cities.
| What they make in gains of income gets subtracted by
| landlords.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| You're missing the fact that class mobility has changed
| wildly over time. Delaying having kids is class mobility
| play, trying to give your a leg up socioeconomically
| based on your own heightened socioeconomic status. This
| was a VERY effective move during the 20th century,
| because the economy was in the biggest growth spurt in
| history.
|
| In contrast, you go back 150 years, and class mobility
| was for the cut-throated, extremely ambitious
| entrepreneurs. The idea of "get a better paying job
| working for someone else and fundamentally change my
| social standing" was laughable. Go back any much further
| than that, and socioeconomic class was basically
| immutable.
| ddfs123 wrote:
| Where I live ( East Asia ) most early-child bearing
| parents are have wealthy grand-parent who could afford to
| fund the whole child raising cost. The less wealthy stay
| working until later in life.
|
| The even more wealthy one marry and have kids right out
| of college. Delegate child-caring to grand-parent, and
| only then start working for their career.
| dotnet00 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.
|
| For most of the human population, this has genuinely been
| the case. Most of South/East Asian and African adults are
| barely 1-2 generations of separation from living in
| poverty. Most of them are very familiar with the struggle
| of giving kids a good life in much worse poverty than
| that experienced in much of the West, and would very much
| rather their grandkids not go through the same thing.
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a
| childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their
| life."
|
| It is also hard to convey, how hard it can be, making the
| transition from only taking care of yourself, to also being
| 100% responsible for someone else. Combine that with little
| sleep and relationships that were not working very good
| before and it is no wonder so many children end up in
| foster homes, or with traumatic experiences of neverending
| fights of their parents.
|
| So no, the conditions don't need to be perfect, they never
| will be. But you have to have some stable base. And
| consensus with the partner on how to raise a child.
| Otherwise parenting won't be meaningful, but hell on earth
| for everyone involved.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| In other words there's no "best" or "perfect" time to
| have a child. There is only when you feel personally
| ready. So maybe the conversation can turn from "everyone
| should have babies when they're in their 20's! It's
| awesome!" to "why do so many people today feel like they
| have to wait until they're 30 to have a baby?"
|
| I think that would be a more constructive conversation
| than the one people in my cohort of people with kids
| wants to have.
| lukan wrote:
| "In other words there's no "best" or "perfect" time to
| have a child. There is only when you feel personally
| ready"
|
| Yup. And it takes 2 to feel ready and to be sure, to do
| it together. At least for some time, even though a
| divorce is not the end of the world, if done right (very
| rare), but it can be for the children, if it means war
| between the parents and using the children as a weapon to
| hurt the other side. That is way too common.
|
| So yes, having kids can be awesome and meaningful. But it
| is a very serious commitment, maybe the most serious
| there is, where my advice would be, don't do it, if you
| don't feel ready.
|
| (I felt ready, but it was and still is very very tough at
| times)
| arkey wrote:
| I think consensus with the partner on how to raise a
| child would be a given. I don't understand how people get
| to late stages of a relationship before starting to talk
| about having kids.
|
| And yes, parenthood is hard, it's tough, you can focus on
| that, but you could also focus on how meaningful it is.
|
| I would never push parenthood on anyone, I understand
| it's a personal choice. Honestly though, I just feel sad
| about people missing out, so very often due to
| misconceptions.
| lukan wrote:
| "I think consensus with the partner on how to raise a
| child would be a given."
|
| Looking around, it really isn't with many of the parents
| I know. There are just so many things one can disagree
| about. Food choices alone are very hard for some. Sugar
| or not, how much, and vegan diet or not, .. (We try to be
| as pragmatic as possible, as healthy as possible, but not
| dogmatic). Then, is it ok to play with toy weapons, what
| movies to watch at what age, how much screen time at all,
| ...
|
| With my partner we were quite clear how to do it in
| theory before. But in reality there are many things we
| disagree - and then it is an art, to find a consensus
| about it, while the kids are watching. Otherwise it is an
| invitation for them for learning how to manipulate.
|
| So good for you, if it was quite easy for you. For many
| it isn't for various reasons. So some probably just
| should have the courage to go with it, before they are
| too old. For others it might be better to wait.
| arkey wrote:
| No, I agree with you, maybe I was wrong in assuming
| parent meant it in a more generalistic way.
