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I want to scream like Annie Edison when nobody has her purple pen when NONE of these articles mention CLIMATE CHANGE! We have heard over and over again that we're past the point of no return, at the very best we could make things ... bearable? And I'm supposed to, as someone who is supposedly more innately loving/gentle/maternal, want to bring someone into that world where they are almost guaranteed to suffer, because no Boomer in Congress wants to appear anti-business? Like you mention in #2 - there is a difference between a "fear" of the end of the world (i.e. the Cold War) and YEARS of actual scientific evidence pointing towards it.
Absolutely. I've never understood why, when (more people) x (more resources) are *literally* destroying the biosphere that keeps us alive, some publications continue to worry about declining population rates.
Thank you for raising this as relevant to climate change! You mention consideration for the individual, and maybe a similar case can be made reducing the risk of the group?
Were ideas like the 1960s efforts of Bucky Fuller (World Game) and Paul Ehrlich (Population Bomb) ever more mainstream than similar ideas today -- or always fringe and uncomfortable? Although I have not read either of their longer writings, they appear to focus on a possible relationship between total population and average quality of life.
We know that creating a new human has a large individual impact on resource consumption Yet choosing to fall below the replacement rate as a society does not feel like a safe subject. It is justifiably sensitive due to the personal and complex nature of reproductive "choice", as well as the "crisis" of elder care. As a result, choosing fewer children as a strategy to improve sustainability seems rarely a focus of climate change media. Perhaps by default?, more often the counterpoint is presented of the potential "crisis" if we don't keep up.
I'll leave my initial comment above, though I agree with David Roberts that it may just not be worth the risks and moral distractions to discuss population change rates as a primary strategy.
As he proposes, a focus on female empowerment and family planning including the developing world is likely a more effective approach to the same goals.
To be clear, I am not arguing that women SHOULD NOT have children. From the article you linked, population is important, sure, but what I'm saying is that I, personally, struggle with the idea to have children in the age of climate change because it feels like I am bringing a child into the world whose life will be full of struggle and suffering and conflict.
The point about this being a reckoning more than a crisis should reverberate across the world. At the very least it should be repeated over and over. What a great piece this is! I also think we should never stop repeating the obvious fact: plenty of people in power, like several state legislatures, have no interest in women's autonomy. They fundamentally believe women *should* be bearing children and staying home to take care of them, leading to punishing policies that make it ever more difficult to have children, work, and develop a healthy family life that balances everyone's needs. We're struggling against a deep-rooted faith.
It's also telling that'd despite many scientific studies further linking declining fertility rates to chemical load, the idea that our environment might be a factor is rarely discussed. Shanna Swan's book "Countdown" is pretty explicit on this subject: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Count-Down/Shanna-H-Swan/9781982113667
Absolutely this, that states have no interest in women's autonomy. You see this as well in Republicans fighting against Biden's family plans. They're pushing the *LIE* that Biden wants to force your children into ECE so you don't have a *choice* in sending your child to pre-school or not, it's REQUIRED. They know it's a lie - they just want people to be against it. And they're certainly not going to raise salaries even if women stayed home while men worked, anyway.
Totally. You saw Republicans being explicit about this in their resistance to covered day care and universal pre-K in states like Montana and Idaho. And I know women who would like to stay home with their kids and can't afford to!
Some people say that there's no such thing as other people's kids, and pitch in to make their community better. Others say "fuck them kids" and voila! you get Arkansas.
Love that this newsletter addressed the very real class component to the issue (which is of course not the only component). Story after story appears with no mention of the fact that having children is extremely expensive, especially when people have mountains of debt, a barely-stable income, and precarious access to healthcare. It's a similar vibe to a recent piece in NPR that talked about how giving money to people of low socioeconomic status helped their mental health and lowered incidences of depression, stress, and anxiety. Which is to say, do we need *more* in-depth studies of what is very obvious to non-wealthy people? Are we really still pretending that finances isn't one of the many reasons women are delaying or entirely avoiding motherhood?
My hunch is that the media refuses to address class because to do so would mean looking into some very uncomfortable structural inequalities and that it is much easier to look at everything else or blame the individual for what is a systemic issue.
