How big a generation have you created personally?

[TRC4941]

20.0 - 2 kids

[Maserschmidt]

@BippityBoppityBoo

BTW, this exclusion and ‘othering’ is very offensive.

Yeah, I agree with that.

@slicedalone

If you give birth to a child at age 20 and give him/her up for adoption, I’ll accept that, but if you’re the parent adopting him/her at age 40, I should count you and that parent both?

How are you counting the other parent? I’m pretty sure she’s not posting here.

[slicedalone]

Next 18 Dopers average out to 33.3.

Starting my next count with elbows.

[eschrodinger]

You said this in the OP:

@slicedalone

Natural births only, please. No adoptions, suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities, etc.

Then RTFirefly commented:

@RTFirefly

I hadn’t realized before this that my son (who we adopted) wasn’t born naturally! Wonder what sort of test tube he came out of.

And you responded that “[t]hose are two separate directives” referring to “natural births only” and “no adoptions.”

Which is why I asked,

@eschrodinger

So what do you mean by “born naturally”?

The explanation about why you said “no adoptions” is the separate directive that I was not asking about.

So, again, can you please tell me what you mean by “'born naturally,” if it doesn’t mean “not adopted”?

[DSeid]

@LSLGuy

It’s about the biological idea of generations.

Have to admit I cannot at all understand what idea is possibly being explored here.

What is the biological idea of generations?

What is this sampling of a very non random population group supposed to be exploring?

[racer72]

20.87, one son.

[slicedalone]

@eschrodinger

can you please tell me what you mean by “'born naturally,” if it doesn’t mean “not adopted”?

I was trying to refer to “suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities” and such, which don’t necessarily comport with adoptions. Just trying to keep things simple here. It wasn’t the smoothest of phrases, I’ll admit. I was trying to account for every possible circumstance where you might not be certain of your age at the time, or the fate of your offspring.

There are also situations I’m aware of that aren’t formal adoptions but where someone considers a child to be their child, or a parent to be their parent.

[eschrodinger]

Thanks for the explanation.

[RTFirefly]

@slicedalone

The adopted child is only one person, and I need to make a choice of which parent to count.

“Which parent to count”? LOL. The likelihood that both the birth and the adoptive parent(s) would be in this thread is infinitesimal. That solves the problem of which parent to count.

And:

Sorry. Those are two separate directives.

Sure. One was directive 3, and the other was also directive 3.

But supposing “natural births only” is a directive of its own, independent of the text beginning with “No adoptions,” then wtf DO you mean by “natural births only”?

Given your restatement, my “what about C-sections?” goes from being a joke to a serious question, because I’m not sure what else it could exclude besides C-sections.

@slicedalone

Just a way of discouraging people with uncertain results. “I think I might have gotten at least six girls pregnant in my heyday, but I think one of them might have miscarried (I was in jail at the time, and never got the whole story) and two said they didn’t have abortions but one of those was a terrible liar, and I don’t really trust the other one, so let’s call it four kids, none of whom I’ve ever seen. I ranged from 16 to almost 30 during this time, so I’ll average my age out at, say, 24.5” is not an answer I want to even look at.

You mentioned that you were excluding “suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities, etc.” and that’s fine. I don’t see what this has to do with having adopted a child. Are adoptive fathers, as a group, more likely than biological fathers to have gotten a bunch of girls pregnant in their younger days? You realize that makes no sense at all?

Apparently not.

[RTFirefly]

@slicedalone

I was trying to refer to “suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities” and such

Oh wait, when you said, “Natural births only, please. No adoptions, suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities, etc,” ‘no adoptions’ were a separate directive, but all the rest of it on either side of ‘no adoptions’ was a single directive.

Please remember the first rule of holes and stop digging.