|
| But then again, the points you bring up, I'd argue it's
| quite difficult to figure all that out before having a
| kid. Everything I said I meant as having in common some
| general guidelines and a direction, not every specific
| detail.
|
| Having a shared, defined direction will also help you in
| settling all the "smaller" disagreements, but I guess my
| reaction comes from seeing many couples that don't have
| that general direction figured out yet, i.e. getting
| married and suddenly husband finds out wife is not that
| keen about having kids.
| lukan wrote:
| "getting married and suddenly husband finds out wife is
| not that keen about having kids"
|
| Yes, stuff like this. It seems many people avoid topics
| that could be uncomfortable, so rather smile and go along
| and hope for the best ... until reality hits them hard.
| And then some decide to do stupid scheming how to still
| have babies. And this is then a really bad foundation.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a
| childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their
| life
|
| I 100% believe you, but at the same time there are a lot of
| us out there that don't feel like we're missing anything of
| that sort from our lives.
|
| On the contrary, if I was to have children, I would have to
| put a whole lot of faith in my biological wiring for
| parental love and fulfilment overcoming the stresses,
| worries, and relationship strains any parent will tell you
| is the norm.
| arkey wrote:
| My own experience is that most people focus on the
| stresses, worries and overall negative(?) aspects. Maybe
| I've had it easy and I'm incredibly fortunate, which I
| often feel like, but after becoming a father I would tell
| you that all the stresses, worries and overall negative
| aspects are nothing, NOTHING, compared to the positives.
|
| As I said in other comments, I'd never push anyone on
| such a personal topic, but I'll never forget how, right
| after my first was born, I simply wished parenthood on
| everyone.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a
| childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their
| life.
|
| Why does that even need to be conveyed? Whether you have
| kids or not is none of my business, and vice versa. If
| anything, the more I hear some variant of "maek keedz und
| haev famili" like some broken record the more I find the
| notion preposterous.
|
| Just leave everyone to their devices. Those who want or are
| interested in kids will have them and those who don't
| won't, regardless what anyone feels obliged to tell them.
|
| As for me personally? I consider the notion of romantic
| love a mental illness. I find the concept of marriage to be
| fundamental violations of an individual's human rights. I
| find the proposal of continuing my bloodline, and more
| broadly the human race, without value. I am happy to be
| single and without issue until my dying breath and I
| certainly couldn't care less what others do in their
| bedroom, so kindly take your high horse and please leave
| for greener pastures.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This sentiment that it's nearly impossible to convey the
| meaning it provides is always irritating to hear. It's an
| extremely condescending idea to have, when the meaning it
| gives people is pretty obvious to see in siblings and
| friends/coworkers who do have children. But that's just
| more reason to want to wait until you feel ready to take on
| the job.
|
| I've seen how my sibling changed upon starting a family,
| I've seen how my PhD advisor proudly talks about every
| little thing his kids do.
|
| The value it gives them is obvious, but that's just more
| reason not to irresponsibly pop put a baby when I barely
| make enough to support myself, when I don't know if I'll
| stay in the country I'm in, when I've had very little time
| being mature enough to know if my partner is someone with
| whom I can expect to provide a good environment for at
| least 18 years.
| zachmu wrote:
| And yet it's perfectly true. Sorry you feel condescended
| to. People who say this are relating their own experience
| of being parents and how they couldn't anticipate how
| much it would change them.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It can be true that parents can feel that way, yet it is
| also true that not all parents feel that way, especially
| among younger parents, else abusive or neglectful parents
| would not be a thing.
|
| Having a child may be meaningful to a parent, but it is
| not at all true that applies to all childless people.
| Continuing to insist on that anyway is just showing sheer
| disregard for the well-being of a child born to parents
| who turn out to not actually be all that concerned about
| parenthood.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > don't need the material wealth college educated people
| tend to assume they will to have a good childhood
|
| But you do need material wealth to launch them smoothly
| (a.k.a. minimize their college debt, so they aren't as
| financially disincentivized to make you grandchildren). A
| different metric from happy childhood or not.
| 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?
| presentation wrote:
| Yeah, if you value your life before children at 0 it's true
| but if you don't then it's valuable time many choose to
| enjoy, in the only period of their lives without huge
| responsibilities they'll get while they're young.
