If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents.
My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.
Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.
My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.
I don't really have a single point here, except that I worry we've ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30's.
The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I'll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example).
Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be bleak if they do.
Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid at 22 would’ve been a mess to say the least. Looking back at that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn’t much more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk into a bar who wouldn’t get his head screwed on quite right for another 6 years or so at minimum.
the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.
oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.
and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.
That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.
This retort is true of literally everything involved in raising kids.
Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.
The best part about being a mature parent is that you have much more control over how you raise your kids. No way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents, coaches, etc. over my actual parents.
My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.
Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.
The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/blueprint/201809/par.... It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support, like Jungian archetypes and things like that. Somehow it’s become part of the unexamined truth of society.
Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this thinking. The main argument of the article is that our experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher, getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much difference in our personalities and genetically determined proclivities in the long term. Although the article says only half of personality / psych traits are genetically determined, which is still substantial imo, so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't matter" even by the arguments in the article.
This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental development, emotional support, getting a good education, avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out". Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about sports if they aren't, but having good parents that foster interests and development is a huge difference in "how a kid turns out".
Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy article you reference, and contradicted by all available evidence. Just one small one:
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html
The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.
when people make this argument I think they mean "assuming the person has an approximately normal parenting style". Its a bit like saying the infra doesn't matter, only the app does (assuming the infra is built with best practices for availability and scale). When in reality, its missing the forest for the trees. You're essentially claiming that a parent who neglects feeding a child, drops them repeatedly, and lives in the drug-infested dangerous area of town, abusing drugs and alcohol while pregant "matters very little", when its obviously _the_ defining factor in how this child will grow up.
Your point holds when we assume most parenting styles are roughly equal (but this would also hold for environmental factors and genes, since most of those won't be too drastically different for most people).
Put another way: perhaps the most important factor is the one furthest from the mean. If your genes are basically average but your parents are horrible (abusive, neglectful), you may not live to 12. If parents and genes are average, but your environment is war-torn 3rd world, you may not make it to 12. If your parents and environment are average but your genes are horrible, you may not make it to 12. But its clear all the factors can be extremely important, and the claim of the GP only applies "all else being roughly equal".
Back to the app example: assuming sane infra, yes the app might be "more important" to the business. But if you have an average app, but your infra is terrible (long load times, constant outages, losing data, payment system failures), well, you aren't going to succeed.
I'm surprised that you are so ready to abandon your common sense in the face of a psychology book (Judith Rich Harris's book specifically, which asserts that how a parent treats a child has almost no influence on how the child turns out). Psychology papers and psychology books misuse and misapply statistics all the time. Surely someone as well educated as you knows this? (Maybe your wife is a psychologist, so you are overly accepting of psychology results?) The basic mistake being made here is to ignore the possibility that a parent has treated different children differently: one kid is shy: a good parent will nudge him into making friends, but avoid forcing him into unstructured situations with many children because that will tend to overwhelm him. I.e., a good parent is part of the so-called "unshared environment": the shy kid's non-shy sister is not treated the way I just described. (There is for example no need to nudge her into making friends.)
wikipedia quotes a study claiming the opposite:
parents differ in their patterns of parenting and that these patterns can have a significant impact on their children's development and well-being
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
and from my own experience i would concur. parenting styles define the relationship parents have with their kids, and that relationship absolutely matters.
i find it worth considering however that when discussing parenting styles it gives the impression that the chosen style is a deliberate choice that parents can switch around at will, when in reality i believe most parenting styles are defined by circumstances and by the experience of the parents themselves.
Have you found any studies that show that shared environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a kid turns out? I haven't seen any.
And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any of those studies it's all correlational. So they have literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by genetics vs shared environment.
This is honestly fascinating. It's obviously not true, just by taking into account the consequences of it being actually true.
Am I missing something? The study says, at some point "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
Are they limiting this to the genetic composition of a person? It seems they refer to the character, behaviour, overall identity... which to me sounds unbelievably absurd.
I mean, being raised by a single mom vs. being raised by an Army dad MUST introduce some differences, right? And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence? Oh, all criminals were going to be criminals regardless?
Come on.
If you look at twins that are raised apart this is freakishly true. Twins raised apart have outcomes that are far closer than 2 unrelated kids raised together.
If you look at children with an absent father vs children with a dead father you find that 80% of the effect disappears in the second group. And that still doesn't entirely eliminate the genetic component because genes influence behavior that can lead to death. This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.
I find that the implications of this being true are very troubling.
Maybe you could attribute the outcomes to the difference between your father abandoning you vs. your father unfortunately passing away? I'm sure both cases would have different effects on a person.
I have the hope that someone with a deadbeat dad being adopted by a caring family will have a better prospect than someone thrown into the system.
Can confirm, have 3 kids. Parenting doesn't have much to do with how kids turn out. The genetic factor is more important. Not just genes of the two parents, but also how they recombine and surface various traits. Best thing to do is to let the kid discover who they want to be. Observe and support their explorations.
Yeah, have 4 and 90% of my psychological strength is spent in making them not do bad things like punch their siblings in the face for looking the wrong way. I'm now resigned to the Sun Tzu principle: if you cannot lose, you'll win - just want to make sure I'm eliminating the obviously losing paths and they'll need to walk the successful paths themselves or I'll end up in an institution.
It is that, but it's not just that; the concept is attested farther back.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola#Disputed
If Voltaire invented it from whole cloth, that's still the 18th century.
Though on your topic, Piaget is an amazing example of someone just inventing a completely ridiculous theory, doing experiments that fail to support it, and getting it enshrined as wisdom anyway.
Oh man Piaget. Responsible for bad information on kids for both Object permanence, and abstract reasoning.
His views on egocentrism at least seem not as obviously wrong as those two; not sure what modern studies have to say.
Oh please. You think the nature versus nurture argument was invented in the 60s? You think that a pop psych article from a behavioral geneticist is the last word in the matter?
