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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   26129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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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could find about remarriage after divorce is from 2015 for the period 1979-2010, and that makes the data fifteen years out of date: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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