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As others have said, low fertility is fundamentally about the desire for a comfortable life (charitable) or hedonism (uncharitable). I think the latter is often uncharitable because I don’t think DINKs mostly want to party and do drugs and eat 17 course three star tasting menus in all their free time in the way the natalist caricature often suggests, I think they mostly just want a quiet, peaceful life that doesn’t involve waking up throughout the night, spending all weekend ferrying kids to and from various activities and babysitting for years.
That desire can be overridden by material or extreme ideological (as in the religious examples) circumstance. But ‘extreme’ is important. Moderately conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims who believe the same things their 7 tfr ancestors did 100 years ago have far fewer children today.
@4bpp is essentially correct. Give every DINK a taxpayer-funded nanny to look after the kids, handle the night nurse stuff for the first 3 years, then take them to school and home, to stuff on the weekend, pay for camp in the summer, and most would happily have children. This was - by the way - the norm for middle class and above households until about a century ago. Mothers of a certain class in 1926 were not spending dozens of hours a week looking after their children, and even working class moms pooled resources.
I expect children but I couldn’t do it on a normal income, not because kids themselves are expensive but because I don’t believe in a form of atomized, isolated, high investment nuclear family parenting that leaves the two parents (mostly the mother it has to be said) as slaves to their own children until they graduate college.
It used to be that parenting was much more low investment (both in terms of money and time and emotional involvement). Some older women in the local community would look after your kids for a pittance if you ever wanted them to, you saw them for an hour a day, certainly you weren’t expected to devote every minute of your free time to them.
The motherhood narrative post-1950 of kids becoming your life and central to every waking minute of your day (and into which men are, post-1990s, also increasingly indoctrinated) just isn’t compelling, presently or historically, to a lot of people. This has (and this is a conservative mistake) nothing to do with women working or not working. An upper class mother in 1890 who saw her children every day before dinner wasn’t working long hours at a merchant bank, but she still had various things she did every day that mostly did not involve constantly looking after her kids.
If you want more women to have more children, the best way is to lower socially expected levels of parental investment, especially in terms of time, and build institutions that essentially let you drop off your child whenever you want and pick them up whenever you want. Free, 24/7 daycare for everyone under 16.
It seems trivially true to me that pretty much every single person posting here today lives a life of wealth and abundance that my grandparents would have quite literally been willing to die for, and that at the very least I think it's safe to assume that anyone posting here is probably doing better financially than the 37 year-old ex-con who runs the kitchen at my local sports bar.
Accordingly I find the complaint that "kids are too expensive" to be laughable on it's face. Anyone posting here about how they can't afford kids can absolutely afford kids, they just don't want to. See @LazyLongposter's comment down thread or my own from a month ago
This is true, but unless you are younger than me, your grandparents had some luxuries that would cost us our left arms to get. They were able to send their kids ages 5 and up out to play with other kids. If they were townies, these children were welcome or at least tolerated on public grounds, had safe parks to play in, and did not require adult supervision. If they lived in the country, there might not be so many neighbor kids, but the natural world made up for it - kids could make forts out of logs and spend all day observing nature.
If you tried that today, you would have CPS called on you. Or you'd be violating some nature preservation statutes. You could be criminally charged with child endangerment. If you can afford it, you can hire a nanny who can take your kids to be supervised at a park. Otherwise, there is a huge time cost that was transferred out of thin air onto the average parent sometime in the past forty years. I don't know what caused the change in attitude. Stranger danger, white flight, vaccines made the possibility of losing even a single kid unthinkable whereas before it was unavoidable? I don't know. But working parents spend twice as much time with their kids than stay-at-home parents did fifty years ago.
We made everything else faster and more convenient while simultaneously we made kids more laborious.
I've heard these stories on the internet as much as anyone else, but does anyone have any clue as to the actual scale of the problem? It's certainly annoying that this failure mode exists at all, since it's relatively scary. That said, my small observation of the real world, seeing kids running around the neighborhood unattended all the time, seems to clash with it. My mild wonder is whether the problem is akin to "unarmed black men getting shot by police for no reason", which objectively is an extremely small problem that manages to capture an extremely oversized proportion of the fears of a subset of the population. Maybe it's just worse in worse places, where perhaps it might actually be a danger for them to be running around on their own?
