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Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
You're not a fish, so you don't notice the water you're not swimming in. Once again, that water is community, and that community gives you values.
When Shakespeare says "there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so", he is echoing everyone from the Stoics to the Buddha.
Your sister says that without kids gets she gets to travel, but with kids she'd be stuck at home with a family, and that's sad.. In every non-WEIRD culture, they would say that if she has kids she gets to spend time with a family, and without kids she'd just be some sad woman alone on an airplane.
You say that now that your brother has kids, he's isolated because he has to bring his family everywhere. In a culture where having families and having families young is the norm, your (many) brothers would say that you've isolated yourself from them by being the one weird childless uncle.
Your niece runs around needing adult attention. In the culture of merely fifty years ago, she would be playing with all the other kids, and told not to bother the adult's table. We don't even have kids tables anymore, because we don't have enough kids to fill one.
We're having less kids, because thinking made it so in the last ten years. The values of the childless replaced the values of the family, and the things childless people do are now seen as valuable instead of childish.
We can dismiss the motivated reasoning of the feminists (childcare is hard) and the incels (women are only going out with six foot three billionaires), because childcare and dating were just as hard in the old days of 2015. We can dismiss the locally-based ones (US abortion laws, Korean hagwons, European economic stagnation), because the entire world minus sub-Saharan Africa suddenly had a huge fertility drop between 2015 and now.
So let's ask that question: Why 2015, and why not SSA? To quote Jonathan Haidt, "It's the phones, stupid".
2015 is when social media on phones came out, and they couldn't afford smartphones with front-facing cameras in SSA.
I think it's almost impossible for a forum full of autistic men to understand just how mimetic young women are. Young women naturally connect, imitate and seek acceptance from each other. Social media amplifies this normal mammalian instinct to an unimaginable level. Every action taken by a socially-deprived young woman is motivated by one thing: "will it look good on Instagram". Young women don't actually want to "travel" to Machu Eiffel, they just want to have pictures taken there.
I keep running across articles about how hard modern motherhood is, and how high the expectations are. They're not about how the kids turn out though, because who cares about that. They're about mom influencers. Every article is the same - modern motherhood is hard because it's impossible to look presentable while having kids. Kids won't stand still for pictures. It's hard to keep a house artfully messy, let alone keep a house clean. Instagram mom influencers are harming your mental health.
It's not the childcare or the average man's wages or anything so pedestrian. The popularity of momfluencers shows that motherhood is still incredibly aspirational. All the celebrities flaunt their enormous families, nannies just a couple pixels out of frame.
It's Instagram. Having kids and an Insta-perfect life is impossible, and Instagram is reality so Instagram wins.
This sounds like a just so story. Have you observed it? The 30 year old women of my acquaintance who seem like maybe they should be settling down but are instead running 5ks, climbing mountains, and drinking fancy cocktails do not necessarily have strong Instagram presences. Also, engagements, marriages, babies, and cute little kids get a lot of positive attention on social media. More than anything other than running social media as an actual business. The mom influencers are generally pro-natal -- they make having children look more aesthetic than it really is.
I don't buy into this story that social media is to blame for the drop in fertility. (In the US, most of the dip happened before the 21st century.)
But I will say that I've seen a tendency for moms I know to almost "brag" about how tough their kid is to take care of, and to make things more difficult for themselves than it needs to be.
In the hospital, they made us watch some educational videos after my first daughter was born. There was a video called something like "Don't Shake the Baby" where the real thesis of the video is that it's okay to ignore the baby for a bit. If she's being annoying and you need a break, put her somewhere safe and then walk away for a few minutes. She'll be fine. But walking away is something new mothers struggle with.
Now don't get me wrong - kids are tough. It takes a ton of work to make one. But it's the pregnancy, the birth (oof), and those first months where you have to wake up multiple times during the night to feed them that are the tough part. Beyond that, the difficulty should be about on par with taking care of a dog. And if it's a lot tougher, you have to give yourself permission to put in less effort. The kids will be fine.
Yeah, I could see that.
I will say that mothers of infants have a bunch of hormones going off, oriented towards getting them to treat a crying baby as an emergency. Breastfeeding mothers, especially, won't necessarily benefit from putting the baby off, they get dripping hurting breasts, a baby who's flailing around in all directions, and general mayhem. Many babies like to cluster feed, and will cry until they get to, and it's awful. Baby #3 is getting 6 oz formula a day during evening cluster feed before bed time (out of ~24 oz total), and it is making a noticeable improvement in quality of life.
Currently the three week old is lying on the floor crying about tummy time while I'm commenting here. Various articles suggest that I could "play" with him, or lay next to him and cheer him on. But I don't want to do that, and attempts to try with his older sister suggest that the crying lasts about as long either way. He would probably not even exist if I really thought following all the interactive suggestions from various articles was mandatory.
On the other hand, I have found our older child legitimately very difficult as a baby and toddler, for reasons that seem to come down to energy level. She was born in a one room apartment without an enclosed yard or playground within walking distance. I do have some sympathy for why many people would prefer not to do that, because it was kind of terrible. If she got woken up in the evening, she would proceed to scream for the next two hours, and nothing we could do would stop her. My husband had to take care of her for several months, and she would refuse a bottle, then proceed to scream at him for hours about how he didn't have any milky breasts. She learned to speak at 2, and has been chattering nonstop ever since. Now she's 5, we have an expansive yard with different whole areas in it, and I have a lot of sympathy for the kind of parent that locks their kid out of the house for outside play time.
I have no intention of ever owning the kind of high strung dog that wants to be taken for walks twice a day and keeps jumping the fence. We don't have a dog, actually, because they're too much effort, in some ways more than children. At least if we go on a trip we can take the children with us, and if they step on thorns we can tell them to wear shoes. The children would like a dog, but we don't have anyone to look after it if we're away, and we are away at least several weeks a year.
Well that all sounds immensely fun. No honestly, I mostly think it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself in for. But maybe it’s best not to know. Reading that does not make me want to have children, even though I very much do. I think that’s the thing, if everyone has children and it’s inevitable and it just happens after you get married (which you do between 19 and 23 because everyone does) and then you get pregnant and then you have to deal with it and suffer through it and then it’s fine then you just do it. If you have to think about it, like I’m doing now, then you doubt.
I realize this is an old comment- I make a point of reading comments under AAQC's from the past month- but observed reality is that women familiar with the reality of taking care of a baby/infant are more likely to have kids.
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Baby and small child problems might not be a very productive line of conversation.
The current status quo of everyone having quite effective birth control all the time is probably not a good idea. I was newly married and on contraceptive pills that I didn't manage to renew quite on time when first baby was conceived. Maybe subconsciously I wasn't trying very hard to keep on top of the birth control, but was still surprised, because it was only for a couple of days and I was past 30. The other two children I had to go to a doctor and remove an implant, so more intentional (and I was clearly not put off having more children), and then I was pregnant two months later. If I were more conscientious, I would probably have waited another couple of years and only ended up with only two, confirming society is probably selecting for not very conscientious mothers who conceive quickly.
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