Posted on 12/05/2019 2:50:53 PM PST by Morgana
We’ve reached a barking point in American history. (Yeah, I’m sorry for that one.) A few years ago, for the first time ever, the number of dogs in this country surpassed the number of children under eighteen. According to Statista, there are 90 million dogs in America today, up from just 68 million in 2000. And a higher percentage of American households own dogs than ever before.
By contrast, there are just over 73 million children. That still sounds like a lot, but as a percentage of the population, children have never been rarer. In 1960, for instance, over one-in-three Americans were under the age of eighteen. According to government projections, by 2050, children will make up less than a quarter of the population.
As you’d expect, this drop in birth rates corresponds to a drop in marriages. What you might not expect is that it also corresponds to a drop in happiness. The General Social Survey in 2018 found that Americans today are more miserable than they’ve been in decades. And replacing family with dogs isn’t reversing the trend.
Of course, what we increasingly hear today, in print and on television and movies, is that what will make us happy is the freedom that can come only from singleness and childlessness. Writing in The Atlantic recently, Mandy Len Catron bemoaned “What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse.” According to her, family life is isolating and unfair to outsiders, because spouses give most of their attention to each other and to their kids. When people get married, she writes, they retreat into “socially neglectful cocoons.”
London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan goes even further in his book, “Happily Ever After.” He says the only reason married people report being happier on average than singles is that they’re lying to save face. The book was corrected, by the way, when this claim turned out to be unsupportable.
In reality, the statistics are clear: Married people really are happier than those who are unmarried—by an average of ten percentage points. But is that because marriage makes people happy, or because happy people are more likely to get married?
A new paper by the Institute for Family Studies offers a surprising answer. Instead of looking at the effect of family itself, author James McQuivey decided to look at the effect of the desire for family. He asked over a thousand men and women how much they value having an emotionally intimate relationship, sexual faithfulness, and children. He then combined these answers into a single measure, which we might call a desire for a traditional, nuclear family.
He discovered that scoring higher on this measure predicted greater happiness and overall life satisfaction—regardless of whether or not the respondent was actually married or had kids!
It’s one of those results that makes you do a double take. After all, you’d expect people who want a family life and haven’t found it to be dissatisfied. But on average, they’re not. As McQuivey says, “[i]f you merely have the desire to pair bond and procreate, you are already happier than average…”
Act on that desire, he adds, and your happiness jumps, while your life satisfaction (a separate metric) “practically leaps off the chart.”
In other words, contrary to the thesis that getting married and having kids dooms you to misery, committing to a family is one of the most effective means ever created to train people to care for others. And a cornerstone of psychology is that other-centeredness brings human beings happiness.
Look, dogs are great and all, but we were made for communion with other people. The family bond is so central to our design that merely pursuing it leads to greater happiness.
For a society like ours, one in the midst of family and happiness shortages, the solution is obvious, but it won’t be found at the dog park.
“Be fruitful and multiply!”
“Arf, arf arf!”
At least one species is smart enough to ‘get it’...
My dad’s parents had their problems, but they were all-around wonderful people. NEVER said or did anything wrong to me or my sister.
Never knew my mom’s parents.
My parents though... hooooo boy. If you want a great example of how to ruin kids, or how not to raise kids, whichever expression you prefer, they’re a great example of that. It’s what I know and grew up with. I didn’t absorb any other relationships between two adults or parents and their children.
I’m taking what I feel is the only responsible route and not having children. I couldn’t bear to ruin someone’s life, especially someone that has done no wrong.
I truly understand.
Legacies, intended or not, material or not, flow down through the familial ties.
Positive legacies and even negative legacies can result in the making of great events or people.
They can also result in terrible actions.
I am more impressed with men and women who recognize they may not be suitable for parenthood and work to curtail actions that might/would create offspring.
I DO NOT MEAN ABORTION.
Folks who make hard choices about not parenting still can love their nieces and nephews. Well, until those nieces and nephews turn into teenagers.
LOL
Great news !
Population should not keep going up.
Cycles up & down are normal.
Me ? 3 kids. No pets
I can’t agree with that, though I get where you’re coming from because I used to think the same way. I don’t think there’s that much of a risk of ruining a kid’s life unless you are a pretty serious screwup. Raising a child is hard work, but there’s no mystery to it and just about anyone can manage it if they put in the work. If someone isn’t responsible enough to raise a child, then I have to wonder what they are responsible enough for.
And I don’t know anyone who wasn’t at least nervous about the responsibility of having a kid, but I also don’t know anyone who regrets having them.
It’s kind of hard to have a civilization if there’s no future, and it’s kind of hard to have a future if there are no children. I don’t think a little pressure to contribute is inappropriate.
“Yes they are spoiled and all 4 of them live in the house.”
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During our 30+ years of marriage we’ve enjoyed being stewards for 7 pooches and 1 cat that managed to con my beloved into loving him. LOL
My beloved and I did not produce children in this marriage. I brought two into our marriage.
One, the eldest, is the type that most parents would be grateful for as in learning life’s lessons, some hard and still go on with living.
The second, almost destroyed us. Intentionally. We learned definitions of medical terms that we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. He’s been forbidden to contact us at my beloved’s instructions and I back my husband up.
Furbabies are furbabies. They can be loved and petted and return it unquestionably.