|
| I agree sentimentally that people tend to overly avoid
| commitment and don't really think about these things, but for
| me I don't think it was an unfair trade.
| dividefuel wrote:
| This is a great way of putting it, and I think about this a
| lot.
|
| My wife's ancestors had kids at younger ages, and my ancestors
| had kids at later ages. Her grandparents are all still alive,
| mine have all been gone for more than ten years.
|
| My spouse and I are on track to have kids in our mid/late 30s.
| My wife's parents are both in their mid 50s, and realistically
| they'll probably have 20 years of overlap with our children.
|
| My parents, though, are in their mid 70s. I have to hope they
| have at least another 10 years of good health so that they can
| forge a bond with our children. Even with good health, though,
| the way a 75-year old interacts with a young kid is going to be
| very different from the way a 55-year old does.
|
| I made the same choice as my parents and will likely face the
| same future, where I may have little or no overlap with my
| grandchildren. Since my generation has delayed childbearing for
| so long, I think this is something we'll see largely as a
| mistake in about 20-30 years.
| zachmu wrote:
| Yes, I'm in a similar boat. We had our first kid in our early
| 30s, basically the same age my parents had me. My parents
| probably aren't going to be around much longer. We chose to
| live close to them so they see our kids a lot, but we are
| very aware of how little time they probably have left with
| them, and it's sad.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| If you think you want kids in your mid/late 30's, you might
| want to have your genetic material frozen as soon as
| possible. Insurance often covers it.
| GuardianCaveman wrote:
| I had kids older so I'm biased but imagining my kids grow up
| and move away how often am I going to see them and talk to
| them? Or rather how often are they going to want to see or talk
| to me. Hopefully a lot but so I have kids when I'm 18 for a
| type of life that may or may not exist. If I could do it again
| we would have had kids maybe 8 years earlier but that still
| doesn't make a huge difference. There's such a strong sentiment
| in this thread that people who wait are selfish or fools or the
| only benefits are financial but I feel like there's a disdain
| from people who had kids early .
|
| My wife was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, we were able
| to travel the world and do things she wouldn't be able to do
| had we had kids right away and tried to do when we were 40. Is
| that worth having 15 years less with our kids? I guess time
| will tell but I know either way we enjoy them every day as a
| home maker and work from home dad they get to enjoy us as young
| kids and we take them on all kinds of adventures since I work
| in the late afternoon evening.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > imagining my kids grow up and move away how often am I
| going to see them and talk to them?
|
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
|
| > It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had
| already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I'm now
| enjoying the last 5% of that time. We're in the tail end.
| 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
| skulk wrote:
| I don't know if this is the right time for you to hear this,
| but don't establish your identity around things that you
| haven't done. Or fine, do it, but once you have done them,
| you'll immediately realize how dumb it was to let not having
| done them define you.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Its more I work 8h and I am exhausted and sit on youtube for
| 5h until bedtime and repeat thats my life
| 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.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Extending lifespan misses the point and is reasoned from the
| individual, and not the child. Lifespan extension adds to your
| maximum age but maximum age isn't the most pressing issue to
| begin with.
|
| When you're born and you have parents that are 20 versus 40,
| that is a dramatically different situation. Likewise if you
| have grandparents that are 50-60 versus 70 or already dead.
| Sure, more lifespan means you'll have more years together but
| you're completely dismissing the quality of those years.
|
| I feel the same way about relationships. Some people willingly
| only seriously settle in their mid 30s or even later. That
| means you did not share the other person's most energetic,
| adventurous, and exciting life phase. You're 40 and have zero
| shared history together, no stories, nothing. But hey, you're
| finally "comfortable".
|
| Fuck comfortable. The clock is ticking, hurry the hell up.
| You're wasting the defining and most valuable years of your
| life.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| My motto is "live slow, die whenever."
| 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.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| One kid is good enough so I don't regret getting one at 38.
| Letting grand parents help with child caring also carries a lot
| of downsides, especially if they live in.
| obruchez wrote:
| "a lot of downsides"
|
| Can you give a few examples? I only see upsides.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| For a start, they have their own ideas of raising kids. This
| is already an everyday headache.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I have an example that helps underscore the lesson here.
