There is quite a bit of evidence that first born children have higher educational attainment and slightly higher scores on IQ tests on average than their later-born siblings.
That would be an argument against a one child policy like China, not the typical Western aspiration for two kids per family.
The average number of kids in each generation of a family depends on tfr, however you distribute them. Can’t have these big families with tons of cousins unless they are part of a group with high fertility rates.
Got to say I’m very glad I don’t live in a world where I’m expected to either dedicate my life to raising 4 or 5 or more children, or remain childless. But I don’t see how we’d get to your ideal anyway.
Which is not at all relevant to the Adlerian claims about the “compromise-and-consensus-seeking preferences” of middle born children, or even of the personality type of first born.
That bit about first born educational status really is it. Which is not evidence for the popularly believed Adlerian birth order personality archetypes.
I started doing this rah-rah-rah cheerleading for parenting stuff to expecting/potential parents when a recently married colleague who had been asking about pregnancy/kids and getting the usual “woe, woe” stuff (including from me, mea culpa) later revealed she was pregnant and somewhat plaintively asked if there were upsides to parenting.
At which point I realised what a clown I’d been and started waxing enthusiastic. But she did ask why she was just hearing now about how great it was, and the answer was really that it felt like bad form to come into work every day and talk about how awesome your kids are. (And of course, parents can be bores and most young kid stories are pretty samey and not that interesting if you don’t know the kid). But! I think particularly nowadays people don’t spend a lot of time with babies until they themselves are parents, and just aren’t familiar with what it’s like. So it does a bit of good to share a few photos and talk about a few cool things and generally present a vibe of parenthood being fun.
Edited to add: this is not some deep laid plan to promote national fertility, it’s just a way of being supportive to expectant parents.
Something being “ace” or “aces” isn’t an idiom used in the US.
You didn’t ask, but likewise “doddle” is not a word you’ll hear in US usage.
I read enough UK writing I recognized both terms, but perhaps @Pleonast doesn’t. IMO it was also pretty obvious from your context what it / they meant.
And that’s great. When i was pregnant, at some point, i realized that all the “giving birth” stories I’d heard were horrible painful affairs from people who were still a little traumatized and needed to share. So i started telling my pregnant friends about my perfectly normal, relatively easy delivery. (It felt like bad stomach cramps. And i jumped in terror when they approached me with a giant needle of novacaine, which made them think there was a problem, and made my husband laugh. And then i had to push, and i was reminded of the time i had to push a car in a parking lot. And then i had a baby.)
But i didn’t find it awesome to have babies. I didn’t really enjoy anything about having kids until they reached the terrific twos. I found it stressful and exhausting and somewhat frustrating. Fortunately for my kids, my husband really enjoys holding babies. When we are at social events where people are playing “pass the baby”, he gets in line with the women, and i try to avoid having to say, “no thanks” explicitly.
I do tell my (mostly male) friends who are frustrated with caring for their babies that it gets a lot better when they reach about 18 months.
I think you should be accurate - presenting only the good side is also deceptive and would leave people to have a poor understanding of what to actually expect just like presenting only the bad sides. It also makes it much more difficult for parents who are actually having problems and difficulties (or even overall feel parenthood as a negative for themselves). It makes them feel something is wrong with them, may dissuade them from getting help, etc. Though if all you care about is increasing the birthrate and not the happiness of the people involved, it’s a way to go about it.
EDIT: I will say I do think we have an issue where it seems too much of adult casual social bonding is built on complaining - about being at work, about bad weather, about bad politicians, etc. People are sometimes dissuaded from talking about great happenings in their lives because others don’t share in those great things. Though, I would say their kids is the one thing that people are always allowed to gush about and praise, unlike vacations, paying off mortgages (really any accomplishments regarding money), getting awards, etc.
As I have said, people are getting plenty of information about the downsides and risks of parenthood to the extent that frequently it is all they hear: my being enthusiastic in person for as many as five minutes at a time casts but a hair upon the balance.
