My dad was one of 13, my mother one of 5, I had a huge family growing up, but most of my uncles and aunts didn’t have children, so I had fewer cousins. But still 11-12. Still big. Fast forward to 2023 and nearly all the older generation are no longer with us, families are stretched across Canada, America, UK, Germany, India, and barely anyone knows anyone else any more.
One cousin who I hadn’t seen for, shit, 31 years, surprised me by arriving in London from Canada one day with her daughter and texting me from a UK number to triply-confuse me. We had an absolutely awesome week, two only children reconnecting after so long, and junior got to meet - even if do say so myself - a very cool uncle who knew all the best places to go.
So my mission for the last five or six years has been to try and connect all my cousins’ kids to my own, so they can hopefully maintain a casual connection and come up with their own relationship. Maybe before I die I can organize a big family get-together of just the kids hanging out.
Cousins are a really great way to be around role models who are in a next phase of life.
Siblings are usually too close in age (or younger), parents are many many steps ahead and experienced your current phase in a different world. But if you're entering high school it's useful to have a connection with people entering college, or getting their first job. That rarely happens outside of the family.
That’s a function of smaller families and parents delaying children until ~30+, one of my siblings was in collage when another was born.
Sure that’s an unusually wide range today, but if you trace family trees you can find many examples of aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews.
I have 84 first cousins - 44 on my Dad's side, 40 on my Mom's. I lived in the Philippines for 3.5 years with my Dad's extended family and got to know almost all my cousins on that side. It was a great time and all my cousins were amazing. Our Christmas celebrations were the best and I still miss them, 40+ years later.
I have 4. All mom’s side. I’m only grandchild on dad’s side. My only child is a male and carries my name which is really rare and would have ended with me. The burden now lies on him. He has 1 cousin on his mom’s side and because we had him later in life, with some bad luck, he lost both his grandfathers before he was even born.
It’s wild to me. I try to be thoughtful in building deep family-like connections outside of actual families to hopefully help compensate. My grandpa was an huge formative influence on me and that’s the part that saddens me the most (he doesn’t even know what having a grandpa is like).
Also our holiday gatherings aren’t huge, usually 10-20, but the family that comes is pretty far removed from nuclear just because there’s not a lot of us.
There was a time when I had as many living grandparents (5, as my mom's parents had divorced and married her stepparents long before I was born) as surviving siblings (1 of 3), cousins (2), aunts (1), and uncles (1 of 4) combined.
Obviously didn't happen intentionally that so many of them died so relatively young, but it was a weird thing to notice.
I think my family has one of the biggest that cousin declines ever: my mother had 32 cousins, while I had only 1. I know that number for a fact because I've done my own genealogy. I guess the advantage is I have a huge number of second cousins
that is one of the reasons I hope to have many children as I get older so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with.
Same here, but it's over 30 on my dad's side; My mom only has 10ish cousins. I have a single cousin.
You know how kids go through phases of what job they want when they grow up? Every time I switched, my dad would say "Oh! My cousin so-and-so does/did that!" To the point where when I said "fighter pilot," I was, perhaps, less surprised than I should be when he said "My cousin flies an F-16 in the Thunderbirds. We should go to one of his air-shows"
> so that my nephews would have cousins to hang out with.
That is a very weird reason to have lots of children, unless you were speaking in jest. If you do decide to have many children, I hope it'll be for more than the mirth of your nephews.
Well there are obviously other reasons I want to have cousins, but that's indeed one of them. I think it's because I've experienced having not many cousins first-hand, even the one cousin I have is 10 years younger than me so I don't hang out with him much.
Also my mom was the first of her cousins to get married and have a child (me) so I always felt like I was in a gray area when hanging out with her cousins because there was too little of an age gap between us for them to not take me seriously (and not treat me as a child) but also I wasn't old enough to connect with them and live through their family lore.
few that was hard to write
more fun context: The age gap between me and my mother's youngest cousin is only 3 years so I hope you can see how I am considered like the true youngest cousin between all the cousins.
Cousins are my greatest lens into human interaction.
Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people relating to their cousins.
Let's start with me. My paternal grandfather had nearly 20 kids with two different women. Those kids then got scattered all over the world, and thus the grandchildren as well. My other grandfather had five and adopted another, and the same thing happened to them, war spread them all over.
So I have two cousin networks that are massive and spread all over. I'm able to compare things like the French and Danish education systems by getting a first-hand impression. I can ask a Bay Area doctor how his experience is, or a Toronto accountant. I can compare humor across the Atlantic. Growing up, I could see cousins starting to date and get married, having kids. The younger ones are still observing, but are young enough to give an insight into what kids are like nowadays.
In terms of studying people, it's hard to get better access.
The emotional angle from the article is right, too. Cousins occupy this nice middle between seeing you all the time like your siblings, and not having to care about you, like strangers. When your parents die, the cousins are sad. But they are also not falling apart and are able to help out. They know common stories like what your grandparents did, how your parents met, and so on. But you also don't have to do much to maintain this, like you might with certain friends. With a large enough network you don't even need to talk to any particular cousin to get all the stories about them, whichever cousin is passing through will tell you news from his part of the network and you give them yours.
In terms of other people, what is most striking to me is where on the near-far scale different cultures seem to put the cousins. Some societies seem to see cousins as basically friends: a relationship that's nice if it's good but if things so sour, no big deal. Others will think of cousins as basically siblings who live in another house: your aunt and uncle can tell you off just like your parents and nobody bats an eye. It seems to be common that birth/wedding/death news goes to all cousins though, regardless of what distance your society places on the cousin relation, and regardless of whether things have soured.
This comment made me lol. This is one of those things where the more money is involved, the worse the results. A shared struggle/history/luck and decades and generations is the price, so if you get started now, maybe your grandkids will benefit, but not you for at least a few decades.
For a small subscription, we will implant good memories into your brain. You will have common shared memories with our other gold tier subscribers. Your corporate family will be just like cousins, people with whom you share a bond, a common history, memories, and subscription fees. You can always ask them for advice and they will know you. If you're travelling to an unfamiliar place, we'll hook you up with a new cousin.
This is one of the saddest things about American life. I still have intense memories of being surrounded by cousins, mostly living in the same city, as a small child in Bangladesh. My wife had the same experience growing up in Oregon. Very sad that my kids will never have the same experience.
People living the life they want isn’t sad. They are empowered, and we should be happy for them. If the question is regret, life isn’t fair, and we all eventually die. Cultivate emotional fortitude for adult choices made with all available information. If you’re lacking wanted family, cultivate community.
Individual “empowerment” is a false prophet. Millennials are the freest and most empowered generation in history—not to mention materially better off—but they seem pretty salty.
Are the salty ones the ones that are free and empowered? I work at a big tech co with a lot of millenials making pretty good money, and no one that I come across seems salty.
But then I read sites like reddit r/antiwork or whatever and see all the salt, with people making sweeping generalized statements about how the entire millenial generation has been screwed over by boomers and will never move out of their mom's basement.
It's a function of money and bubbles within class strata. Antiwork is all minimum wage workers (or those making low to median amounts of money) and they see their wages not growing while things get more expensive. Your tech peers are relatively rich so they wouldn't be salty. Both are different bubbles that rarely intersect.
