Posted on 05/25/2022 8:02:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
“Most people I know have zero or one kid.”
So Elon is “non-binary”.
I think it was the ‘80s when surveys started to show men interested for the first time in the earning power of their prospective wives. There’s a big boost in lifestyle and social rank if your family unit is raking in twice as much income.
I couldn’t afford the first one but now I’ve invested heavily in six that I couldn’t afford. There ain’t nothin better than babies. More people need to find that out.
How many professional athletes have done that & more???
I believe you have solved this problem...
Cause they don’t want to. The biggest societal change of the latter half of the 20th century was the end of the “expected path” and the rise of “choose your own adventure”. For a very long time adulthood was a path largely dictated by society: men got on their career track, found a spouse, had kids, and looked forward to retirement; women developed their domestic skills, found a spouse, had kids, and looked forward to their spouse’s retirement. That was life. Everybody did it. Very few even contemplated varying from that.
But then in the 60s that started to change. People started seeing options. Certainly effective available birth control changed a lot of that. Kids became technically optional, which eventually led to them being societally optional. Gap years where you have a “retired” person’s adventure before you get on your “track”. Career changes, now you’re not set on your track. Long term bachelorhood, some folks just aren’t really wired for marriage.
There really is no fix. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. People are going to choose their own paths. And for many the responsibility and permanence of kids just isn’t on that path. Best you can really do is make kids sound more appealing. Not really sure how one accomplishes that, but that is the “solution”.
I’m wealthy and I have 4. I think it’s about religion primarily. I’m a devout church going evangelical Christian. I know devout Jews in Israel are having huge families. Lots of babies over there.
I have 4 kids and worked P/T for 10 years while they were little. I was full time both before and after. So no need to go down to one income—perhaps just a reduced income for a short period of time.
My parents and my in-laws helped by babysitting one day a week each so I could go to work two days a week (for 10 years). It’s a great solution for many reasons.
...and so on
that’s true- they want the wives to bring in $$ instead of babies.
or they have the kids to shut grandma up and then there is still not enough $$, with everybody driving a monster SUV, ect.
we were so broke but did not know it!!!
That kind of broke in many ways was superior. Less materialistic, different values.
Sure it is not JUST about the money. There are many factors as other responses mentioned. But it did not start in the early 70’s as some may interpret from the graph being below 2.1 after that point. The decline started late 50’s. But the worldview that started the progression is from the late 40’s! Before then the worldview was not looking into the future as the article infers. That started in the late 40’s after the war,”I’m going to give my kids a better future than I had”. This is what drove in sharp increase in college enrollment, initiated and supported by the GI bill. They were told that if you had a college education you can always get a job, thinking back on the depression. However, a large percentage of those unemployed during the depression were college graduates. Many engineers, lawyers and accountants sat on the park benches and traveled the rails.
Before the war parents were thinking of the present day they were occupying and trying to feed their families. Those years in the late 40’s and 50’s were turbulant years economically; it just did not seem that way compared to the depression and today we don’t talk about those years, so we assume it was comfortable.
After the war, the kids (boomers) were trained to be self-centered by the parents striving to make sure their kids would never suffer. “What do you want to do”, “What do you want to become” “Use the government to pay for it: GI bill, loans. This attitude started to kick in on the fertility rate by the early boomers late 50’s. Why blame them; that is how they were trained. All the reasons started to kick in: don’t limit yourself so early, live a little, kids cost money, I don’t want to divide my time between them, travel some and see the world.....
Then wanting better for your kids turned into wanting them to be happy, which turned into ensuring they felt good about themselves, which turned into don’t you dare criticize my kid. To follow this progression: the parents made sure their kids could be part of the baseball team, ballet, ect. To take them to to these activities, to making sure nothing interfers with these activities or their self image (helicopter or bulldozer parents). Ya, I was part of that progression. I thought I was better then most, I was one step back of the current malaise.
From where I stand now, I think the parents should not put emphasis on ensuring the kids feel good about themselves or are involved with after school activities. The focus should be the family. And if possible, depending on the fathers employment, to have the kids, age dependent, involved with the fathers career. You know, similar to the family farm or business. And involved with how the parents are interacting with the community: helping an aging neighbor, saving a down trodden neighborhood. This way the parents actually are working to ensure their kids have it better but the kids don’t see it as it centered on them and are not being trained to think of themselves first. And to bring this back around to the theme of this thread, the fertility rate will naturally go up, I assume.
I have examined the data going back to 1800, just after Malthus predicted overpopulation and widespread famine, which never happened.
There is an ironclad relationship between development and population growth. I have no idea what causes which, but it always happens in every country.
As development takes hold and a country transitions from rural poverty to middle class urbanism, the birth rate begins to decline. It happened in Britain and France in the 19th Century. Once this decline begins, it never reverses.
The post-WWII Baby Boom temporarily reversed this decline, but countries later reverted back to it.
Now, all of Europe and Japan are below replacement rates. The US has been below replacement rate, but it was masked by immigration.
Nearly the entire world is experiencing decline in the birth rate. By 2050, world population will stop growing and stabilize. But, it won't be long until world population begins to decline.
Why does this happen? Hard to say. Certainly, parents had an incentive to raise large families in a rural environment but the urban environment reverses that incentive.
The bottom line is no country has ever been able to reverse this pattern, no matter what they try. The US won't either.
To the contrary, raising children is a very wise economic decision. We want to flourish at home.
Back when I was in school, in the age of “The Population Bomb” and “Soylent Green”, we had school events where speakers were invited to explain to us that having children was destroying the planet. It was the early rise of the religion of “climate change” -— except back then the planet was getting colder and we were all going to freeze to death in our lifetimes if we didn’t stop multiplying. There was even a song they taught us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK3oWQfb_2M
Fast forward a lifetime, and I know from class reunions that about half of us never had any children, and are now childless senior citizens. We did not “replace” ourselves -— it was the “right” thing to do.
We are doctors, lawyers, own businesses, employers of lots of people, well educated, and successful -— and our genes have been culled from future generations because of propaganda fed to us a little more than children.
I suspect there were still lots of welfare babies born during the same era since welfare Moms got paid to make them. They are our future by our own choices, and subsequent attrition.
We have eight.
It doesn’t help that the government, media, schools, etc are pushing communism. It’s constant propaganda about marriage bad, having kids bad, homosexuality good, trannys good, etc. It’s non stop.
My take on this. I was born in 1961 when the deep state began stealing the culture. First with Alfred Kinsey [pedo] & sexual revolution just before I was born and then in 1973 with legalized abortion. Now go back to the graph at the top of this article and see how these 2 events caused the birthrates to plummet while my gen and all those after were encouraged to live sexually like there were no consequences.
Best part of my life was fatherhood, in different times I’m sure it would have been at least 5, the more the better if only I’d have sought a wife who also wanted lots of kids. Instead I got 5 (or more) the wrong way - 1 bio daughter, 1 adopted son, 2 more sons adopted into my heart and possibly 1 in college. If I was not even told in college then were there others who also chose not to tell me?
What a screwed up culture - we all got some kind of ‘Brady Bunch’ treatment as each next gen got more and more fractured by a me-me-me culture. I’m sorry and deeply regret my behavior, wish I could take most of it back. I always tried to be the best weekend father I could be but it’s about as effective as trying to win a swimming race with only 1 arm.
Mostly I hope our culture and worldwide that we end this leftward downward spiral soon. Large family and small government someday in my lifetime please.
You are correct.
People have been trained not to have children and it will take many generations to train them otherwise.
People are generally obedient to their training.
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