alt Hacker NewsThe real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence:
"It takes a village to raise a kid".
Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%.
When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society.
Add to that all the other factors like:
- both parents working often without the grandparents nearby or even willing to help
- unnafordable housing, even when renting
- effectively delayed adulthood (university) into the 30s
- falling fertility from whatever chemicals we're poisoning ourselves with
- anti-natalist messaging
- etc.
Replies
It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids
I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep things in line
Now my daughter has just 3-5 kids of her age in my locality, and because they don't have any older siblings, they always have to be accompanied by adults
Honestly that resonates with me. I haven't made up my mind 100% about the topic, but I can say it would be an easier decision if there was a stronger support network. Watching single children be bored and play with their semi-enthusiastic parents makes me sad.
But it's not all doom and gloom, there are plenty of areas where families live and you see gangs of kids of various age-groups roam the streets and parks.
Yes, my wife and I live away from family. On the weekends, when there is no nanny, we are at work 100% of the time with him. One's only downtime is when he naps, or when your partner is looking after him.
Once we add a second child to that mix it'll be 100% of each of our time the entire time.
It's pretty extreme.
We both work full time (like most millennial families), so if we couldn't afford a nanny we literally could not have a child.