Not to hijack, but is there evidence to separate out the effects of mother’s age & SES from biological issues that might be race- / ethnicity-related?
For sure, the only way to get to e.g. 4 kids is to have had numbers 1, 2, and 3 first. Just as a matter of math, the number of mothers with n kids has to be a monotonically decreasing function as n increases.
My now ex- second wife had two kids by her first husband. At the then typical age of low 30s. I’ve forgotten the details, but she accepted sterilization as part of the second birth process to prevent a third pregnancy that the medics told her was likely to be very dangerous for her & that third fetus were it ever to occur. So yeah, the damage is, or can be, cumulative.
As a separate matter …
The lifestyle change going from zero kids to 1 kid is huge. The changes going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 are each smaller and smaller. Call it decreasing marginal change. And to the degree you already have all the age- and gender-appropriate equipment, decreasing marginal dollar cost as well.
There are many people who see that, and think “in for a penny; in for a pound” That’s the mindset that leads to large families. Or at least large-ish like 4-6. Nobody is having 32 kids because #32 is really really easy.
So I see two different forces at work. One makes each incremental kid harder. The other makes each incremental kid easier. At least up to biologically plausible numbers. Which of those forces is more powerful is mostly a matter of individual preference. Much of which is unconscious.
Yes. See here and here for example. Discussion of the why is beyond this thread I suspect. The aside was just that regardless of reason certain groups are at especially high risk of medical complications including death.
The bigger point is, I admit, not something I have more than my sense of. My sense is that moms very quickly forget how hard delivery and the first two months postpartum were and to large degrees don’t even think about the catastrophic risks to their health from the process. My actually partly serious gag is that evolution has selected for postpartum amnesia, or we’d never have more than one child.
The emotional labor and ongoing psychological costs of caring for the older one(s) is real time and can’t be discounted so easily. I believe it is mostly that balanced against a speculated marginal increase satisfaction of some “want” not yet met by child number so far that drives the decision over reasoned health risk or economic analyses.
Surprisingly, there was a woman in the eighteenth century who had 69 children. How is that possible? It was because she had 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets.
My guess would have been “shoddy record keeping”.
Good one. Thank you.
I have a similar partly serious gag:
Darn good thing they’re cute, or they’d never live to puberty. The parents would kill most of them somewhere along the way.
Natural selection for perceived cuteness at work.
No, I have not forgotten the pain of labor. I have just one child, but the reasons for that have nothing to do with not wanting to go through pregnancy, labor, or even my emergency c-section again.
The fact is, I was scared and worried about making it through the process.
But I did.
Now that I know I can, I’m much less worried about doing it again. The reasons for not doing it again had nothing to do with my willingness to go through it.
It was like reading Torah at my bat mitzvah. I was sweaty-palmed, & dry-mouthed, and dizzy, and worried I’d pass out. That was 45 years ago. In my 20s, I became a regular Torah reader, and now I don’t think twice about it. I can even cold read if someone doesn’t show up. I used to cheat when they needed a cold reader, and stick a page with the trop marks on it on the Torah, but I don’t even do that anymore.
I also know from friends that childbirth the second time is almost always easier than the first time. I have a friend who has 11 kids, and while her first wasn’t all that difficult compared to my experience, it was eons more difficult than her 11th (her 9th pregnancy-- 2 sets of twins), which I remember, and she barely made it to maternity. Almost had to deliver in the ER, and she was pushing for all of 15 minutes.
In the US, I think, having a lot of children isn’t considered an accomplishment, and it used to be. Parents who have a really large family take some flack, even. There used to be concern about a problem of serious overpopulation.
When I was really little, on Mother’s Day, wherever you went, there were flowers, or other small tokens given out to mothers, and a lot of the time, there were colors or other decorations on the ones for mothers with particularly big families.
No one does anything like that anymore.
If you have a big family, you don’t know the point at which people will judge you, talk about you behind you back, or assume you are very religious.
