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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26653 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Perhaps we could actually try to make having children the financially preferable choice instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?

We can't. Essentially everyone wants them, especially those who have children. Removing them would mean making children somehow less safe and protected. This is everything from child labor laws to car seats to occupancy restrictions (on number of children in a room) to expensive requirements on child care providers, and much more.

Of course we can, gradually increase taxation for the childless with commensurate tax rebates for those with children. Have the exact rates depend on the fertility rate.

Easy peasy. Perhaps you don't want to do this but its well within the capacity of the state to do.

ly try to make having children the financially preferable choice (or even just equivalent!) instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?

Something like, special yearly levy on childless adult, then split the earning from this levy to every child so that people are encouraged to have at least 1 kid to avoid the tax, while poor people can continue to spawn kids to get more benefit from this tax

And what of those who aren't able to have kids, would be terrible parents if they did have kids, or aren't earning enough for the levy to be worthwhile? Here's a charming story of a married couple with six children who were abusive scum to those kids. Yes, how lovely to contemplate a future filled with such happy thriving families!

If you make it a condition that "everyone has to be the parent of one child", then you will get "hello, me and Joe agreed to have a baby, here's the baby, we're giving it up to social services because neither of us wants to raise a kid, can we have our certificates of child-production stamped for the tax office, please?"

Surely you realise it would be trivial to design policy around this?

This is easy to say, but very hard to demonstrate that it actually works. It certainly is not a mathematical inevitability.

Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?

Why continue massively subsidising civilisation destroying anti-social behaviour?

So are you the parent of fifteen children? Walk the walk before you demand the right to control others over when and how they have children. That's what annoys me the most about these blithe theoretical solutions: the people putting them forward are also the ones saying they're not married yet, have no kids, etc.

Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?

Because we already have. There are lots of policies which transfer money to people with children. Most directly in the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the tax deduction for dependents, but many, many others. As these policies have proliferated, fertility has dropped.

And yet it's more and more financially preferable to not have children. What we have done is like noticed that car sales a dropping and handed out 10$ vouchers and wonder why that doesn't have an impact on car sales.

And at the same time increased the initial, maintenance, and regulatory cost of a car to that of a new 18-wheeler. You might want to start looking at those issues before trying to move enough money around to increase the number of Freightliners people are willing to buy.

They'll go on welfare though. Lacking the need to provide, they don't have much motivation already. Just video games all day, TV for the women, fooling around in between. They'll be like the blessed teenagers of Omelas.

So tie welfare to children as well if it becomes an issue. We do this shit all the time.

We've made parenthood and family size a moral issue, where having more than two children is a sin against blessed Gaia, and moreover a sign that you're a fool to waste your prime years having babies instead of having fun, and this also means that you must be poor, stupid, inferior human capital since everyone knows it's the underclass that is the most fertile.

You're not going to wind back fifty years of "having babies is irresponsible and selfish" by promising "hey, we'll give you twenty dollars coupon every month for each kid up to the age of seven!"

Children's allowance is indeed a thing, and indeed a very necessary thing. But so is abuse of the system, and for all the scorn about the 'welfare queens' political sloganeering, I've seen myself people cheating the system.

Changing social attitudes is like turning an oil tanker. You can do it, but it'll take a lot of time and careful manoeuvring. Plus men being unwilling to marry a woman who already has children - and remember, single mothers also includes widows and divorced women. So there's little incentive to have a lot of kids unless you're sure your spouse will never leave you, and that's not 100% any more since we've reduced marriage to "if at least two people (but maybe we can legislate in the future for more partners) want to live together, but only so long as they want to live together and are 'in love', no more than that".

If your choice is to be single mother with young children, or single woman with no children, after your relationship/marriage breaks down, then option B is better for dating/getting a new partner. I'm making a large assumption on that one, the first study I could find about remarriage after divorce is from 2015 for the period 1979-2010, and that makes the data fifteen years out of date:

Previous studies have identified several consistent predictors of remarriage for divorced women (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002; Folk, Graham, & Beller, 1992; Goldscheider & Sassler, 2006; McNamee & Raley, 2011; Shafer & James, 2013; Stewart, 2010). These predictors include being young at the time of divorce, having a college education, being employed, and living in the southern region of the United States. In addition, remarriage is less common for African Americans, the poor, and mothers who conceived or gave birth prior to marrying. It is not clear whether having children affects the likelihood of remarriage. Some studies show that remarriage is more likely when women have children, some studies show that remarriage is less likely, and yet others suggest that the association is contingent on other factors. These discrepant findings may reflect conflicting effects of children. On the one hand, some custodial mothers may be motivated to remarry because their new husbands can assist with the economic support and supervision of children (Morrison & Ritualo, 2000; Smock, Manning, & Gupta, 1999). On the other hand, some men may be reluctant to take on the economic and social responsibilities of the stepfather role, thus decreasing the attractiveness of mothers in the remarriage market.

...Our results cast some light on the notions that marriage is a “package deal” and that men “exchange children” when they remarry (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Tach, Mincy, & Edin, 2010). This idea is based on the assumption that men are connected to children primarily through their spouses and partners. Consequently, when men remarry they become less involved with children from their former marriages and more involved with their stepchildren. Because the current study does not have data on stepfathers’ relationships with children from previous unions, our findings do not provide direct evidence either for or against this idea. The current study does show, however, that men are more likely to marry when the fathers of their new partners’ children are highly involved. It appears, therefore, that many stepfathers prefer to “share” rather than “exchange” children.

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