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'Baby Bust': Why Fewer Young People Expect to Become Parents (2013)

59 点作者 leonry超过 1 年前

19 条评论

matthewaveryusa超过 1 年前
Being a parent is _punished_ in our society. It messes with your career growth in a dual income family, and for any metro with well paying jobs you&#x27;re looking at ~3k&#x2F;month daycare infant costs, down to 1.5k&#x2F;month by age 5. And that&#x27;s post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight.<p>So if you&#x27;re looking at income, for 2 kids, your break-even for stay-at-home is north of 100k per year. That&#x27;s absurdly high.<p>Combine that with infant kid rearing coinciding with the most expensive purchase of one&#x27;s life (housing) and you see how impossiblly punishing it is for someone not making 200k+ in yearly income
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s1gnp0st超过 1 年前
Biological systems where the cost of reproduction increases without an increase in the available resources cease to exist. How could it be otherwise?<p>People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit.
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surajrmal超过 1 年前
Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve noticed that it has a lot to do with women having the sense of security and freedom to say they don&#x27;t want children. About half of the women in my friend group do not want children despite their husbands wanting them. It has life long physical side effects on women, pregnancy isn&#x27;t very fun, giving birth can be traumatic and painful, and there are all too many societal expectations placed on the mom. Almost every parenting book I read seemed to be assuming only the mom would read the book. Networking with other parents seems to need to occur primarily through moms, breastfeeding is endlessly pushed and shifts a great deal of the work required early in the child&#x27;s life onto the mother, possibly carrying over into habits that are maintained afterwards. People don&#x27;t even talk about any of these things beforehand, but I&#x27;d honestly be surprised if most women would want children after learning about these things.<p>This isn&#x27;t to mention the fact that having children completely upends your time. Hobbies and free time are seldom available after children. This affects both parents, and it feels like people really don&#x27;t want to give these things up these days. Really, short of parents constantly pushing you to have kids, there doesn&#x27;t seem to be a lot of motivation to have kids.
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fnordpiglet超过 1 年前
Note this article is 11 years old.<p>Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.
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westbywest超过 1 年前
The increasingly toxic politics (arguably by design) emerging around school board elections is very recent addition to disincentives. I live in a Midwest city where suburban school districts that previously wooed young professionals away from urban core now frequently feature nasty culture war fights, book banning, etc. It&#x27;s notable for impacting generally wealthier households that could bear the expense of relocating to suburban municipalities with higher cost of living&#x2F;taxes to access better schools.
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Pamar超过 1 年前
I was born in the early &#x27;60s and I have no children.<p>Economical concerns are surely part of the equation but I also suspect that in Western Culture adults tend to have a more individualistic stance and this could also be a factor.<p>What I mean is: as soon as we start getting some sort of economic independence we tend to focus on our own hobbies, travels, interests. Those of us who are lucky enough in being in a long lasting relationship would hopefully do this together... but we are always aware that the moment a child enters our life, we can forget most of it, at least for a decade.
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johnea超过 1 年前
The usual suspects: high cost of living, corp jobs sucking people dry, fear of uncertain future, all seem reasonably valid.<p>But no one seems willing to suggest that maybe people today are just so self centered, that they don&#x27;t want such a distraction from minecraft&#x2F;halo&#x2F;call of doodoo.<p>If people can&#x27;t manage to look out of the windshield of the car they&#x27;re driving for more than 11 seconds at a stretch, because it&#x27;s distracting from their cell phone usage, when their life is literally endangered, why would they choose to take on a lifelong commitment to another child besides themselves?
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jeffrallen超过 1 年前
As a parent of 3 in Switzerland, I always laugh (sadly) at these threads. Cost of daycare? Make a sliding scale. Cost of housing? Accept smaller living space, but count on your community to give you other safe, comfortable and fun public spaces. Pay parents to have kids? Yup (1500 at birth, 200 a month until school is done, even up to bachelor degree). Cost of education? Free public universities.<p>If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
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geenat超过 1 年前
Cost of housing
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kthejoker2超过 1 年前