|
| I was adopted by older parents, in their mid-40s when I was
| adopted around 2 years old. They were the "youngsters" in their
| families, so it meant I was exceedingly young compared to my
| cousins and other relatives.
|
| Fast forward a few decades and my adoptive parents are deceased,
| and we have lost touch with the few relatives I have. My wife is
| in a similar situation.
|
| We adopted two older children, 7 and 3 at the time, when I was in
| my mid 40's. It has been great for us and for the kids, a
| challenge and an adventure, but the biggest miss is lack of
| family. We have no grand parents to fall back on, let alone great
| grand parents. It is incredibly difficult to raise kids without
| an extended family to help out. We manage, but boy do I envy
| those who have bigger families to lean into. Not to mention the
| network of cousins, etc that the kids can relate to.
| harel wrote:
| We just said goodbye to my kid's great grandmother. They knew her
| very well and treated her like a their regular grandma. When my
| eldest son was just under 1 year old he met his great-great
| grandmother (who died shortly after meeting him at 105). I think
| me and my wife's parents will live to see their great grand
| children. It's not too far fetched to imagine.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For that matter, a small change in number of siblings makes a
| much larger change in the number of cousins. That is, if every
| family has _N_ children, you have _N-1_ siblings and _2N(N-1)_
| cousins. (Corrected thanks to comment)
| rayiner wrote:
| In Christmas 2021, as COVID was winding down, we rented a house
| on the Oregon coast to see my wife's family. My wife's
| grandmother surreptitiously messaged me on Facebook to pick her
| up from her house so she could see our youngest, her newest great
| grand. Much to the consternation of my COVID-wary father in law.
| In her view, the point of living the 87 was to count up the great
| grandchildren (10 total). She died the next year (not of COVID).
|
| If my kids have kids the same time I did, as do those kids, then
| within the expected Asian male lifespan I should see at least one
| and hopefully two great grands.
| softgrow wrote:
| Both of my great-grandmothers died by the time by 12 months old.
| A message to my children - hurry up, make my living parents
| great-grandparents!
| smoyer wrote:
| I attended my great-great-grandmother's 100th birthday party when
| I was 8 or 9.
| tropdrop wrote:
| Came here to say something similar: I didn't realize how rare
| this was until this thread, but as I kid I knew not only _four_
| of my great-grandparents, but even a great-great-grandmother.
| She died at 96 years old, but I was old enough to hang out with
| her a few times, and remember her.
|
| My great-grandfather is still alive and turned 100 last year.
| Since I'm already much older than any of my progenitors when
| they had their children, even if I live to his age it is
| unlikely I'll get to spend time with my own great-great-
| grandchildren.
| gr8_commission wrote:
| When I was about 16 years old it became my life dream to get
| married young and to have kids young. My inspiring thought was
| that I could be a young grandparent and that my kids would be
| able to know their parents for a long time as well as their
| grandparents and great grandparents. I did get married at 19 and
| had my first son at 20. 3 years later I had my daughter. 5 months
| into my daughters life, the kids mother left us and I was
| stranded alone as a single father of 2 at age 23. That was 4
| years ago and it was the most difficult time of my life. I moved
| back in with my parents and my then recently "empty cage" mother
| had to become a "mum" again while I slowly got back on my feet.
| I've been remarried for about a year now and everything is going
| very well. My daughter is about to turn 4 and my son turns 7 this
| year. I love thinking about how when I'm 30 my son will be 10 and
| when I'm 40 he'll be 20 etc.
|
| Before the divorce, I was very adamant on promoting young
| marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think
| it's a good idea... but I am a lot more open minded and less
| critical. Life is so unique and never goes according to plan. I
| wouldn't recommend my exact life to anyone as it has its own
| unique and undesirable difficulties. When my own children grow
| up, I will strongly recommend against rushing anything with
| anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in
| place.
|
| My kids know and love their grandparents. They know their great
| grandparents. I am prepared physically and mentally for 2 more
| kids (yes I know, but I think I know better than I did at 19),
| but I cannot imagine doing the whole baby thing in my mid 30s or
| early 40s... I think my current age is a good time to just get it
| all out of the way. I like to think of it as delayed
| gratification and that having adult children at a relatively
| young age is a huge blessing. Let's see how it goes.
| gr8r wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. On a tangent...
