I also had my first kid around that age, and at this point, almost no one that I was friends with as a kid has kids of their own. Very few are even married, or in a long term relationship.
My wife’s friends did a bit better, but mostly because she grew up in a heavily Mormon town, and her Mormon friends almost universally married and started popping out kids in their 20s. Even some who left the church, interestingly; maybe some of the cultural attitudes to children stuck even if the faith didn’t.
I absolutely agree with you about liking growing up in a big family, thanks to my many aunts and uncles and many, many cousins - at least, before we moved to America - which also gave me a point of comparison: what is it like not to have a big family?
That said, I don’t know if that’s entirely selfish. Yes, I want a big family for myself. But I also want a big family for my kids, because I think being a kid in a big family is nice.
We sort of felt that 2 was replacement level, and our “fair share”. And yes, I definitely am more worried about overpopulation than underpopulation. And i suspect that’s a common reason for parents to stop at two.
Also, if you start late, you reach the point where the risks of having a child with a major birth defect increase earlier in your reproductive timeframe. And having a significantly disabled kid is an enormous burden. That becomes your life. At least, it pretty much consumes the whole life of one parent. And not just for 10-18 years, but pretty much for the rest of your life. That’s scary.
Anecdotal, sure. But anecdotes are, in fact, evidence.
I agree with this. And I certainly don’t mean to question your lived experience.
But I think that in e.g. 1960, having kids or not having kids wasn’t a selfish decision. It wasn’t even a decision at all. Instead having kids is “just what everyone does.” The very idea you (any you) had a decision to make was heretical.
Now to be sure, some folks of that era still failed to have kids. Usually they were exogenously-driven outliers already somehow. Sterility, wild adventurer, insane, convict, died before reproducing, etc.
Using you as an example, not meaning to call you out …
You personally did make a conscious decision to have kids. But that was at least partly conditioned by the social mileau in which you were raised: people 10 years older than you are were fully in the era of “It’s not even a decision”. You were early in the transition from that to “Of course it’s a decision.”
I suspect that part of the reason you can’t articulate just what selfish motivations you both did have is simply a sign that there weren’t much of any. What there was, was a deeply conditioned expectation to go with the flow, and that flow leads solely to parenthood, or at least sincerely diligently attempted parenthood. An effort you succeeded at 3 times.
The last line first, to get it out of the way. Four times. Not sure if that was intended to not count the adoption experience, our fourth child, as parenthood. I will assume not.
The explanation you offer is basically that the selfish satisfaction is the conforming to perceived expectations. And of course we humans often do that. I in no way would imagine that my wife and I are above that. But nah. We both wanted kids. My wife came from a two child family, her father was an only, her mother one of two. None of her good friends were having kids ahead of her. While I came from a larger family I personally was fine stopping at two anyway. The postpartum stuff was very hard. She was the more driven one to have the third despite the risks, and who after that, when I said definitely never again, brought up adoption as the way to achieve it. It was not, for her, conforming to any expectation. Nor for me: of my sibs one has no children, one three, and two two each. I’m the only with four.
Having kids, as many and beginning when we did, was a decision. One that stood out within our families and peer groups.
By “succeeding 3 times” I was referring to 3 bio-kids carried to term. At which point one of the involuntary things in life reared its head, making a 4th bio-kid somewhere between a Very Bad Idea and impossible for you two. This was in the context of my earlier comment about people who have bio-kids unless / until they can’t.
I have a niece in the fostering biz who has an adopted daughter. Yes I totally think of her as parent to her daughter. And I think of you as being a 4-time parent, albeit one with 3 full-term pregnancies under your belt.
Again my apologies if my word choices were disrespectful or hurtful. That was clumsiness and context, not hostility or (I hope) ignorance.
That’s something societies can copy without bringing back patriarchy, and I think these changes would benefit everyone.
This is the biggest thing I would like to change. It’s something I would say is part of the “we’ve replaced society with an economy” capitalism thing. Right now, having kids is seen as an essentially selfish decision by and for the parents, much like getting a pet (and people are somewhat encouraged to satisfy their nurturing impulses with a lower-maintenance pet, instead of having kids - most unhelpful). The message is that you should only have kids if you can support them - that it’s not society’s job to help you - and that in general, kids in public are a nuisance and an imposition on everyone else, with all the complaints about crying babies on aeroplanes and badly-behaved kids in shops and restaurants. (After hearing these complaints all my life, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of adults who were obviously happy to see my daughter running around being crazy when she was a toddler.)
Why? We already accord people higher status for having a job, and for educational achievements. If getting an education and working didn’t get people status and respect, a whole lot fewer people would do those things, and that would be bad for them and for society. Many people do get personal fulfilment from working, even in jobs where you might not expect it - but as long as we need people to work, that can’t be the only reason to do so. Having more kids is similarly necessary and pro-social (in countries way below replacement rate), so why shouldn’t we incentivise it the same way?
I don’t see women derided for it, but it’s lower status than working for the majority of mothers, and this is even more starkly true for fathers.
