Apart from the “bang for the buck,” there’s a strong case to be made that it traps low education (especially immigrant) women in a cycle of having more and more kids It makes more sense economically for the family than working the lowest paying job they can hope to get.
Nah. But dogs are (I’m a dog person, but do like cats).
In all seriousness, you’re coming close to introducing the crazy cat lady stereotype. I suppose that there really are people who refer to their pets as fur babies, and anthropomorphize them. But the idea that someone gets a cat or a dog as a substitute for having children doesn’t sit right with me. Getting a puppy is like having invited a toddler that will remain a toddler for 10+ years (give or take depending on breed). One has to have a very serious yearning for toddlers to think of substituting a pet for a kid. As you mentioned, children don’t remain in the diaper/toddler stage forever.
He wrote as he’s getting giddy about the next puppy which will arrive mid July.
In my experience it’s other people referring to my pet(s) as “fur babies” or, in my case, “feather babies”.
Most offensively, to me (I don’t speak for anyone else) is on Mother’s Day. I absolutely hate working Mother’s Day because, for 8 unrelenting hours I get greetings assuming I am a mother, or have a mother. My mother is dead. My mother-in-law is dead. Every other woman who has filled that role in my life is dead. I am happy to help others celebrate the mothers in their lives but for me, it’s a reminder of loss and grief. In addition, I never had children. I am no one’s mother. I’m OK with that. What pisses me off is when people try to contort something in my life to make it fit. No, my pet does not make me a “mother”. At all. Stop doing that! I am not entitled to the title of “mother” in any way. Attempting to saddle me with that feels like stolen honor. Stop doing that! Please!
I usually try to arrange to have the day off and avoid people on Mother’s Day. I’m usually much, much happier that way.
It was a friend’s puppy that nudged me to parenthood. Well, that’s not true. But i remember how much time they spent caring for and training the puppy, and i remarked to my husband, “if I’m going to have to put in that much work, i want to have a child, not just a dog. Children grow up.”
But i wanted “family”, not “children”.
I didn’t cite numbers in one of my posts, above (where i says South Korean fertility send to be increasing) because every site i looked at gave different numbers, although they all showed the same trend. I don’t know what’s up with that, as i thought the calculation was agreed upon and a well -documented nation like South Korea should have a grip on that number.
Yeah, that’s probably true. And yet, even though it was normal and expected for my generation, i found having children very isolating. Basically, my husband and i had no time for anything other than work and childcare for 10+ years. I think that isolation is a big reason people choose not to have kids.
Good point about the isolation. Paradoxically, when there are more children around there is often more adult/child social segregation, as the children roam around in packs with older kids supervising younger ones.
Fewer kids means that small children are with their parents almost all the time. So if parents don’t want to be isolated from other adults, then either the adults have to be okay with a lot of small-child behavior including screaming and breaking stuff, or small children have to be adult-socialized at a young age, which is hard and not always beneficial.
Awww. Your son reminds me of myself as a child; not that I was some kind of genius, but interests wise. My daughter doesn’t seem more than casually interested in any of those things; right now she likes animals, mermaids, and superhero cartoons, pretty normal kid stuff. I think my nephew might be the only mathsy one in the family.
Oh, yes. Kids model themselves on their parents. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sweet, sometimes it’s mortifying (“do I really sound that that?”). It all makes me want to be a better person.
And having her makes me care more about the state of the world, and about the future. Yes, that can lead to increased worries, but I can’t believe that it’s a bad thing.
Yes, that’s true. There probably were and are people talking about how much they love being parents on Reddit, but they would be on a parenting subreddit where I never saw them. General forums like this one, where you can just run across something you wouldn’t have thought to seek out are a dying breed. Revitalising real life community would be a boon for this, as for so many other problems of modern life.
Yes, I agree. Governments could be making fertility treatments available for free right now, and aren’t. Finding a way to create new eggs, eliminating the negative effects of aging on them, would be especially beneficial.
I think we also need to remind young men that these limits impact them too. They can’t just attract a younger woman at will if they wait until later in life to settle down, and if they are already married or in a relationship, waiting longer reduces their chances of having children with their partner.
Yeah. Babies and children are people too, and deserve to participate in society. And actually, after all the complaining and judgemental attitudes I’ve seen in the news and on social media, I was pleasantly surprised at how positive strangers have been towards my daughter.