The one daycare near our old apartment in Seattle that listed their prices online is currently $2850/mo for a child between six weeks and 12 months. Our rent in that apartment was $2100. The other daycares near that apartment that I looked up all had "email for more information", which is honestly a barrier for someone looking for information. That place may be godawful expensive with a year-long waitlist, but at least they're honest and up-front. While we lived in that apartment, my entire paychecks went to two things: childcare and our one car payment. It was a third of our monthly income! We moved away because in my hometown, our parents were close enough to provide reliable childcare for free.
This morning I listened to the most recent Pod Save America episode and it has a long interview with Elizabeth Warren, who spent much of it talking about how childcare is an essential part of any infrastructure or jobs plan, because you can't get (let's face it) women into the work force if they don't have reliable childcare. Someone I went to high school with was complaining that he couldn't get anyone to apply to a position he'd posted at $20/hour, and quite a few women were pointing out that they would love to work but can't find childcare, and it's not worth taking a job if childcare is nonexistent or costs more than you make.
I love the pushback against the idea that we should be replicating or expanding our species as the default. Our planet - and our cities - can barely keep up with our population as it is. Some contraction is not necessarily a bad thing.
I gotta drop a book recommendation here - Birth Strike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41219518-birth-strike I found it very readable and plainspoken about the economic structures behind the falling birthrate. (It was focused on the economic/labor lens at the expense of some very important social/cultural ones IMO, but that narrow focus helped make a very clear case for why the US ruling class can at once believe the falling birthrate is a problem and steadfastly refuse to do anything to make child-rearing better.)
It’s not all about economic factors. I know plenty of millennials who have had children despite the mounting costs and inadequate societal structures, and people like myself who are fully equipped financially and have the support of family but just... aren’t interested, save for the fact that we feel like we’re missing out on some normative activity. We need to talk about how having children is no longer the default, and how that’s OK.
So glad you brought this up! Having children is burdensome not only financially but time as well. The expectations for parents, especially mothers, to participate in school activities and extra curriculars, are extremely high and very time-consuming. Do I want to spend every evening helping with homework and every weekend at soccer games and birthday parties? Not really. I like children just fine, but I also know that the societal pressure and time demands expected of a "good mom" would crush me.
Completely agree with all this analysis, which is why I really wish people left of center would start calling conservatives "bro-birth" or "anti-choice," since they only care about life being created, not nurtured.
Another factor I think that leads to this is technological advancement. America is no longer an agrarian society and large families are no longer needed to tend to farms. But I also think about how we have more capacity than ever before to travel, live in multiple places, or pursue various ambitions. I'm only speaking from myself, but I value my discretionary money and free time over having a baby. Maybe this is because I'm under 30 and single, and maybe this because of career ambitions. But we have more options now to find a source of fulfillment outside of raising a family: I'd rather travel than have kids, personally, and I think social expectations are adapting to at least be more inclusive to this sentiment.
Another component of the role the patriarchy has with declining birthrates, which I have not seen covered anywhere, is about the role heterosexual men play in this. Some articles have written about increasing challenges for heterosexual dating for educated women over 35. It seems interesting that the only demographic with an increasing birthrate is never married women over 40. It does seem like there is a segment of women, who would like to have children but cannot find a partner, and therefore some are becoming "choice moms," a controversial term given the lack of choice many feel as they near the end of their time they can have a child biologically. This is the case with myself and many of my peers, and we are so tired of the rhetoric that women are delaying having children for their education and careers, when we find more and more challenges finding men who are interested in a relationship and family as we advance in those areas.
I have seen research indicating that men are most likely to form long-term heterosexual bonds in their mid- to late twenties and then again in their early fifties. If you are a woman looking for a man in your mid- to late 30's you are either too late (all the good ones are taken) or too early (the George Clooney's and Leonardo diCaprio's haven't run out of free milk yet and such men--unscarred by divorce and childless -- aren't that numerous to start with.) I had a co-worker with an 8.5 x 11 sheet taped to his work surface. It read "I'll never get married again. I'll just find some other bitch and give her a house."
If you haven't partnered with a man interested in family formation by the time he is thirty, you are highly unlikely to partner with such a man, period.
