The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I'll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example).
Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be bleak if they do.
I had my first daughter when I was 20 and grew up very quickly, I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.
She is an adult now and I couldn’t be any prouder of all she has achieved in life so far.
I also had two more kids in my 30s. It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s. I do have more work responsibilities but it’s balanced by working from home so I get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school, here when they get home, etc.
There are benefits either way, but I think if you are committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more of lives too.
>I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.
the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.
> It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s.
I'm a second child with after a large age-gap. My brother was born when my mother was 16, I was born twenty years later. My parents routinely told me how much harder it was with my brother -- lack of cash and profession, the party lifestyle that comes with youth and college-life, constant moving for opportunity and cheaper housing, and an overall lack of time to dedicate to the kid due to the instability and struggle to keep afloat financially.
I was born at a time of great stability for them. They had professions, they could make their own schedules. They had time to participate in my schooling and extracurricular stuff. I had good food, good toys, good clothing, and a stable house. They let me voice my decisions because they had the time and freedom to consider options other than pure survival. I was told that I was the 'easy' one -- not because of my personality but because "The 70s sucked.", which is code for "We were young, poor, un-established and struggling."
So, after the anecdote I feel compelled to ask : Why do you think it is harder when you're older? You have more money, you have the power of flexibility within your scheduling that allows for participation in your childrens' growth and development -- is it simply a 'strength of youth' kind of thing?
I have no kids, I have no plans for them, so I ask just as a curiosity. The opinion varies wildly from person to person, and I think it's fascinating what kind of 'diversity of parenting' exists.
We had our first kid when I was about 37, and our second when I was about 43.
The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's not drastic, but I notice it.
The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still had two.
The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids. We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or medically, or whatnot.
Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time with them while they're still young. There's no clear answer on the balance other than doing one's best.
> The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely.
This bothers me a lot, too (although I had my kids a couple of years earlier than you). Not just the physical presence, but also being physically and mentally fit when they're adults. I'd like to do sports, travel with them, help them move between apartments. I'd like to be mentally on the same page, not an old grumpy fart not understanding what they're thinking about. All of that can be done, but it simply gets more difficult with a larger age difference.
As someone who's had kids at a similar age to you, yeah its not a nice thought not being around for them as long as you'd like to be. Especially the thought of them having lost their parents when still relatively young (e:g in their 30s). Your life expectancy estimate sounds possibly a little pessimistic to me. With modern healthcare, barring bad luck, trying to live to 85-90 might be not a crazy ambition? That'd involve being somewhat focused on not eating cr*p and trying to get a decent amount of exercise, nothing crazy but just a little bit of prioritisation. That's my approach anyway. I wonder if in time older parents will be found to have longer life expectancy because they have an extra incentive to look after their health?
This is exactly why I decided not to have kids. My mum had me at 40. I lost my dad when I was 23 and my mum at 44. I'm 47 now and it's frankly too late for me (I'm male, so theoretically I could father some) to have children now.
Another thing not yet mentioned is that it literally becomes physically more difficult to have children as you age. Female fertility starts to rapidly drop in their thirties, and many will hit menopause in their 40s. The exact age is somewhat random, and some women will even enter menopause in their 30s.
Before I had children I thought it would be relatively easy - that's why you use birth control after all. But when you actually have children you learn things like at best you're looking at, at best, a 10-30% probability per month if you hit the ~48 hour ovulation window just perfectly. That doesn't sound so bad - because a month isn't such a long time, and ovulation is pretty predictable. But when you start late each month matters, and then if you want to actually have multiple children, then you're already looking at a years long process.
And then add in that as you age, all sorts of birth defects and disorders like Down Syndrome become much more likely, and you can't effectively test for them until about halfway through the pregnancy. It's just not a great idea to start late. I'd also add that for us to have a sustainable population, everybody needs to be having more than 2 children on average. This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.
> This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.
It won't. You can't extrapolate the short-term recent trend to centuries. In the past, social/cultural/religious norms forced you to have children even if you didn't really have a great desire for them. This changed and now there will be selection pressure on personality traits which desire children.
I thought about replying with something exactly like this, but generally this sentiment gets downvoted to oblivion.
