The fact so many countries have similarly low birth rates, despite quite different policies, is one argument suggesting that none of those policies make very much difference.
I’m from (and in) the UK. We have free healthcare, but don’t get free childcare; in fact it’s extremely expensive, though there are partial subsidies for 3 and 4 year olds, which the government recently extended to 2 year olds (too late to benefit us). We do get up to a year of maternity leave, at low pay and the last 3 months unpaid, so a lot of women go back to work earlier. However, there are other countries in Europe where this is all free, and they don’t have notably higher birth rates.
A particular issue in the UK is the high cost of housing, anywhere near decent jobs. Also, the economy has been somewhere between mediocre and bad more or less continuously since 2008, the great majority of my working life (IIRC, wages today have still not returned to 2008 levels, 17 years after the financial crisis). Feels like we’re stuck in a permanent decline, which doesn’t exactly inspire the sort of optimism that would make people want to have kids (and probably will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result).
Wow. I don’t know how comparable it is, but my daughter has meltdowns over the stupidest things, and I never know what to do. I don’t want to give in when she’s demanding something (and sometimes she’s so upset I can’t even tell what the matter is), but she just goes on endlessly, and trying to comfort her doesn’t work at all. It’s worse in a public place where it’s bothering other people. Sometimes I can distract her, but that’s rare.
One of my nieces also has serious meltdowns, and my brother in law especially struggles with it because he hates loud noise. I think that’s a major factor in why they only had one.
I figure whatever arrogance he develops from being praised will be chastened by everything else in his life. The only time I’ve really seen this backfire is when it’s followed by not enforcing accountability. “You’re so great” is fine, but all too often it’s, “you’re so great and nothing you do is ever wrong” and that will ruin a person.
People say “meltdown” to mean various things, so, for clarity: There are tantrums, where a kid just wants their way and has learned that pitching a fit will get it. I flat-out ignore those, or maybe make a comment like, “that’s not going to help you.” So he doesn’t have those much, and they are very brief.
Then there’s the meltdown, which is 20-30 minutes of sustained crying triggered by sensory overwhelm or something else, where it’s not about getting what he wants, it’s an intense physiological response to feeling out of control. I know he can’t control them because he asks me in the middle of it how to stop. He doesn’t want it to be happening. We can usually avoid these by paying attention to what triggers them, but they do happen sometimes.
My understanding is that these are usually much more frequent and often more severe with autistic kids than they are with my son. I dunno, it’s just his nature to be happy. He can be hyper controlling though - we like to say he has a promising career in middle management.
I also think neurotypical kids have meltdowns sometimes.
See, I know this isn’t what you mean and isn’t what’s true, but this discourse is kind of giving a vibe that you were happier before you changed your mind. (Yes, I understand that that’s not true, I’m not attempting some kind of stupid gotcha here!)
But somebody considering parenthood and reading that might get the message “I didn’t want kids and didn’t have kids, so I had no idea what I was missing. Then I changed my mind and had a kid, and now I regret that I didn’t start earlier and can’t have more, and it makes me gloomy and depressed that other people aren’t having more kids and not knowing what they’re missing, and also parenting is very hard and underfunded.”
Um, okay, thanks for the pep talk? (No, I don’t seriously mean that you should be running a pro-natalist advertising campaign of curated positivity in honest IMHO discussions on the Dope, it’s okay!) But you can see how somebody who isn’t particularly FOMO-prone might take in that message and think “Hmmm, I can go on being fine with not having kids and miss a big transformative experience but not really be bothered by it because I don’t know what I’m missing. Or I can take the leap and commit to all that cost and care and uncertainty while simultaneously being sad about the wrongness of my previous choice and despairing about all the other people making similarly wrong choices. Yeah, um, I think maybe I’ll just stick with my blue-pill version of reality here.”
There’s got to be a better way of helping others attain the confidence and freedom and support to choose what they really do want most with regard to parenthood. Because if that won’t be adequate to maintain the human race, I don’t think there’s anything else that will be.
“Oh woe, more people need to put themselves through this because it really is by far the better path, in ways that you’ll never come close to understanding if you don’t choose it, and also we need more people to do it because the fate of the species hangs in the balance” is not really going to cut it as a sales pitch, ISTM.
Another cultural factor in Black American birthrates, as I noted above, may be that there’s more community support for choosing parenthood prior to marital partnership.
The expectations and perceived stakes of partnered relationships, like those of parenthood, have increased a lot over the past decades. If we’re using marriage or some similar kind of relationship commitment as an entry barrier to parenthood, we’re making things extra hard for aspiring parents who are not yet (and may never be) partnered.
My daughter has phases like this. As long as she’s not too upset, I’ve been calming her down by having something she’s working towards earning - right now it’s cars from a Paw Patrol car set - she’s pretty logical for a 3 year old, so I can tell her, “You did really good at your Quiet Time today - you’re on track to get your car at the end of the week - but if you want that, you can’t throw a fit right now”. That’s been really effective lately. Although every so often she’s upset enough that we have to step outside or away and calm down for a bit.
And yes, it happens over the stupidest stuff. The other day I was trying to motivate her to get dressed quickly after a bath, so I asked her, “Who’s gonna get dressed first, you or your sister?”. And she immediately erupted into tears, crying: “It’s not a race, daddy!!!”
The only thing I can say is, they happen to my oldest most often when she’s overtired. She doesn’t nap anymore, but when she did, it was almost always when she skipped a nap.