I 100% disagree.
On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in, you will see a bunch of problems.
For example:
- kids turning out really poorly if they have bad parenting. Magnitude matters too.
- I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids counted?)
- some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those from older parents may not be impacted at all)
In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is so deficient, things go bad, fast.
My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on average, except that when it does, it's the main determinant for outcome.
And further, i posit that this parenting variable is increasingly worse over time.
Arguably you can chose other teachers and coaches and daycare
What about crappy parents?
Exactly. That's the distinction. While you can chose other people in most roles for your kids, you cannot pick their grandparents.
You have up to 4 grandparents to choose from (in the case where all 4 are still living, but separated).
This is specious. If they are particularly awful, their kid probably won't want anything to do with them raising his/her kids.
Additionally, in generational cycles where you can maintain or exceed your parent's class status without moving away.
Whole swaths of the US don't have enough good jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle for kids of middle class parents.
And parents are working longer as well, meaning that overlap is less likely to happen.
I went to my grandparents every Wednesday. My mom just retired, my kids are 12 and I didn't have kids until my 30s.
There's so much about life that has changed the fabric of families in the last few decades
you can't choose your parents obviously, but having parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your experience.
for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.
my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.
but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids
Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.
Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.
But only 20% of Indian women are in the workforce, due to culture--family honor concerns.
It is due to those Indian women not having the opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other developed countries).
But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.
Children of immigrants rapidly absorb the core culture of their new country. Especially when in grants them greater independence.
The upper classes in India are a rounding error, maybe the population of Spain at most.
Edit: you are right that it's a trade-off. In Bangladesh keeping women at home may mean starvation, so they are grudgingly allowed to work.
28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education. The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than men).[2] Since they're from different sources the participation rates might not be directly comparable shrug but the gender stats should still be applicable.
At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.
1. https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/news/news/i...
2. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta...
Sure, they go to college. Which makes the low labor force participation rate even more of a tragedy for them and the country.
I thought you were going to say it for a minute there - the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is missing in our US culture during the younger years is 'duty'
I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.
Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.
Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.
it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out
I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.
There are no secrets these days.
I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.
We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.
well, i think it is or was more than duty. it was necessity because your children were there to take care of you in old age. (and i have seen that in action with the great grandfather of my kids)
and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.
this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)
I personally think it stems from a strong focus on individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if necessary to achieve that.
That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.
The boomer generation in general kind of broke this social contract. Too busy being eternal teenagers.
I think a potential problem (depending on ones point of view) is that when parents wait till they are responsible they tend to have one, maybe two kids, which is below replacement rate. When coupled with things like costs, you end up with a rapidly shrinking population.
Cost and support networks are both big factors here. 30-somethings are probably more likely to have replacement rate or more if it’s affordable to do so and there’s family/friends around to lend a hand, but few enjoy such circumstances.
Things like remote work could’ve helped here, allowing couples to live near family instead of wherever the best employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push prevented that.
The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have been indoctrinated to place career first and only.
Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.
Is it possible women could want financial independence without being indoctrinated?
Or are they incapable of desiring power over their own lives, perhaps unlike men?
Of course a lot of people would like financial independence. Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence, because they are indebted or renters. They have to work a salary job or be out on the streets.
A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband than most working young people have today, even though they get fancy titles now.
Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
A greater proportion of women today have more financial independence than they have ever had in the past.
This is financial dependence, not independence.
Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family. They were and are literally married off because they were liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of daughters. And umpteen other examples.
This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms that provide women equal access to power as men, biology throws them a curveball every month with the effects of menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth.
Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is massive to convince the young generations that they want to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity and still not afford to own their homes to have families.
Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny this even if you read about it and find out. Just say "Nonsense!" and shut it out.
We are simply living in different realities. In mine, women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent discrimination against them in the labor market. And this is not even worldwide.
In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/real-reason-south-koreans...
False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their own house outright and have supplementary income. Either in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work outside the home, or they were expected to do all the housework. There was no option to stop working (housework is work).
I think we are living in different realities yes. And also, none of us are living in the past to really know how things were. We can not rely too much on the testimony from the elderly generation, because they are known liars and cheats.
But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.
Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.
It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.
Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.
If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.
You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand. How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
This is a useless measure of independence in the context of this discussion since it applies to men and women. When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are discussing one gender being able to achieve more financial independence than the other due to laws/customs/discrimination.
Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.
Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the world for 99% of history have never had or been in families with enough wealth such that they did not have to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot at the decision making table.
But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is does my daughter have the same opportunities available to her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a high paying job?
It is possible to live well enough to raise children with "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year technical college training, instead of a four year college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for "a career". A job with flexible hours.
Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.
Independence is cool and all that, but I'd rather go with the teamwork of marriage and family.
Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning, idealistic one.
If you want absolute power over your own life, and your goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but maybe marriage and family is not for you.
The sneer of "soccer mom" isn't that she's a mother busy raising children. It's that she's too busy shuffling the kids between enrichment activities to take the downtime to be their mother. That and her children are her personality.
Don't worry, there's plenty of irresponsible people out there still. And the planet is thankful for a bit of steady decline in population.
The planet doesn’t care either way. The question is what’s best for the humans - and those things or beings that humans value.
add that waiting longer also increases the replacement rate.
As someone who had his first kid at 23, you grow up real quick once you become a parent. Moreover I doubt it’s even possible for a person to fully mature if they don’t have kids. Or to really understand their own parents for that matter.
I was 24 and still in college. This thread is full of people saying "I was a mess" or "I wasn't mature enough".
When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck with my friends yelling things at people walking by on the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.
Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and make less because it was easier.
So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to, and a kid has that effect.
What really cracks me up is that people have this expectation that they’ll ever be “ready” to have kids. Not going to happen. The whole thing reminds me of the first few minutes of “Idiocracy”.