And no one needs to breed their own bevy of farmhands anymore.
Maybe. I had never seen a website before now that argued that way. Incidentally, it says that women can have babies as early as 15 and as late as 51. In fact, there are women who had babies before 15. There are ones who had babies later than 51. Perhaps she had some physical condition that made her more likely to have multiple births. Perhaps she had some additional physical condition that made her more likely to survive birth. I have no way to check the records on this, so I can say nothing more.
At that point you had a much of a choice but to? “Nah. Changed my mind.”
You say you remember exactly how bad it was I have no choice but to take you at your word. But I think you will understand my wondering how you in active labor would have responded to you now comparing it to being “like reading Torah at my bat mitzvah”?
Pretty sure my wife would not reacted well to my making that comparison …
Still to the main point I was making -
Nor I assume with the very real risk of death or serious medical complications associated with pregnancy and delivery.
As vividly as you remember the pain of labor, as much as you intellectually appreciate the health risks involved even with excellent obstetric care throughout, those were not the reasons. I’m not asking what the reasons were; none of my business. But established that other factors about what you wanted your life and your family to be, possibly based partly on what is was like with child one in hand, and your values, were the big inputs to the decision. Whatever the costs.
I wanted to circle back for a moment to the discussion of the social and cultural changes that affect birthrate. Just to go over some minor musing I’d had in the last few ways. One change that I’ve seen between the way I was raised, and the way my brother has raised my niece and nephew is that even in that 30ish years, the “community” factor has been noticeably reduced.
[ for the record, my upbringing was, with some disruptions, pretty solidly upper-middle class, and my brother’s household is probably lower-upper class, so not 100% comparable ]
When I was growing up, my parents had several friends, local and otherwise, and frequently exchanged outgrown child clothes, goods, and the like. Their closest friends had a pair of boys (+1 later) that my brother and I were within roughly 1-2 years of the two of us, so there was a near-constant back and forth of well-treated hand-me-downs. There was a lot less of the in-family swapping that I’ve heard of, because well, neither my folks or their friends lived near their own families. But it also meant that it was easy for one family to have the other’s kids over for a day or three if the other family needed time alone/away.
Now? That trend seems to have increased - especially for affluent nations where it’s easy, or even expected to move to follow opportunities, you’re a lot less likely to have local family to pass hand-me downs around, to have the constant exposure (mentioned upthread) to other friends/family expecting and possibly generate a sense of desire, and your close friends can just as easily be across the nation (or international, see this board!) rather than across the street and able to help out.
My brother (giving him full credit) is very involved with his kids, as is in my-sister in law. And my mother moved to be close to them, and is also very involved. But I managed to have a longish visit with them this past summer, and while the kids had plenty of social contacts and friends, there wasn’t much talk about my brother interacting with other friends in that sort of shared-family experience. It’s not that he doesn’t have friends, but it’s not the sort of communal or extended family I had growing up.
Not to say better, worse, or even common, this is a personal experience, but I don’t know if it’s shared in the thread’s experience. I just suspect, and it is one of those little things that could easily add up to substantial cultural costs in the cumulative sense.
Interesting, because I remember getting hand-me-downs from both family and neighbors when I was a kid. In fact, my “rich aunt”'s boxes were always appreciated.
But I think a lot of people today are squeamish about old clothes. Maybe because I grew up the way I had, I always liked adding vintage clothing to my wardrobe. But more and more I find people with the attitude of “Ick! Dead people’s clothes.”
What I’d heard about childbirth, I was worried about experiencing the worst pain of my life.
Nope.
Not as bad as a migraine headache, and not as bad as an adult tonsillectomy.
Which is not to say, “Nothing,” just, I had been worrying for something even worse.
And I wasn’t comparing active labor to reading Torah. I was comparing WORRYING about reading Torah the first time to WORRYING before I was in labor about what labor would be like.
Pretty sure I’ve shared this on these boards in the past. Three older sisters and one older brother. Took me a long time to understand why some of my shirts buttoned one side and others the other way.
