I have and have never had any problem with positive models of masculinity. I have problems with arbitrary definitions of what they are. If I am being a good person and I am male then I am to anyone who might be using me as a role model a positive model of masculinity.
This is also simple reality. Present in every society. The role model for masculinity is simply what men in that society do. Hopefully we can have those be positive things.
Attempts to define that I am only being a model of masculinity when I engage in “traditional” or stereotypical male behaviors from decades past is poo poo.
Changing what the models of masculinity are is not only not impossible; it is and always has been unavoidable. Masculinity was idealized differently in Sparta and Athens, and by my father and by me. A very different thing.
A woman who really didn’t want children in 1200 England could become a nun. Single women and widows could support themselves by working, though they had limited opportunities compared to men. It’s true that marriage and kids were a package deal, but it was hardly unthinkable to avoid them.
That’s true, and very understandable. But we have greatly improved this aspect in modern times, thankfully.
I agree with this part. It’s having no distinction between roles or characteristics expected of men and women that I think is difficult or impossible. But I don’t want to reargue this issue. The question is whether people and society can change their views and behaviour based on social campaigns, government incentives etc. I think you’ll agree this is possible in general, and that the way people act under current conditions is not some eternal unchanging fact of human nature. So it doesn’t make sense to write off the possibility of raising birthrates at this point, when governments have only tried a limited selection of policies to increase them.
My sister didn’t have kids because she didn’t want to give birth. She told her husband they could have as many kids as he was willing to carry and birth. He kinda wanted kids, but hadn’t believed her when she said that before they married. They have a lot of pets.
Would you think it makes sense to have absolute confidence that some new initiative will be successful, at least without causing other great harms?
Again, I am all for pro family policies in any case. Real pro family policies, not code word for a regressive religious fundamentalist dream checklist. Support.
And we also need to accept the … possibility … … that such policies will continue to be only modestly effective, and plan on how we adapt to that.
If governments have only tried a limited number of policies to encourage birth rates, it might be because there are a limited number of non-coercive policy solutions available and those have been used to only slight success.
I tend to lean towards generally improving citizens’ lives by weaning off a consumerist and toxically capitalist society but the Scandinavian results thus far aren’t even encouraging about that approach.
But that’s not what I said. What I said is that the crucial issue here about olden-days parenthood is that it was mostly DECOUPLED from how much you wanted to be a parent.
In patriarchal societies without reliable contraception, the underlying base level of desire for parenthood (which may indeed be quite high on average) is not what’s primarily determining the actual procreative outcomes.
The point is not to claim that lots of premodern women didn’t want children: the point is that whether or not they wanted them was largely irrelevant to whether or not they had them.
We shouldn’t be pointing to that as a successful strategy for encouraging procreation.
It occurs to me that part of the way parenthood is discouraged is that our society values “jobs” and “money” above nearly everything else, but parenthood is a 24/7 effort that is unpaid and not recognized as work, even if most parents view it as highly rewarding (to the point they’ll do it for free).
A woman who stays home to take care of her children is considered “unemployed”. she has no pension, and earns ZERO towards her own SSN retirement. Nevermind it having any sort of salary, I’m just talking about credits to support in her old age. Although it having some sort of “salary” (effectively a subsidy) that lasts from birth through 18 (or even 21) wouldn’t be a bad idea either. Time was women with dependent children and no visible means of support were allowed to stay home and take care of them, but nowadays, what with them being the idle unemployed ( ) they are expected to hold down a full time job and pay childcare (which may or may not work with their job schedules and might eat up most of their income) just to get food stamps. Medical care - when available at all - is given grudgingly and with many caveats.
Is this how we want to treat people doing some of the most important work in society - raising the next generation?
Maybe - just spitballin’ here - if we treated parenthood as work it would have the same respect as working outside the home. Rather than a self-indulgent hobby people do instead of “productive work”.
Yes. And a lot of the current system is still structured around the old idea that one parent is staying home.
I honestly don’t know how I would be able to hold down a job without the insane level of autonomy I have over my own work schedule. School schedules alone are ridiculous for working parents. It feels like not a week goes by where my kid’s schedule isn’t messed up in some way. School breaks, teacher in-service days, field trips, it’s a nightmare to navigate for two working parents. Then there’s the endless, endless cold and flu season.
Now I remember school breaks when I was a kid in the 90s. My parents went to work on those days and I stayed home and watched TV or played outside. In many respects it’s worse, because you can’t do that anymore. You can’t even let your kids walk to the bus-stop alone anymore. (Obviously my five year old wouldn’t be able to do that, but I was seven years old when I started staying home alone.) So either parents have to rely on grandparents, who no longer want to do that shit, or we have to build this complicated system of outrageously expensive childcare (our current situation.)
When i was five, i walked with other neighborhood kids, most of whom were older. But my sister walked home alone from kindergarten (which let out earlier than the other grades) and she has very happy memories of that freedom.
I would argue that freedom is critical for social, problem-solving and self-regulation skills in children.
My parents did plenty wrong, but they raised me to be independent. And I was. By the time I was seventeen, I was competent enough to live without them.