|
| > I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing
| to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea...
| ... Life is so unique and never goes according to plan ...
| rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and
| have a good plan in place
|
| Among other reasons, social media can suddenly change a person
| in very unexpected ways at an unexpected pace.
|
| Ppl are more connected to the infinite-scroll than ever before,
| more than to other ppl around them. It is no longer even our
| friends we watch and envy - its all "influencer" content.
| LeonB wrote:
| My siblings and I did unusually well at school (relative to
| cousins and peers) - and it's possible this was due to having an
| "older" father.
|
| There's a 2017 study that older parents produce kids with a
| higher Geek Index --
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2017125
|
| Seems "truthy" to me.
| 90d wrote:
| Ah just what I needed, more anxiety.
| hm-nah wrote:
| Apple will soon include A.I. in iPhones that will in essence
| provide an eternal simulation of each of us. Progeny will be able
| to interact with us in our own voices and likely in 3D. When
| openAI and its humanoid robots align, your AI clone will be
| uploaded to the unit. Unfortunately "you" won't be able to enjoy
| or reciprocate "their" enjoyment. Similar to if you recorded a
| video to your family today and they watched it after you passed
| away.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| My kid didn't get to meet his grandmother (my mom). She had me at
| 30, I had him at 46, one year too late.
|
| One of the problems with capitalism is that the highest achieving
| people (somewhat likely the actual "fittest" people in terms of
| genetic selection) don't have kids until they are much later, if
| at all. I don't want this to get too elitist, but this country
| (actually the entire first world aside from France) needs to
| figure out how to incentivize productive people to have kids.
|
| I always thought what we should do with the people in retirement
| for longer and longer periods of time is encourage them to
| provide some child care, even if it isn't their own. Especially
| in some countries (Japan, holy shit South Korea) that really are
| imbalanced.
|
| Although, tangentially, I think South Korea will solve its
| demographic bomb by toppling North Korea's government and
| immigrating a massive number of shellshocked North Koreans.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| The author says that shorter life expectancies in the past means
| that there weren't many great-grandparents back in the day.
|
| I don't think that's the case: the shorter average life
| expectancy is due to infant and youth mortality. As long as you
| didn't die from what would nowadays be a preventable disease,
| people still got old: that's where the term "three score years
| and ten" comes from.
|
| So I think there were probably many 70yo great grandparents.
| MaysonL wrote:
| My great-grandfather, whom I met a few times in the '50s, was
| born during the Civil War.
| drKarl wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here focused on their individual
| experiences and opinions, which is fine. But on those comments I
| see a lot of people saying they won't have kids. Which
| individually is their choice, but collectively, combined with
| people who do have kids have them older which can lead to
| fertility issues when they want to have them, combined with the
| increase in the number of people who is LGBTQ+ which again it's
| their choice and nothing wrong with that individually, but as a
| species we can see how these factors combined, and other factors,
| are the cause of drop in number of children born in all
| countries. I recently read that in Japan there are more adult
| diapers sold than baby diapers because of drop in births and
| increase of aging population. This seems to be driving us to
| extinction as a species, just food for thought.
| defrost wrote:
| > are the cause of drop in number of children born in all
| countries.
|
| Yes.
|
| > This seems to be driving us to extinction as a species
|
| No.
|
| There are more people alive now than there ever has been. Ever.
|
| This will continue until at least 2100 when numbers may
| _finally_ peak and then fall.
|
| When human populations numbers fall there is no sane reason to
| think that they will plummet to zero.
|
| It is far more likely numbers will decrease to the mid 10
| billions and more or less stabilise.
| drKarl wrote:
| > This will continue until at least 2100 when numbers may
| finally peak and then fall.
|
| That's due to the higher fertility rate of countries like
| Niger, Angola etc which far outpace the declining rates of
| most of the rest of the world like China, Russia, Europe,
| Japan, South Corea, USA, etc.
| arkey wrote:
| After reading the comments I understand this MUST mean
| people in Niger, Angola, etc. are more financially ready to
| have kids than people in Europe, Japan, USA, South Corea,
| etc.
| daveoc64 wrote:
| >the increase in the number of people who is LGBTQ+ which again
| it's their choice
|
| Choice?