I’ll add that we waited longer than we should have, and while it’s hard to conclusively say we would have had an easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of thousands in fertility treatments.
You always think you have more time, but as they say “it’s later than you think.”
In a kinda similar boat, though less "trying to convince" and more "trying to decide if we want a kid". (Because really, the boat for multiple kids for us has sailed.) My wife's five years younger, but we only met three years ago, so it feels like we've been speed-running our relationship while simultaneously dealing with life and career stuff.
I live across the country from my nephew, but if I end up not having kids, he can look forward to notably more visits and funtime with the uncle.
I think it's more like start early > start late > start never. There's more hurdles, and less chance of success - but I definitely wouldn't say it's a bad idea. The worst that happens is nothing happens. I sincerely hope you two at least try. Good luck.
The risks of childbirth for a healthy woman, even 40+, are negligible. And the worst of issues for the child, like Downs, can be screened for with perfect accuracy. The most difficult part with aging is actually getting to the point of childbirth!
I also would emphasize that it's not like not having a child is without issues. Much of the West, including the US, is already suffering with from increasing isolation, depression, and other such issues. And aging, especially without family, is likely to only exasperate these issues. Friends that will last forever, don't. And it becomes more and more difficult to meet new people as you age. Places like Japan and South Korea may be a foreshadowing of where we're headed, and it's not pretty. See things like kodukushi - lonely deaths. [1]
> the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.
Do you mind sharing how your brother and you turned out in terms of career, family, and general life happiness? Sorry for an overly personal question, but I'm very curious as a parent myself with my own theories about the craft.
To borrow terms from RFC 2119, "having a child makes people more responsible" is a SHOULD, but statistically, turns out to be a MAY. (#survivorBias: people are likely to acknowledge this, if they did turn out to actually be more responsible - "turned out GREAT for ME", emphasis added. The other case, not so much.)
However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure - but it's not an overwhelming factor...
Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid at 22 would’ve been a mess to say the least. Looking back at that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn’t much more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk into a bar who wouldn’t get his head screwed on quite right for another 6 years or so at minimum.
the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.
oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.
and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.
> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.
Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.
It is due to those Indian women not having the opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other developed countries).
But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.
28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education. The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than men).[2] Since they're from different sources the participation rates might not be directly comparable shrug but the gender stats should still be applicable.
At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.
> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help
That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.
> the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.
This retort is true of literally everything involved in raising kids.
Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.
The best part about being a mature parent is that you have much more control over how you raise your kids. No way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents, coaches, etc. over my actual parents.
My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.
Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.
Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this thinking. The main argument of the article is that our experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher, getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much difference in our personalities and genetically determined proclivities in the long term. Although the article says only half of personality / psych traits are genetically determined, which is still substantial imo, so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't matter" even by the arguments in the article.
>> Research shows that inherited DNA differences account for about half of the differences for all psychological traits — including personality.
>> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth
This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental development, emotional support, getting a good education, avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out". Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about sports if they aren't, but having good parents that foster interests and development is a huge difference in "how a kid turns out".
Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy article you reference, and contradicted by all available evidence. Just one small one:
Have you found any studies that show that shared environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a kid turns out? I haven't seen any.
And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any of those studies it's all correlational. So they have literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by genetics vs shared environment.
The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.
when people make this argument I think they mean "assuming the person has an approximately normal parenting style". Its a bit like saying the infra doesn't matter, only the app does (assuming the infra is built with best practices for availability and scale). When in reality, its missing the forest for the trees. You're essentially claiming that a parent who neglects feeding a child, drops them repeatedly, and lives in the drug-infested dangerous area of town, abusing drugs and alcohol while pregant "matters very little", when its obviously _the_ defining factor in how this child will grow up.
Your point holds when we assume most parenting styles are roughly equal (but this would also hold for environmental factors and genes, since most of those won't be too drastically different for most people).
Put another way: perhaps the most important factor is the one furthest from the mean. If your genes are basically average but your parents are horrible (abusive, neglectful), you may not live to 12. If parents and genes are average, but your environment is war-torn 3rd world, you may not make it to 12. If your parents and environment are average but your genes are horrible, you may not make it to 12. But its clear all the factors can be extremely important, and the claim of the GP only applies "all else being roughly equal".
