I would replace “government” with “society” in @Der_Trihs’ comments.
It is not the government’s responsibility to manage everything.
Actually it is, because nobody else can. “Society” can’t because society doesn’t have direction or leadership; it doesn’t have the agency necessary to manage anything.
And any person or organization that somehow gained enough power to “manage” society-wide issues would in the process become the government, in practice if not name.
What’s underfunded? National health doesn’t pay for maternity care‽
Maybe i had so few choices that i can’t even conceive of what choices you wish you’d had.
Besides causing a great deal of avoidable human suffering, it’s a false economy to skimp on maternity care, since if something goes wrong during birth it can lead to enormous long term costs for the NHS. But our government just doesn’t prioritise it.
Another article discussing the unseen economic aspects of parenthood these days. Gift article, all should be able to read it.
Interesting, though it attempts to support its thesis with a pair of arguments I find less than compelling:
- The “free rider” argument, which is so universal in any kind of specialized society (e.g. people who don’t personally work in the sewer system enjoy “free rider” safety from plague) as to be meaningless.
- The “people are having fewer children than they’d like to have”, which is also a phenomenon so universal (e.g. people live in smaller houses than they’d like to have) as to be meaningless.
We pay taxes to fund sewer systems and to pay the salaries of people who work in them, so we aren’t free-riding. But we are not paying parents anything close to the cost of raising a child, yet we require those children to fund retirement and medical care for all old people, not just their own parents.
That does not compute, given that the “old people” contributed taxes and savings for those services and that the current generation of middle-aged people is currently additional taxes and savings toward those services. Ergo, the next generation of children pays a fraction of the cost of retirement, just as the current generation of adults pays a fraction of the cost of raising children (e.g. education) whether or not they themselves have children to use those services.
Relevant (heartbreaking) article I read today.
They let the kids, 10 and 7, walk two blocks home. The kids took a shortcut, the seven year old was hit and killed. Now both parents are in jail awaiting criminal charges. The article speculates that race was a factor, as well as the fact that both parents had criminal backgrounds.
I looked at the pictures of the street and it looks pretty busy. I might balk at the idea of two kids alone at that intersection. Course I have a five year old who doesn’t pay attention to anything. The other day we were at the park near a paved walking/bike path and he crossed the path to look at a sign. He was probably about six feet away from me. Before I could call him back over, a bike came down the path and my son made to walk right in front of the bike. Both me and my husband yelled, “Wee Weasel, STOP!” and of course his response was to ask “why?” and keep right on walking. That kid isn’t going by himself near busy intersections anytime soon.
Personally as a kid I think I was really careful. I remember riding my bike at my Dad’s down reasonably busy roads, I was more careful than he was. At home, which was more rural, I had about a two mile radius I was allowed to bike. I routinely went down to the lake by myself or with friends my age starting around age nine or ten. I recall those experiences fondly. I do recall when I was about seven visiting my Dad, I was with some older kids like ten or eleven who broke into a school and vandalized it. I got a lecture by a cop and that’s about it.
I’m not sure I would have made the same decision as the parents. But their decision seems like, at worst, a tragic lapse in judgment, not grounds for criminal prosecution. At the time this happened, the older kid was on the phone with his Dad, who was waiting for them at home. I hope they get things sorted out eventually.
Yeah, there was one busy street on the walk to and from my school. However this was NYC, land of the ubiquitous subways. So I was carefully taught to descend on one side of the street and cross over underground to come up on the other side.
If I had kids (I don’t) I honestly don’t know if I would have been comfortable giving that level of autonomy to me at that age. My parents were pretty good and I was a precocious kid, but this was more a working class timing decision forced on them by pressing schedules. They carefully walked me through it and shadowed me some x number of times, but I dunno. It obviously worked out fine and I became quite independent maybe partially as a result. But if someone asked me today if I thought it was okay, I’d definitely hesitate and probably say no. I was awfully young. That’s why I try not to be too critical of more modern parenting - mine was different, but again I’m not sure it was better.
I think it all comes down to the kid.
I could have handled it no problem.
My son? No way.
In the case of that article, I don’t know how anybody could know whether it was a crazy accident or those particular kids should have never been unsupervised. It’s hard because you want your kids to gain independence. We took my son to Florida and were out on a farm where you could pick flowers, and he started running away from us down the flower path. He wasn’t running toward a road or anything, just wide open space, so we let him run. His Dad told him he could run until he counted to 60, then he could turn around and come back. He was so delighted to be so far away from us, he didn’t stop running, so my husband had to go chase him down. By the time my husband caught up to him, I couldn’t see either of them, which was terrifying. Sometimes it’s a very thin line between, “Look at how great he’s doing with a little independence!” and ''Oh shit."
