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Notes -
bro wtf
Do you disagree with the premise or with the lack of tact?
The latter - why'd you have to do me like that
What, you too?
Look, I had my first and hitherto only kid when I was 30, and my wife 29. My brother had his first at 23. My wife's sister on the other side had her first at...hell, 17? The consequences of becoming at parent at various ages and what it does to people under different circumstances aren't some abstract, statistical question to me. It's right there. I see how I struggle to live up to my idea of what a parent should do because I lack the health and energy of my younger self, and because I need to walk back a decade of entrenched non-parent habits that would have been a decade of parent habits instead had I become a dad at 20. I see how those other people I mentioned, and others besides, rise to meet the challenge and become more responsible, more practical and more far-sighted thanks to parenthood. I see how bullshit and bad habits evaporate. And I see how young people are just far more up to the task than those who are already beginning to slide into physical and mental decline. Lower neurplasticity, more bad habits, bodies having had more time to pick up various beginnings of decrepitude, the whole social support network being older and less able to help - it's just worse parenting material.
The only things you gain from being an older parent is more material wealth to throw at parenting issues, and additional life experience (but those experiences being those of a non-parent, so not as valuable as otherwise). But those advantages aren't worth much compared to what you're giving up. It's perhaps a little different if parenthood forces you to become a single dad because the mother dies or runs off or collapses into a pile of mental illness, but if you can become a regular (though young!) couple in which the man does the career and the woman takes care of the kids, then starting as early as possible is, in my view, mostly just the better way. And yes, this implies that women having careers is a tremendous waste of time and effort.
Unless, big caveat, there's preexisting mental illness. That just gets worse with kids. Those women are probably better off safely stowed in some office job.
This is a funny one. We ended up (not for that reason) having children three months before my mum retired. The difference between what a retired (but not yet decrepit) grandparent can offer vs a grandparent with a demanding full-time job is massive. There is a reason why the Chinese are loath to raise the retirement age - they rely on grandparental childcare far more than we do.
Fair point, but grandparents working full-time up to a set age and then suddenly becoming fully available is not a fixed law of the universe. Grandaprents growing older and less capable is.
Especially these days when it's increasingly normalized to teleport off into the Everglades or onto a cruise instead of remaining part of the household fabric.
Or for the kids to head off to somewhere more exciting than the place they grew up. I am aware that the West is denormalising high-effort grandparenting in multiple ways, and it sucks. Although the comparison with 1st-world Asia suggests that it isn't driving the fertility decline.
It's probably a downward spiral. Parenting and grandparenting are becoming less rewarding in part because of low fertility, and so fewer people are prepared to make that investment, which further drives down fertility. Or so I might speculate.
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