In fact, this reminds me of Slate Star Codex's I can tolerate anything except the outgroup [0], where the author talks about how he doesn't interact with conservatives even though he's aware that half of the US is composed of them.
> My hunch – both the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe, for whatever reason, identify “America” with the Red Tribe. Ask people for typically “American” things, and you end up with a very Red list of characteristics – guns, religion, barbecues, American football, NASCAR, cowboys, SUVs, unrestrained capitalism.
> That means the Red Tribe feels intensely patriotic about “their” country, and the Blue Tribe feels like they’re living in fortified enclaves deep in hostile territory.
> Here is a popular piece published on a major media site called America: A Big, Fat, Stupid Nation. Another: America: A Bunch Of Spoiled, Whiny Brats. Americans are ignorant, scientifically illiterate religious fanatics whose “patriotism” is actually just narcissism. You Will Be Shocked At How Ignorant Americans Are, and we should Blame The Childish, Ignorant American People.
> Needless to say, every single one of these articles was written by an American and read almost entirely by Americans. Those Americans very likely enjoyed the articles very much and did not feel the least bit insulted.
> On both sides, “American” can be either a normal demonym, or a code word for a member of the Red Tribe.
Fascinating. I think "white people" operates the same way today.
> The other day, I logged into OKCupid and found someone who looked cool. I was reading over her profile and found the following sentence:
> > Don’t message me if you’re a sexist white guy
> And my first thought was “Wait, so a sexist black person would be okay? Why?”
> (The girl in question was white as snow)
> Around the time the Ferguson riots were first starting, there were a host of articles with titles like Why White People Don’t Seem To Understand Ferguson, Why It’s So Hard For Whites To Understand Ferguson, and White Folks Listen Up And Let Me Tell You What Ferguson Is All About, this last of which says:
> > Social media is full of people on both sides making presumptions, and believing what they want to believe. But it’s the white folks that don’t understand what this is all about. Let me put it as simply as I can for you […]
> > No matter how wrong you think Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown were, I think we can all agree they didn’t deserve to die over it. I want you white folks to understand that this is where the anger is coming from. You focused on the looting….”
> And on a hunch I checked the author photos, and every single one of these articles was written by a white person.
> White People Are Ruining America? White. White People Are Still A Disgrace? White. White Guys: We Suck And We’re Sorry? White. Bye Bye, Whiny White Dudes? White. Dear Entitled Straight White Dudes, I’m Evicting You From My Life? White. White Dudes Need To Stop Whitesplaining? White. Reasons Why Americans Suck #1: White People? White.
> We’ve all seen articles and comments and articles like this. Some unsavory people try to use them to prove that white people are the real victims or the media is biased against white people or something. Other people who are very nice and optimistic use them to show that some white people have developed some self-awareness and are willing to engage in self-criticism.
> But I think the situation with “white” is much the same as the situation with “American” – it can either mean what it says, or be a code word for the Red Tribe.
> (except on the blog Stuff White People Like, where it obviously serves as a code word for the Blue tribe. I don’t know, guys. I didn’t do it.)
> I realize that’s making a strong claim, but it would hardly be without precedent. When people say things like “gamers are misogynist”, do they mean the 52% of gamers who are women? Do they mean every one of the 59% of Americans from every walk of life who are known to play video or computer games occasionally? No. “Gamer” is a coded reference to the Gray Tribe, the half-branched-off collection of libertarianish tech-savvy nerds, and everyone knows it. As well expect that when people talk about “fedoras”, they mean Indiana Jones. Or when they talk about “urban youth”, they mean freshmen at NYU. Everyone knows exactly who we mean when we say “urban youth”, and them being young people who live in a city has only the most tenuous of relations to the actual concept.
> And I’m saying words like “American” and “white” work the same way. Bill Clinton was the “first black President”, but if Herman Cain had won in 2012 he’d have been the 43rd white president. And when an angry white person talks at great length about how much he hates “white dudes”, he is not being humble and self-critical.
Nope, completely different, so much that r/overemployed makes fun of r/antiwork-ers. Those who are overemployed are grateful to be in a position to do so, they are not salty at all, quite the opposite.
I love that we can so violently disagree and still approach this from a place of intellectual curiosity and civil discourse. I always appreciate your viewpoint and your perspective.
They will call the millennials the “little boomers” in the future to refer to the killing any of them who bought low interest rate houses made. The millennials don’t realize it yet but soon they will be the Karen’s and hated generation for their failures to do anything meaningful with their wealth.
Should young children be empowered to touch hot stoves, or restricted in doing so? Empowerment to do whatever you want is not a priori good; rather, it is a prerequisite to enable other goods. But it’s important to recognize that the power to choose means the power to choose wrongly. Shouldn’t then our goal to be the creation of structures that help us make better choices?
We’re talking adults, not children. If you’re old enough to go to war and be treated as an adult by society, you can choose whether to have children. Children regretted is far worse than children not had regretted, in my opinion. ~40% of annual US and global pregnancies are unintended (the percentage that are unintended and unwanted is unknown).
Choices have consequences, but humans have the right to make their choices, hopefully fully informed. Who are we to tell someone their reproductive choice was wrong? That’s their decision. You can do everything right and still lose. That’s life.
Different cultures prioritise different things. Some cultures prioritise individual choice over reproduction, others prioritise reproduction over individual choice. What's going to happen in the long-run? The culture that prioritises individual choice will shrink, the culture that prioritises reproduction will boom.
A good example of this is Israel - the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), roughly 13% of Israel's population, prioritise large families over individual choice, and are booming; secular Jews, (by and large) do the opposite, and while currently around 40% of Israel's population, are slowly shrinking; it is predicted that in 2065, close to 50% of all Israeli children will be from Haredi families, only 35% from non-Haredi Jewish families (secular or moderately religious).
Over time, everyone becomes atheistic. Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity. It is not that most of the children who are born from reproduction-heavy religions will continue the practice, as we have seen in human history, when people have been much more religious than now.
In fact, I see this attitude so often online that I believe it's some sort of logical fallacy akin to the Malthusian trap, that "they" (for some definition of "they" as chosen by the doomer) will eventually take over lest we reprioritize having kids, when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
It isn't universally true. There is no evidence the Haredim are becoming atheistic, nor the Old Order Amish. Yes, there are defectors from both (mostly not to atheism, mostly to more moderate versions of the respective religion), but not enough to counteract the high birth rates.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
The Exclusive Brethren [0] are notoriously well-off, yet they continue to have large families, and there's no evidence of a high defection rate of their children.
> when in reality the entire world's population is dropping, and it's distributed mostly equally, even in areas where there are some of the highest birth rates in the world historically, like India, China, and Nigeria.
According to OECD data, [1] in 2005, Israel's TFR was 2.84. By 2017, it had grown to 3.11. From there, it declined to a low of 2.90 in 2020 (probably in part COVID-related), but by 2021 had rebounded to 3.00, and I expect it will probably be above 3.00 when the 2022 data is released. Israel's TFR in 2017 (3.11) was higher than its TFR in 1981 (3.06). So Israel is at least one counterexample to the narrative of a uniform global population decline.
