Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

Yes, it was, but I agree. And with fewer kids around them (us) in real life, they are unlikely to get a more balanced view.

Earlier in the thread I suggested this solution:

They’d have to make sure to present a positive and achievable view, though, or it could backfire.

And there’s still a drive among younger generations to answer that question - as seen in the revived popularity of T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other after it was featured on The Good Place.

(Side note: it’s a bit misleading for the Times to mention millennials but not Gen Z in its subhed to that guest essay, seeing as the youngest millennials are pushing 30.)

As an anecdote, last week I was at an overnight all staff annual conference thing. talking to colleagues at dinner, somehow the conversation got round to relationships/families and one woman was very open and said her (younger) partner was keen on kids but she wasn’t sure. So I as one of the few parents round the table shared my experience which is:

Having kids is ace. Honestly, it’s brilliant, involves so much joy adn fun I can hardly describe it. Also, it’s incredibly easy to keep babies healthy, honestly a doddle. I mean, I could do it and I’m an idiot.

There’s a certain rhetorical slant here, which is deliberate because I’ve had this kind of conversation before and I’ve seen what kind of input people get when they’re thinking about becoming parents: everyone, especially parents who should know better, seems to take great delight in talking about what a pain in the arse it is. “Oh, you’ll never sleep again” “Oh, there goes the sex life”, “Oh, they’re so much work”, “Oh you’ve had your last adventurous holiday”, “Oh, woe and misery, trial and tribulation”. It’s a fucking horrible message to give people and it misses out on big and important truths: having kids is ace, you’ll love it, the upsides are huge.

So I lay it on a bit thick, but I stand by it all. And people are pleased to hear it - so much so that the colleague above pulled me over the next day to speak to another colleague who is currently expecting to say the same stuff and honestly, the relief in people’s eyes when you tell them this thing they’re doing will be good actually.

(None of which is to say that people shouldn’t go into parenthood with their eyes open, and of course there are risks to be managed, but that information is widely available so it’s good to balance it out.)

Some data.

Overall American adults feel strongly that we have responsibility to other generations. Seemingly based on what problems are of the moment. Adults old enough to have deteriorating parents care most about caring for them. At earlier stages more about taking care of the kids. Not a huge shock that younger adults care the most about adults passing money on to their kids! Not sure that is a trend or a function of age and era. Their aging Boomer parents are relatively well to do and not needing their help. It’s often these young adults still getting help. And they see that as the model going forward.

To expound further: there are also parents who will tell their own kids how much hassle it was to have them, and say little or nothing about how their kids bring them any sort of joy, and then later demand why their kids (now adults) won’t have kids.

After a 20-year long diet of “Giving birth to you was so painful/you screamed and fussed so much as a toddler/we spent so much money on you/I puked 20 times from morning sickness while having you”, and never saying “having you in our lives is a joy,” it’s unsurprising that the offspring decide not to experience that misery for themselves.

The author at least partially attributes her choosing to have kids to being raised in a subculture that encouraged it:

It’s something I’ve been thinking about more generally: you can’t get rid of norms, only change them, so we ought to promote societal norms that benefit the majority (while also promoting the idea that it’s okay to opt out of those norms if they don’t fit you).

If we want more kids, then parenthood should be something you choose to opt out of, not opt into.

That’s a big if (and i disagree with it) but i agree, that’s what worked in the past to keep up birth rates, and it seems the mostly likely way to increase them in the future.

It’s too bad, as i continue to believe we’d all be better off if a few people who really like kids and are good at rearing children have very large families, and many people have no kids.

Her thesis does seem to echo the age-old debate between orthodoxy and secularism in American Judaism - the latter of which still tends to be caricatured as neurotic and therapy-culture-obsessed (think Woody Allen or Philip Roth).

I agree.

As long as the people who really want kids are not motivated by anything religious. Otherwise the next generation will consist largely of religionists.

That sounds quite dystopian to me. It’s like saying we’d be better off if a large portion of the population stayed single - sure, a small percentage of people aren’t interested, or aren’t able to find a relationship, but for most of us it’s something that enriches our lives. The problem is that modern society has unreasonable expectations of parents while providing them with too little support. I don’t think childrearing ability or love of children is so unevenly distributed that this plan would make sense, either.

My ideal society is one where we’ve extended human lifespans and fertility, so it’s possible to focus on education, career, and personal growth, and then find the right partner and have kids. Not impossible in the future maybe, but it’s not going to happen any time soon.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

never mind

I think many more people crave a partner than crave children. And many of those childless adults would have nephews and nieces they could invest in emotionally, because, you know, most people would have a lot of siblings.

I think being an only child is kinda sad. Sometimes, that’s how it works. But i think we’d be better off overall if a larger fraction of the population had a bunch of sibs.

And it just doesn’t work for everyone to have lots of kids, even if that was an option that appealed to most adults (which it isn’t.)

Agree w @puzzlegal.

Imagine a world where humans normally gave birth to litters of ~6 like canids do.

Everyone would have siblings and only some would need to reproduce providing niblings for their childfree sibs.

We’ve still treated being partnered as the norm until recently. That may be changing as more and more of Gen Z are swearing off dating.

The reasons they give in the article are pretty similar to those for delaying or rejecting parenthood.

I agree. I wish my daughter could have had a sibling. But actually, all the adults I know who were only children, including my husband, say it was great. There are advantages and disadvantages either way: the more siblings there are, the less attention each child gets from their parents. I’m not convinced 3 siblings are better than 1, and kids can also be close to their cousins. One thing I’ve really enjoyed about having a child, and my sisters having them too, is how the kids have brought our family closer together and encouraged us to renew those ties.

Not until we start colonising space, anyway. :wink:

God forbid. I was in the maternity ward with a woman who had triplets; I always wondered how the hell that couple coped when they took them home. They couldn’t even have family come to help since it was during lockdown.

I’ve seen it claimed that our no-compromise, fight-to-the-death politics is an outgrowth of the demise of larger families. With fewer middle children and their compromise-and-consensus-seeking preferences in the electorate, there is more incentive for politicians to play toward the preferences of onlies and firsts in particular, fighting to conquer the other side rather than come to a modus vivendi. (This is an Adlerian, birth-order kind of analysis, and I don’t know if there’s any way to test it - but it is a little interesting to think about.)

Which is one of those things we all sort of want to believe is true, but that actually has no evidence that supports it. Unfortunately our Zodiac sign is about as good as our birth order.

And as a youngest I adapt well to this changing information! :grinning_face:

For clarity, what do you mean by this phrase?

You don’t have cousins unless your parents had siblings. And more siblings gives you options.

I mean it’s brilliant, really good, a blast, joyful, makes life better.

Out of curiosity, what did you think it might mean?