As we’re approaching 1500 posts, I can’t really say that any of the proposals mentioned seem like viable options for increasing the birthrate. Even if they could theoretically work, there would be a lot of issues around implementation complexities and social resistance that would make them unrealistic as practical solutions in the real world. It seems like societies with declining populations would be better served by investigating options that don’t depend on their citizens having more children. The time, effort and money that might be spent on trying to increase birthrate would probably be better spent on things like reforming immigration policies to help maintain a healthy population.
I have my wishlist of policies that support families, and conservatives have their regressive wishlist; neither is justified as likely to dramatically increase fertility to replacement rates.
I strongly suspect there’s a cause and effect relationship, there. Since many people will do it for free, governments cheap out and rely on it being done for free.
And are at a loss on what to do when the people willing to do it for free fail to have as many children as the government would prefer.
Yeah, that’s been one of the most visible changes in child-rearing in my lifetime. I was walking to and from school by myself by 1rst grade in New York City (Washington Heights in the early 1970’s). If my parents weren’t home when I returned (not common, but it happened) I’d have to wait for the building superintendent to let me in if he was around to let me loiter in front of my apartment door. By third grade I was a latchkey kid in San Francisco.
Also after school activities were overwhelmingly limited to sports and our parent’s usually weren’t about to drive us anywhere on a work day. Weekends, maybe. But otherwise need to go some place and you don’t have a car? “Here’s the bus schedule” .
The level of curation I see in at least middle-class and above children’s activities is so very, very different from my free-range childhood when we wandered about on our own at all hours. I will not say it’s a worse experience - I really can’t judge at my remove, the culture has shifted. But it is not very relatable.
There are duelling ideologies regarding parental involvement with children’s day-to-day lives. You can do a think-piece about why it’s correct to let your children entertain themselves and only intervene in life-or-limb emergencies. Or you can do one on why a parent must be fully present at all times and deeply engaged with pretend-play and if you don’t enjoy crafts projects and having your children inside your house 24/7 pandemic-style what right did you have to reproduce.
But what you can’t do is a hot take about why actually it’s fine if you have very energetic children to sign them up for dance or gymnastics. This is a third thing both of the sides agree to be mad at. Scheduling your children? Unacceptable. You should either be letting them figure out backflips on their own via benign neglect, or right there doing the backflips with them. This even if there are affordable city-run classes. Even if it’s all nearby and no station wagons or indeed cars of any kind are involved.
This, plus having something of a phobia of needles and medical treatment in general, was a significant factor in why I originally didn’t want kids. Having now had one, I think I was foolish to base such a major decision on fear of pain that only lasts a short time compared to the rest of your life. However, pregnancy and birth are still a significant strain on the body, usually leaving permanent changes, and this is something women rightly take into account. Eventually perhaps we will be able to grow babies in artificial uteruses that provide the optimal environment, and it will no longer be a problem, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. (And it will doubtless be extremely expensive.)
Something we could change now is giving women more choices and more support when giving birth. We’ve made childbirth much safer for both mother and baby, but far too many women are left feeling like they weren’t supported, weren’t listened to or believed when talking about their own bodies, and were pushed into doing things they didn’t want, without being given enough information to decide.
Also, I don’t know if this is the case in the US, but in the UK it’s criminally underfunded.
Or it might be because the costs are immediate, while the benefits don’t appear until 20 years later when today’s politicians will have been long out of power. Just think how much money you can save by not having to pay for schools, medical care etc for children, and instead import young adults ready to work. Who cares about community or life satisfaction, when you can add another few percent to the GDP?
Interesting article. I don’t think it contradicts what I wrote, since she argues that women historically have had some ways of controlling reproduction. She also writes the same thing I’ve been saying: that the choice to become a parent is not something made in isolation from totally internal motives, but depends greatly on the surrounding society:
And I liked the part about how the divide between people with kids and those without doesn’t need to be so wide. It’s something that I think has been mentioned already in this thread and could be beneficial for both parents and non-parents.
I’m happy to see that this issue is getting more attention in the media. Getting anyone to care is half the battle. Just wish it wasn’t being picked up by the right, since that will likely induce everyone on the left to oppose it out of negative polarisation. It’s so hard to keep issues out of the culture war these days.
Yeah, I agree. And additionally, people in general tend to discount the value of unpaid work just because it isn’t measured.
My daughter’s school (in the UK) doesn’t allow children to walk to and from it alone until, IIRC, year 5, when they will be 9 or 10. And this seems to be pretty standard. I guess you could send a child alone earlier, but the teachers won’t let kids leave the school unless a parent or guardian they recognise is there to pick them up.
There’s no minimum age for leaving children home alone, but the NSPCC advises not leaving a child under 12 alone for long periods.
I do think lack of independence is bad for children; they can’t learn self reliance and confidence in their own abilities if there is always an adult there to help, or worse, take over. But as a parent I just have to do what I can in the society I find myself.
… that such policies will continue to be only modestly effective, and plan on how we adapt to that.
) they are expected to hold down a full time job and pay childcare (which may or may not work with their job schedules and might eat up most of their income) just to get food stamps. Medical care - when available at all - is given grudgingly and with many caveats.
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