This is my favorite of the lies parents tell, it's so obviously nonsensical
I take it you don't have kids.
I often see people settled into being more financially responsible, and it's good. But not in term of personality maturity.
Yeah, same here. I don't think I was mature enough to have a kid at 22, apart from the fact that I was still studying, and when I started working I had low salary and needed to work long hours to fight for job stability in a competitive sector. However, it would likely have worked at 30, and reading through all this makes me think that it would have been better than waiting until 36 as I did.
Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done, though.
I had my first daughter when I was 20 and grew up very quickly, I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.
She is an adult now and I couldn’t be any prouder of all she has achieved in life so far.
I also had two more kids in my 30s. It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s. I do have more work responsibilities but it’s balanced by working from home so I get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school, here when they get home, etc.
There are benefits either way, but I think if you are committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more of lives too.
the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.
I'm a second child with after a large age-gap. My brother was born when my mother was 16, I was born twenty years later. My parents routinely told me how much harder it was with my brother -- lack of cash and profession, the party lifestyle that comes with youth and college-life, constant moving for opportunity and cheaper housing, and an overall lack of time to dedicate to the kid due to the instability and struggle to keep afloat financially.
I was born at a time of great stability for them. They had professions, they could make their own schedules. They had time to participate in my schooling and extracurricular stuff. I had good food, good toys, good clothing, and a stable house. They let me voice my decisions because they had the time and freedom to consider options other than pure survival. I was told that I was the 'easy' one -- not because of my personality but because "The 70s sucked.", which is code for "We were young, poor, un-established and struggling."
So, after the anecdote I feel compelled to ask : Why do you think it is harder when you're older? You have more money, you have the power of flexibility within your scheduling that allows for participation in your childrens' growth and development -- is it simply a 'strength of youth' kind of thing?
I have no kids, I have no plans for them, so I ask just as a curiosity. The opinion varies wildly from person to person, and I think it's fascinating what kind of 'diversity of parenting' exists.
Another thing not yet mentioned is that it literally becomes physically more difficult to have children as you age. Female fertility starts to rapidly drop in their thirties, and many will hit menopause in their 40s. The exact age is somewhat random, and some women will even enter menopause in their 30s.
Before I had children I thought it would be relatively easy - that's why you use birth control after all. But when you actually have children you learn things like at best you're looking at, at best, a 10-30% probability per month if you hit the ~48 hour ovulation window just perfectly. That doesn't sound so bad - because a month isn't such a long time, and ovulation is pretty predictable. But when you start late each month matters, and then if you want to actually have multiple children, then you're already looking at a years long process.
And then add in that as you age, all sorts of birth defects and disorders like Down Syndrome become much more likely, and you can't effectively test for them until about halfway through the pregnancy. It's just not a great idea to start late. I'd also add that for us to have a sustainable population, everybody needs to be having more than 2 children on average. This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.
I've been trying to convince my wife to have at least one child, but I'm afraid it's too late already. She's 43.
You've just made me think it would be a bad idea anyway at this point :(.
Oh well, at least I have many nieces.
I think it's more like start early > start late > start never. There's more hurdles, and less chance of success - but I definitely wouldn't say it's a bad idea. The worst that happens is nothing happens. I sincerely hope you two at least try. Good luck.
The worst thing that happens is the woman or the child suffers complications that result in short term or even life long sacrifices.
Not that it might be 51% or even 11% likely, but the odds certainly go up for a woman, and will likely influence her decision.
The risks of childbirth for a healthy woman, even 40+, are negligible. And the worst of issues for the child, like Downs, can be screened for with perfect accuracy. The most difficult part with aging is actually getting to the point of childbirth!
I also would emphasize that it's not like not having a child is without issues. Much of the West, including the US, is already suffering with from increasing isolation, depression, and other such issues. And aging, especially without family, is likely to only exasperate these issues. Friends that will last forever, don't. And it becomes more and more difficult to meet new people as you age. Places like Japan and South Korea may be a foreshadowing of where we're headed, and it's not pretty. See things like kodukushi - lonely deaths. [1]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
It seems like she just doesn't want to have kids.
In a kinda similar boat, though less "trying to convince" and more "trying to decide if we want a kid". (Because really, the boat for multiple kids for us has sailed.) My wife's five years younger, but we only met three years ago, so it feels like we've been speed-running our relationship while simultaneously dealing with life and career stuff.
I live across the country from my nephew, but if I end up not having kids, he can look forward to notably more visits and funtime with the uncle.
I thought about replying with something exactly like this, but generally this sentiment gets downvoted to oblivion.
I’ll add that we waited longer than we should have, and while it’s hard to conclusively say we would have had an easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of thousands in fertility treatments.
You always think you have more time, but as they say “it’s later than you think.”
It won't. You can't extrapolate the short-term recent trend to centuries. In the past, social/cultural/religious norms forced you to have children even if you didn't really have a great desire for them. This changed and now there will be selection pressure on personality traits which desire children.
We had our first kid when I was about 37, and our second when I was about 43.
The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's not drastic, but I notice it.
The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still had two.
The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids. We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or medically, or whatnot.
Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time with them while they're still young. There's no clear answer on the balance other than doing one's best.
This is exactly why I decided not to have kids. My mum had me at 40. I lost my dad when I was 23 and my mum at 44. I'm 47 now and it's frankly too late for me (I'm male, so theoretically I could father some) to have children now.
I’m sure you’re still a cool uncle and good influence to the youngins.
That's super sweet of you. Thank you. I do try my best.
As someone who's had kids at a similar age to you, yeah its not a nice thought not being around for them as long as you'd like to be. Especially the thought of them having lost their parents when still relatively young (e:g in their 30s). Your life expectancy estimate sounds possibly a little pessimistic to me. With modern healthcare, barring bad luck, trying to live to 85-90 might be not a crazy ambition? That'd involve being somewhat focused on not eating cr*p and trying to get a decent amount of exercise, nothing crazy but just a little bit of prioritisation. That's my approach anyway. I wonder if in time older parents will be found to have longer life expectancy because they have an extra incentive to look after their health?