China only had a one-child policy from 1979 to 2015. In 2016 through 2020, it replaced it with a two-child policy. In 2021, it replaced that with a three-child policy. The population of China is now alowly decreasing. It’s dropped from being the country with the most population in the world to the country with the second largest population, after India:
Yeah. Something that struck me strongly was when I told my manager I was pregnant, and he was really happy for me. Until then I mostly only heard the negative stuff; I do think it’s unbalanced.
Definitely a factor. There’s such a taboo against sounding like you’re bragging, and also I’m wary of making other parents feel bad if I say my daughter has reached some milestone, in case their child hasn’t got there yet.
My experience of sharing birth stories is that they often turn into a competition to see whose was worst. But that’s between mothers. I’ve only had one friend who got pregnant after me (who didn’t already have kids) and I told her about my relatively straightforward delivery, but she ended up getting a C-section since her baby was breech. (And she’s booked in for a second one in a couple of weeks.)
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the baby stage, because I didn’t particularly like babies before I had one, but I did enjoy it a lot. The ‘fourth trimester’ was very hard and quite overwhelming, but once my daughter started to do things and respond to us, it was really fun. She seemed to learn something new every day, basically growing and developing into a person in front of our eyes. Plus I enjoyed the time off work. Between feeding her and letting her nap on me, I was able to catch up on some TV and reading I had wanted to do, and I got to go on nice walks in the countryside while she slept in the sling.
My husband was very helpful, too. He took her every evening so I could sleep, he used to let her nap next to him while he played computer games with his friends, lol.
Very true. I find it hard to talk about the positives, and I think it’s partly because of not wanting to make others feel bad, and partly lack of practice!
That’s right. A sunshade could cool the planet, and allow another trillion people to live here. But there’d be no room for elephants, or seahorses, or bobcats, &c.
Whereas i found it an enormous relief when i went back to work. I remember sitting at my desk, holding a hot cup of coffee, and realizing that i didn’t have to worry about spilling it on my child, and that i wouldn’t be interrupted before i finished it. A wave of peace settled over me.
I guess i didn’t have a TV, and lived in Manhattan, where i didn’t especially like walking in the winter.
My husband was able to eat while holding the baby, but i never mastered that skill. I found having an infant incredibly stressful.
I had my babies before the family leave act. I got 6 weeks of disability, and had to fight to get another month of unpaid leave. My boss was onboard, but HR wasn’t. So i guess that was all what you call the 4th trimester.
I tell my kid regularly he’s the greatest joy of my life. I worry sometimes it will feel like pressure, but I think the alternative, not knowing you contributed so much to your parents’ happiness, is worse.
I understand the appeal of playing up the hard part, because it’s like a badge of honor to walk through fire for your kid, and I like that part too; I like that it’s hard sometimes. I like to prove myself loyal. I always say nothing worth doing is easy.
The other day I finally laid out before Sr. Weasel everything that was going through my head the few days after my son was born, and we settled on “post-partum OCD and probably psychosis.” I don’t talk about my ordeal in detail with many people because I think the severity of what I experienced was pretty rare. But that’s the part where I feel the most loss, that I didn’t get to enjoy this kid every second of his life. I feel like he deserved better.
But I’m also just so grateful we survived that. And like, if that had to happen for this to happen, then fine. I’ll take it.
I remember one day getting my son off the ECSE school bus I was hit with this very hard and fast revelation: Every painful moment of your life was necessary to be the exact parent this child needs right now.
I wish I had known that then, but knowing it now - it helps.
With my first (did not carry to term) pregnancy, my boss at the time said, “You’re doing this on purpose?”
I can’t help but wonder how many people choosing not to have children for fear of their parents’ mistakes are missing the transformative joy of finding out you’re not anything like the people who raised you, and even better, you get to give your own child, the person you love most in the world, all the support and understanding you never got. In my case, my son gets a stable, loving, engaged father whom he absolutely adores. That ship sailed a long time ago for me, but my boy is living the dream.