In part the reaction to this data indicates that many are surprised by the significant drop in birthrates during the pandemic. I remember in the early months people would speculate about a coming baby boom (because people were at home and obviously boning 24-7) but my response to that was "maybe for first kids." The pandemic may be a tipping point or a revelation of how little our employers and societies value families and caregivers. I consider myself an involved dad, and took paternity leave for both our kids, but dealt with backlash both times, and continued sniping about getting to the office at 8:45 instead of 8 since I am taking a kid to school (and it doesn't fucking matter what time I get to the office). Without breaking down this internalized misogyny/patriarchy, there's really very little incentive for anyone to have kids.
I think for many people, the pandemic merely sped up decisions they were going to make anyway. A lot has been written about the exaggeration about the exodus of people from cities, when people who were probably going to leave for the suburbs or less expensive metro areas simply ended up doing it sooner because they were no longer tied to offices.
My friend works as a L&D nurse and said there was a SLIGHT increase exactly 9 months after initial shut-downs (so, roughly mid-December) but not what had been predicted by any means. I had more friends get divorced than conceive.
I feel really grateful for having had a supportive workplace and, specifically, a woman for a manager when my kids were both born. She had three of her own and didn't bat an eye when I came in late, left randomly early to deal with childcare emergencies b/c my work was closer to home + daycare than their mom's, or bailed entirely for 10 days when my kid was in the hospital. Those couple years were hard enough and I do not know what I would have done in a workplace that had less flexibility and understanding.
Now that I'm a single dad there's no way I'm going to persist in a workplace that doesn't offer that kind of support. No way. I'm lucky that I have a lot of skills in high demand right now, so I can negotiate. But everyone should enjoy that, full stop.
Amen! And it can be hard to tell which workplaces are the really supportive ones. I worked for a law firm that saw itself as “progressive” (as much as possible in a corporate firm) but the upshot was just expecting men AND women with kids to have stay at home spouses.
This made me laugh. I'm also a lawyer, at a woman-led, female dominant public defense firm, and we have much less of this issue than private civil firms. But, my spouse is in medicine and I think this is exactly the dynamic there.
Yep. My husband works for employers who claim to be "pro-life" yet BALKED at the idea of him taking even one week off of work after I gave birth. (He originally asked for two weeks and was denied despite having the vacation time saved up!) They called him literally the day after asking for help, and my husband went in for a couple of hours and left me alone before our daughter was even 48 hours old. It still makes me LIVID thinking about it.
Also, as someone who did not have children for reasons tied to environmental issues (climate, consumption, etc...), I’d like to hear about various rationales behind dipping birth rates.
I think you missed something critically important. Marriage--and divorce. 'Johnny and Susie sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Susie pushing a baby carriage.' Except, if you don't think marriage works anymore, the baby carriage gets a lot less likely. Momma don't wanna wind up with kids and no daddy and Daddy don't wanna wind up with child support payments and no access. Best way to avoid those conundrums is to skip the whole baby-making enterprise all together. And lots of people do. Build a chart showing divorce rates and birth rates lagged by 20 years. I think you'll see correlations across multiple societies. Children of divorce aren't quite so gung-ho to try what their own parents failed at. In fact, the only people having lots of babies are in the bottom quintile of income, where broken marriages have been the norm for generations already and NOT having babies isn't going to materially improve their situation. Those folks, and third world immigrants. Everyone else looks at the long-term risk/reward associated with adding another child to the family and says 'nah.' Zero, or one or two is enough. There are diminishing rewards and escalating risks to adding to your family. I have one child. The missus was 39 when she was born. We weren't going to roll the Down's Syndrome dice for child number 2.
We no longer live in an age where ANYONE has a great deal of confidence in making life-long commitments, whether that's marriage, childbirth or the clergy, or even things that resemble that like Lions, Elks, Masons, or the bowling team. We are unrooted, and unrooted people do not have children.
I am almost 34 and have a daughter who is almost two years old and she is the light of my life. I am one and done but not entirely by choice. I have chronic health issues - physical and mental - that exploded in my late 20s that made having just her at age 32 very hard. Also, our society doesn't value moms, so having only one child seems like the only way to attempt to "have it all" - family, a fulfilling career, travel, hobbies, domestic life, and time to relax!
I do wish we talked about infertility more - it's unreal to me how many of my friends who started in their late 20s and early 30s needed to have treatments (and how expensive they are!) There's a perception that women that young don't need treatments, which couldn't be further from the truth. I wonder if I had my first earlier if I would have then had a second at age 32 - maybe not, but it would have been more realistic a possibility.