This is a misconception based on recent experience in the west. In the Muslim world, the trend has been the exact opposite. Neither of my grandmothers (one from a well-to-do urban family, another from a village) wore hijab. In their old age, they covered part of their hair with their sari, as is the south Asian custom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheikh_Hasina_Darshana_.... None of my aunts wore hijab. But several of my cousins do. There’s a video of the President of Egypt laughing at the prospect of a hijab law in 1958: https://youtu.be/brlFxRYCggE?si=jBZ97TCpz3P7LASC. Today, 90% of Egyptian women wear a headscarf.
> Not having children is a function of a society's wealth (which is then correlated to education which is the correlated to non-religiosity), not (necessarily) their religiosity.
Affluence allows individual independence, which tends to weaken religiosity. But it’s the religiosity (and social policy—in most societies, the two are closely connected) that then drives reproductive choices. Religious Pakistan has almost double the fertility rate of secular Bangladesh, despite similar GDP per capita. Muslim Americans have more affluence and more education, but also much higher birth rates than both white Americans generally, and non-college educated white Americans in places where that group is secular and not evangelical. West Virginia has a comparable fertility rate to Washington State or Colorado. Oregon has one of the lowest fertility rates, despite being relatively poor and rural. (In red states, you can see a stark contrast between places that are populated by descendants of Germans, or British planters, and those that are populated by Scots-Irish.)
> Religious Pakistan has almost double the fertility rate of secular Bangladesh, despite similar GDP per capita.
I agree with your overall conclusion, but nowadays Bangladesh's GDP per capita is significantly higher than Pakistan's, so that part of your argument no longer holds. And, Bangladesh's economy is now growing significantly faster than Pakistan's (in 2022, 7.1% vs 4.7%), so it seems likely that Bangladesh will keep on pulling ahead.
Religiosity rate within the Muslim world are up in the last 50 years. They call it the Islamic revival in their historgraphy. Same dynamic in Qatar, UAE and Bahrain as it is in Yemen. Wealth doesn’t automatically lead your society to abandon a belief in god. History did not and will never end.
People often argue that the real-world success/failure of an idea is evidence for its correctness or lack thereof. For example, many argue that the failure of the Soviet Union is evidence that communism is wrong; similarly, many view the decline of religion in the mainstream contemporary West as yet more evidence that religion is erroneous.
This is another instance of that type of argument: if, in the long-run, collectivist cultures grow and individualist cultures shrink, that would be evidence that collectivism is more correct than individualism.
Of course, an individual need not care about such arguments. An individual might be happy to be communist, non-communist, religious, non-religious, individualist, non-individualist, whatever, even if that was in some objective sense wrong. They might just not care if it was.
> They are empowered, and we should be happy for them.
A lot of people don't have kids because they simply can't afford it. My mom stayed at home while my dad worked (unskilled job), and we still lived okay financially wise, good luck doing that today. A lot of people have fertility issues, and it's growing due to our ever more polluted environment
The life that you thought you wanted in your twenties and thirties might not necessarily be the one that you (or your family) will wish you had wanted.
Personally agree. We moved back to the city we grew up after having been away for 20 years.
The reason was family and it turned out to be much more worth it than we expected. For us, family proved to be a much tighter bond than our best of friends when we were away from family.
Our kids are the happiest they’ve been being around family who love them so much.
I have no idea why you are downvoted. My parents’ generation immigrated to the US and UK, and were generally not rich, not even middle class. We could not stay in hotels, but because of having big families, we got to vacation all over and save money on hotels because we would just sleep on the floor next to each other.
That type of tight relationship is hard to form outside of family.
Probably because those usually talking about "extinction" are dogwhistling a race based extinction and are parroting white supremacist talking points. I can't tell if this poster is doing so, but now you know!
Indeed, I see this quite often, as if some race based boogeyman will take over. It is often an attitude displayed against those with high religiosity, even though the world's overall population growth rate is decreasing and reversing, as even the most religious areas of the world are not having as many kids, predictably because they're getting richer.
Getting richer is correlated to not having children, but most of these dog whistlers assume a monotonically increasing number of births, not realizing that most populations are sigmoidal, not linear; eventually, even those races these people are against will slow down having kids, that is what happens everywhere.
And yet that has nothing to do with this conversation, and neither rayiner nor I are white or any kind of race supremacists (presumably from their million posts here).
Families are unique social structures, and as much as fast and furious want people to believe a random grouping of people can be a family, the reality is that the probability of an equivalent social bond being built between people who do not share a history is low.
Honestly sounds more like basic probability—splitting up large families into small, isolated units.
I tried searching for what you’re talking about but couldn’t find anything other than stuff like “white nuclear family hegemony” vis-à-vis the tax code.
Maybe I’m just a dumb redneck who grew up around too many white supremacists. Who knows anymore. I feel like if somebody thinks white people are going extinct due to small family units they can just say it on the Internet.
I hung out with cousins sometimes as a kid and honestly am glad I don't have to anymore as an adult. It was always awkward and uncomfortable feeling. There was just no reason I wanted to be around them and ultimately I still had to be because they were _family_ as if that actually matters.
My wife and I are each one of three kids, and we have two kids ourselves. She wanted a third because she very much wanted our kids to have the same experience of having two siblings. The thing is, our kids have no experience of having two siblings -- having only one is all they know, and they're very close.
Maybe my kids will themselves want a family, or maybe they won't. I have no nieces or nephews on my side but do on my wife's side. At least as far as this subject goes, I don't ruminate on what might have been. Que sera, sera.
I’m mixed race but have family from the other side of the border from where you are from, and I can’t stand my cousins. I feel incredibly happy not to be surrounded by my cousins. Brothers and sisters, like them or not, they are close family. Cousins for me are some sort of twilight zone where I feel nothing in common with them, don’t even like them, but have to be nice because they are “family”. I like the American way of treating cousins as essentially not real relatives. Be friends with them if you happen to get along, but otherwise they are just some random strangers
Some Americans rely far more on friendships, though many people seriously devalue those relationships because they don't fit the rigid, traditional mold.
I wouldn't generalize - I grew up here and had 4 first cousins on my dad's side and three on my mom's from back home, but at the once removed level it blows up - my dad had at least ten first cousins in the same city and I currently have a close relationship with a second cousin once removed from my mom's side in the city I live now.
Exactly. Not only do I know all my first cousins very well, but I also occasionally meet up with 2nd cousins and once a blue moon will even catch up with or run into third cousins.
Not only Americans, I’m seeing this pattern everywhere in my age group peers. I’m mid-40 and in almost every gathering with friends and family, there are about 5 adults to each child. Most of the children have no siblings and no cousins.
Population growth across most of the world is over. India which had been used as an example of population growth for decades now has a fertility rate 2.05. And, China is well below Japan!
Most people are going to be old for decades to come.
Still growing and the main reason worldwide population continues to increase. That said it is projected to slow down over the next several generations like other areas.
Perhaps they should reframe as the end of the cousin bubble?