I homeschool one of my daughters who still receives speech services from the Public School. She is 8 years old.
On the days where my daughter has speech therapy, my husband drops off the boys at their preschool and I drive my daughter to speech therapy. One day, my husband had to take a car to be maintained, and I figured I would drop off my daughter at speech and then take the boys to school, then come back to pick up my daughter.
I watched my daughter go into the school building, made sure she made it to the office where two secretaries are, then I started driving my boys to their school.
I hadn't left the parking lot before the school office ladies called. They were freaked out. "Where are you, why is your daughter here alone? You need to be here now, she cannot be in the waiting room without you." I told them it was snowing and I had trouble finding parking (both true). They told me, "OK, I will watch her to make sure she is SUPERVISED but I need you here right now."
By 8 years old I was left home alone for a few hours at a time. Waiting in the school office where there is a waiting room with couches, books, and a fish tank, two secretaries and a nurse wouldn't have been something to think twice over. My mom waited in the car to nurse my baby brother and had me walk into McDonalds to purchase a cheeseburger by the time I was five.
Stupid? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Should be better? Obviously. But it's not calling CPS. It's not taking your kids away. It's not charging you criminally with child endangerment.
Nor does it seem to contradict my observation of just looking out the window or walking down the street and seeing kids running around unattended all the time. I'm sure plenty of black people can describe some stupid or annoying situation that should have gone differently, and many of them even have a plausible claim that racism was involved. I still sorta think that the concern about unarmed black men being shot by police for no reason is just not an all-consuming problem in the world.
The threat is there. Even if only 1% of parents who leaves a kid unattended they get CPS called on them, it creates a chilling effect.
All parks have signs saying something like, "Kids under 12 need adult supervision." Amtrak will not let you buy train tickets for kids unless you have one adult per kid. I have four kids, so I can't take my family on an Amtrak trip until they are teenagers.
The culture is different. The rules and expectations are different. You have to admit that much.
Honestly, my initial reaction is basically the same as it would be if I had heard, "Even if only 1% of unarmed black men are shot by police..." Which is, I'm pretty sure you're missing some number of zeros. I don't know how many zeros. I don't know how many zeros matter. I'm not sure if there's a particular number of zeros where it goes from concern to not-concern. But I'm pretty sure the number is far from correct.
I was ready to believe you, because I am never surprised that the federal government would screw up literally anything in the most ridiculous way. Right before I hit "comment", I did decide to check. My search for "Amtrak children" brought me here, which says:
Ok, I could read that either way. But I guess what was nice about your claim is that it was that they won't even let you buy tickets. It's not some situation where you could buy tickets, get there, and learn that the correct reading of this phrase is that they have a one-adult-per-child policy. So, presumably, it's something I can check.
Sure enough, I just went to the reservations, picked totally random cities, totally random dates, one adult, four children (2-12, not 'youth', which could plausibly have different rules under various readings, though at this stage, it actually says, "Youth, children and infants must travel with at least one adult who is 18 years old."). At the very least, it lets me get to the page where they want me to start putting in traveler information (name, etc.) for each of the five passengers. I can tab over without entering any information, and it clearly has marked four children, with a different amount of information requested for the children than the adult.
I suppose it is possible that at some point after this step, after all the personal info has been put in and whatnot, the system will finally realize and say, "No, we actually had a one-adult-per-child policy all along, and we just tricked you into getting this far," but on first read, I think you're just wrong on this claim.
I mean, yes? But that's true for any epsilon difference. Presumably you also have to admit that I look out the window or walk around town and see kids out playing unattended all the time, too, right? Like, we're probably somewhere between epsilon and infinity, but it's kinda squishy to really capture it well.
I guess you will not believe me, but in 2023 it was the case that I was kept from buying Amtrak tickets without as many adults as there are kids. Maybe it was a COVID rule. You have to admit, it would be weirdly specific for me to just make it up.
Where do you live that you see kids unattended all the time? I have never seen that since 2010 or so.
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