I say maybe not because I think of all of the costs of having a child today - five years of day care plus a minimum of four years of undergrad being the biggest costs. The more children, the more you divide the resources. It wasn't lost on me as a millennial fifteen years ago that me and my white middle class friends from smaller families got more help with college costs than the friends from larger families, and the more kids the less help...and how that set them up for the rest of their lives.
I've asserted it and you've said it. Family size is now perceived as having diminishing life-satisfaction returns. Couple that with employment instability and marital dissolution and nobody but the Duggars and company are up for 'cheaper by the dozen.'
When I tweeted about this and included "patriarchy" as one of the reasons for the continued decline, several dudes were like "we have less patriarchy now than every before." I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that while that might be true, we also still live under patriarchal terms and (many, certainly not all) women now have more ability to negotiate their participation in them.
It blows my mind thinking about how RECENTLY women got some very basic freedoms in this country. It's easy to look at a list of rights women have now that they didn't have fifty years ago and think we've come so far, harder to grasp how short fifty years is in terms of cultural change.
I don't think that if you asked <couples> if they would be willing to add <another> baby to their family, that their answer would be 'no, there's too much patriarchy.' If you asked them 'would the risk of having <another> baby be worth the reward?' the answer would be 'no.' 'An heir and a spare' as they say. Some folks have the idea that having an only child is mean to the child without siblings, so it is a dice toss between zero and two. Some folks are willing to roll the dice on child number three if the first two were both the same sex--but most are not. There are diminishing rewards to more children and escalating risks.
And then there's the truncation of the early childbearing years as couples wait for some semblance of security before starting a family, and the truncation of the later childbearing years as divorce leaves people unpartnered. But 'patriarchy' is not something that factors into a deeply personal decision, where risk averseness does.
I want to scream like Annie Edison when nobody has her purple pen when NONE of these articles mention CLIMATE CHANGE! We have heard over and over again that we're past the point of no return, at the very best we could make things ... bearable? And I'm supposed to, as someone who is supposedly more innately loving/gentle/maternal, want to bring someone into that world where they are almost guaranteed to suffer, because no Boomer in Congress wants to appear anti-business? Like you mention in #2 - there is a difference between a "fear" of the end of the world (i.e. the Cold War) and YEARS of actual scientific evidence pointing towards it.
Absolutely. I've never understood why, when (more people) x (more resources) are *literally* destroying the biosphere that keeps us alive, some publications continue to worry about declining population rates.
Thank you for raising this as relevant to climate change! You mention consideration for the individual, and maybe a similar case can be made reducing the risk of the group?
Were ideas like the 1960s efforts of Bucky Fuller (World Game) and Paul Ehrlich (Population Bomb) ever more mainstream than similar ideas today -- or always fringe and uncomfortable? Although I have not read either of their longer writings, they appear to focus on a possible relationship between total population and average quality of life.
We know that creating a new human has a large individual impact on resource consumption Yet choosing to fall below the replacement rate as a society does not feel like a safe subject. It is justifiably sensitive due to the personal and complex nature of reproductive "choice", as well as the "crisis" of elder care. As a result, choosing fewer children as a strategy to improve sustainability seems rarely a focus of climate change media. Perhaps by default?, more often the counterpoint is presented of the potential "crisis" if we don't keep up.
Much of this is addressed with additional detail here, happily pulled from the Sidechannel discussion (thanks!). https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question
I'll leave my initial comment above, though I agree with David Roberts that it may just not be worth the risks and moral distractions to discuss population change rates as a primary strategy.
As he proposes, a focus on female empowerment and family planning including the developing world is likely a more effective approach to the same goals.
I guess I need to join Sidechannel, finally :P
To be clear, I am not arguing that women SHOULD NOT have children. From the article you linked, population is important, sure, but what I'm saying is that I, personally, struggle with the idea to have children in the age of climate change because it feels like I am bringing a child into the world whose life will be full of struggle and suffering and conflict.