Back to the app example: assuming sane infra, yes the app might be "more important" to the business. But if you have an average app, but your infra is terrible (long load times, constant outages, losing data, payment system failures), well, you aren't going to succeed.
I'm surprised that you are so ready to abandon your common sense in the face of a psychology book (Judith Rich Harris's book specifically, which asserts that how a parent treats a child has almost no influence on how the child turns out). Psychology papers and psychology books misuse and misapply statistics all the time. Surely someone as well educated as you knows this? (Maybe your wife is a psychologist, so you are overly accepting of psychology results?) The basic mistake being made here is to ignore the possibility that a parent has treated different children differently: one kid is shy: a good parent will nudge him into making friends, but avoid forcing him into unstructured situations with many children because that will tend to overwhelm him. I.e., a good parent is part of the so-called "unshared environment": the shy kid's non-shy sister is not treated the way I just described. (There is for example no need to nudge her into making friends.)
and from my own experience i would concur. parenting styles define the relationship parents have with their kids, and that relationship absolutely matters.
i find it worth considering however that when discussing parenting styles it gives the impression that the chosen style is a deliberate choice that parents can switch around at will, when in reality i believe most parenting styles are defined by circumstances and by the experience of the parents themselves.
On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in, you will see a bunch of problems.
For example:
- kids turning out really poorly if they have bad parenting. Magnitude matters too.
- I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids counted?)
- some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those from older parents may not be impacted at all)
In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is so deficient, things go bad, fast.
My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on average, except that when it does, it's the main determinant for outcome.
And further, i posit that this parenting variable is increasingly worse over time.
> Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.
If Voltaire invented it from whole cloth, that's still the 18th century.
Though on your topic, Piaget is an amazing example of someone just inventing a completely ridiculous theory, doing experiments that fail to support it, and getting it enshrined as wisdom anyway.
Can confirm, have 3 kids. Parenting doesn't have much to do with how kids turn out. The genetic factor is more important. Not just genes of the two parents, but also how they recombine and surface various traits. Best thing to do is to let the kid discover who they want to be. Observe and support their explorations.
Yeah, have 4 and 90% of my psychological strength is spent in making them not do bad things like punch their siblings in the face for looking the wrong way. I'm now resigned to the Sun Tzu principle: if you cannot lose, you'll win - just want to make sure I'm eliminating the obviously losing paths and they'll need to walk the successful paths themselves or I'll end up in an institution.
> It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support
Oh please. You think the nature versus nurture argument was invented in the 60s? You think that a pop psych article from a behavioral geneticist is the last word in the matter?
> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth.
This is honestly fascinating. It's obviously not true, just by taking into account the consequences of it being actually true.
Am I missing something? The study says, at some point "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
Are they limiting this to the genetic composition of a person? It seems they refer to the character, behaviour, overall identity... which to me sounds unbelievably absurd.
I mean, being raised by a single mom vs. being raised by an Army dad MUST introduce some differences, right? And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence? Oh, all criminals were going to be criminals regardless?
> "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
If you look at twins that are raised apart this is freakishly true. Twins raised apart have outcomes that are far closer than 2 unrelated kids raised together.
> And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence?
If you look at children with an absent father vs children with a dead father you find that 80% of the effect disappears in the second group. And that still doesn't entirely eliminate the genetic component because genes influence behavior that can lead to death. This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.
> This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.
I find that the implications of this being true are very troubling.
Maybe you could attribute the outcomes to the difference between your father abandoning you vs. your father unfortunately passing away? I'm sure both cases would have different effects on a person.
I have the hope that someone with a deadbeat dad being adopted by a caring family will have a better prospect than someone thrown into the system.
you can't choose your parents obviously, but having parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your experience.
for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.
my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.
but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids
I thought you were going to say it for a minute there - the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is missing in our US culture during the younger years is 'duty'
I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.
Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.
Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.
it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out
I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.
There are no secrets these days.
I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.
We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.
I personally think it stems from a strong focus on individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if necessary to achieve that.
well, i think it is or was more than duty. it was necessity because your children were there to take care of you in old age. (and i have seen that in action with the great grandfather of my kids)
and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.
this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)
As someone who had his first kid at 23, you grow up real quick once you become a parent. Moreover I doubt it’s even possible for a person to fully mature if they don’t have kids. Or to really understand their own parents for that matter.