| helpfulmandrill wrote:
| I wish I lived in a society where I could have a kid at 25 rather
| than 35 without messing up my life. I feel like we ignore how
| nice it must be to have another 10 years with your parents in
| your life.
| arkey wrote:
| Why can't you have a kid at 25 without messing up your life?
| Some people do.
| helpfulmandrill wrote:
| That deadline has passed, but I was living in a one bedroom
| flat making no money at all at 25, as were most of my
| friends.
| arkey wrote:
| Apologies, I probably misunderstood your comment and I'm
| sorry if you missed out on something you hoped for.
|
| I agree, today's society in many places can make it very
| hard for young people to start a family.
| hateful wrote:
| I've always had this weird thought - that doesn't really pass the
| ethics test, but here it is anyway.
|
| I was raised by my grandmother - let's just say my parents were
| not ready. And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to
| have kids but the kids aren't ready. What if it would become the
| norm for Grandparents to raise the children? That way the second
| generation can focus on their careers, etc and the first
| generation could raise the third. That wouldn't mean the second
| generation wouldn't have a role and be a part of the process. Of
| course, there would have to be consent on each level - and if it
| was part of the culture maybe there would be. Also, technology
| may have a role in this also - if no one has to actually carry
| the children, the second generation could be more willing.
|
| The whole point is that this happens all the time, but it's
| always seen as a break from the norm, not the norm. What if we
| just embraced it?
|
| The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation
| would have their grand kids and the second generation would have
| time to "wait" for whatever reason.
|
| Again, I know this doesn't really work out, but it's a thought
| I've always had.
| johnkpaul wrote:
| Anthropologically, I think that this isn't super far from what
| has already happened for humans. Grandmothers specifically had
| a lot of repsonsibilities and importance and I believe that's
| why they generally live longer than grandfathers.
|
| Instead of being about career development, it's been about
| specializing in hunter/gatherer stuff while still able bodied.
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/grandmothers-a...
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I believe that's why they generally live longer than
| grandfathers.
|
| Iirc that's at least partly due to estrogen & other female
| hormones. They have I think anti-infection or anti-cancer
| properties. (Though if your comment was from an evolutionary
| perspective that would make sense.)
| jzb wrote:
| Even leaving aside the ethics (which...yikes) I think this kind
| of falls down, logically.
|
| Parents want to become grandparents after having the experience
| of being parents. If you cut the "being parents" out of that
| cycle, why would you even want grand kids? And having been
| parents prepares grandparents to step in if needed. If you skip
| the parenting step, why would they be any better at it just
| because they're 20 years older?
|
| Also, frankly, infants are hard. They're _great_ when you can
| give them back. But the loss of sleep and everything is
| something that does not go well with being in your 40s and
| beyond. It 's hard at any age, but doubly so later in life.
|
| All that said, it'd be great if society placed more emphasis on
| extended family involvement and if we start to really embrace
| remote work that might be more possible. (e.g., stop making
| people move thousands of miles away from their families just
| for jobs...) But accelerating child-having just for the sake of
| great-grandparents... bad idea, even leaving aside the ethics.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| what are your ethical qualms?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Child-rearing approaches that weren't used where/when I
| grew up are unethical
| imacomputer wrote:
| > Also, frankly, infants are hard.
|
| Honestly, they are as difficult as you want them to be. Some
| parents stress way to much about them hurting themselves in
| the process.
|
| If you take everything in moderation, they are not that bad
| at all. There will be a few bad days ofc, but at large my
| kids are the best thing that happened to me, and I have two
| at the same age.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| This is the norm in countries like South Korea, and much of
| Eastern Europe
| makeitdouble wrote:
| IMHO the part about the kids not being ready is crucial.
|
| If they're just not well off financially I'd see your idea
| happen (but then, we already see grand parents giving a hand
| financially in these kind of circumstances)
|
| But if they're not ready mentally, there would be mountains of
| issues with their relationship with their child. For instance,
| do they even fully understand it's their child under their
| responsibility ? Can they continue raising their child when the
| grand parents can't anymore ? How well will they take it if
| suddenly they have to give up important things to completely
| focus on the kid(s) ? On the other hand will they be able to
| step in if the grand parents aren't fit for that ? etc.