People had many kids before and yet many died from disease, childbirth, accidents, war, etc. Inbreeding and limited resources also meant it wasn't a party for much of human existence. After antibiotics, before birth control, and before moving far away were practical, there was a glut for a few generations. Now things are correcting.
If you're talking pre-1890 or so, the people would still have had more cousins than the latest generations. The population was still going up at that time, just slowly.
When looking at countries like Japan you're talking about rapid depopulation after the older generations die. Even in the US population growth is mostly caused by migrants within 2 generations.
Industrial farming is a relatively new invention. Yet it didn't immediately deliver equal rights, contraception, or education for women. Doubtful we'll roll back any of those, even if the future of antibiotics may be in doubt.
And before industrialization population gains from agriculture were limited; albeit significantly more than the hunter-gatherers. Yet it was the that lifestyle which dominated most of hominids' existence. So I'd argue population is reaching a peak, and that's not a bad thing.
Families may have been larger and smaller in various centuries, though before widespread agriculture it was significantly lower than the post-antibiotics generations in the 20th century. Natives in North America for example were known to wait 4+ years between children because their nomadic lifestyle demanded they be able to walk before having another.
Regardless, doubtful we'll go back to hunting-gathering or to women without equal rights, education, or contraception.
As someone with a very small family I sometimes lament the fact that friendships, no matter how significant or long-lasting, are not held in the same regard as technical familial relationships. Maybe this will change as the demographics continue to change, but I feel like we lacking the language to acknowledge it. I have several friends who have kids that refer to me as "uncle", which I love, but it still feels like the wrong label because we traditionally restrict special nouns like that to blood or legal relations.
It’s not considered the same because it’s not the same. In traditional societies, kinship networks allow this web of interdependency that just makes life easier. It’s not just the depth of the relationships, but the breadth. Your friends are probably the same age as you, work in similar jobs, etc. That’s not true of your kin, who will be in a range of aged and different life stages that can support you, or whom you can support.
Two of my mom’s sisters lived with us between college and when they got married. How many people do you know that are say 5 years older who would let you move in with them for years? How many would watch your kids every day for months? How many of your friends are going to attend your parents’ funeral?
I would ask those same questions about cousins. The funeral one seems irrelevant/circumstantial, but the others imply a person who is willing and able to make personal sacrifices for another person. I'm fortunate to have many of friends who meet those criteria, and maybe one cousin that does.
I'd also say that though friendships tend to be very homogenous by age when we're young, that can change considerably as we get older. But because longevity is one of the key factors in any relationship, most of my closest friends are +/- 3 years of me. And in support of your point, it's often when we're young and mostly have young friends that we need support, and those friends are not likely to be in a great position to help.
EDIT: I actually did get help from friends' parents as a kid! As well as an adult "family friend". Those types of connections shouldn't be overlooked.
And yet most of humanity's scientific and technological progress happened in a part of the world (Western Europe from about 1500 to 1900) with relatively weak kinship networks by world-historical standards.
While they could have been relatively weak, I would not presume they were weak or played a small role in progressing civilization. Being a cousin was recognized as being important for lots of things at the leadership levels and I assume that filtered down to society:
> Traditionally, many factors were important in arranging royal marriages. One such factor was the amount of territory that the other royal family governed or controlled.[4] Another, related factor was the stability of the control exerted over that territory: when there was territorial instability in a royal family, other royalty would be less inclined to marry into that family.[4] Another factor was political alliance: marriage was an important way to bind together royal families and their countries during peace and war and could justify many important political decisions.[4][116]
I’m just pointing out that friendship networks are a treated differently than kinship networks because they are. Hard to deny the economic effectiveness of the western model, however.
Part of the problem with that is that in the modern world, we use the word "friend" too quickly, too easily, and continue to use it even after that person has demonstrated that they are not friends.
If you have acquaintances that you call friends, quite subconsciously you'll have less regard for them than for family. And that might actually color how you'd regard true friends.
I've only ever had a handful of friends in my entire half-century life. An exceptional person might have 8 or 10 or something like that. I doubt that most people have had any at all. The modern world isn't very good at cultivating real friendships.
My cousins all died from meth and alcohol before any of them reached the age of fifty, but after bleeding my parents of significant sums of money. I hold my friends in much higher regard.
So, your family held the cousins in such low regard that they self-medicated and fell off the edge of the world... somehow they're the ones that caused you to hold your friends in higher regard? You speak from bitterness that they've done you wrong, but did you ever do them right in the first place?
Which of your friends would stick with you if things got tough? Which would let their lives go off the rails for a chance to put yours back on them? What norms would they flout to protect you, in other words, which of them could you call certain they'd help you get rid of the body?
Also friendship is way too atomized. My parents had friends we called aunt and uncle and the entire family was friends. It's not a relationship between individuals, but between families, like marriage.
In the culture I'm from (indian), it's not at all abnormal to call dads and moms friends uncle and auntie. It took me forever to realize our godparents weren't related to us even though we called them uncle and aunty.
So your last statements only true if you restrict the 'we' you're talking about.
Agreed. I, an American, have a small family and have many "adopted" family relationships - an ex of my mother I call uncle, his ex wife incall grandma, etc. It works out and no one is surprised or confused when I clarify they aren't really blood family.
The writer's recent articles are largely about romance, the article subheading includes "But the weirdest family role is a vital one.", followed by the photo of the boy paying attention to the girl the same age... So I was wondering whether this article was heading towards Les Cousins Dangereux.
Or country. I know in the Indian subcontinent and parts of Asia that it's commonplace, and to be honest, there is a very low chance of genetic abnormalities unless it's done continuously over generations.
It might be de jure illegal but I can tell you from personal experience that that law is not enforced in southern India, as I know many there who have done this and continue to do so. In fact, many movies even portray relationships between those first cousins, as if it were completely normal.
> In India, consanguineous marriage is seen mostly among first-cousins, and mostly practised in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka except Kerala. The National Family Health Survey found that consanguineous marriage was most common among Hindus (26.9%) followed by Sikhs (13.9%) and Muslims (12.7%), but only 2.3% for Christians.[39]
Arrested Development aside, I had a crush on a cousin as a little kid and as an adult, I would absolutely date and/or have sex with a cousin. I really don't see the issue as long as procreation is firmly off the table.
This is interesting to me. Did you grow up seeing your cousins often?
I saw most of my cousins at least once a week growing up, and even went to the same middle and high school as some of them—meaning I spent more time with them than I did my siblings.
As an adult, the idea of being romantic with one of them is as off-putting as the idea of doing it with a sibling. I wonder how much of that is from growing up together.
> The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that states that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived with like siblings before the age of six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891) as one explanation for the incest taboo.
Interesting. Although, an opposite example would be Hindu cultures banning cousin marriages a very long time ago, but maintaining a relatively collectivist society until recently:
The "great cousin decline"? Hell, an inceasing number of people don't even care much for their parents, not to mention, according to polls, not even having a spouse or kids themselves later in life, or even a romantic partner. It's a general "connecting to another human being" decline.
Because in the US for example, research, polls, and even the Surgeon General advisories, says people are connecting less than ever.
And it's not like they're connecting, just without the marriage and kids part: they're not connecting, period.