This article is where I am coming from: https://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change
The point about this being a reckoning more than a crisis should reverberate across the world. At the very least it should be repeated over and over. What a great piece this is! I also think we should never stop repeating the obvious fact: plenty of people in power, like several state legislatures, have no interest in women's autonomy. They fundamentally believe women *should* be bearing children and staying home to take care of them, leading to punishing policies that make it ever more difficult to have children, work, and develop a healthy family life that balances everyone's needs. We're struggling against a deep-rooted faith.
It's also telling that'd despite many scientific studies further linking declining fertility rates to chemical load, the idea that our environment might be a factor is rarely discussed. Shanna Swan's book "Countdown" is pretty explicit on this subject: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Count-Down/Shanna-H-Swan/9781982113667
Absolutely this, that states have no interest in women's autonomy. You see this as well in Republicans fighting against Biden's family plans. They're pushing the *LIE* that Biden wants to force your children into ECE so you don't have a *choice* in sending your child to pre-school or not, it's REQUIRED. They know it's a lie - they just want people to be against it. And they're certainly not going to raise salaries even if women stayed home while men worked, anyway.
Totally. You saw Republicans being explicit about this in their resistance to covered day care and universal pre-K in states like Montana and Idaho. And I know women who would like to stay home with their kids and can't afford to!
Some people say that there's no such thing as other people's kids, and pitch in to make their community better. Others say "fuck them kids" and voila! you get Arkansas.
:(
Love that this newsletter addressed the very real class component to the issue (which is of course not the only component). Story after story appears with no mention of the fact that having children is extremely expensive, especially when people have mountains of debt, a barely-stable income, and precarious access to healthcare. It's a similar vibe to a recent piece in NPR that talked about how giving money to people of low socioeconomic status helped their mental health and lowered incidences of depression, stress, and anxiety. Which is to say, do we need *more* in-depth studies of what is very obvious to non-wealthy people? Are we really still pretending that finances isn't one of the many reasons women are delaying or entirely avoiding motherhood?
My hunch is that the media refuses to address class because to do so would mean looking into some very uncomfortable structural inequalities and that it is much easier to look at everything else or blame the individual for what is a systemic issue.
The one daycare near our old apartment in Seattle that listed their prices online is currently $2850/mo for a child between six weeks and 12 months. Our rent in that apartment was $2100. The other daycares near that apartment that I looked up all had "email for more information", which is honestly a barrier for someone looking for information. That place may be godawful expensive with a year-long waitlist, but at least they're honest and up-front. While we lived in that apartment, my entire paychecks went to two things: childcare and our one car payment. It was a third of our monthly income! We moved away because in my hometown, our parents were close enough to provide reliable childcare for free.
This morning I listened to the most recent Pod Save America episode and it has a long interview with Elizabeth Warren, who spent much of it talking about how childcare is an essential part of any infrastructure or jobs plan, because you can't get (let's face it) women into the work force if they don't have reliable childcare. Someone I went to high school with was complaining that he couldn't get anyone to apply to a position he'd posted at $20/hour, and quite a few women were pointing out that they would love to work but can't find childcare, and it's not worth taking a job if childcare is nonexistent or costs more than you make.
I love the pushback against the idea that we should be replicating or expanding our species as the default. Our planet - and our cities - can barely keep up with our population as it is. Some contraction is not necessarily a bad thing.
I gotta drop a book recommendation here - Birth Strike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41219518-birth-strike I found it very readable and plainspoken about the economic structures behind the falling birthrate. (It was focused on the economic/labor lens at the expense of some very important social/cultural ones IMO, but that narrow focus helped make a very clear case for why the US ruling class can at once believe the falling birthrate is a problem and steadfastly refuse to do anything to make child-rearing better.)
It’s not all about economic factors. I know plenty of millennials who have had children despite the mounting costs and inadequate societal structures, and people like myself who are fully equipped financially and have the support of family but just... aren’t interested, save for the fact that we feel like we’re missing out on some normative activity. We need to talk about how having children is no longer the default, and how that’s OK.
So glad you brought this up! Having children is burdensome not only financially but time as well. The expectations for parents, especially mothers, to participate in school activities and extra curriculars, are extremely high and very time-consuming. Do I want to spend every evening helping with homework and every weekend at soccer games and birthday parties? Not really. I like children just fine, but I also know that the societal pressure and time demands expected of a "good mom" would crush me.