Social security isn’t a savings scheme where you pay in and then get your own money back later. You pay for previous generations, including your own parents, and future generations pay for you. That requires some people to sacrifice to produce those future generations, and everyone who doesn’t is benefiting from their labour without compensating them.
However, according to the article, paying parents enough to significantly offset the costs would be really, really expensive:
Good luck getting anyone to agree to that.
Actually, it seems like what we are seeing here is Baumol’s cost disease: as productivity increases in some sectors, wages need to be raised even in areas which have seen no productivity gains, since otherwise people will quit to work in the better paid sectors. Parenting is like the ultimate example of a job that cannot be automated to increase productivity. And then we compound the problem by socialising the financial benefit of children (care in old age) while leaving parents to bear the majority of the costs privately. It’s hardly surprising birth rates are falling.
Thanks for the link. I was looking at the comments: so many of them are talking about how there are too many humans and it’s good that so many people aren’t reproducing - some are even pro human extinction. The American left is ngmi.
“ngmi”?
“NGMI” means
“Not Gonna Make It.”
I take my daughter to the park a lot, and we got her a balance bike off Facebook marketplace. She was super fast on that bike! At the park, she’d be disappearing off before I knew it, and it was hard work jogging after her. I told her she could go ahead, but she had to stop before going out of my sight. And she was not very good about following that rule. So I told her if she didn’t listen to me, I’d take her home immediately. And the next time she disappeared off and didn’t listen when I shouted to her to stop, I chased her down, picked her up in one arm and the little bike in the other, and put them both in the car and took her straight home. Which was disappointing for both of us, but she was much better about staying in my sight after that.
All this is to say that while all kids are different, parents can still influence how reliable they are. I don’t know if something like this would work on your son, but I’m not surprised he didn’t listen the first time you let him go some distance away from you.
(And now my daughter has a real bike with pedals, and I dug out the kick scooter I used to use for commuting so I could keep up with her. It’s much more fun for both of us, as I get to ride around too, and she doesn’t have to keep stopping.)
I definitely wouldn’t let my daughter walk alone on a road yet, though. I don’t know what age will be old enough, but it isn’t five!
One possible way to attack this issue is with social media influencers. Promote family bloggers who portray having babies and kids in a positive and fun light. If young people see post after post of people loving their life with kids, it can influence them to have kids of their own.
Sure, he’s all the time finding out there are consequences to his actions. I think part of his disorder, though, is poor danger awareness, and the probable ADHD makes it worse. To a certain extent it has to be accommodated until he is at the appropriate developmental stage (not based on age, because he’s behind in this way.) He’s still learning to look both ways before crossing the street, how to behave in a parking lot, etc. He has a slow processing speed like both of his parents.
My challenge is not trying to push him beyond his current capabilities based on where I was at his age.
And to be fair, while I had a lot of independence from a young age, I did my share of really stupidly dangerous things, usually unwittingly. I could cross a street and ride my bike safely but I remember a bunch of us kids used to play at a local construction site, I remember another time I was at the top of a waterfall and stood on a rock not far from the edge, not because I was a daring risk taker but because I’m a total space cadet and it just wouldn’t occur to me that something was dangerous until after I already did it. I still have these moments as an adult sometimes. There’s a reason people with ADHD have a lower life expentancy.
Who would be promoting these influencers? Don’t we already have a branch of social media doing this?
Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram could tweak their algorithms to put more baby positive content into the news feeds. They have a business interest in promoting population increases since every new person is a potential new social media customer. Groups like the government and family-positive organizations could pay influencers to create content which was baby positive. That’s similar to how companies use influencers today. A company like Pampers will pay an influencer with a baby to create content where they talk about Pampers. Pampers could decide to be proactive about encouraging people to have babies by using influencers. Pampers could approach newlyweds and say that if they decide to have a baby, they’ll pay them to create content about their efforts to get pregnant, how wonderful pregnancy is, how heartwarming it is to raise their newborn, etc. This will result in more baby positive content that will be spread into news feeds organically and people will see it on a frequent basis. It can help shape people’s ideas about having kids to be a positive and fulfilling experience. If they see the videos frequently enough, it can give them the impression that everyone is having kids and they are missing out by not having their own kids.
Eewww