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Are Pets Replacing Kids?
I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.
Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.
Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).
Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.
I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.
I agree, but I’m sympathetic to the degenerate hedonist a bit more than you. Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance. You can dodge the shackles of instinct by diverting those feelings towards a creature that will never grow up, talk back, or steal your laptop for heroin money. Yes, society will collapse because of this, but it’s a free rider problem. Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.
Pretty much. "collapse will come but it won't be my problem" Kids are low status unless you are in Hollywood. Then it seems to be reversed.
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It also dies in about a decade unless you happened to make it a parrot (which might talk back or swear a blue streak at your funeral if you're based enough).
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Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect." Think skydiving or similar. IMO the availability of easy and effective family planning makes it really easy to look at that description and decide that misery doesn't sound fun, and hedonism seems like a better short-term choice. I think it's similar in that regard to, say, unhealthy-but-tasty food and living metabolically healthy.
I don't know that I consider birth control to be a net negative, but I can at least see how given the choice people might decide to not take the leap that turns out better primarily in hindsight. I would agree with other posters that this can probably be countered with a reasonably small amount of culture shifting to make child rearing and families higher status, and perhaps a bit more general encouragement to temporary discomfort that makes things better in the long run.
As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?
First baby screamed All. The. Time for the first 7 months or so, and continued to be fairly high maintenance thereafter. Second baby exists partly as a distraction for first baby, and is also much calmer and more enjoyable as an infant. I do not think this is on account of anything we did, as far as I can tell.
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Feedings continually interrupting sleep are a form of torture, and that was the first few months of each baby.
From maybe 9-months-old onward has been net fun, but I think the bigger tradeoff is the growing senses of connection and meaning vs the reduction of individual freedom. More and more family member needs and schedules mean less and less opportunity to do adventurous things on a whim ... but now everything we do as a family, I get to experience empathetically from all their perspectives at once, along with the dual experience of watching how the activities change them, and the additional motivation from that has me actually getting off my butt and doing interesting things no less often than I did when it was simpler 20 years ago.
Fellow dad here; my wife had it ... not better or worse, but definitely different. She felt a bond with the newborns that I didn't fully match until they started talking, but on the other hand every pregnancy was exhausted suffering for her.
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One terrible week when one child was sick at about 1 month was pretty bad. Other than that it's much more of the hard but intensely rewarding here.
Another unexpected benefit of being here is there aren't nearly so many subreddit s to spill personal information.
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I would say that the overall experience has definitely been positive, but it also brings a lot of not-always-fun tasks like late-night doctor visits, dirty diapers, and scheduling parent-teacher conferences. Doing things together is lots of fun, as is watching them learn and grow, but I'm still learning to work with the way the interaction is almost entirely interrupt-driven and impossible to schedule ("I fell down, I need a band-aid right now!").
As someone who's taken care of pets, my experience is that it's also rather interrupting. Either it's an emergency (cat throws up) or it's something that makes me have to put down something I'd rather be doing lest I procrastinate into near-infinity (walking the dog).
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I would call that what it is: not fun. You can have fond memories of things that aren't fun, but that doesn't make those things fun.
I think your food analogy kind of undermines your thesis as well. We all understand that we should eat vegetables and not junk food, but very few people are able to say they do so because they enjoy vegetables more. The reality is: vegetables suck, you just have to eat them. So that isn't exactly doing a great job of supporting the idea that having kids is fun.
I recognize the higher-level point you're making, and I think it's a valid point, but on the object level I think you might need a steamer or an air fryer. If your experience is that vegetables suck, you may get a lot of mileage out of figuring out ways to cook them that you actually like.
If I have the choice between a bag of doritos or a bowl of lightly steamed broccoli with lemon, pepper, and a sprinkle of msg, I'll generally take the broccoli (assuming both are already prepared). As snacks go, chips are cheaper, and much more convenient, and much easier to mindlessly eat with one hand while doing something else, but I don't think I actually experience more enjoyment while eating chips than I do while eating vegetables that I cooked according to my own preferences.
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This may not be your experience, but knowing that the meal is healthy can enhance the enjoyment of the meal like an exotic spice.
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This seems like a solvable problem: make having kids higher status. You can't just unilaterally declare something to be high status by dictatorial fiat, but there are things you can do to push in that direction, or even more easily, stop pushing in the opposite direction. I think this one of my main complaints against the Blue Tribe, and all this stuff about the destruction of the family unit, is that they seem to be deliberately lowering the status of children and families. There's a qualitative difference between removing oppressive structures that force people into certain lifestyles, and actively disparaging those lifestyles and mocking people who like them.