A couple of years ago we went on holiday with some friends of my husbands, including a couple who are childfree. And they were talking about how they don’t want children because kids are so limiting. This couple own two greyhounds, and these dogs were literally more of a pain than our 3 yo daughter. They can’t walk far, and can’t get over stiles, so only one of the couple could come on hikes. They couldn’t come for a meal in a pub, because the dogs can’t be left alone that long in a holiday home. We went on a fun train ride, and the couple had to stay at home because the dogs wouldn’t handle it. Forget about taking them on a foreign holiday. Two years’ later, and we have ever more freedom as our daughter grows up and becomes more capable, while they are stuck with the same limitations.
I think this is part of the issue. I feel like all the advice I saw was that you should not, and had no right to, expect anything from your kids after they were grown up, so you should only have them if you really enjoy spending (all your) time with young children for its own sake. Sometimes there’s the addition that if you aren’t 100% sure you could handle loving and caring for a profoundly disable child for the rest of your life, you shouldn’t have kids.
What do you think could be changed to make it less isolating?
Yes. My husband calls them ‘feral kids’, lol. But I think that’s the ‘natural’ way for children to be raised, and probably better for them. And it allows the adults to have adult conversations with their friends, rather than spending all their time supervising small children or trying to keep older ones entertained.
Changes in the social rules that children must be supervised at all times. Of course, that attention really does decrease child mortality and child morbidity. So that’s a big trade off.
When unavoidable child mortality was high enough that it was fairly common to lose a kid, the small increase in risk to let them run free, or to leave the baby in the care of the 5 year old, was more palatable than it is when we all expect that all our children will outlive us.
And I’m surprised about your friend with the greyhounds. It’s much easier to kennel dogs when you go on vacation, or leave you dog with a friend who has dogs, than it is to get away from your small children for a week.
One change, that doesn’t have so many negative trade offs, that might increase the birth rate is to normalize large families. Some adults really enjoy rearing children, and tend to be good at it. Others really don’t, and often aren’t. I think the world would be a better place if ~half of adults didn’t have children, and the other half had, on average, larger families. More kids would have good, engaged parents, more children would have siblings, which i think is really valuable, both when you are a kid and also as you age, and more adults would be spared the expectation of child care.
To a very real degree this is what’s already happening in the US. There’ve been statistics cited up-thread about that.
The number of childless has grown, but among those with non-zero numbers of kids, the average is larger than it was say 30 or 40 years ago. Still not as large as the late 19th or early 20th century when the US was much more a country of rural / small farm living.
A societal challenge arising from this is that the preference for large family sizes is very highly correlated with strongly traditional religious views. Which suggests that 30-40 years later, the only people of childbearing age will be the highly traditionally religious.
You can’t have a fifth baby before you’ve had the first. When that first happens at 16, five happens more often than when the first is at 33 or later.
Women (and yes the key person in this is the woman) have family planning ability now, and when they do a large number are choosing to not start until late and then have fewer on average even if they would have wanted more had they started earlier.
Yes that ability is under attack. And greatly reducing that ability would increase fertility and the number of much larger families. I don’t think many here however would be in support of that approach.
Here’s a bit of an analogy that’s unrelated to birthrates strictly speaking …
We lament a bit the rise of the insular family over the older model of 3 generations under one roof and 10 aunts and uncles plus 50 cousins all living within a few blocks of our home.
Conversely I (and my late wife) lived most of my / our adult lives in a different time zone from 100% of her and my extended family. A very different cultural thing.
Yet what I/we did is 100% the product of choice. In the main, it’s only people who have little or no choice who remain clustered like that traditional family.
It’s pretty much a one-way function by logical necessity: If choice exists, some percentage of the family will leave for whatever reasons make sense to them. There’s no countervailing mechanism for strangers to move into your family cluster and become replacement family members. So by definition, choice ensures the shrinkage of these clusters.
The only way to preserve clusters is to remove choice. Or, in a softer version, persuade people to not take the choices on offer. Which IMO is not much different from training your dog to stay in its crate even when you leave the door open. Social (or especially familial) pressure is (or can be) just as much a restraint on action as can be e.g. economic necessity.
It doesn’t greatly matter if you (any you) don’t have a choice, or don’t think you have a choice. In those circumstances you’ll act as if you don’t. And acts are all that matters.
That’s true. If it were easier to start at 25, women who want kids would have more babies. But people do feel that they need to be settled enough to support the kids, and to step back some from work & education, before they can start.
I didn’t really feel settled enough at 30, and only started that young because of a family history of fertility problems.
It may not be widespread, but there are mechanism for building family-like support networks.
We had our kids thousands of miles from any family. But we quickly built a support network. We have friends who will, do, and did help us with our children (and pets and house). Friends from the neighborhood, friends from work, friends from church, friends from the kids’ schools, etc. Of course there’s varying levels of trust and responsibility.