Of course some always are. Even the majority. But a huge number (not just something like 10%), reports not, and even reports (and is registered) as suffering mental health consequences from this.
Of course they're suffering mental health consequences from loneliness and lack of connection. However, how does it compare to the past, when people suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out? Back in those day, "mental health" wasn't even a known phrase, and no one tracked this at all; people just put up with the misery.
As a divorced person, I'll say from firsthand experience that being single can be very lonely at times, but it's 100 times better than being in an unhappy relationship with the wrong person. And my marriage wasn't even that bad, objectively speaking; I can only imagine the misery some married people have put up with.
I get your angle, and hope you're in a happy place now.
Though I'm not saying people are worse off today in comparison to the fifties or some past where people "suffered in dysfunctional and abusive relationships and couldn't get out" and "mental health" wasn't a thing.
I'm saying that within recent decades, and even within the current decade (not some past where they "couldn't get out"), the trends are worsening. It's no great consolation being "better than the 50s or the 80s" when you're worse than the 00s and 10s and getting worser year by year.
It's also not people being alone because they're getting out of abusive relationships more. It's increasingly that people don't even get into a relationship to begin with. Heck, the statistics show that young people (18-30) even have way less sex.
And they're not happy about it, as if they made a winning choice: they're reporting being more depressed and bitter.
Standards have changed. In the olden times, people were pressured by society and upbringing to stick with their families and family members, no matter how toxic and dysfunctional and abusive they were. These days, people are more individualistic and it's socially acceptable to sever contact with toxic family members, even your own parents. It's just like divorce: 100 years ago, it simply wasn't acceptable to divorce your spouse, even if your husband was physically abusive and breaking your arms. These days, that's changed and you can not only get the police to intervene, you can divorce him and move on with your life. So now, more and more, people only associate with their family members if they're a positive asset in their lives, not someone causing them misery.
And, of course, you mainly hear about all the people who got tired of their shitty relatives and cut them out of their lives, while you rarely hear about the people who love and value their wonderful relatives, because the latter people don't go on social media to complain about their lives or ask "am I the asshole for cutting contact with my narcissistic mother who said she wished I had never been born?".
As for romantic partners, here again it's higher expectations. 100 years ago, people were ostracized if they didn't get married by a certain age, so they settled for the best they could get, which in many cases was a shitty and possibly abusive partner. These days, it's mostly acceptable to just stay single if you can't find someone that you really enjoy having in your life.
Yes, between a spike in depression rates and a whole generation where a huge percentage lives alone, reports being lonely and miserable, and will die alone, it's working out great.
I'll add my anecdote here. The framing at the beginning of this article is very interesting, and brought up my own relationship with my cousins.
>Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.
This especially crystallized my thoughts. My aunt had 5 kids, and their family experienced a major traumatic event when I was too young to understand. They were all older than me, and the ripple effects of that event are still occurring ~ 40 years later. They all indeed had a completely different upbringing and class background than I. For a stretch of time into my adulthood it was hard to be around them, and we drifted apart, with apathy filling the space. We would avoid or ignore invitations and justify it by not wanting to experience the generally chaotic and haphazard experience of being in their company.
Largely by the efforts of one persistent sibling, we finally attended one family event with low expectations. I left that gathering with a completely revised perspective, and a heaping pile of shame. We hit it off right away, as if no time had passed, with the deep rooted familiarity of growing up together, with the same patriarchal/matriarchal role models and propagated personality characteristics. My thoughts while leaving that night were "these are my people". They implicitly understand. Their roughness is endearing, with absolutely no pretension whatsoever. Being older than me, they knew my recently deceased father for longer than I had, and it was very therapeutic to talk about him with people who knew him so deeply.
>American families are shrinking in general, but with cousins, that drop happens at a dramatic scale.
Not sure why this is surprising. You have many more potential for cousins if mom or dad was one of six, than if they were one of two. If they're only children, there's no potential there at all.
So as the fertility rate drops, cousin count drops as a power of that decrease.
If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.
This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self.
I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
Not having kids and having less kids is a universal trend that is not unique to America. It's affecting every country in the world, and the US is actually doing better than most at the same level of development.
Bangladesh’s decline in fertility rate is due to deliberate population control efforts over the last 70 years. (That was my dad’s career. We came to the US because he was working on a USAID population control program in Bangladesh.)
You can see this clearly by looking over at Pakistan, which has almost double the fertility rate despite being at a similar level of economic development. If it was dictated by economics rather than culture and policy, you wouldn’t see that.
It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world.
Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals.
Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
Or, again, make it easier to raise kids. Subsidize childcare, or even better, allow zoning that stimulates community development so people have free childcare in their neighbors or extended family living nearby.
Countries such as Portugal, South Korea, Iceland, and Latvia have more affordable childcare, more subsidies, and more parental leave than the US, yet even fewer cousins.
Like most human related things there is no single cause.
I can't comment on Iceland.
However, South Korea has one of the most crushing work cultures in the world, with insane work hours. Most people are not even in a relationship yet alone with kids.
In Portugal you have a huge problem of disposable income. Median salaries are insanely low and stagnant when adjusted to COL. To the point that by now most former 'Iron Curtain' EU members have surpassed Portugal in workers income both adjusted and absolute.
The fact is, when comparing across all countries in the world, that the harsher the conditions, the more kids there were. Do people really believe that their ancestors lived in better times for raising children than currently? It is precisely because they didn't that they had so many, as they needed labor for agriculture or to make sure at least a few survived since so many would die before the age of 5.
Now, I am not having children either, but I will not deny that even in the best of countries, when controlling for all of these factors, people still aren't having children simply because they have no want or need of having them. That's it, that's the reality. Now it is an uncomfortable truth for many, but many people nowadays, me included, just don't want them, for no particular reason at all.
Child subsidies are a great help for parents, but they don't seem that successful at getting people to have kids in the first place.
Apparently, married people are having kids at roughly the same rate as they did decades ago. However, fewer people are getting married and far fewer kids are being born outside of wedlock.
These are not necessarily negative developments, at least at the individual level, but they do point towards a significant change in human culture and society: increasingly, only people with a strong intrinsic drive to have kids will do so.
I don't think that we can predict the effect of this trend a few generations from now.
$2K/month for two kids in flyover country at what amounts to the only day-care in the area. That's just the day-care costs, not counting the additional missed work from every bowel-voiding illness they bring home! Have to pick them up by 16:30.
Our parents' parents were primarily not paying for day-care. It still seems quite odd to their generation to have mom work to pay for someone else to watch the kids.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
Fun fact, like 80% of the kids at that particular day-care are there on "scholarship." Not sure exactly what that means, being as how they're not likely to be there on intellectual merit at this age, but it looks like care is partially or completely subsidized by the government. I'm for affordable care, but it seems like the same perverse incentives that have caused the cost of college to go up like they have.
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Yeah I'm hoping mgmt can't claw WFH back, a lot of the folks I know still doing mostly programming or desk-job engineering work have seen a significant improvement in both their personal lives and the development of their children from WFH.
It would be politically impossible to implement, but I would like a daring economist to compute the exact amount that childless people should be paying as subsidies towards those with kids.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?