Oh wow, it’s not surprising you didn’t enjoy it. Definitely not the easiest environment to have kids. And with no in-home entertainment too, while you’re surrounded by fun but non-child-friendly stuff to do. Covid lockdown was a stressful time to become a parent, but one advantage was that we were definitely not missing out on anything - solo walks and TV were pretty much the only activities allowed, and pub nights were replaced with baby-friendly online socialising.
That’s a shame, it’s way way too little. IIRC my employer gave me 12 weeks of leave at 90% salary (as a benefit, since they were only obliged to give 6), then I got another 6 months on statutory maternity pay (which is low) and another 3 months unpaid. The latter two are optional; it’s fairly common for women to go back to work after nine months, but since we had unintentionally waited until we were established in our careers (and then some) I took the full year off. The ‘fourth trimester’ is usually considered to be the first 3 or 4 months, so you’d still have been within that when you went back to work.
I was hoping to go back to work part time for a couple of years, but HR wouldn’t agree. I thought about quitting, but I didn’t want to be a stay at home parent. I need the external structure of a job - if there are no deadlines my time just disappears somehow, and I get nothing done. And I think I’d struggle to stay patient with my daughter if I had to do it all day every day. These issues don’t apply to most people, but I think the average woman (or man) struggles with being a full time parent due to lack of socialising with other adults and lack of time off. When I returned to work I was sad to send my daughter to nursery, but it really was peaceful having the house to myself, and nice to be able to focus with no interruptions.
I tell my daughter I’m very happy to have her, and that she’s made my life better. And I try not to overthink it, because no good comes of that.
I think this should also be part of the message to people considering becoming parents. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s far more satisfying to accomplish something difficult than to spend one’s time on easy, superficial fun stuff - and you get far more personal growth out of it. We shouldn’t avoid doing things we want to do because they are hard.
What a dick! I was afraid my manager would react badly since I hadn’t been in the job all that long, and that’s why it was a nice surprise when he was positive. Guess I was just lucky.
Unlike yours, my parents did a mostly decent job, but I want to give my daughter the intact home I didn’t get. And my husband agrees, thanks to what happened in his own childhood.
That wasn’t on the table for me. No complaints about it, my parents were terrific, especially my stay-at-home mom. My mom was much better at supporting and understanding all of us than i was with my daughter. I never really “got” her in some important way. Her grandmother did, and i tried to make sure they got a lot of time together, because i knew that Baba could give my daughter things that i couldn’t. (Emotionally, i mean.) I did a better job parenting my son, whose needs i understood better.
I got three months, which I had to save money for, because we definitely do not have parental leave where I work. I couldn’t have been happier to return to work, only it was dampened somewhat by the pandemic and we got into a bad situation with an incompetent nanny and her small child and I was trapped at home with all this noise and stress and major executive function problems. But we can file that one pretty firmly under “2020 sucked for a lot of people.”
I had two significant tears and on top of my mental health wasn’t dealing well. Probably four or five weeks post-partum, someone inquired about me to my husband. When he told them I was still healing, they were confused. “Oh, was it a cesarian?”
No, it was a childbirth. Do you know what happens to most women, physically, during childbirth? Even the medical literature says four weeks. They do a follow-up after four weeks and then they never talk to you again. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or what, but women are given a matter of weeks in most cases before they are expected to be back to standard. When in my experience it took a solid year to remotely feel like myself again. And of course with everything that happened in 2020, there was no normal to get back to, really. Just the new reality.
It’s actually impossible, I think, to disentangle my experience with COVID. No idea how it might have gone in different circumstances.
I have a relative who held a birthday party for her twins, in a public play place, four days after her fourth was born. But she told me she enjoys pregnancy, so I guess it wasn’t a thing for her. And my own mother had me over Spring Break in college – never missed a class!
Since the insults are trending male, I should probably point out she was a woman.