This bothers me a lot, too (although I had my kids a couple of years earlier than you). Not just the physical presence, but also being physically and mentally fit when they're adults. I'd like to do sports, travel with them, help them move between apartments. I'd like to be mentally on the same page, not an old grumpy fart not understanding what they're thinking about. All of that can be done, but it simply gets more difficult with a larger age difference.
For some it is really never.
Do you mind sharing how your brother and you turned out in terms of career, family, and general life happiness? Sorry for an overly personal question, but I'm very curious as a parent myself with my own theories about the craft.
For one, grandkids. If I live as long as my dad, I’ll have 7 fewer years than he did with me and my wife and son.
My family brings me great joy.
Interesting how until recently people in their early 20s were perfectly capable of raising children, but today they’re not.
They just didn't know any better. The whole idea that everyone has to have children is frankly asinine. I want people to have fewer children. I want fewer people to have children. I want nobody to have more than two children.
The whole idea that population must grow and keep growing is silly. It is ok for the population to shrink a little.
The first idea is way more extreme than the second idea.
They didn't say "Nobody should be allowed to have more than two children". They simply have an opinion that people shouldn't, purposefully, have more than two children. Seems reasonable to me.
Yes, thank you. I'm not Mao. People should choose to have either no children Or ideally one or two children And not no children.
Ideally, we as a society should support people who choose to have one or two children, prioritizing these families over people who have half a dozen or more children. But that's because in my opinion people who have dozens of children have something wrong in their heads. If you choose to have a dozen children, you better be able to afford to raise them all on your own dime.
That being said, I really dislike means testing of any kind so I'd be ok with a social safety net for the wackos and their unfortunate children.
The way the trend is going, the population is going to shrink. South Korea is already down to 0.84 (2.1 means population stays the same).
That is good and I'm all for it but a problem is now is that fundamentalists still have a lot of children and at some point, they will have too much political power.
A high school education doesn't go as far as it used to, women have more life paths that don't involve being a stay-at-home mom, houses are harder to come by, average age at first marriage is almost a decade higher than it was in the 50s ... notable, sure, but interesting, I dunno.
True. Though until recently, children were usually allowed some adult-level duties and responsibilities before their early 20s, so they could actually grow up. My mother did all the cooking for a family of 6, on a wood stove, before she was 12 years old. In an era (and economic circumstances) when "we need more bread" meant "check that there is enough flour in the bin, and get some water from the well...".
It used to be that the average person at 25 already had worked a full-time job for 5-7 years. Now a college education is much more important and at 25 many haven't had a full-time job at all yet and in a way haven't been exposed to the real world. I sometimes think about Robert M. Pirsig's point that young people should work and then get further education to see better where the value comes from. I do wonder if that would push children even further back though.
I don’t think anyone really thinks that. The vast majority of people in their 20s are perfectly capable of raising children, it’s just not desirable.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing (why not spend your 20s exploring?) but it’s also easily explained by financial burdens that didn’t used to exist. Housing is now very expensive, can you blame people waiting until they have the right size home before they have kids?
The standards of what's "acceptable parenting" shot up greatly in the past decades. In the 60s, you were a great father if you passed out drunk only sometimes, didn't beat your kids too much and brought enough income to feed/house the family.
My childhood was all about spending the whole day outside roaming the streets with very little involvement from my parents. I didn't have any after-school (organized) activities, and I don't remember a single time that my father would drive me anywhere just because I needed it. That was all just normal, but today might get social services called on you.
There were a lot of incompetent parents, but they pushed ahead blindly.
Today can recognize when they'd bee a pie parent and choose not to do it anyway.
This is exactly why I don't think anyone should have children until they're at least 50 years old, and better yet 75-100. We just need to solve this "aging" disease problem first. 20-somethings just aren't emotionally mature enough to be good parents.
And somehow we've done it through hundreds of generations.
Oh, please stop. This is the rhetoric of stunted men with Peter Pan syndrome. If you are too scared to face this type of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion just fine.
According to the most recent fertility statistics, they're not.
You are trying to make a point against old values using "most recent statistics". Do you realize how illogical this is?
You seem to not be living in the real world, instead pining for "old values" which obviously not many people still live by.
Your "solution" to the problem that adults now are claiming to be unable to become parents is, literally, "cure aging".
Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and have them at a age where your parents can still help you."
The fact that people are forgetting these "old values" is what is bringing to this unsustainable state, and instead of accepting the reality of our limited lifespans and that people have managed to start having kids in the early 20's (or before that) for centuries just fine, you want to double down on the idea that "no one should have kids before their 50s"?
Who is "not living in the real world"?
If people wanted to do that, they would. They obviously don't want to do that, for various reasons. What's your solution now, genius?
You, because you're the one telling people to go back to the "good old days" and then shaking his fist because they aren't.
If people had listened to people like you throughout human history, we'd still be living in caves.
Is this sarcasm or a joke? I honestly can't tell, but I hope it is.
Suggesting people to have child in their 20ties, to avoid health problems, is sexist and not based in reality. This is just extrapolation of this trend.
People can totally freeze relevant body parts, and have child in their 70ties. Saying anything else would be sexist! Natural selection in action...
You see, in a proper early childrearing situation, you would be a) near your parents and inlaws ideally b) they would share in the burden of child-rearing.
We had kids later in life (33-ish) and I think if I were to do it again, I'd have moved quicker to having kids earlier (waited 2 years to marry and 3 years before having first kid).
More and more people are living closer to their parents - which opens up this possibility.
A lot of this assumes so many things that I think people who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most on HN) take for granted.