Completely agree with all this analysis, which is why I really wish people left of center would start calling conservatives "bro-birth" or "anti-choice," since they only care about life being created, not nurtured.
Another factor I think that leads to this is technological advancement. America is no longer an agrarian society and large families are no longer needed to tend to farms. But I also think about how we have more capacity than ever before to travel, live in multiple places, or pursue various ambitions. I'm only speaking from myself, but I value my discretionary money and free time over having a baby. Maybe this is because I'm under 30 and single, and maybe this because of career ambitions. But we have more options now to find a source of fulfillment outside of raising a family: I'd rather travel than have kids, personally, and I think social expectations are adapting to at least be more inclusive to this sentiment.
Another component of the role the patriarchy has with declining birthrates, which I have not seen covered anywhere, is about the role heterosexual men play in this. Some articles have written about increasing challenges for heterosexual dating for educated women over 35. It seems interesting that the only demographic with an increasing birthrate is never married women over 40. It does seem like there is a segment of women, who would like to have children but cannot find a partner, and therefore some are becoming "choice moms," a controversial term given the lack of choice many feel as they near the end of their time they can have a child biologically. This is the case with myself and many of my peers, and we are so tired of the rhetoric that women are delaying having children for their education and careers, when we find more and more challenges finding men who are interested in a relationship and family as we advance in those areas.
I have seen research indicating that men are most likely to form long-term heterosexual bonds in their mid- to late twenties and then again in their early fifties. If you are a woman looking for a man in your mid- to late 30's you are either too late (all the good ones are taken) or too early (the George Clooney's and Leonardo diCaprio's haven't run out of free milk yet and such men--unscarred by divorce and childless -- aren't that numerous to start with.) I had a co-worker with an 8.5 x 11 sheet taped to his work surface. It read "I'll never get married again. I'll just find some other bitch and give her a house."
If you haven't partnered with a man interested in family formation by the time he is thirty, you are highly unlikely to partner with such a man, period.
In part the reaction to this data indicates that many are surprised by the significant drop in birthrates during the pandemic. I remember in the early months people would speculate about a coming baby boom (because people were at home and obviously boning 24-7) but my response to that was "maybe for first kids." The pandemic may be a tipping point or a revelation of how little our employers and societies value families and caregivers. I consider myself an involved dad, and took paternity leave for both our kids, but dealt with backlash both times, and continued sniping about getting to the office at 8:45 instead of 8 since I am taking a kid to school (and it doesn't fucking matter what time I get to the office). Without breaking down this internalized misogyny/patriarchy, there's really very little incentive for anyone to have kids.
I think for many people, the pandemic merely sped up decisions they were going to make anyway. A lot has been written about the exaggeration about the exodus of people from cities, when people who were probably going to leave for the suburbs or less expensive metro areas simply ended up doing it sooner because they were no longer tied to offices.
My friend works as a L&D nurse and said there was a SLIGHT increase exactly 9 months after initial shut-downs (so, roughly mid-December) but not what had been predicted by any means. I had more friends get divorced than conceive.
Makes sense! I wonder if we might see a slight bump in August (9 mo after election was called). Two friends are expecting their first around then.
I feel really grateful for having had a supportive workplace and, specifically, a woman for a manager when my kids were both born. She had three of her own and didn't bat an eye when I came in late, left randomly early to deal with childcare emergencies b/c my work was closer to home + daycare than their mom's, or bailed entirely for 10 days when my kid was in the hospital. Those couple years were hard enough and I do not know what I would have done in a workplace that had less flexibility and understanding.
Now that I'm a single dad there's no way I'm going to persist in a workplace that doesn't offer that kind of support. No way. I'm lucky that I have a lot of skills in high demand right now, so I can negotiate. But everyone should enjoy that, full stop.
Amen! And it can be hard to tell which workplaces are the really supportive ones. I worked for a law firm that saw itself as “progressive” (as much as possible in a corporate firm) but the upshot was just expecting men AND women with kids to have stay at home spouses.
This made me laugh. I'm also a lawyer, at a woman-led, female dominant public defense firm, and we have much less of this issue than private civil firms. But, my spouse is in medicine and I think this is exactly the dynamic there.