I was 24 and still in college. This thread is full of people saying "I was a mess" or "I wasn't mature enough".
When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck with my friends yelling things at people walking by on the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.
Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and make less because it was easier.
So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to, and a kid has that effect.
What really cracks me up is that people have this expectation that they’ll ever be “ready” to have kids. Not going to happen. The whole thing reminds me of the first few minutes of “Idiocracy”.
I think a potential problem (depending on ones point of view) is that when parents wait till they are responsible they tend to have one, maybe two kids, which is below replacement rate. When coupled with things like costs, you end up with a rapidly shrinking population.
Cost and support networks are both big factors here. 30-somethings are probably more likely to have replacement rate or more if it’s affordable to do so and there’s family/friends around to lend a hand, but few enjoy such circumstances.
Things like remote work could’ve helped here, allowing couples to live near family instead of wherever the best employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push prevented that.
The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have been indoctrinated to place career first and only.
Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.
Of course a lot of people would like financial independence. Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence, because they are indebted or renters. They have to work a salary job or be out on the streets.
A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband than most working young people have today, even though they get fancy titles now.
Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
> Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence,
A greater proportion of women today have more financial independence than they have ever had in the past.
> A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband
This is financial dependence, not independence.
> Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
> Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family. They were and are literally married off because they were liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of daughters. And umpteen other examples.
This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms that provide women equal access to power as men, biology throws them a curveball every month with the effects of menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth.
Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
> Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is massive to convince the young generations that they want to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity and still not afford to own their homes to have families.
> Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family.
Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny this even if you read about it and find out. Just say "Nonsense!" and shut it out.
We are simply living in different realities. In mine, women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent discrimination against them in the labor market. And this is not even worldwide.
In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home:
>and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care.
>Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their own house outright and have supplementary income. Either in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work outside the home, or they were expected to do all the housework. There was no option to stop working (housework is work).
I think we are living in different realities yes. And also, none of us are living in the past to really know how things were. We can not rely too much on the testimony from the elderly generation, because they are known liars and cheats.
But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.
Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.
It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.
> Either in laws own it
Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.
> or they were expected to do all the housework.
If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.
Independence is cool and all that, but I'd rather go with the teamwork of marriage and family.
Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning, idealistic one.
If you want absolute power over your own life, and your goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but maybe marriage and family is not for you.
You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand. How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
> How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
This is a useless measure of independence in the context of this discussion since it applies to men and women. When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are discussing one gender being able to achieve more financial independence than the other due to laws/customs/discrimination.
> You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand.
Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.
Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the world for 99% of history have never had or been in families with enough wealth such that they did not have to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot at the decision making table.
But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is does my daughter have the same opportunities available to her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a high paying job?
It is possible to live well enough to raise children with "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year technical college training, instead of a four year college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for "a career". A job with flexible hours.
Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.
Independence is a complete illusion, especially in our modern globalized world. Someone has to pay you the money, so even if you go as a solo entrepreneur selling real stuff that you made yourself, you largely depend on your customers at least.
The reality is that it is extremely stressful and for most people with no guarantee of how it will work out overtime.
And the fact is that it is much better to have one person focused on getting the ressource while the other runs the household, "making" other humans in the process.
It could be the man at home, but most woman don't actually want that even if they may say so to win an argument; and there is the added problem that only woman can make other human being.
Then you have people complaining that our society doesn't make babies anymore, well maybe if we didn't push the bullshit of independence on woman we wouldn't have this problem...
The sneer of "soccer mom" isn't that she's a mother busy raising children. It's that she's too busy shuffling the kids between enrichment activities to take the downtime to be their mother. That and her children are her personality.
Yeah, same here. I don't think I was mature enough to have a kid at 22, apart from the fact that I was still studying, and when I started working I had low salary and needed to work long hours to fight for job stability in a competitive sector. However, it would likely have worked at 30, and reading through all this makes me think that it would have been better than waiting until 36 as I did.
Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done, though.
Emotional maturity is important, but there's also financial readiness.
