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Can I ask all the men blaming women, the hussies, for not getting married at seventeen and pumping out a baby a year for the next ten years - are you fathers? Any of you? Do you have kids? More than one kid? If not, why not? "I always wanted six kids but I couldn't find a woman willing to have that big a family" or "Don't be dumb, I'm not forty yet, time enough for me to settle down after I build my career and have my fun along the way with as many hot chicks as I can persuade to let me bang them"?
Because I'm fed-up right now of this stream of comments as if women magically are the only ones having babies or not. Oh, all the eighteen year old men just aching to take on adult life as a husband and father, if only those trollops weren't busy painting their faces and working at jobs!
Excuse me if I don't believe that.
Let's turn the solutions that have been presented in previous comments around. Easy one first: no contraception. Men who have sex are going to become fathers, or else they can wait until a woman decides to marry them. And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty.
Men can wait ten or so years to have a career, they'll easily pick one up when they're thirty-plus and asking an employer to take them on for full-time white collar work for the first time ever. It's much more important that they be around to be the head of the house and raise the kids right. Women can take a year out to have a baby and then go back to work, but it's a full-time job for a father. And since women have it so soft and easy in this world, and it's easier for women to get degrees and white-collar jobs, let Mom be the worker but Dad should be there for his brood because who else is going to teach them the right ways?
Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump! If it would work for a woman, certainly no man would object to having his freedom curtailed in this way - after all, his duty to society and the future trumps any petty personal ambitions, right?
EDIT: Yes, I am going to put this out there: unless you are a married father of at least three kids, shut your yap about this. You are as much part of the problem as the women. Any guy who is not married (if you're cohabiting, why the fuck aren't you getting married instead of lolling around getting free milk without buying the cow?) and not the father of kids (are you putting it off until "someday later"? "it's too expensive"? "it's not the right time"?) can't have the neck to say "oh why aren't those women getting married and having kids?"
Hello, I am a married young man (24) without kids, and I can speak to part of why we don't have them yet, despite my wife wanting them.
I have a high-paying, but very unstable job. It could disappear at any moment. My relationship with my wife is very strong, but I don't want to risk a possible divorce if I convince her to leave her job to have kids, then I lose my job, and we thus are forced to reduce our standard of living to continue paying for everything.
Realistically this is quite unlikely. Like I said, we're doing great. But I'd prefer to wait 1-2 years for kids rather than increasing the risk of divorce by 1-2 percentage points.
My experience with women has been that they are much less "constant" than men, in the sense that their opinions are simply a lot more malleable. When we got married she was quite progressive, but (in line with my own experience and what other commenters have said) over time her beliefs have basically grown to match mine completely. I think that this effect--and my ability to win her loyalty--will persist for as long as I have a good enough job or at least prospects. Without that, I hope my worth would still persist, but there is no longer any guarantee.
What I'm getting at is that the sexual marketplace will continue to force men into the workforce regardless of economic incentives. Incentivizing men to stay home and father will lead to an even worse fertility slump. Nobody really wants to work--I strongly suspect the driving factor behind women's higher average happiness is their lower workforce participation--and women stressed out by busy corporate jobs would be much less inclined to marry and have children than they are now.
If you force men to be even less attractive than they already are by denying them their main source of value, fertility can only plummet.
Yeah, I get it you have an excuse. A good excuse. And I have an excuse. And that's the point. Everybody has an excuse. My grandfather would have had a similar excuse, too, except he didn't make a lot of money and my grandmother didn't work at all. And yet they managed to have 5 kids between 1950 and 1963, because that's the way the culture was. If you were in the same position as you are now but it was 1953 instead of 2023, you'd have kids. The point I think the OP is trying to make isn't that your excuses are invalid, or that you're hypocritical, it's that eras with high fertility had high fertility because people didn't make excuses. A family wasn't something you meticulously planned, it's something that happened. And if you expect to raise fertility rates, bitching that women need to stop being so picky with dating apps isn't going to get you anywhere, because that isn't the problem.
Can confirm, I had 3 kids with my first wife, 1 with my second and maybe I will squeeze one more in with my (hopefully) 3rd wife before I turn 60. As long as you have the minimum level of space, you can cope. If you want kids, just have them. You can work things out, retool your lives and make it work.
You're kind of proving my point lol. It's very important to me that I stick with 1 wife. You can definitely have kids in any financial situation but I think that doing so if you're not stable is a good recipe for divorce. Not to imply that's what happened to you, but this is the sort of thing I want to be extremely careful about.
Well my first wife passed from cancer after 20 years of marriage and three kids. Which is not to make you feel bad, but just to illustrate, you cannot control the future. If you both prize kids above financial success thats unlikely to lead to a divorce. If you're on different pages, then thats the real problem.
Maybe it will add 1% to your divorce chance, but you have to trade that against the chance, the timing is never right,or something happens to one of you in the meantime.
Sorry about your wife. I agree that the timing is never perfect but there are certainly tradeoffs to starting earlier vs later, even if you disagree on where exactly that tradeoff lands.
For me the priorities are:
Have enough kids (3-6)
Don't have kids after my wife hits advanced maternal age
Don't have kids until completely financially stable
In that order. Since we're still pretty young, we're not yet constrained by 1-2, so may as well work on fulfilling 3. In a few years 1 and 2 will start to be actual constraints, so by then we'll be having kids whether or not 3 is met.
I think this is generally how people should be making these decisions--get your priorities straight and then act accordingly, rather than waiting for ill-defined life circumstances to line up correctly.
That doesn't sound unreasonable to me, especially at your age. The thing to look out for is if you start pushing that start time back. That can go more quickly than you think.
In any case i hope everything works out for you!
Thanks!
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