|
| I think it would work better if parents give it a fair try, but
| end up being inept and have the grandparents step in. Giving up
| from the start would be a worse path IMHO.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| My life was a mess until we unexpectedly had our first child.
| I don't think I ever would have considered myself mentally
| ready. The child came first, then I started growing into a
| suitable person.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| TBF, I don't think any of us really understood what it
| would take or were well prepared to become parents, even
| when getting into it on our terms.
|
| I don't know if I'm a suitable person, but having a kid
| sure pushed me out of my boundaries pretty far, in every
| possible direction.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids
| but the kids aren't ready. ... The next generation would happen
| earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and
| the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever
| reason.
|
| I mean, putting aside the other good comments this has
| received, why are the kids not ready? Because if I look around
| at myself and my peers, I see a lot of people who absolutely
| _want kids_ but feel they can 't have them, for a number of
| reasons, but not unimportant reasons:
|
| - A lot of people are delaying because they don't feel
| financially stable enough, because of the increasing costs of
| lifes essentials, not the least of which is housing, and/or
| student loan debt which was foisted on them by the selfish
| decisions of the aforementioned grandparents.
|
| - Tons of people are avoiding kids because they don't want to
| bring them into a world as unstable as ours, that instability
| expressed as some combination of: our ever worsening biosphere
| and the long-term threats of climate change, the aforementioned
| everything-getting-more-expensive-all-the-time while wages
| continue stagnating, the political instability with micro-wars
| playing out all over the place, the economic precarity as our
| system continues enabling bad actors, the social instability
| caused by deepening political divides and extremisms literally
| everywhere over what would otherwise be such benign things, and
| for flavor, a few things that absolutely deserve extremist
| responses...
|
| Like, one of the first things that goes away when an animal
| population is stressed on a macro-scale is reproduction. It
| seems to me if we want to promote reproduction again, we need
| to make our world less... awful? Like by and large, my life is
| great, but I'm child-free and that decision was informed partly
| by the fact that I have to meter my intake of global news lest
| I become so depressed I can't function, and aside of that, I
| started making six figures 2 years ago which is legitimately a
| thing I never thought would happen, and yet in those subsequent
| 2 years I have never felt poorer because every last thing costs
| more now than it ever has, even asking my mother.
|
| I think it's impossible to divorce a discussion like this from
| the fact that there are absolutely pages upon pages of good,
| rational, logical reasons one can write to _not have children_
| and commensurate with that fact, we see birth rates plummeting
| all over the place.
| antifa wrote:
| > micro-wars
|
| That's an interesting choice of worlds, I'd just call them
| wars, maybe proxy wars. Some of them look like candidates for
| what future historians might call the early conflicts of WW3.
| There's also lot of noise about declaring war on China too,
| which honestly sounds like a bad idea, and the grievances
| I've seen range from fake to you're-doing-the-same-thing and
| what's left is not really worth fighting a war over.
|
| From what I've seen, the loudest proponents demanding
| everyone have more kids are also the worst offenders in
| making the world a worse place to be a new kid or a new
| parent.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Yeah I couldn't really settle on the term. The Ukraine-
| Russia conflict is kind of half-proxy war, since one of the
| entities is Russia itself but then the other side is
| basically NATO plus or minus, but (to my knowledge) no NATO
| nations have been in direct conflict with Russia yet,
| they're just supplying the Ukraine. And then you have the
| Israel Palestine shit which isn't really a proxy war at all
| so much as a regular war that happens to be small in scale
| (compared to the world, not compared to it's combatants of
| course).
|
| But yeah, this feels distinctly like the period of history
| right before maps get covered in flags and arrows and it's
| not a good vibe.
| jffhn wrote:
| >I see a lot of people who absolutely want kids but feel they
| can't have them, for a number of reasons
|
| I remember thinking about that in the street, and then be
| overtaken by a rom family, the father pushing the kids in a
| shopping cart and the mother walking alongside.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I would like to read the SF story fleshing this out!
| SystemOut wrote:
| From my limited vantage point (in-laws) this is normal in the
| Filipino culture. My wife and I moved away from her parents so
| we didn't do this but her sister's kids were probably a 70/30
| split in being at the grandparents' house. Her cousin's kids
| were the same. In fact, many of them would send the kids to the
| Philippines for months at a time where the grandparents lived
| to be raised by them. It felt really odd to me at first but
| that's more because it wasn't how I was raised plus I didn't
| have any grandparents that were still alive when I grew up.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| This is eh very common in many parts of the world. I myself
| have probably spent more time with my grandparents than my
| parents at certain times of my life. Often this happens if
| grandparents and parents live closeby and children cant go to
| daycare for whatever reason.