Considering current events, I consider this comment to be inappropriate. A different example, perhaps relating to children who aren't in a conflict zone would have been more constructive.
In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.
The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands?
It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case.
That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing.
It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
Well, you have insurance, facilities, logistics. Local area matters a lot. For each family there should be some point, a little below the lower earners salary probably, where they'd rather just stay home themselves than pay for care. That will vary by income but I imagine the average price is a little below average woman earnings (usually but not always the lower earner still I think). That is basically what you can charge unless there is enough competition to bring the price down a lot. It doesnt sound like there is based on the prices people are claiming?
$1k per week is very high even for the SF Bay Area or Manhattan.
I would need proof to believe it, and am interested in what kind of pampered existence these kids have at school considering TN’s average CoL, and even if such a daycare exists, it is surely not representative of 99% of daycares.
I mean, I'm not gonna give you the proof there as this is as anonymous an account as I can be.
One thing would be to try to look at the wait lists of various daycares. My buddies in TN are at ~3 years. We were at ~1.5 years. And yes, it's quite common in the US for the waitlist for a daycare to be longer than 40 weeks of human gestation.
Daycare in the US in general is really not very well tied to the local CoL. Many factors influence the cost and CoL is but one. Things like the quality of churches really affect things in ways that other services are not affected by normally.
In general, if there is a waitlist, then capitalism has failed. You'd just raise prices until there is no more waitlist. But with daycare, you can't really do that without knocking out a large percentage of the workforce. Hence waitlists.
NPR has a good PlanetMoney episode from a while back on the issues with daycare in the US. It's worth checking out.
Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo.
This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury.
No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)?
When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way.
What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care!
And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
> Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids.
The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
Either one, doesn't really matter, and it is up to the parents. Although, not sure if you know this, but fathers can't breastfeed, no matter what you read on Twitter. It affects your options for the early years.
Hahaha. As a parent and regular human, I'm fully aware of who can breastfeed. I assume my point was clear though. We need to stop putting all of this on women. Yes there are certain biology issues that require women to take some outsized roles in child development but those aren't permanent and telling women that they should stay home with the kids is usually not aligned with "until they're off the breast and then the father can stay home instead."
Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods.
On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people.
If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
Not sure if you know this, but it's possible to pump and refrigerate breast milk. And even freeze it.
Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
You're not American, are you? Maternity leave is not a year here. There's a 12 but it's "weeks" and never months. That's the law I'm the very liberal states.
It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
Unfortunately most women, even the most feminist and empowered ones, would refuse to marry a man that makes less than her. That being the case, if it comes time for one to quit their job, it usually makes sense for it to be the lower earner. Not sure if there’s a way to really square that circle without restructuring male/female psychology.
I strongly disagree with your framing that this is "women refusing to marry."
Here's a few excerpts from the article you linked:
> On one hand, women’s advantage in education may enable them to be more economically independent and thus put less emphasis on economic traits when evaluating potential spouses (Press, 2004). On the other hand, evidence suggests that men may still feel uncomfortable forming relationships in which they have lower status than their female partners (Bertrand, Kamenica, & Pan, 2015; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson, 2006).
> From men’s perspective, although men have placed more importance on the financial prospects of a potential spouse over time (Buss et al., 2001), they may value women’s high status only up to the point when women’s status exceeds their own status (Bertrand et al., 2015; England, 2011; Graf & Schwartz, 2011). For example, a speed dating study found that men did not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeded their own (Fisman et al., 2006). Psychology experiments showed that men’s self-esteem was lower when their partners succeeded than when their partners failed, whereas women’s self-esteem was not affected by their partners’ performance (Ratliff & Oishi, 2013). Although these studies did not directly test men’s reaction to their partners’ education or income, they suggest that men may avoid a potential spouse who has both higher education and higher income than themselves.
> Given a shortage of more-educated men, women may seek to maximize gains from marriage by evaluating potential spouses more on the basis of income. Because mate selection is a two-sided process, it is equally possible that men hesitate to form marital relationships with women who have both more education and higher incomes than they do.
Sure, it takes two to tango, and some of the effect may be on the man's side as well. But if you're at all tuned into popular culture, it's pretty clear that from a dating/marriage perspective, a lower earning man is at a huge disadvantage. Whereas this isn't really the case for a woman. Setting studies aside, just look at what people say in the real world: https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/154w09d/do_women_fi...
This doesn’t fit what I’ve personally seen, it is basically random among my friends. But we’re unusually progressive people in an already progressive state. That said, the Overton window only goes so far, so I think it will be widespread next generation.
I disagree TBH, haha. Regardless of historical trends, I think, but mostly hope, that we’re heading toward equality. I don’t need a citation to see that we’ve still got work to do—I believe it!
Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank?
The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors.
That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1].
> I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal.
It does because the site is a right wing think tank but I will give that my link is more about "women are happier when they get to be people first" and it doesn't contradict the "women often marry up in income." The problem with starting with a place like a right wing think tank's evaluation of a study is that the goal is to sell a narrative that aligns with their existing bias. See the use of the word "prefer" which is only used once in the interview and it's from a leading question that asserts the preference to be true. It's easy for women to marry up economically: find a man doing your same job, marry him and he'll likely get paid more.
Additionally, it's easy for better educated women to do that same. Find qualified women in various industries and review the educational qualifications of their male peers who are making more than them and... same outcome.
So yes, I find the source to be problematic. I have not read the cited study itself but I did see that fun Q&A.
I think even my generation, and I’m not that young, has the expectation that at least an approximate balance would be expected as an outcome, absent any enforcement.
I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
Your failure to draw meaning from the simplified problem disappoints. If you can’t grapple with this toy model I’m afraid you won’t make inroads in any real scenario.
If you’d started the conversation with a good-faith attempt to be understandable I think we could have had a more interesting conversation, or maybe not, but at least it would have been shorter.
Your premise is flawed, anyway. That which "dominates" the other is strictly through force, historically speaking, and thus you are unfortunately succumbing to argumentum ad antiquitatem. Even if it were not fallacious, it also seems that you exhibit this as natural, unfortunately additionally succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy.
What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
Nobody is forcing anyone, it’s just the natural choice for the lower earning parent to step away from their job. If women to a high degree only marry higher earning spouses, then this is frequently going to be the woman.
That's not the natural choice. The natural choice is to find the bottom of the barrel outside care and have a second income because we've made it financially impossible to do anything else.
Sorry, it's true that the common choice is often for both parents to work. I meant the natural choice given that a couple has decided for one of the two parents to stay at home while their children are too young for school.
Because in a given couple, women typically match with men that earn more than them. Whether that is the “fault” of the woman or man is for anyone to decide.
With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things.
I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
> I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance.
In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married.
There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband.
When someone wrote:
>> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance
I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
That is mostly what I meant, just dropping the assumption that there ought to be an imbalance.
I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up.
I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see males constantly fight each other to lead the pack and mate with multiple women, with women having little choice in the matter.
Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
And anyway, what hands are we talking about? Human nature is whatever humans do I guess, and that includes things like inventing feminism and equality.
The extra income, post childcare. went into housing, as families had a higher income they had more to spend on the house, but the same houses existed. So it meant prices went up. The only winners were those who owned houses before the change.