Even if I lived close to the family I was born into, I would never let them get near my children. The years of neglect and child abuse are reason enough that they should never see them - let alone be caregivers.
Similarly, you’re assuming that your marriage would have gone smoothly still and so would the childbearing if you hadn’t waited. I was with someone for five years and we never got legally married. We talked a lot about kids and marriage. I still felt like we had years to go before we were ready for marriage and kids. We separated over financial differences once it became clear they were never going to resolve. Imagine we had ignored our intuitions and married and had kids based on arbitrary deadlines? It would have been terrible. The differences wouldn’t have solved themselves with marriage or kids - we would’ve gone separate ways and both would experience truly insane hardship due to such poor decisions.
Living near people who can take care of your kids sounds lovely if you grew up where all the jobs are. Not uncommon for many SV types here who grew up in Palo Alto and such but it’s farfetched for so many more.
We need better regulations to give better paid leave and lower the cost of housing so I’m not homeless when my spouse decides to stop working to take care of the kids.
You don’t have to be “UMC” to take those things for granted. All those things are normal in the third world village where my dad grew up.
Right, it’s less about economic class, more about cultural values.
I'm not denying your experiences - I was reasoning using my own. I did not have a typical upbringing - I'm felt like an outsider and went to a different school for like 7 years in a row.
Clearly your circumstances dictated your options. Nowadays, in this truly oligarchic economy, most young people simply don't feel they'll ever be able to afford a home or family either (which is a massive regression). Perhaps the future means - you raise your family in your parents house (with their help)... if you trust your parents.
Agreed about better support for families and housing.
Housing affordability has little to do with an oligarchic economy and everything to do with policy decisions we made to make housing expensive.
It's complicated. It's definitely true that we're less mature in our 20s than we are in our 30s. But, also, maturity doesn't just accumulate on us like growth rings. You can easily be a completely immature thirty-something if you don't have the kind of challenging life experiences that cause maturity.
Probably the number one life experience that increases maturity is having kids. If you'd had kids younger, you would have grown up faster too and earned some of the maturity needed to raise them well earlier.
Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long improv scene and do your best.
I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no one should have children until they're perfectly prepared, but that's just an impossible bar.
I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an ancillary benefit to having children or from any other relationship for that matter. Yes, if it’s your primary goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one’s good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part of the equation of forming relationships and having children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human experience across cultures and times.
> there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil.
This is a really good observation.
Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It seems like there are a lot of people out there today who believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have kids or pets.
A very close friend of mine was murdered at 18, his sister was a year younger and she matured very quickly as a result of this experience. She’s now in her early 20s and you’d assume she’s 35 by her personality and view points.
I wonder if you’d mind sharing some examples of her viewpoints? It’s not obvious to me what sort of maturity a sibling murder would induce. She moved to the suburbs already?
How common is it that people are incompetent to raise kids in their 20s, versus people who may not presently have everything together because nobody expects anything from or depends on them?
Great point. Most people are perfectly capable of raising to the occasion, but while there's no occasion they just stay in the comfort of their responsibility-free lives... I say, enjoy it while it lasts!
Everyone's life is completely different, and their choices are their own. It seems you made the right choice for yourself, and I hope your kids agree.
I will say though, I think there's a chicken and egg element in this line of thinking.
A part of my thinks that being childless in twenties provides space that facilitates being a basket-case.
I think that having a child immediately makes most people at least 50% more responsible, and 85%+ within a year.
Again, there's a huge range here for people who: - Never get better - Their 85%+ still isn't really responsible enough.
Unsolicited 2 cents from a guy who had a kid in his twenties
To borrow terms from RFC 2119, "having a child makes people more responsible" is a SHOULD, but statistically, turns out to be a MAY. (#survivorBias: people are likely to acknowledge this, if they did turn out to actually be more responsible - "turned out GREAT for ME", emphasis added. The other case, not so much.)
However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure - but it's not an overwhelming factor...
I think a lot of these “20s” lessons and better emotional regulation you learn before the child is old enough to remember, i.e. by your late twenties.
Although, I think going through that learning process + raising a baby + recently newly wed is a contributing factor to divorce.
Few are really prepared to have kids, until they have their second kid. Everyone I know who had kids shortly after college (which skews the parents a bit economically, I know, but not necessarily emotionally or in maturity) had great family lives and outcomes.
I'm sure you could handle nights with little sleep fine in your early twenties. Being up all night. Dealing with childish drama. Vomit.
I am so glad I waited until my late 30s to have a kid. It sucks not being as physically capable as I would've been, but being calmer and more understanding I think is a big help in child rearing.
It is arguable that the increased emotional regulation of older parents is responsible for the higher incidence of adhd as the kids have to fill the emotional void
I think the optimal strategy depends partly on your genes. Challenging kids seem to run in families, and it’s probably easier to succeed as a very young parent if your kids are naturally the quiet & obedient sort.
It’s not politically correct, but we all know a few little hellions, and they are obviously difficult to parent.
Emotional maturity is important, but there's also financial readiness.
People don't have extended families and villages to be nannies-on-demand anymore, so older parents have a lot more financial resources to raise kids and more likely to give the kid a comfortable life.
Especially when housing prices have gone up much faster than salaries in the past 30 years, and that is reflected not only in one's own mortgage/rent but also that you have to indirectly pay the rent increases of every Chipotle worker you interact with.
My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in their 140s-150s today, is basically unthinkable for me.
In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were in the colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less than 40 years per generation?
My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.
(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)
* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.
I am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn’t reflect reality
Wait, given the age differences described here, the book very much reflected reality, no?
No, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due to competition from men "of substance".
EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?
Isn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I mostly recall her having sex with much older men even before she enters prostitution
I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable
Good question! It's on my slush list, but atm I have a lot of physical things which need to be rearranged at or near the surface of the earth, so unlikely I'll dig into this before it's slid well out of HN's attention span.
Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.
I do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or unfounded things about couples with relatively small age gaps 7-15 years. It’s the norm, not the exception.
And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.
Many things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970
(it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per generation)
My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.
John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845.
His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.
According to Wikipedia, John died in 1862 and Harrison was born in 1928. So he never met his grandfather.
It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known" person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the person that one of them actually met who was born the earliest?
Seems to be the rule used in Coco.
If you think about it, there are about a couple of hundred super-centenarians (110 or older) alive[1]. Surely at least one of them met a very old relative when they were young - for example, when I was 9, I met a great uncle who was 100 years old. Taking into account life expectancy, if you assume at least one of them has met someone 85 years older than them, that means this oldest "directly known person" would have been born at least 195 years ago (1829). Which means there’s a good chance someone alive has met someone born in the 1820’s.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Incidence
I really love this recording[0] from 1941 of a photographer born in 1843, talking about the American West. It's one of Youtube's many gems.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ab5nv4Suc (video)
There's also this video interview of Bertrand Russell, whose grandfather met Napoleon as a young member of Parliament.
https://youtu.be/4OXtO92x5KA
My grandpa's mother worked as a servant in a castle that I only know as a burned-out ruin and my grandpa fought in Stalingrad as a teenager. Unfathomable
Same.
When my were in school and had friends who were visiting great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm) once. One of those children lived behind us when I was growing up, and if I'd paid better attention when helping him with his garden would have taught me how to plant by the moon and stars --- he did teach me how to gut and skin a squirrel.
feel like it is questionable to describe yourself as a sharecropper if your daddy owns the entire farm
He married one of the daughters --- two different family branches here.
The wording here is a bit odd, almost like blaming people for delaying childbearing. The world is complicated and a number of factors have produced this outcome in the developed world.
My parents were factory workers and they encouraged me to study a university degree as a sure way to a successful career. I finished my degree well into my 20s, but then the economic collapse of 2008 happened and I spent several years living paycheck to paycheck, lucky me who at least had a job.
In my late 20s I finally broke from economic stagnation by moving abroad. Then I spent the next 12 years moving countries every 2-3 years, which isn't good for stability. In fact I didn't meet who would become my wife until my mid 30s.
Now I approach 40 and have a good paying job in tech. However I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa and my company has done waves of layoffs that I luckily survived. We are seriously considering having a child, but the prospects don't look great. Everything else aside, we don't really know anyone or have a support network here.
I know most of this is moaning and if we "really wanted" we could make it work. But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network.
It's not that it has gotten harder to have kids, but that people come to expect and want to provide more.
I had a perfectly decent living standard growing up, but I also remember very clearly in retrospect the economic uncertainty and the things my parents did to save money, and no uncertainty I've faced has been anywhere near that. Of course it's not like that for everyone, but overall, living standards are up massively, yet fertility rates are down, and the two are firmly correlated.
If I were to budget like my parents did, I could afford many kids. But I don't want to budget like that. Not because I resent how we had it, but because I don't want to go back to that just for the sake of having lots of kids.
But it has gotten harder in some important ways, housing costs as a % of median income have risen by multiples since then. Shelter being thing that probably makes people feel the most insecure
Housing costs have increased as much as they have because people can afford to bid them up because other things do not take up as much of income.
Those 'other things' are generally more optional than shelter, so you'll bid up shelter until you get it while sacrificing those other things. Inelastic demand and inelastic supply is a bad combo.
We see affordability and population growth in places that allow housing.
We don't see population growth without immigration anywhere but third world countries any more, and consistently dropping there too as living standards increase.
While I agree it's a bad combo and could be better, there's nothing to support any notion that cheaper housing will be enough to increase fertility rates.
I wonder if other parents waiting till they can offer the kids more creates pressure. Not only on the parents but the kids as well. I frequently couldn't get what I wanted as a kid, but that was the norm and in fact several kids I went to school with were clearly poorer. However, if I look at kids around me today, they have seemingly everything they could want. If I imagined the majority of the kids around me had had as much stuff, fancy vacations, expensive after-school activities etc. and I had what I had in actuality I would have felt much poorer. Just the after-school activities alone would ruin everything. My friends and family's kids now are always out at clubs and classes and that's where they see their friends. This would put poorer kids at a disadvantage.
It is easier, but people have been having kids in all sorts of various situations for, well, as long as the human race has been around.
Kids are way more resilient than we think.
The kids will stay alive, but they would certainly prefer stability, and their parents would've just as much loved to give their children a better life. For most of human history the parents didn't really have much control over improving their circumstances, nor did they have effective means of birth control, so they just had kids whenever. I don't think it's reasonable to just put that aside as "kids are way more resilient".
"But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network."
Definitely. Still, sometimes you have to take risks, as you are not getting younger. Maybe moving again somewhere, where you could have a support network, even though pay is lower, might be an option?
We had grandparents around, that definitely helped. No idea, what other people do without that. If both parents get sick, the child still needs lots of care .. and you don't want some stranger to take care of your baby.
I don't blame people, just noting that at least in my own youth all I heard were reasons to wait.
Good luck! Funny enough my wife and I are from the US and we waited until we knew our kids would have EU citizenship before having them. And raising kids without a support network sucks, I can't pretend otherwise.
It weirds me out a lot when people talk about parenting and family planning like this. Like, having kids should be planned around strategically based on factors like "are my parents young enough to be supplemental child care" over "do I have the mental and financial readiness to be responsible for raising a human being? And do I even want to do that?"
If people want earlier parenting, then create a society that supports it. One with living wages, universal health care, and programs to provide childcare for working people. Because those are reasons people hesitate to have kids, and those situations are not improving.
Do you have evidence for the second paragraph? The wealthiest countries are generally those with lower birth rates, although the very lowest fertility is in upper-middle income regions like Eastern Europe and E Asia
Sweden doesn't have exactly the things that was mentioned, but it is far more supportive of parents than the United States: https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/parental-benefit-swede...