| latexr wrote:
| > The whole point is that this happens all the time
|
| What happens all the time is an adult raising their our
| children and then later on raising their grandchildren. But
| what you're suggesting is having old people with zero
| experience raising anyone taking care of their grandchildren. I
| don't quite see that as a clearcut case of success.
| britzkopf wrote:
| Zero? Doesn't seem a very good faith assessment of the
| concept proposed.
| elcomet wrote:
| What does it change from parents with zero experience taking
| care of their children ?
| lbourdages wrote:
| Parents can ask their own parents for guidance. In the
| proposed scenario, the grandparents would have no one to
| ask because the previous generation is most likely dead
| already.
| 91bananas wrote:
| Wait the people that raised the kids that then had kids have
| no experience raising kids?
| latexr wrote:
| No, you misunderstood completely. Under the OP's proposal,
| you have people raising their grandkids, not their kids.
| jzb wrote:
| So if I understand: Starting today, a pair of
| 20-somethings has kids, hands them off to their parents
| to raise - OK, their parents had experience now they are
| doing double-duty, but they know what they're doing
| raising kids.
|
| Now... 20 years later, _those_ children have kids and
| hand them off to their biological parents who ... have no
| experience raising children. Also, which grandparents?
| Mom 's or dad's?
| latexr wrote:
| Ask the OP, I wasn't the one who suggested the idea.
| jader201 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point (but possible I am).
|
| My understanding is that OP is proposing that since the
| grandparents would be raising the kids, this would
| incentivize people to have kids much younger, e.g. in their
| early 20s, or even teens.
|
| So the "grandparents" would be in their early/mid 40s, or
| even late 30s.
|
| Definitely not "old people".
|
| And zero experience parenting, yes (just like any new parent
| today), but definitely more life experience, and likely more
| mature.
|
| Not saying I'd advocate for this -- I think there are still
| some flaws with this -- but an interesting hypothetical
| that's fun to discuss.
| dochtman wrote:
| Here in NL it is quite common for grandparents to help parents
| out with day care on their workdays. School pickup is rife with
| grandparents...
| nirav72 wrote:
| yeah this is also fairly common in many East and South-Asian
| countries. In countries like China, many people leave their
| children behind in the village with the grandparents, while
| they go work in the cities.
| mplewis wrote:
| Visit any WIC clinic. Grandmas are always the ones picking up
| the societal slack.
| CWJeff wrote:
| I've always had an even worse idea, ethically speaking, that I
| think would combine well with yours : the first generation
| would raise the third, as you said, but that third generation
| would be born out of the frozen gametes of the now deceased
| zero generation.
|
| That way, embryos would only be created after the death of both
| biological parents, which would give you whole lives to look at
| to decide if you wanted these persons to reproduce.
|
| That would open the way to some interesting possibilities in
| directing human evolution while opening a whole new world of
| horrific abuse and creative eugenics.
| supertofu wrote:
| The framing of this essay bothers me, because it suggests that
| losing great-grandmothers is a bad thing.
|
| But why can't we focus on the enormous positive effect of girls
| having the option to fully mature into women before bearing their
| children?
|
| Maybe instead of focusing what we lose with the absence of great-
| grandmothers, we should focus on what we gain with the decline of
| girl-mothers.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| There's a huge and well thought out consensus teenage
| parenthood is bad.
|
| It's talked about a lot. Not as much as it used to be, but
| that's because it's become common sense. People don't talk
| about common sense consensus positions.
|
| But good things can have bad side effects, and people can be so
| happy about the good thing, they don't see the bad thing.
|
| Talk about the advantages of delayed child bearing all you
| want, but it won't be a particularly original conversation.
| supertofu wrote:
| I don't really care if the conversation is original, if it
| means we live in a world where girls are granted the
| opportunity to grow in knowledge and experience before
| sacrificing their bodies and lives to childbearing and
| childrearing.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| And posting articles like this doesn't take away from that
| in any way.
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