Yep. My husband works for employers who claim to be "pro-life" yet BALKED at the idea of him taking even one week off of work after I gave birth. (He originally asked for two weeks and was denied despite having the vacation time saved up!) They called him literally the day after asking for help, and my husband went in for a couple of hours and left me alone before our daughter was even 48 hours old. It still makes me LIVID thinking about it.
Fuck capitalism.
Yes! Thank you for this. It’s not a crisis. Your points are excellent. Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s perspective on NPR’s weekend edition today felt weird.
Also, as someone who did not have children for reasons tied to environmental issues (climate, consumption, etc...), I’d like to hear about various rationales behind dipping birth rates.
I think you missed something critically important. Marriage--and divorce. 'Johnny and Susie sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Susie pushing a baby carriage.' Except, if you don't think marriage works anymore, the baby carriage gets a lot less likely. Momma don't wanna wind up with kids and no daddy and Daddy don't wanna wind up with child support payments and no access. Best way to avoid those conundrums is to skip the whole baby-making enterprise all together. And lots of people do. Build a chart showing divorce rates and birth rates lagged by 20 years. I think you'll see correlations across multiple societies. Children of divorce aren't quite so gung-ho to try what their own parents failed at. In fact, the only people having lots of babies are in the bottom quintile of income, where broken marriages have been the norm for generations already and NOT having babies isn't going to materially improve their situation. Those folks, and third world immigrants. Everyone else looks at the long-term risk/reward associated with adding another child to the family and says 'nah.' Zero, or one or two is enough. There are diminishing rewards and escalating risks to adding to your family. I have one child. The missus was 39 when she was born. We weren't going to roll the Down's Syndrome dice for child number 2.
We no longer live in an age where ANYONE has a great deal of confidence in making life-long commitments, whether that's marriage, childbirth or the clergy, or even things that resemble that like Lions, Elks, Masons, or the bowling team. We are unrooted, and unrooted people do not have children.
Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19
I am almost 34 and have a daughter who is almost two years old and she is the light of my life. I am one and done but not entirely by choice. I have chronic health issues - physical and mental - that exploded in my late 20s that made having just her at age 32 very hard. Also, our society doesn't value moms, so having only one child seems like the only way to attempt to "have it all" - family, a fulfilling career, travel, hobbies, domestic life, and time to relax!
I do wish we talked about infertility more - it's unreal to me how many of my friends who started in their late 20s and early 30s needed to have treatments (and how expensive they are!) There's a perception that women that young don't need treatments, which couldn't be further from the truth. I wonder if I had my first earlier if I would have then had a second at age 32 - maybe not, but it would have been more realistic a possibility.
I say maybe not because I think of all of the costs of having a child today - five years of day care plus a minimum of four years of undergrad being the biggest costs. The more children, the more you divide the resources. It wasn't lost on me as a millennial fifteen years ago that me and my white middle class friends from smaller families got more help with college costs than the friends from larger families, and the more kids the less help...and how that set them up for the rest of their lives.
I've asserted it and you've said it. Family size is now perceived as having diminishing life-satisfaction returns. Couple that with employment instability and marital dissolution and nobody but the Duggars and company are up for 'cheaper by the dozen.'
When I tweeted about this and included "patriarchy" as one of the reasons for the continued decline, several dudes were like "we have less patriarchy now than every before." I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that while that might be true, we also still live under patriarchal terms and (many, certainly not all) women now have more ability to negotiate their participation in them.
It blows my mind thinking about how RECENTLY women got some very basic freedoms in this country. It's easy to look at a list of rights women have now that they didn't have fifty years ago and think we've come so far, harder to grasp how short fifty years is in terms of cultural change.
I don't think that if you asked <couples> if they would be willing to add <another> baby to their family, that their answer would be 'no, there's too much patriarchy.' If you asked them 'would the risk of having <another> baby be worth the reward?' the answer would be 'no.' 'An heir and a spare' as they say. Some folks have the idea that having an only child is mean to the child without siblings, so it is a dice toss between zero and two. Some folks are willing to roll the dice on child number three if the first two were both the same sex--but most are not. There are diminishing rewards to more children and escalating risks.
And then there's the truncation of the early childbearing years as couples wait for some semblance of security before starting a family, and the truncation of the later childbearing years as divorce leaves people unpartnered. But 'patriarchy' is not something that factors into a deeply personal decision, where risk averseness does.
Also I'd love to hear more about your research!!