Nobody should be forced to be a stay at home parent and raise seven children, but if somebody chooses that lifestyle then we should celebrate them as a strong person and a valuable contributor to society. Not mock them as backwards and oppressed and quaint. Everyone who mocks and disparages traditional families and cultures lowers the effective status of those lifestyles and makes other people less likely to choose them. People shouldn't be forced between a high status job versus a low status family, they should be able to have a high status family, provided they actually do a competent job of raising kids. But traditional families are yesterdays fashion, and red-coded which makes them automatically distasteful to the blue tribe. Families didn't used to be low status, but in the process of destroying gender roles our society has completely and utterly ignored the collateral damage, resulting in the current situation. Victory at any costs indeed.
I agree that we should not be mocking mothers with lots of kids, but how do you go about celebrating them without implicitly denigrating women with few or no kids as lazy or selfish?
Edit: I guess the answer to my question is that you would celebrate it until you got to a point where both outcomes were more or less normalized within the culture, so that being a prolific mother was respected, but choosing to produce few or no children was understandable and normal.
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They sort of do this in Turkey. Daytime television is filled with marriage shows, only legitimating dating and flirting within the context of marriage and reproduction. When the AKP (Erdogan's party) took power, they shifted the entire cultural/media apparatus to be more pro-family, buying up channels and manipulating the programs they showed. This naturally came at the cost of the rights-based understanding of gender equality. Government leaders announce that they're doing everything for the family, that they want people to reproduce.
https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2018.1443838
For your information, daytime marriage shows were banned in Turkey by decree by the broadcasting regulator a couple years ago (at the absolute peak of their popularity). For corrupting public morals. To be honest, those shows very quickly degenerated into reality TV shows full of casting agency models trying to achieve fame through scandals.
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I want to highlight this comment because I move back and forth between a comfortably-well-above-replacement-fertility subculture and the mainstream USA- there is a tradeoff between women's rights/women's lib/gender equality/free gender roles and fertility rate. I do not see any possible way around that, either. If you have a 3.5 tfr then a good portion of women of childbearing age are either going to be pregnant or caring for small children at any given time, and it is simply not a rational economic decision for most women to prioritize their careers while having multiple children. And an individual woman who has four kids probably got started before she could get settled into a high status career where it would make sense to make careers a priority even with multiple kids. You can't generally trade off against that by asking the husband to make career sacrifices, either, for biological reasons.
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The thing about degenerate societies is that no one is in charge, just institutions careening down their tracks. You’re lower status not (only) because you’re a stay-at-home mom, but because you aren’t a practicing lawyer/doctor/girl boss, like in the tv shows. You have less time to post TikTok’s about the hip brewery you found or how great your guru is or how tasteful your 1 bedroom soho loft is. The status game is global now kiddo and if you think individual players making individual decisions can beat back moloch I’ve got a good essay for you.
In blue spaces kids are a luxury good, for people both rich enough to afford them and attractive enough to bag a secure LTR. This is fucked and bad and doomed long term but it’s a pretty reasonable outcome if you understand some of the market forces.
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I'm not convinced that this is truly the Molochian equilibrium in the long run. The whole race to the bottom via market forces occurs in highly competitive industries because any industry that chooses morals or slack over profit gets outcompeted and replaced by the more ruthless ones that optimize for profit alone. The market forces in culture cause cultures and ideologies which deliberately propagate themselves and suppress other cultures to spread, while cultures which are tolerant and allow dissent get replaced. Things which are more likely to spread are more likely to exist, even if they sacrifice things we like in exchange for spreadability. It's just the tautology of evolution applied more generally.
So in a cultural sense, people who sacrifice families for careers will have more wealth, and thus more power and status in a society that rewards wealth with status. And thus this ideology spreads conditional on society, or significant subsets of society, conveying status for wealth. But actual evolution still exists, so this is inherently unstable. People who don't reproduce will get replaced by people who do reproduce. We see this via demographic shifts, as some races and cultural subsets reproduce much more than others and their relative populations increase. Now, maybe some of those people will be culturally captured by the Molochian culture giving status for wealth, but some of them won't, especially if they have a culture which has anti-bodies against this particular meme.