Dad of 4, feel a ton of empathy for double income families. Just today my (stay at home) wife cheerfully and idly answered, &quot;That&#x27;s my job!&quot; to a breakfast request while I was reading this thread ....<p>So that being said, <i>barring childcare</i> (and major health problems which are very rare), my kids are almost completely subsidized by the US government.<p>They cost me (by my own estimate) about $30,000 in marginal non-discretionary spending - housing, clothing, food, transportation, medical visits, etc.<p>(There&#x27;s also lessons, vacations, arts and crafts, holiday gifts and the like, but those are highly variable and my own choice.)<p>My tax burden without 4 dependents is nearly $28,000 higher than with them.<p>Just anecdata (I also call major shenanigans on the &quot;$1 million&quot; needed to raise a kid&quot; meme ... so far I&#x27;ve racked up 42 &quot;kid-years&quot; on ~ $1 million <i>total net income</i> And I&#x27;m doing a lot better financially than I was when I first became a dad....)
throwaway49849超过 1 年前
&gt;Friedman: One of the pieces of what I see as good news in this story is that more people, women and men, are willing and able to say, “I don’t want to have children.” For women especially, I see this as a kind of social progress in human evolution. In every generation prior to the current one, women have been normatively sanctioned to think of themselves as mothers. There’s almost a mindless march into motherhood throughout history. That question hasn’t really been raised. Today, young women are saying, “I don’t feel a need to do that.”<p>Mr. Friedman should interview the women after their biological window has closed, and see if there answers have changed. Not doing so is ignoring the full picture of how we conceptualize an idea like having children over the course of our entire lives.
mkl95超过 1 年前
I bought my first apartment in my mid twenties, like my parents did. Let&#x27;s measure it in Porsches. Their place was newer than mine and cost them less than a run down Porsche. My tiny apartment cost me about the same as a new 911 with multiple extras.
immibis超过 1 年前
If you want something to happen, pay people to do it. If someone wants there to be more babies, they need to pay for them.<p>At least the baby shortage will help with the teacher shortage.
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_fat_santa超过 1 年前
I can&#x27;t speak for others but at least for me, I have an irrational desire for a family. I&#x27;m well aware of the costs, the setbacks to your career and other penalties but at the end of the day my attitude is: &quot;I don&#x27;t give a shit, I want a family&quot;
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shae超过 1 年前
I want children, I&#x27;ll never be able to afford it.
tombert超过 1 年前
I remember as a kid when I first had the realization that I do <i>have</i> to have my own kids when I&#x27;m a grownup, and from that day decided that I don&#x27;t want to have kids. When I was 25 (about 8 years ago) I got a vasectomy and I haven&#x27;t had any regrets yet. I&#x27;m not one of those toxic &quot;Child-free&quot; douchebags on Reddit [1]; I do like kids, I enjoy playing with my nieces and nephew, but I also really like having money and less responsibility.<p>It&#x27;s absurdly expensive to raise kids, especially before they&#x27;re school age, and I spent a lot of 2023 unemployed. I am very happy that I didn&#x27;t have to worry about an infant while also looking for a job.<p>[1] I&#x27;m sure not all of them are bad but what I saw was calling kids &quot;cum goblins&quot; and the like, acting like they&#x27;re some kind of blight on the world.
alx_the_new_guy超过 1 年前
Hot take time. Not having children, thus decreasing future population actually solves a decent amount of problems:<p>Less pressure on the housing market, so maybe owning a home becomes actually feasible for regular people. Hopefully, prices come down enough so that renting stops being a thing.<p>Lowers labor supply, thus increasing competition for it, especially, hopefully, in the lower salary bracket. Or maybe, even better, less of human life would be wasted mopping floors and what not, because hiring some sucker is cheaper than buying a robot or whatever.<p>Less people means less pollution and general toll on the surroundins (less water used for irrigation, less overfishing and so on).<p>Hopefully motivating people to get children includes making raising them suck less for those, who decide to have them.<p>Less disposable lives means higher cost and lower probability of armed conflicts.<p>Obviously it brings problems of it&#x27;s own. Thing is, people not having children has probably more to do with some sort of societal crisis, than with better access to contraception, sex ed and what not. Population has exploded in the last 100 years, maybe it was a bubble of sorts all along, and now it&#x27;s starting to burst?<p>Anyways, fine by me. We either make living suck less, or make less people go through that. Seems like a win-win to me.
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revscat超过 1 年前
tl;dr: Money.<p>People with moderate incomes can barely afford to house and feed themselves, even with a partner. Introduce a dependent child into the mix and the subsequent ~30% increase in fixed expenses and it is easy to see why fewer and fewer people are having children.<p>Personally I wouldn’t want children because of the increasingly bleak outlook for humanity. Climate change is looking increasingly dire, and fascism is seeing a frightening upswing.
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Solvency超过 1 年前
Less money, more microplastics. End of story.