I don’t resent those who do not have children. After having lived in terror because of actions of a child, it is only being honest in understanding why many do not wish for children.
About your furbabies living in the house.... where else would good stewards have their furbabies??
Okay. Huskies. Huskies like being out in the cold. But they do need to be combed and cooled the rest of the year!
I believe there are three types of parents:
1. Parents who are okay with being parents and not friends to their offspring. These parents are often the ones TARGETED by government groups because they do not like the standards the parents have set for their children.
2. Parents who are hooked on drugs or other forms of illicit behavior that precludes loving instruction and caring of their children. These are probably the number TWO risks to their children.
3. Parents who willingly abuse their children via sexual abuse or other forms of physical or psychological (sp?) abuse. These are probably the number ONE risks to children.
I wish could be swayed from my beliefs on this issue.
Life has shown me too many times that this is the current way of the Western World.
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Don’t know which this fits into but the parents I see? They usually on their screen touch phone while their baby is crying or their toddler is is going “momma momma” while doing the “up up” motions with their arms (any of you who are parents know what I mean by that.) The parents don’t see it because they on that damn machine and not looking at the kid.
In fact I’ve been in places where the baby just be crying something terrible and the adults just ignore the child and keep talking like they don’t hear it. I wanna scream “DO YOU SEE YOUR BABY NEEDS YOU??” But you can’t these days because people crazy
““DO YOU SEE YOUR BABY NEEDS YOU??” “
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They would fall under Type Two. Many, many people are escaping what they consider ‘boring’ lives into the fantasy lives of what they see on the Internet.
Daytime television sponsored by the Laundry companies over the years were the first to offer this type of drug.
With radio, a person could still function within the scope of their daily lives and couldn’t escape from their daily lives, so there was still family duties getting done.
With television all bets came off the table. Women, especially housewives, were enticed to spend more and more time watching and envying lifestyles different from what they were living. With the vast increases in the efficiency of the modern home it just increased the time they could spend watching the television.
With the advent of the cell phone it wasn’t so bad, at the first introduction. Like a taste of a drug when first offered by the local pusher, is how I viewed it.
When cell phones got Smart it became like the New Television Drug. Folks can live via these little devices other lives for moments or hours.
Now, toss on to that the issue with asking other folks to ask their kids to behave and it’s like a cake batter missing ingredients and with no time instructions for baking the cake. A total mess.
I was out yesterday evening at a local restaurant and I kept hearing this constant (and annoying) thump, thump, THUMP. I nailed it down to the little girl in the booth right behind my husband who was sitting across from me. After a few moments I got up and walked over and told the mother that I was terribly sorry for interrupting her. I asked her if she could ask her little girl to stop banging her feet against the booth. The mom said it was her little boy who was doing it. I advised her that I think the little girl is picking up what she got the little boy to stop doing. LOL She apologized. I told her that normally it wouldn’t bother me, and that at this time I had a severe headache and it was just causing me to notice the kicking. She again apologized and said her boy’s kicking was bother her.
I was fortunate in that this mother really cared about the problem being created.
I’ve also been on the receiving end of an extremely dirty look from a mother when I advised her quietly to tell her daughter to avoid bending over in church because her undergarments were showing. Like it was MY fault she didn’t monitor what her daughter was wearing or how NOT to bend over in a very short dress. LOL
Number of offspring is a symptom not a cause.
The cause is the U.N. Replacement Migration.
The cause is invasion.
Who here volunteers to fight?
Then there are cats.
Even a little pressure is inappropriate.
It certainly is difficult to raise a child. My birth givers failed spectacularly with me and my sister.
Many people who refuse to have children out of pure selfishness find convenient masks for their choice; environmentalism today provides a common one. It is not my business if people voluntarily choose to forego children, but I’m tired of hearing the same people complain about the number of foreigners here; they are being imported as a direct result of those Americans’ choices.
Any co-habitating woman who has pets probably has a slim chance of ever getting married, and an even slimmer chance of having children.
Cats don’t have enough human-like traits to ever replace dogs as “man’s best friend”; they make poor “pseudo-children”. I see more and more weirdos with dogs in baby strollers (”taking baby out to the park/store/whatever”); can’t do that with cats.
I believe “incels” don’t even date; they are “INvoluntary CELibates”, not even trying anymore. Never mind marriage; they aren’t even playing the field.
I understand they see no point in it; a recipe for cultural suicide, but preferable to them.
More importantly, pets involve a much shorter commitment than children; “pet parents” usually have much more turnover due to the shorter lifespans, so they have numerous opportunities to opt out (unlike the lifelong commitment to children, grandchildren, etc.).
“Incel” is a derogatory term invented by feminists and the left to shame men for leaving the plantation of relationships/ marriage and reproduction.
Re: your 116
Unless your kid turns out to be a monster.
I don’t know about you, but I want immigration closed for at least a decade, same with long-term work and school visas. Banda I’m fine with, because concerts are fun.
Even if the discrepancy of children and pets didnt exist, America has a pet ownership problem. It seems almost everybody thinks they need to ‘own’ a pet or three. It’s like it satisfies some human need to control and dominate other living beings. It’s truly a master & slave relationship particularly with dogs. Cat owners I’m sure will say it’s the other way around.
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