And how does their fertility rate compare? Actually I'll tell you, Sweden's is 1.66, the USA is 1.64.
South Sudan, the poorest country in the world, is 4.54
Creating a society that supports it is an intractable problem. Instead, the problem that we are faced with (as organisms) is how can we raise as many successful children as possible? This problem is workable, and hopefully involves support from ones grandparents.
I’m curious how many children you have.
I refuse the idea that I need to solve the problem of raising as many successful children as possible. If a person chooses to have children, then raising them successfully is a problem they need to face. I totally refuse the idea that having children is mandatory, necessary, or even desirable for a lot of people. The world would be a happier place if we stopped placing that expectation on everyone.
I have two step-children. Having children of my own (biologically) was never something I wanted to do for a lot of reasons. Without getting into TMI territory, I'll just say it was apparent (no pun intended) that one of my parents never wanted the responsibility + resented it, and the other wanted to "be a parent" without actually doing the work. So I did not have the desire or background that lends itself to being a good parent early on -- whether I've made a good showing or a mess of it later in life is something that my kids would have to answer...
My first kid(late 20s) didn't get my parents watching the kid because they were working.
My next 3 kids (early 30s) got grandparents attention because they were retired.
Although I feel like the baby/kid thing has lost its magic on the grandparents. But on the flip side, the kids are basically old enough to take care of themselves(4+ yr old).
It's not just great grandparents, but the family calculus on grandparents changes significantly as well. If my parents were 35 when I was born, and I don't have children until 35, my parents are 70. With a life expectancy of 80, my children never really get a chance to know my parents. Whereas if each generation is having children at age 25, my children will likely be able to know their grandparents for 30 years.
I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct connection to the past.
Its bad. Ofc course its bad to have a smaller support network.
Support networks are not necessarily limited to blood relatives.
(in particular, I was never within 5 hours of gp or ggp until my teens, and born multiple TZ away. then again, I'm in the "come home before it gets dark" generation; ymmv)
No but its nice
We have cheap daycare, maternity leave etc etc here in Sweden but having some another dropoff for the kids is still nice for parents
I realised last year that I'd reached the age (48) that my mums dad was when I was born. I remember him "always" being "old", but I also know that I have memories of him from before he turned 55 (he took early retirement around then, and I remember clearly the discussions about what would happen to his workplace that led up to the offer of taking early retirement). He lived another 32 years after that, and all of my grandparents were young enough through most of my childhood and teens that not only were they around but they had the energy to have us stay for whole weeks during the holidays and take us all kinds of places...
Meanwhile my son, at 14, has only one living grandparent, and it does feel weird.
My mom's parents were relatively old when they had her, and my dad's parents were relatively young when they had him. I had a set of 'old' grandparents, and 'young' grandparents.
My mom's parents were gone by the time I was 24 - I didn't really ever get a chance to interact with them as an adult. My dad's father passed away when I was 39, but I had many visits with them as an adult while he and my grandmother were still pretty active. My grandmother is now 94 and not in great health, but still with us, still mentally there. When I was in 5th grade, they came to 'grandparents day' at my school, and she won 'youngest grandmother', but wouldn't come up on stage to accept the award! ;)
Isn't the ultimate goal of parenting that your kids shouldn't have to trust anyone but themselves?
Parents who don't have a plan and need help shouldn't have had kids. The grandparents and great grandparents would just get in the way of these goals. There shouldn't be anything magical about getting to know your family. If you got to meet them, great, but you're your own person and developing that is so much more important.
This reads like a parody of American individualism that a Chinese government newspaper might write.
The ultimate goal of my parenting is for my kids to realize they're part of a community that gave them tremendous advantages, and to which they have a duty to give back.
Not sure what bubble you're describing, but the sense of community anywhere at any time in human history is ultimately an illusion.
I'm not saying the kids should grow up to be selfish, but that the more they can do for themselves the more they can also do for others. That is a leader. We really don't need another generation of guilt ridden cogs.
It's "rugged individualism" that is the bubble, both in time and in space. Community and duty exist everywhere and have at every time, despite what it is like in 2024 America.
Is this a joke?
The economic situation of your mom having a great career is not the same as the economic situation of today; appeal to her hard work considered. People cannot afford to have kids like they used to. And yes, the older grandparents make this much worse because they’re now a costly liability rather than a useful child watcher.
I find the idea that people haven’t considered downsides of waiting to have kids to be grating personally
Why do you care about what other people do? It's not harming you.
Publicly asserting incorrect reasons why people do things is in fact harmful due the social dialogue it creates.
Why does anyone care about anyone else's opinions? I think it's pretty reasonable to take issue with others assuming that you made a particular decision because you hadn't fully thought through the consequences. Do you like having people second-guess your decisions, or does it annoy you?
I think being judged feels bad. If someone thinks you haven't considered the obvious it feels pretty insulting.
One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance. There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, ....
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502822...
Probably a good thing to speed up the evolutionary landscape during these rapidly changing times.
It would not speed up evolution at all.
I remember seeing a talk by Steve Jones[1] where someone asked a question like this and he said the human species has basically not evolved at all for I forget how long he said but it was at least hundreds of thousands of years. He said specifically if you took the children of someone like this dude[2] and put them in a modern school system they would not perform noticeably differently in any way from a modern child as long as they had decent food etc all the other benefits of modern society.
[1] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7056 (emeritus professor of human genetics and evolution at university college London and the author of a fantastic book on the subject called "In the Blood")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
Increased mutations/mutation rate is not necessarily a downside. Mutations aren't inherently bad, they can be beneficial, and the vast majority actually have no effect whatsoever, as the majority of our DNA is never used. But yes increased mutations means increased chances of bad mutations happening even if it also means increased chances of good mutations happening. Anyhow, it may put evolutionary pressure for longer lifespans. Studies involving fruit flies, and selective breeding them as old as possible for successive generations, show that can be the case. And other studies involving natural selection show that high mutation rates are a good thing (ie they help species survive), when environmental change is high (but high mutation rates are detrimental if the environment remains stable).