Because people who have kids, but no family, have that in common and have the resources to help each other. If I’m already picking up my kid from school, it’s easy enough to pick up another kid from school. And then get repaid in kind. And there’s a lot of us now.
And the unspoken rule: never comment on another’s parenting. It’s kind of the opposite of family who give advice but no support.
True, and nonparents are also part of those networks. Like, my preschooler-parent friend has a doctor appointment and just drops her kid with me, or someone else in our friend group, for an hour or so.
I think continuing to normalize parenthood and nonparenthood as equally socially acceptable, with no shaming or putdowns on either side, will do a lot to reintegrate nonparents into the child support network.
For a while there, the self-described “childfree” community was very aggressively anti-kid, largely in pushback against aggressive anti-childlessness in society as a whole. And of course there will always be SOME nonparents who openly just “hate kids” and want nothing to do with them.
But most of us very much don’t feel that way. And when our willing participation in the CSN is appreciated, rather than pitied or derided as some kind of parasitism by the emotionally stunted or starved, I think everyone is better off. Especially kids.
I think you’re on to something here. My husband and I married at 23. That was when we had our first conversation about having kids. Due to his PhD program, the need to establish our careers, and a long wait for a planned adoption that didn’t happen, we didn’t have kids until we were 37.
I hated being pregnant and I hated the early months of parenting. When my son was born, the first words out of my mouth, I’m embarrassed to admit, were, “I’m not doing that again.” It would take fully six months before I began to start to enjoy parenting.
We had those early talks about how we didn’t think we could handle more kids. But we were basing that decision on what my son was like as a toddler.
I can’t remember exactly when it happened but my husband said to me, “We just hit our deductible. If I’m going to get a vasectomy, now’s the time to do it before the next insurance year.” And I assumed that meant he didn’t want more kids. So he got the snip.
But as our son got older and we talked about it, we kind of rushed into that decision. Maybe if we’d talked about it more, we would have had the same outcome. We have very compelling reasons to not have more kids. But in a sense it felt like we didn’t get a chance to see if we liked having kids before we decided whether we wanted more. We made the decision at one of our parenting low points.
That said, I had a miscarriage at 33 and I’m glad I didn’t become a parent then, because I wasn’t ready. Waiting until I was 37 made a big difference in my overall maturity and mental stability. It gave my husband time to establish his career. Overall I think it was a better outcome for the kid we have. It sounds crazy that four years can make a difference but in my case, it really did.
I didn’t hate months 4-18, but i can’t say i enjoyed anything about having kids until they hit the terrific twos. (Which happens around 18 months.) I hated being pregnant, and also had quite severe hormone-related depression through most of my second pregnancy. (Which no one will treat, because of the risk to the fetus, and because it is expected to clear up on its own in a few months. But i was really miserable, and made my husband miserable, and it probably wasn’t great for the first child, either.) And i hated the first three months, when i had to be constantly available for a lump that didn’t do anything. (They eat, they sleep, they poop.) And i found the next ~15 months tedious and generally unpleasant.
Fortunately for our kids, my husband loves infants, and loves to hold and cuddle infants. Because i sure don’t.
Fewer working hours. If people didn’t need to spend so much time at work, they could raise children and still have time do things other than work + children + sleep.
And probably have more children in the first place; I don’t buy that it’s a coincidence that the places with the worst birth rate dropoffs are the ones known for workaholism.
Under 8 or so, I think the main issue with kids is the unrelenting time commitment. It’s stressful because a huge portion of your time is spent meeting their needs. The problems with young kids are pretty straightforward to deal with, even if they take a lot of time and energy. But in the tween/teen years, there’s the potential for a lot of very complex problems to come up which are very hard to deal with. There may be issues with behavior, lying, drugs, alcohol, sex, respect, mental health, body image, eating disorders, lack of motivation, etc. These sorts of problems don’t have simple solutions and can be very stressful to deal with. A good parent will be able to not take things personally and not get overwhelmed if these problems don’t have easy solutions. When thinking about encouraging people to have kids, it’s important to recognize that being a parent is not all rainbows and stuffed animals. Being a parent can also mean dealing with your kid having crushing emotional problems that last for years and years and the effect it has on the family unit. If someone doesn’t have the personality to handle that kind of stuff, they may find being a parent too stressful and regret being a parent.
Here’s a study that just came out which looks at how dogs can satisfy some aspects of the nurturing drive similar to parenting. Although people don’t typically think of their pets truly as children, the act of taking care of a pet fulfills their nurturing need in a similar way to raising a child.