People don't have extended families and villages to be nannies-on-demand anymore, so older parents have a lot more financial resources to raise kids and more likely to give the kid a comfortable life.
Especially when housing prices have gone up much faster than salaries in the past 30 years, and that is reflected not only in one's own mortgage/rent but also that you have to indirectly pay the rent increases of every Chipotle worker you interact with.
It's complicated. It's definitely true that we're less mature in our 20s than we are in our 30s. But, also, maturity doesn't just accumulate on us like growth rings. You can easily be a completely immature thirty-something if you don't have the kind of challenging life experiences that cause maturity.
Probably the number one life experience that increases maturity is having kids. If you'd had kids younger, you would have grown up faster too and earned some of the maturity needed to raise them well earlier.
Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long improv scene and do your best.
I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no one should have children until they're perfectly prepared, but that's just an impossible bar.
A very close friend of mine was murdered at 18, his sister was a year younger and she matured very quickly as a result of this experience. She’s now in her early 20s and you’d assume she’s 35 by her personality and view points.
I wonder if you’d mind sharing some examples of her viewpoints? It’s not obvious to me what sort of maturity a sibling murder would induce. She moved to the suburbs already?
> no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth
I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an ancillary benefit to having children or from any other relationship for that matter. Yes, if it’s your primary goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one’s good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part of the equation of forming relationships and having children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human experience across cultures and times.
> there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil.
This is a really good observation.
Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It seems like there are a lot of people out there today who believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have kids or pets.
> The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.
You see, in a proper early childrearing situation, you would be a) near your parents and inlaws ideally b) they would share in the burden of child-rearing.
We had kids later in life (33-ish) and I think if I were to do it again, I'd have moved quicker to having kids earlier (waited 2 years to marry and 3 years before having first kid).
More and more people are living closer to their parents - which opens up this possibility.
A lot of this assumes so many things that I think people who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most on HN) take for granted.
Even if I lived close to the family I was born into, I would never let them get near my children. The years of neglect and child abuse are reason enough that they should never see them - let alone be caregivers.
Similarly, you’re assuming that your marriage would have gone smoothly still and so would the childbearing if you hadn’t waited. I was with someone for five years and we never got legally married. We talked a lot about kids and marriage. I still felt like we had years to go before we were ready for marriage and kids. We separated over financial differences once it became clear they were never going to resolve. Imagine we had ignored our intuitions and married and had kids based on arbitrary deadlines? It would have been terrible. The differences wouldn’t have solved themselves with marriage or kids - we would’ve gone separate ways and both would experience truly insane hardship due to such poor decisions.
Living near people who can take care of your kids sounds lovely if you grew up where all the jobs are. Not uncommon for many SV types here who grew up in Palo Alto and such but it’s farfetched for so many more.
We need better regulations to give better paid leave and lower the cost of housing so I’m not homeless when my spouse decides to stop working to take care of the kids.
I'm not denying your experiences - I was reasoning using my own. I did not have a typical upbringing - I'm felt like an outsider and went to a different school for like 7 years in a row.
Clearly your circumstances dictated your options. Nowadays, in this truly oligarchic economy, most young people simply don't feel they'll ever be able to afford a home or family either (which is a massive regression). Perhaps the future means - you raise your family in your parents house (with their help)... if you trust your parents.
Agreed about better support for families and housing.
I am so glad I waited until my late 30s to have a kid. It sucks not being as physically capable as I would've been, but being calmer and more understanding I think is a big help in child rearing.
The standards of what's "acceptable parenting" shot up greatly in the past decades. In the 60s, you were a great father if you passed out drunk only sometimes, didn't beat your kids too much and brought enough income to feed/house the family.
My childhood was all about spending the whole day outside roaming the streets with very little involvement from my parents. I didn't have any after-school (organized) activities, and I don't remember a single time that my father would drive me anywhere just because I needed it. That was all just normal, but today might get social services called on you.
It used to be that the average person at 25 already had worked a full-time job for 5-7 years. Now a college education is much more important and at 25 many haven't had a full-time job at all yet and in a way haven't been exposed to the real world. I sometimes think about Robert M. Pirsig's point that young people should work and then get further education to see better where the value comes from. I do wonder if that would push children even further back though.
