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All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
I think you can. Theoretically it's possible. If we raised cattle the way parents are expected to raise kids, nobody would ever get to eat beef. Easing the regulations on parenting and education would help the supply issue.
If the birth rate issue was serious, we probably shouldn't have any child protective services at all, as it should be pretty trivial to demonstrate that the fear of legal repercussions for accidental child harm prevents the average non-abusive parents from adding another child. Exhibit 1 on travel-related regulations reducing birth rate:
When the bureaucrats run out of peasants to feed them they'll find out that you can't eat paper. It's odd how millenials who literally grew up with the libertarian revolution of the web, birthing such bureaucracy-killers as uber, youtube, amazon or onlyfans, still hold dear to letting dead people decide how their life should be lived.
Unironically.
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
Well I'm not saying you should be doing this in the current circumstances, but there are some easy things that could be done to make it easier to be a parent, legally and socially.
Currently we have parents getting arrested for letting their child walk to a nearby shop in a tiny town.
Yes and of course you'd get judged if you were to put them on a leash, even though that's the safest, most responsible thing to do as a parent of such a child.
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