No, if we want a higher birth rate we need to stop telling people that this is a bad reason to have kids. As others have said, it’s not about how you want your death to be, it’s about how you want your life to be when you’re older: family around you, children to help out and spend time with, and hopefully grandchildren to spoil and share your memories with. A personal reason to care about the future. Having kids of your own isn’t the only way to get this, but it’s the most straightforward for the majority of people. Joining a forum where people were talking about their grandchildren got me thinking about the future, it was the first brick to crumble in my certainty that I didn’t want kids.
Which is why there is some hope that changing the messaging can help. Almost everyone is still stuck thinking overpopulation is a problem and it’s virtuous not to have kids. Madness in a country where the birth rate has been underwater for over half a century.
I wish I had. My daughter wouldn’t be an only child with no one to play with. And it would have been a lot easier to go through pregnancy, childbirth, and all the sleep deprivation of the newborn period when I was younger. Now I’m in my 40s trying to keep up with a young child; I’m lucky I’m healthy and can handle it.
In a more child-positive society, I probably would have had kids earlier, and I would have had at least one more. And probably @DSeid and @puzzlegal would be grandparents by now - some people really don’t like or want kids, but I truly doubt the number has changed so much in just one generation. What’s happening is that people who would be happy being parents aren’t doing it, because of career, difficulty finding a partner, and because of a lot of messaging from society that doesn’t support it.
Damn, that’s evidence against my education theory - mandatory military service delays starting out in a career even more, but your Israeli friends and relations are now ahead of your American friends in forming families. I wonder if it has the opposite effect in terms of making people feel more adult and independent vs the extended childhood of staying in education? It really seems that culture is the most important variable.
Well, because having kids, unlike career or sports achievement etc., involves making another human being dependent on you for nearly everything in the most vulnerable years of their life. Don’t we want people to regard that as more of a mission of fulfillment and devotion than as a stepping stone to personal advantage and social status? I’m a bit surprised that that needs to be spelled out, tbh.
To avoid more tedious motte snd bailey stuff, note that I already concurred that everybody’s motives for everything are partly about selfish personal advantage, and that’s normal and okay. But that doesn’t mean that selfish personal advantage is what we as a society should focus on encouraging when it comes to something like parenthood.
Overpopulation IS a problem, however, at least as human resource use is currently practiced. That doesn’t mean that people who want children ahould be discouraged from having them. But societies lying to people about environmental impacts, in order to coax them into procreating more simply because we’re worried about economic contraction, isn’t doing anybody a favor. Honestly looking at complicated problems from all sides is the first requirement.
I’ll try and explain my thinking better. All else being equal, people would divide their time and energy between work and having kids, according to how much fulfilment and life satisfaction they get out of each. For women with well paid and interesting jobs, this might mean taking maternity leave and then going back to work and hiring a nanny or sending the kids to daycare, while taking a small career hit as it can no longer be the first priority. For those with routine jobs, it might mean becoming a stay at home mother for a few years. And the same for men, but to a lesser degree.
But all else is not equal. In our society, paid work gives people far more status than having kids, tilting their choices in that direction, eg by prioritising career development and delaying kids to the less fertile years, or leading people to decide against having them altogether. So I would like to raise the status of parenthood to the point prestige is no longer a deciding factor in this equation. I would not, however, want to raise it so high that people start having kids primarily for this motive.
And future prospects should be part of this decision: having younger family around for support and companionship in old age, vs more money saved up for retirement. In neither case are these benefits guaranteed, but too often the message is that the former should not even be a consideration, while the latter is a necessary and responsible thing to do.
In both cases the ultimate risk is the collapse of civilisation as we know it. I believe raising birth rates in developed countries by a judicious amount would help to prevent this, and that we can mitigate impact on the environment better with new technology than with degrowth.
That makes no sense, given that the two are not mutually exclusive and that using both approaches simultaneously would clearly be more efficacious than using either alone.
BOTH are desirable IMHO. On a global basis. The world population can stand to drop, you just don’t want to simultaneously crater 1rst world economies and hollow out the world economic system. Which is why I prefer a combination of immigration into the developed world and an improving economic “rise all boats” solution to the developing world.
Easier said than done, but I think more workable than the nativist “bar the barn door and encourage more breeding in the barn” solution.
Why? At some point the human population on this planet has to stop growing. There’s absolutely no reason why there can’t be a modest degrowth in our population, with quality of life and aging population issues mitigated by improved technology. Particularly if existing assets like domiciles and commercial real estate can be reused and upgraded, fewer resources will have to be directed to building new things for all the additional people added this year.
Eventually, but we are at least an order of magnitude short of that theoretical limit, if not more.
And there’s absolutely no reason why there can’t be continued massive growth spurts in population as we greatly increase the efficiency of our resource and energy utilization while also greatly increasing our ability to harness resources and energy from the Earth and around it.
By degrowth I didn’t mean shrinking the population, I meant shrinking the economy, reducing living standards etc in order to consume less resources per person.