I got fairly unlucky in the great grandparent department. My grandmother had my mom at 15, and my mom had me at 19, and all my great grandparents were already dead!
oh wow, talk about having the best conditions to have your great grandparents around for quite a while, and still no luck. at what age did they have your grandmother? i am sorry they had to leave so early.
Those sound like awful conditions.
My grandmother was the 2nd youngest of 9 sisters, so they weren't that young when they had her, but I don't know the exact age. Her dad killed himself when she was a young child, alcoholism and war trauma among other things, and her mom passed from some illness.
Starting having kids in our 20s is the best decision my wife and I ever made. When my daughter was born, my parents (then in their early 60s) got a decade younger overnight. I wish we hadn’t spaced them out so much (27-37) because indeed my parents are not able to keep up with the littlest one like they could with the first two.
Same. Easiest decision we made. I don't understand the comments about maturity. I fully agree that at 25 I would be unable to raise a 16 year old. Luckily I've never met someone who gave birth to one of those.
I’ve had a similar thought about marriage, late marriage means you forgo the likelihood for big wedding anniversaries.
Reading all these comments I just keep thinking it's all a matter of priorities. If you really want to do something, the sooner you do it the better. Responsibly, of course.
What "responsibly" means in any case might also be influenced by your priorities. For instance, a lot of people say "We're not financially ready to have kids" but they really mean "We can't keep up the fancy holiday trips if we add a kid". If your priority is to have a family, you might cut on holidays and have the kid.
That applies to some, even plenty, of cases, but I acknowledge that not for all. At least where I'm from, it often feels everything is set up to make it difficult for people to build a family.
I only got to meet one of my great grandparents, my great grandmother, though she died when I was five years old so I don't remember her terribly well. I am the oldest kid in my family, and my mom had me when she was 25. My oldest sister also got to meet my great grandmother, but my two youngest sisters never did.
I still have two living grandparents as well, both grandmothers, one I won't talk to, and one that I like a lot. My oldest sister had a kid almost three years ago, and he got to meet his great grandmother last October for her 90th birthday.
That grandmother is still in pretty good health for her age, so I certainly hope she lives a lot longer, but realistically she probably doesn't have that much time left. I'm not having kids, but my other sisters are planning on it and it seems unlikely that they'll get to meet their great grandmother.
We just had our first child at 33 and I wish we had done it at 24 or 25, although it's hard to predict if we'd be as happy as we spent those years changing jobs, going back to graduate school, and traveling
My mother had me when she was 20. I am not yet in my forties, but I lost my last grandparent many years ago.
:(
Oh, don’t kid yourself. There are areas of the country where knowing a great grandmother is common, and even great great grandmother.
If you have kids at 15, it tends to be generational.
Same way as having kids in your 30s+ is generational.
The flip side, and I recognize this is not a privilege everyone shares, is that being an older parent may mean better financial stability and opportunities. On today's world of housing costs putting ownership out of reach of many, inflation, layoffs, that can mean a lot in terms of stability for a family.
It really depends.
When I was born my youngest grandma was 50. She already had three grandchildren.
I already had only 3 grandparents, one had died when my father was young, having survived two world wars, ironic ain't it?
At the age of 10 only one grandma was still alive, but she lived to the age of 95 and managed to meet 4 great grand-children.
My cousins had children late in their lives, their parents were average for their times.
I would say that meeting your grand parents is a benefit that has become a given only for the past 2-3 generations, when life and work conditions improved so much that it became the norm.
Good points to think about. One I consider is that traditions and family roots are often good for people to feel connected and find meaning although traditions should be questioned from time to time.
I think having family members of varying ages alive at the same time does help people feel connected, safe, and confident in having meaning and purpose. (Not that people can't have those things otherwise, it's just without that support)
My parents had me in their early 20s and I only met one of my grandparents. We had our kid in our late 20s and my parents aren't healthy enough to help at all. Take it from someone who never had the opportunity. If you have healthy parents do yourself and them a favor and if you're gonna have kids have them sooner.
I'm in my late 20s, but my mom had me when she was 42. My Dad's father died 32 years before I was born and my Mom's father died 22 years before I was born, so I've always wondered what it must have been like to grow up with grandfathers, let alone great grandfathers or grandmothers.
On the plus side, in the early 60s, my recently windowed grandmother put herself through night school while raising 4 teenage kids, one of whom eventually worked on the national security council and traveled the world; all these years later, I still wonder how she managed it all without having a nervous breakdown. Life is strange like that, sometimes.
Conversely even people who start young don't necessarily end up having living great grandparents let alone grandparents. My parents were both the youngest of 6 and 7 kids so my grandparents who started having kids in their early 20s had already passed or were quite old by the time I was born.
It would be nice if our life expectancy got longer at the same pace (instead of doing exactly the opposite).
Except grandparents in their 40s are still working, so not a great choice for childcare.
My story covers both ends of this.
Mom had me at 21 (dad was 30). I knew both my grandmothers and neither of my grandfathers. One was left behind when my mom's family immigrated. The other died not too long after my dad's family immigrated - just before my dad was born
I had my son (now 4) when I was 41. Both his grandmothers are around, and neither of his grandfathers. My dad died last year and my son barely remembers him. My wife's dad died when she was two.
I'm glad to say my son and my mother are very close - they spend every other weekend together. His other grandmother and my wife aren't close and so my son doesn't know her very well.
Not sure if there's much here - except to say that having kids in our thirties should still be young enough that healthy grandparents can be around for the formative years. And regardless of age, life happens, and a multi-generational family unit isn't guaranteed.