Wow, okay, that is not what I expected you to get from what I wrote. Having a kid has been by far one of the best experiences of my life, and I’m thankful every day that I was able to do it. I’d be a hell of a lot more sad and depressed, and my life would feel far less meaningful if I hadn’t been able to have any, which was a pretty likely outcome when we started trying.
It’s been far more rewarding - and way more fun! - than I ever expected.
If you discovered that some experience, which you had previously been put off trying for mostly bad reasons, was actually great, wouldn’t you feel that other people were missing out too, and should be more willing to take the leap? That doesn’t mean I’m depressed about it. Surely you think all the war, famine, and disease in the world is depressing, and would change it if you could? That’s a lot worse than low birth rates. But I doubt you’d say you’re actually depressed because of those things.
Yes, it has. But it’s fallen even more precipitously in those where they aren’t.
This seems rather implausible, given the much higher proportion of births to single mothers in that community.
This is a more likely explanation. Delayed marriage and not marrying at all are thought to be a contributor to low birth rates, so not waiting for marriage would logically increase them.
That’s definitely a factor with my daughter. She’s always been a bad sleeper, and we’re not the best at being strict with bedtime. She’s a champion at finding excuses to delay it. She was even doing her homework to put off the bedtime routine the other day! (Yes, this school gives homework to 4 and 5 year olds. Madness.)
In our family it’s a race if she’s winning, and suddenly not a race if she falls behind.
I don’t hold this up as good parenting but I do agree with that as a general principle, and especially if dealing with gifted kids. It’s a personal values thing for me. “Wow you’re so smart.” to me is not so much different than “Wow you’re so tall.” I’d rather reinforce what they volitionally do than what they happen to be. I am impressed by their choosing to challenge themselves and work to be their best. By tenacity. Just say getting As without having to work hard at it is sort of meh.
Yes. Earlier in the thread I shared a NYT article. Precisely that. In countries like South Korea where there has been economic growth and women working outside the home more but gender role expectations in households have changed little, the birth rate has fallen off the cliff. In countries with gender role expectations changing some to more paternal involvement (albeit still unequal) the drop off has been more modest.
Nnno, not really, I guess? I mean, I would be happy to witness to my own happiness with the experience, of course. But what would anybody else really get out of my assuring them “Trust me, you only think you don’t want to do this, you’ll never realize how wrong you were unless you change your mind!” ?
The world is full of people exhorting all of us that doing some particular thing that we currently don’t think we want to do would turn out to be the best thing of our whole lives. Sure, statistically speaking some of those people are likely to be right in their claims, but why would I expect someone to take my word for it that I was one of them?
Fine! I’m just going by a number of things you said in this thread, some of which I quoted above. The negativity and disapproval about other people’s choices, as I noted, and the implication that other people just don’t understand what would be best for themselves, seems less likely to increase the appeal of parenthood than measures of constructive support.
The two possible explanatory factors (neither one of which, I suspect, would constitute a sufficient explanation all by itself) aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s very possible that greater fertility among Black American women is facilitated both by not having to deal with such strong normative expectations of marriage/partnership prior to motherhood, and by the benefits of greater paternal involvement with children. But AFAICT there isn’t any study on the potential causal impacts of either of these correlations.
[ETA: Note that level of paternal involvement doesn’t necessarily depend on parental marriage. There are a whole lot of unmarried Black men who are very involved with their children.]
I’m trying to remember something I read twelve years ago in graduate school, but it was about how white communities tend to perceive children out of wedlock, particularly to teen mothers, as overwhelmingly negative, however in Black communities, having a child as a teenager could operate as a protective factor of child well-being, especially because, in the absence of two parents, the grandparents were usually young enough to support their grandkid.
I think perhaps the dominant culture views teen pregnancy negatively because of how disruptive it is, and we’re not well-equipped to support people in that situation. But the article I read would suggest that many Black communities are better equipped to offer that support, so it’s not as big of a deal.
My Mom (white) had me out of wedlock when she was 19. She actually did get a fair amount of support from her father, and my grandmother, but ultimately she had to put herself through college, where she received a BA in Mechanical Engineering, in the 80s. She was in many respects a very inspiring person, and a pretty good Mom in my early years, but sometime in her 20s (when I was 6 or 7) she just went off the deep end into severe mental illness. When her stepsister became pregnant at 16, she refused and I was not allowed to attend the baby shower because “It’s immoral to have a child out of wedlock and shouldn’t be celebrated.” But really it was her own (probably deluded) perception that her stepsister was getting more resources from her parents than she had as a single Mom, and she was jealous, so she made up this reason to punish my Aunt for it. And my Aunt never forgave her.
My Mom also has admitted that the reason she’s so stridently against abortion is that she wanted to have one but couldn’t go through with it and “If I had to give birth, so should everyone else.” I think a lot of people have that attitude and she’s just saying the quiet part out loud.
Either way, both of them were looked down on for being young mothers. I’m not Black so I can’t attest how the Black community views having children out of wedlock, I’m just throwing that out there.
…that is an entirely common everyday phenomenon in my experience. I’m kinda surprised it seems strange to you?
“You wouldn’t think the zucchini burger would be good, but I can’t taste the difference! You should try it.”
“I know axe throwing sounds weird, but we went last weekend, and it was actually a ton of fun!”.
Etc…
Presumably you aren’t having these sorts of conversations with random people, but with trusted friends who value your opinion.
Yeah, but if you’re telling me that there isn’t a strong correlation, I’m going to consider that an extraordinary claim and need at least some evidence for it.