A high school education doesn't go as far as it used to, women have more life paths that don't involve being a stay-at-home mom, houses are harder to come by, average age at first marriage is almost a decade higher than it was in the 50s ... notable, sure, but interesting, I dunno.
True. Though until recently, children were usually allowed some adult-level duties and responsibilities before their early 20s, so they could actually grow up. My mother did all the cooking for a family of 6, on a wood stove, before she was 12 years old. In an era (and economic circumstances) when "we need more bread" meant "check that there is enough flour in the bin, and get some water from the well...".
I don’t think anyone really thinks that. The vast majority of people in their 20s are perfectly capable of raising children, it’s just not desirable.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing (why not spend your 20s exploring?) but it’s also easily explained by financial burdens that didn’t used to exist. Housing is now very expensive, can you blame people waiting until they have the right size home before they have kids?
They just didn't know any better.
The whole idea that everyone has to have children is frankly asinine.
I want people to have fewer children.
I want fewer people to have children.
I want nobody to have more than two children.
The whole idea that population must grow and keep growing is silly.
It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
They didn't say "Nobody should be allowed to have more than two children". They simply have an opinion that people shouldn't, purposefully, have more than two children. Seems reasonable to me.
Yes, thank you.
I'm not Mao.
People should choose to have either no children
Or ideally one or two children
And not no children.
Ideally, we as a society should support people who choose to have one or two children,
prioritizing these families over people who have half a dozen or more children.
But that's because in my opinion people who have dozens of children have something wrong in their heads.
If you choose to have a dozen children, you better be able to afford to raise them all on your own dime.
That being said, I really dislike means testing of any kind so I'd be ok with a social safety net for the wackos and their unfortunate children.
That is good and I'm all for it but a problem is now is that fundamentalists still have a lot of children and at some point, they will have too much political power.
> The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.
How common is it that people are incompetent to raise kids in their 20s, versus people who may not presently have everything together because nobody expects anything from or depends on them?
Great point. Most people are perfectly capable of raising to the occasion, but while there's no occasion they just stay in the comfort of their responsibility-free lives... I say, enjoy it while it lasts!
Few are really prepared to have kids, until they have their second kid. Everyone I know who had kids shortly after college (which skews the parents a bit economically, I know, but not necessarily emotionally or in maturity) had great family lives and outcomes.
>The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. ... Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate,...
This is exactly why I don't think anyone should have children until they're at least 50 years old, and better yet 75-100. We just need to solve this "aging" disease problem first. 20-somethings just aren't emotionally mature enough to be good parents.
Suggesting people to have child in their 20ties, to avoid health problems, is sexist and not based in reality. This is just extrapolation of this trend.
People can totally freeze relevant body parts, and have child in their 70ties. Saying anything else would be sexist! Natural selection in action...
And somehow we've done it through hundreds of generations.
> just need to solve this "aging" disease.
Oh, please stop. This is the rhetoric of stunted men with Peter Pan syndrome. If you are too scared to face this type of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion just fine.
Your "solution" to the problem that adults now are claiming to be unable to become parents is, literally, "cure aging".
Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and have them at a age where your parents can still help you."
The fact that people are forgetting these "old values" is what is bringing to this unsustainable state, and instead of accepting the reality of our limited lifespans and that people have managed to start having kids in the early 20's (or before that) for centuries just fine, you want to double down on the idea that "no one should have kids before their 50s"?
I think the optimal strategy depends partly on your genes. Challenging kids seem to run in families, and it’s probably easier to succeed as a very young parent if your kids are naturally the quiet & obedient sort.
It’s not politically correct, but we all know a few little hellions, and they are obviously difficult to parent.
It is arguable that the increased emotional regulation of older parents is responsible for the higher incidence of adhd as the kids have to fill the emotional void
Whipping Star has some amazing alien vs human discourse (at least, that's my memory from ~20 years ago!). It was the first time I found alien dialog that didn't sound like repackaged English.
The really fun thing is to realize that juggling is a meta-hobby. I started out with juggling balls, a short time on rings, spent a long time on clubs, and now spend my time trying to apply some of that to juggling hoops. Plus there's kendama, yo-yo, diablo, poi, and contact juggling, all of which are also available for juggling (I've never seen someone juggle yo-yos, but kendama, diablo, and poi, it's all attested).