I suppose it depends on what the purpose of children is. I’ll be a bit provocative and say that I think that they are largely status symbols - they need to go to good schools and onto high status careers in order to bring as much prestige to the family as possible.
There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
I don’t disagree that some people treat kids as status symbols, but that’s basically a pathology in our society IMO. The point of having kids should be to raise some happy, well-adjusted people. Education is important but for their enrichment, not as some silly high-score focused game.
Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please.
I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
I think it's the opposite actually; only individuals can really opt out. As a long time observer of the US (having lived in it my entire life), I'd say it's a highly anti-collectivist country. Socialized education is under attack as unfree and lacking choice. I find it instructive to think about if libraries did not exist and someone proposed creating them today - can you imagine the screams of "socialism!" and the attacks on such an idea as collective ownership of books? And we're the only developed country that lacks a universal healthcare system.
I feel that I've voted my entire life for more collective solutions to problems (what else is government for?) though imperfect the purveyors of such solutions may be (let's be real, as fashionable as it is to say that both sides are bad, the Democratic party are the only ones trying to actually improve things). But it seems that enough voters go the other direction that we have decided against such solutions. I am truly sorry for the state of things and that children today will inherit these problems.
Private and subscription libraries were a thing even in the Gilded Age - and the working class used them too (hence the Pratt "Free" Library to contrast it)
The education costs are high, but not THAT high. We're on a forum for tech workers and their corresponding suits: that kind of salary can comfortably send 2 kids to any university they fancy on a single income. We're talking about saving up about three quarter million by the time the second kid hits college. Faaaarr from impossible on a 1500-200k salary.
My lazy kids are terrible status symbols but they are excellently suited for their actual purposes which are to laugh at my dad jokes and keep me honest about snacking.
Seriously though I don't know anyone who has kids as status symbols. That seems quite weird.
If they remain pleasant, carry their weight around the house, and don't mind that we are going to be moving somewhere much warmer the day they both finish high school, then sure! I like them.
It does sound like you have a few qualifications there at least, not that I can blame you. I wonder - what do you feel does give you status within your community if not your children?
I think most of my local status, such as it is, comes from being generally amiable and having helped out at least half the people on the street with repair/lifting/moving tasks at some point.
Also I suppose living in a desirable neighborhood indicates status to outsiders maybe? I'm not sure what, if any, benefits that perception confers on me.
I may be a little broken in that I don't see the value of status signalling. If I'm nice to people, they're nice to me. That system has suited me increasingly well for decades. I dress for practical comfort, don't have high-ranking frequent flyer membership tier, and routinely get upgrades at the airport because I am sympathetic to the agents' pressures. People recommend me for jobs because I didn't make them feel shitty at work and make a point of boosting other people's contributions.
Between that, and trying to signal something with expensive sneakers or a sports car, I much prefer the approach that makes me feel happy inside, and builds people up rather than trying to make them jealous.
I'd like to think it's so easy to disregard all this, but I can say that as someone who also eschews the whole status thing (maybe I'm overly sensitive to it), people seem to disregard me mostly, which I suppose is fine. I think I'd rather be left alone to mostly just fart around and play, but I have some rather serious medical needs and so I have to try and stay employed through one company's layoffs or other. It seems I can never really escape the employment status games at a minimum.
Yes but interest rates were higher and you generally needed 20% down to get a mortgage. The years of near zero interest and zero-equity financing inflated housing prices. Also with dual-income buyers, people could afford bigger and more highly-speced houses, and builders built these instead of "starter homes" because their costs were about the same so why would they not build what was more profitable for them (this is still the reason we don't have enough "affordable" housing being built, because there is still not enough supply of higher-end housing).
Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"
Don’t worry, AI will end most SWE jobs within 10 years. Significant amounts of the population will learn about morvecs paradox which is that it’s really hard to automate away physical labor intensive tasks but shockingly easy to automate brainy tasks. Hope you like construction!
>[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
So then I expect you'll have a child and give up several years of your career to do so? Or perhaps multiple children and drop out of the workforce altogether?
Some people, believe it or not, find their jobs fulfilling. They go to school to learn something so they can do it for the rest of their lives. Having a child jeopardizes the role you planned for yourself for the future. The goals you wanted to accomplish often never get accomplished because having a child takes up an insane amount of your time.
Yes, being a parent is a very important job in society, but often it means that your personal horizons become a lot more narrow. Rather than aspiring to climb to the top of your field, create art, invent something, discover new things, or whatever else you'd hoped to do when you were a teenager, your focus becomes almost entirely on keeping a single human being alive and then raising them.
My children are more important than my personal ambitions. I will find a wife who feels the same. I don't live to work, I work to live and to support my children.
Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it?
Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature.
Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one.
I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population.
I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
Men can stay home and that's the point: we don't see men volunteering to be the stay-at-home parent because there's no incentive for them. We assume being mom is the pinnacle of female existence because we ignore the reality that all humans have goals and independent needs. Maybe your wife is special and thinks she needs nothing else and get cup is filled only by pouring herself out into the cups of others until she's empty. Maybe your local community days the same thing out loud. But I bet if you asked your wife if she ever felt like she'd like to do have something for herself, something that let her feel like individual she once was, she'd probably have some comments and ideas. Perhaps explore that a bit.
Without exception, my male friends with kids have significantly reduced their time and energy spent on their jobs to focus more on their small children. They all say that their kids are the most rewarding part of their lives. Most have highly-paid professional jobs. I expect to do the same, at least for the early years, when I eventually have children.
This seems to be a huge shift from the previous generation. My father and most of his peers worked long hours and contributed little to childrearing.
I think you're still in the minority but it's a good thing. I'm devoted to my spouse and my kid. I'll drop anything for them. Some of the fathers I know feel the same but some smell like mine and he was a piece of crap. I fully support parenting being a team sport and in my opinion, that's how we're going to fix the modern family, by making it better than pretend version of The Good Old Days.
I don't know about your good old days, but I am just emulating my very religious, very conservative father, who, like me, made similar career choices to spend more time with his kids, as well as that of my grandfather's. Their good old days were pretty darn nice and I fully intend to recreate it for my children.
Reduced but not abandoned, that's the difference. My wife works part time hours since since the birth of our son, but she would never quit her job entirely and that dynamic will change substantially once he's old enough to start school.
Referring back to your previous post, I asked my wife if she felt she should be paid. She says she is paid, in that my money (which I make for the family) is her money and supports the entire household.
I'd guess men don't volunteer to be primary child rearers because stay-at-home jobs have been relatively rare, prior to the past 4 years, men tend overwhelmingly to want to support a spouse than to be supported (which is probably why gay couples have greater household incomes and lower divorce rates than all other categories), and women tend to be hypergamous in mate selection. It's not that there's no incentive to stay home (if you like your children, at least, which I hope is true), it's that there's a strong incentive to go to work.
In my particular situation, tax and childcare would eat most of my wife's income, so she'd be spending 40+ hrs/wk working with other people's children in exchange for less time with hers. She'd rather work with our children and be able to take an afternoon nap.
Would we both prefer to be independently wealthy and not have to work, sure! Might one or both of us work anyway? I probably would. She probably wouldn't.