[slicedalone]

There is a large, perhaps infinite, number of possibilities that I didn’t think of at the time I wrote out the OP, and still have not considered, concerning the paternity/maternity ages, their certainty that they are in fact the parent, their beliefs and thoughts about the child conceived (I know women who swear they have given birth to a child who had to be aborted very late in the gestational period, and who insist that the fetus was in fact their child). Rather than try to cover every possible definition of what constitutes a generation, I decided to err on the conservative side of what constitutes knowing the facts and definition of a child, a parent, a birth, etc.

You’re certainly free to dissent from my choices, and to open a separate thread with less conservative definitions, if you think it’s that important to do so. Again, no offense intended–I’m trying very hard not to entangle myself in adjudicating what is and is not a parent at the time of his/her child’s birth.

I hope you will agree that it is possible that, without some strictures, people on this message board are capable of submitting data that goes outside of everyone’s definitions of a parent, a child, a birth, etc.

[DSeid]

@slicedalone

Starting my next count with elbows.

This does seem to be that sort of question?

What sort of idea about “generations” are you trying to explore?

I’m really at a complete loss to understand. Maybe there is actual data that can be sourced to explore something or at least discussion that can be had? But what is the actual concept you are thinking about?

[slicedalone]

@DSeid

But what is the actual concept you are thinking about?

I’m still working on that.

[slicedalone]

@DSeid

This does seem to be that sort of question?

I’m not sure what “This” refers to. or “that sort of question”–can you clarify?

If you’re wondering why I decided to count in eighteens, there’s no reason at all. When we hit 18 responses the first time, I got around to tallying them up, and I figured that counting by 18s will make computing easier.

[DSeid]

“This” refers to the op. It seems to be like counting elbows or coins in your pocket? Random information.

Is there a thought or concept you have about “generations” that parents’ mean age at birth of their biological children is intended to explore?

I assume there is one but I am unable to figure out what it is. Maybe more clear to others and my apologies if it is just my being slow to figure it out.

[LSLGuy]

This other thread by the same OP is probably the origin of the data gathering here:

How stable is a "generation"?

Have we lit upon a definition of “a generation” that is stable over time? It seems to me that the average age that a parent (of either sex) has his or her children constitutes a generation, no? Is this an acceptable measure of what makes for the length of a generation? If so, we should be able to track things like the length of a generation in the sixteenth century and the twenty-first pretty accurately. Or the length of a generation in the U.S. and in Tahiti. Or is a generation’s definition…

In a nutshell, how long is a “generation” of humans? How has that number changed over the centuries?

It’s not clear to me how this anecdata is going to shed light on that question, but it’ll be interesting to watch.

[RTFirefly]

@slicedalone

You’re certainly free to dissent from my choices

Your choices are unclear and seem to shift with your need to rebut different posters.

There’s not enough ‘there’ there to dissent from.

[DSeid]

@LSLGuy

In a nutshell, how long is a “generation” of humans? How has that number changed over the centuries?

It’s not clear to me how this anecdata is going to shed light on that question

Ah.

I’ll post there then.

[eschrodinger]

@slicedalone

I hope you will agree that it is possible that, without some strictures, people on this message board are capable of submitting data that goes outside of everyone’s definitions of a parent, a child, a birth, etc.

I guess it seems very odd to me that you are trying to create a (bizarrely in my view) rigorous standard for the particular “data” you are collecting, yet you are averaging averages, don’t remotely have a representative sample, and you’re not sure what question you’re trying to answer.

And your justifications for the limitations you chose don’t seem to hold much water. Some of the distinctions you are making reinforce outdated ideas of who is “truly” a parent. That might be OK if you had a really good reason, but I haven’t seen one yet.

You’re worried about both an adoptive parent and a birth parent posting because you don’t want to count a kid twice, but you don’t seem concerned about a second birth parent posting re the same kid.

[slicedalone]

@eschrodinger

you don’t seem concerned about a second birth parent posting re the same kid.

Okay, thanks for pointing this out to me. Folks, if your co-parent has already posted here about your kid, please don’t cast a ballot that would IMO be duplicative. If you have already so posted, please let me know so I can eliminate your ballot from my tallies.