As someone who has always picked up and put down hobbies, juggling has stuck with me because it's easy for me to just shift slightly and now have a very different experience even though it's all "just juggling".
My history was teaching myself 3-ball cascade, reverse cascade and then figuring I was 'done' with juggling. When I went to teach my kids in, in an attempt to get them to understand "improvement by inches", I discovered that youtube now has slow-motion breakdowns of every trick you might ever want to do. I picked it back up more than 5 years ago now and still go to regular local meetups. (sadly, my kids didn't ever really get into it)
There are several philosophical approaches to the purpose of prison.
1. Revenge
2. to keep society safe from dangerous/anti-social people
3. to provide a safe space for rehabilitating people for re-integration.
I tend to view (1) as the worst possible option, even discounting the fact that we are completely 100% aware of the existence of false convictions. You are entitled to believe that revenge is a valid society choice, but I will definitely judge you for believing that.
I don’t fully buy into rehabilitative Justice. I’ve not read an account of how to handle one off crimes. Things like manslaughter or negligence. Crimes with extremely low rates of recidivism. Should people who commit these crimes be let off without consequence? If the point is character building, do you simply keep people imprisoned until their character improves. I’m not saying you have these answers but I haven’t seen them elsewhere.
Does some people deserve a shitty life, in general that is not something we should strive for.
There are two things I feel about this, first is prisons as they are in many countries are really bad for the employees, lots of suicide etc. As a prisoner being put away for years with minimal contact with the outside world is a really heavy punishment even if you live a life without constant fear.
A society that mistreat people is not something to strive for, and making prisons as bad as they can get will affect society as a whole. Paying prisonguards a little extra to take the risk of suicide seems really rotten to me.
If those people are extremely unlikely to commit a crime again, why should there be continuing consequences for them? What purpose does it serve beyond satisfying someone's feeling of revenge?
And if they are still dangerous, then, yes, you keep them locked up. But even then what's the point of making them suffer beyond the restrictions that are necessary to ensure the safety of the rest of society?
I know American management isn't a monolith, but over the course of my career, I have gotten extremely good play by educating people about blameless RCAs both for myself and my chain below, and across chains. Once I make it clear that the goal is to understand how this happened, and how to make it not happen again (or at least how to think about the risk-vs-cost calculation), most people would get onboard.
I've on occasion also educated up the chain on why attacking someone is an anti-pattern. If you can get the higher-ups onboard, then attacks tend to be viewed as a problem in and of themselves. Or, and this is certainly possible, I'm incredibly naive and have just been very lucky.
I know this is off topic, but having spent a significant amount of time convincing people around me to use signal, once they remove this feature, literally 100% of the non-tech folks I've gotten onto signal will drop it and move back to SMS. It makes me so sad.
I'm certainly unconvinced that the first part of that statement is true. We've seen self-driving cars run into static obstacles. We still need to deal with emergent behaviour of groups of self-driving cars. There are still unpredictable environmental factors that we rely on humans to work out now.
Stupid question(s) for a non-medical person who doesn't even know enough to be wrong.
I really thought "inflammation" is/was a generic term for a myriad of different causes and symptoms. Did something change and now we "know" that inflammation == c reactive protein? Or is this just one particular well-known marker of a common cluster of inflammation symptoms? Or am I just completely confused about the whole thing?
I can't read the study directly (and it's not my field, which makes reading it directly challenging), but this is the abstract conclusion:
`
Higher fasting insulin and higher c-reactive protein confound the association between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. The increase in mortality that has been attributed to higher BMI is more likely due to hyperinsulinemia and inflammation rather than obesity.`
Bashing on lottery tickets due to EV also really feels like it's really missing the point. Lottery tickets are a mechanism for enjoying a fantasy. Sure you could technically just pretend that you won $10^9, but there is a hard cliff from >0% to 0%. I buy lottery tickets (very very occasionally, but who cares!) because it helps me enjoy a fantasy about being radically independently wealthy.
There's no reason to hate on people for doing something that they enjoy, regardless of what the expected value is. For god's sake, I juggle! As a hobby! Can you imagine the expected return on THAT?
Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be bleak if they do.