I suspect hand me downs don’t happen as much because clothes became a disposable item.
The point though is cogent: there was a time that the mainstream in wealthy nations had ecosystems built around multiple kid and multigenerational households. And before that when having many kids was necessary because infant and child mortality was so high. Those ecosystems no longer exist except in very specific subcultural pockets and they are not easily rebuilt once gone, even if we wanted them.
But on the bright side, the current administration is doing what it can to bring back high infant and child mortality rates! Measles is back baby! Yeah like tariffs there will be early pain with eventual fertility rates the best you’ve ever seen anywhere!
The only thing known to have effect is reduction of age at birth of first child. Things which do have the effect of reduction of age at birth of first child are often “lack of support”, rather than “support”.
Subsidizing babies has not been shown to have the effect of increasing birth rate. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.
Interesting. My first was very painful, but not as bad as a broken bone. My second, a breech delivery, was the most painful experience of my life. I remember thinking, “now i understand how someone could die of pain”. But it was fairly quick, and i knew the end was in sight, so to speak. (Yes, he came ass backwards into this world.)
And i no longer directly remember the pain. I think that amnesia thing is real.
No; I’m pretty sure that many nations would rather go extinct than support women. Same as they’d rather go extinct than encourage immigration, which is even easier. Persecution is far more popular than survival.
I do recall a woman on a forum - I think the SDMB but am not certain - talking about how she kept a journal and as she wrote down how giving birth felt shortly afterwards, she could “feel her mind trying to make her forget” even as she wrote it down.
I read a study somewhere, and a quick Google search was unable to find it, but as I recall South Korea, which has a significant problem with falling birthrate, did a study to determine what would best support South Korean women in having more babies. The results of the study was basically better men. South Korean women would be inclined to have more babies if South Korean men were better husbands and fathers. The government, naturally, reacted to this study by increasing the paid time off for maternity leave by a week or something similar.
So, anyway, the best way to increase the birthrate would be to improve men. If there is any practical way to do that, well, I don’t know.
I’ve read that the person’s brain is flooded with hormones to promote bonding to the baby after giving birth. These are hormones like oxytocin which are produced when you’re feeling loved. These hormones will help lessen the memory of the pain, as a flood of loving feelings will also be part of the memory of giving birth. The person will remember that there was pain, but they may not clearly remember exactly what the pain felt like. Plus, they’ll remember how wonderful they also felt at that time. Then when they consider having another child, the pain aspect is not necessarily at the forefront of their thoughts. Compare that with something like a root canal, where the pain is clearly remembered. No one forgets what a root canal feels like or would consider having another one voluntarily.
I’m surprised that there isn’t more easily findable but I did find this:
About half of women remember significantly less pain 5 years later than 2 months after birth. 35% made the same assessment. Interestingly rating childbirth as an overall positive experience was associated with greater decrease in remembered pain. Negative experience and having an epidural was associated with pain scores increasing over time.
In Japan, there are a number of factors which contribute to many women not having children or having fewer.
Many jobs require an insane amount of overtime, and you just can’t have two parents put in that much time. In those companies, women get tossed aside if they aren’t able to work as long.
Another problem is inadequate childcare. We were lucky to find childcare but many couples can’t.
Something unique to Japan, AFAIK, is that there is a difference between kindergarten 幼稚園 and daycare 保育園. Kindergarten is three years, so two years longer than in America. It’s mornings only.
Daycare can start as early as two months, and can continue as an alternative to kindergarten. The hours go until later in the afternoon or evening so it’s better for couples that both work.
They don’t teach as much in daycare, so many families put their child in kindergarten and the wife quits work. When our kids were in daycare, one of the other mothers did that.
Something I’ve wondered about is that when I was growing up, most of the parents weren’t as involved to the same degree. Most kids in my neighborhood didn’t have as many activities, and kids raised themselves. There is so much more these days.