I don't think the Molochian future is one where anti-family leftists take over everything and then the human population dies out, it's one where all the anti-family people get replaced, either by an offshoot that re-prioritizes family, or more likely by a new culture driven by immigrants or Amish or something who resist the temptation to change cultures, keep having large families, and eventually grow to large enough numbers to impose their own views on status
Why do comments like these imply that the culture which prioritizes career and the single life over parenthood is evil, by comparing them to Molochian processes like immoral business practices. Preferring childlessness is not necessarily 'anti-family'. Its a bit irritating to me that a place like this which should have people with different outlooks on these topics seems to be in overwhelming agreement about them. Why is the culture giving status for wealth considered "molochian", but not the culture giving status for having a big family. Am I mistaken about what "molochian" means, because this seems to be a case of consensus building.
The original post describing Moloch from Scott in case you haven't read it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Moloch is neither evil nor good, on its own. Moloch is the blind idiot God, a process that does what it does for its own bizarre reasons that are difficult (though in some cases possible) to comprehend, is extremely powerful and difficult to resist, and does not care about you or the things you care about. It's often hard to even notice, because it's not a real person doing things for a reason, it's an emergent property of numerous people doing different things. It's the structure of incentives driving in a direction that almost nobody actually wants to go. In some instances, it will actually do things you like, though mostly by accident, and usually people only use the term for negative things. But I would argue that evolution is probably the number one notable Molochian process and I very much like many of the things it's done for me and the human race, and all of the various positive traits I have, though it's also responsible for zero-sum and negative-sum features and drives that lead to ruthlessness that I don't like. So I don't necessarily think describing something as Molochian necessarily implies that it's entirely evil, but it is usually implied at least that it's negative, or else a different term would be used, so I sort of see your point.
To address some of your other points, I agree that preferring childlessness, as an individual, is not necessarily anti-family. But I think a large subset of modern culture is anti-family, either explicitly, implicitly, or both. Just check out /r/childfree, though that's probably a bit of a weakman, I think the much more common situation is just people disvaluing children and disincentivizing it in others. Poor maternity/paternity leave, poor ability for someone to take a decade off work and then come back without crippling their career, lack of shame and social sanctions against men who impregnate women outside of marriage, or for women who get pregnant outside of marriage, lack of respect for dedicated parents who choose families instead of careers. Lack of support for homeschooling, increasing idealogical capture of schools as moral authorities replacing parents rather than as educational supplements, expansion of the welfare state and the governments role in caring for children rather than the parents, etc. All of these contribute to worse incentives to have children, which I would describe as anti-family incentives, and then people rationally respond to incentives and choose to not get married or get married later, and have fewer children, or children in less stable homes (family does not mean maximize total fecundity, it means raising happy healthy families, which massively benefits from two parents)
So I wouldn't describe people who choose not to have families for personal reasons as necessarily anti-family, but I would describe the general culture that's obsessed with careers, money, and casual sex as anti-family.
My point was that this is Molochian on a memetic sense, in that it spreads via culture and is bad for the people living in it. If the culture giving status for having a big family was memetically Molochian, it wouldn't be getting replaced so easily. But I think that it is genetically Molochian, in that as certain people have fewer children they will get replaced by people who have more. I don't think western society being wiped out and replaced by immigrants and/or Amish and/or some cult that explicitly requires all women to birth at least 10 children is a good thing, but is the direction I predict the pendulum going if the anti-family culture goes too far. I actually think that a reasonable balance involving children incentivized but not mandated such that we end up at or slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1 would be a useful anti-body against this outcome.
I think the reason that the culture giving status for having a big family was replaced was because in the past having a big family symbolized high income and good health, because those were the attributes that allowed people to achieve a big family, there was also not the option to not end up with a big family if you had the means because getting married and raising children was seen as a religious duty, and negating or defying the procreative purpose of sex was seen as sinful with all that that implied. Nowadays when people have the freedom to separate sex from baby making, most people do not desire big families and prefer to get married later. I don't think you explained why the culture giving status for career and money is bad for the people living in it, I think that the default conclusion would be that it is better for most of the people living in it than the pro family culture, otherwise how would it have spread the way it has? You would have to explain that it misleads or lies to people and that they would be better off in a pro-family culture.
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People are willing to spend quite a bit on luxury goods provided they signal status. I don't think it's impossible that kids could be seen that way, but it's certainly not the case right now: IMO there's some lingering anti-natalism from a few decades of the environmental movement that defines children as "selfish." In a decade or two I could imagine the general sentiment shifting.
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Very true despite what feminists will say about having no problem with women that want to be moms. It is either or. My wife’s cousin, maybe 7 years back was in elementary school and the teacher asked what every kid wanted to be when they grew up. Her response of “a mom” earned her parents a concerned call from the teacher, chiding them that they should encourage her to have bigger aspirations. Of course she just came out as a lesbian last month, so mission accomplished I guess.
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