The remainder of your message appears to be uninformed condescension. My wife is not a chattel slave. Her primary focus is child rearing and home making, but it's not her sole occupation nor solely her responsibility.
There are parts of being single we miss, and parts of being childless we miss. That doesn't change the fact that we've worked very hard for the life we have, find it very rewarding, and wouldn't give it up easily.
I'm not sure who the "we" is in this comment, and I can't think of any group I know in real life that it aligns to.
Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.
Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.
The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.
It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.
Yeah I don't get this. My wife and I have both traveled alone with kids. She says that when she's in an airport with the kids, people help her and approach her and tell her what good jobs she's doing. I've never experienced that. At most I get a 'cute kids' comment. No one ever helps or even offers or even acknowledges. She says people give up their seats for her, help her with luggage, etc...
Women are responsible for 80% of the consumer spending. If we assume men and women have equal pay, then 3/5 of men's income is spent by women. If women make 20-30% less overall, then women are actually spending more than 3/4 of all the money men make.
If men are handing 60-75% of their money over to their wives/partners to spend, I'd assert that those women are getting paid better than men are.
This is the dumbest take I’ve seen in a while. Perhaps “buying stuff for the household” is just another chore that a non-working partner has more time for? It’s not like the average young family’s consumer spending is mostly discretionary purchases the wife makes to amuse herself.
Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places.
It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities?
Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
> Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.
> Why do they need to go to different schools?
Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.
It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.
Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
Ok so now it's even more ludicrous. So a couple in their early thirties is gonna sit down to discuss having kids and the deal breaker will be "well in 16 years Alice will be in high school and Bob will be finishing elementary school, so for 2 years we will need to drive them 15min from each other. You know what? Let's just not have kids, I don't think I can deal with this."
Some absolutely see how full their schedules are gonna be with one, give some consideration to what that’ll look like with two, older and at different ages, and stop at fewer than they might have if they hadn’t thought about that.
Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds.
Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken.
I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.
Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
Right, but if you're already partially paying (through your taxes) for childcare, the change in costs between not having children and having children is dramatically lower. And the financial costs of raising the next generation are shared more evenly across the population, instead of being concentrated on the people that are also doing the majority of the actual work.
Not enough. Here in Finland full time childcare is capped at 300 euros per child by law, the rest of the cost passing on to the taxpayer, but we haven't seen a resurgence in birthrates due to that. But you could get that down to 150 if you doubled the ratio, or 100 if you tripled it, and maybe then people would start again.
The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.
1) The costs are heavily front-loaded. This makes the opportunity cost enormous.
2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing.
3) Health insurance goes up. Kids are cheap but it’s still a couple thousands more per year. Plus hundreds to low-thousands per year in other healthcare spending per year (averaged—we’ve had $5k years and $1k years)
4) … Except having kids is a reverse lottery ticket for each one, and the healthcare & related costs could end up being “most of your money, forever”, if you’re unlucky.
5) Childcare costs are either $500-$thousands per kid per month (unless you’ve got relatives who are cool doing that all the time) or the entirety of one parent’s foregone compensation for the same span (five to six figures a year for most folks)
6) Housing. Unless you can’t afford it, you’re gonna find it very hard to settle for cheap housing in a bad school district. The premium in our area for a good vs. mediocre (not even the awful, horribly dangerous ones!) district is about 35-40% for a similar house. That’s… a fuckton of money, and the difference is likely to be 100% financed for folks around having-kids ages.
Everything else is basically negligible compared to healthcare, daycare, and housing, or can be made very cheap with minimal sacrifice.
Child related expenses were often over 50% of everything leaving our bank account, for months on end, when our kids were younger.
Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children.
Median income in my area is ~$40k per year.
There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual.
Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue.
Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think.
But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow.
Like, you know the 80/20 rule?
Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future.
The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance.
(Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment)
Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have.
From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same.
That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
Because it is very likely to be the biggest expense you will have apart from rent/mortgage payments. In the UK it is easily 50% of the take home pay of one parent if they are on a "good" above average wage.
It will soak up the the full take home pay of one parent on an average wage or around that.
There are government funded childcare hours (that are increasing finally) which help, but it's still a tough choice unless both parents have earnings well above average.
Families get spread out because children are priced out of where their parents live, and can only afford a small home. So the grandparent support is often hard to make work too.
I find it curious that the type of people that moan about low birth rates and the loss of "family values" are also the ones voting for politicians that block house building and impose spending cuts on government services like childcare.
Not having children in the current political climate is a rational choice.
Both my parents were only children, their parents only had siblings for two out of 4. One of my Mom's second cousin was a retired NYPD cop from Ireland who took the time tracing the family tree. He went from a letter of condolence from my grandfather to his mom and tracked down my Mom. But those two branches being large we didn't click with any of them but him. Cool for my mom and fun to meet distant relatives. Thanks for jogging my memory, I should contact him and see who has kids around my kid's age (15) just to see. My wife, an only child too, is close with her second cousins and that is the extended family for us.
I have been trying to stay connected with a first cousin who recently had two children by sending her and her family books each year which I recalled having read and enjoyed and being formative (in a positive way) when I was their age.
I'm closer in age to one of my cousins and I'm closer to him than my own brother.
Some of my fondest memories are with cousins. And for many, cousins serve as drop in brothers/sisters. It's sad especially for only children.
My kids live 2 doors from 3 of their cousins. We architected it because of all the benefits. It's good for the kids and for my wife and her sis. It's awesome.
Both families always have someone to count on at any time when needed.
Simply a different, more humanist perspective on declining reproduction rates across much of the world. It’s really not news, just a different lens. And this particular symptom is not alleviated by immigration - if you import a bunch of people your existing population doesnt get more cousins.
I have about a dozen cousins, but only one in the US - and she is not nearby either. I basically grew up being strangers with them as a result.
Obviously the means to reach out and connect are now available, but we’re still just too far apart. Plus now that we’re all grown up, mostly married, and some with kids, there’s less time for everything.
COVID led some of my family into being antivax and the ones who already were just went deeper and bought into QAnon. Ny partner is immunocompromised. Willfully making choices that are dangerous to the general population is where I had to draw the line. It's unlikely my kid will meet many of their cousins. I just can't trust their parents and the things they say are comic book level conspiracy.
My story isn't unique. Geography isn't the only thing preventing interaction with extended family, some of it is the deterioration of family because the world has gone dumb.
Are you forgetting which site you're on? This is HN, which is a hotbed of anti-vax, QAnon, and various other crazy conspiracy theories. This shouldn't be a surprise: it's an American site, and most of the readers are American, and half the American population has become big believers of that stuff lately, so of course a sizeable fraction of the readers here are strong believers in such things.
I’m not a new speaker. This is just a pretentious leftist invention because they don’t like wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend for some arrogant “I’m better than you because I use this.”
My spouse (partner) should avoid those that put their own misconceptions about health science ahead of the greater good. Thankfully, those people tend to advertise loudly and are often easy to stay away from. We can't avoid every danger but we don't have to stand on well marked landmines. I feel like that's a fantastic lesson most kids lear: don't stick your hand in the fire on purpose.
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