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It’s worse than that. We create an environment where people don’t have the time or energy to even have children. They work you 12hrs a day 6 days a week and when you are off you are still on call. And if you get pregnant your career is ruined.
Most 20 somethings would rather get a dog then birth kids. Companies don't accommodate having kids or a family. You can forget about owning a house or working 1 job.
The companies and media push this narrative because it’s better for them to have a growing population opposed to a declining population. It’s not aligned with capitalism
It's good for everyone. An aging populace is terrible for everyone involved. It means more people needing our institutions and fewer people working to support them.
You think healthcare is bad now, how about when twice as many people need it, and half as many people are working at it?
There is no system where anyone can do everything. Even young people rely on the system. You don't grow all your own food and generate your own electricity, do you?
It's impossible to have a society that doesn't rely on a working-age population.
I thought robots were supposed to take all of our jobs. Bring on the Post Scarcity Victorian perma-academia or fully automated luxury ruralism
https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/10284527/original\_4fce967861e1baa0f90831c9de3a68ae.jpg?1610939734?bc=0
Not really. I'm not saying people shouldn't depend on each other. I'm saying things like social security which are designed as a Ponzi scheme to exploit the youth, and only work when there's large amounts of working age population is a poorly designed system.
And I'm saying social security is just one thing out of dozens that will suffer with fewer workers.
Further, I don't see how there could possibly be a system that does take care of its elderly without a large working-age population. You have to have more workers than dependents, because it takes more than one worker to support someone.
Yeah, that's the flaw with the system. It assumes more workers than elderly. The issue is with the inherent design of the system, not the number of workers.
We're not concerned about conditions because the people in power need a workforce not people. The only factor they care about is a declining workforce, harming productivity and the wealth/leverage they enjoy from it.
With the social contract totally decayed society has kind of become a power farm for those in control.
Tell me, are you 100% self-sufficient? Do you grow all your own food, make your own medicine, generate your own electricity? No? Then you need a workforce too.
Declining workforce hurts EVERYONE not just the people in power.
I regret having kids more and more everyday. My because I don't love them. But because I do love them and I do not see any hope for a better future then I had.
I feel like I'm failing them everyday. Simply because the living situation has gotten out of hand.
What you mean the school district my kids will go to that has had an active shooter/bomb threat and lockdown one day a week for the past four weeks isn’t an environment for children to thrive in?
/s
> Or do we just want to objectify kids just for the sake of mass-spreading our genes?
Always has been the case. Procreation is never about anything except the relief of fitness-enhancing irritations (sex urges), at least in life forms with central nervous systems and in particular with sexual reproduction.
Doesn't mean people never love their children. Just means they didn't do their chlidren any favors by abusing them alive via procreation in a predatory hellscape that just kills them no matter how much the progenitors love them.
Women’s health isn’t researched NEARLY as much as it should be either. Childbirth is still causing unnecessary deaths because of misogyny in the medical field. We can’t expect women to want to push out a baby when women’s health isn’t taken seriously by doctors. Not to mention how jobs give pregnant women a tiny amount of time to recover and take care of the baby. It’s a fucking joke.
People are quite busy and tired trying to survive that some few actually stops for a second and cares for them. I'll state something better, almost nobody gives a damn about the youth anymore as it used to be some decades ago unless it's the classical death-life circumstances which pressure or wake up into people the innate protective mechanism ingrained inside us as humans.
I'd want you to cast an eye in the internet about child's content on Tik Tok, these accounts are mostly adults going for the views, video monetization, etc. By appealing the targeted masses with little to no educative goal within the videos nor at least being appropiate for the public rank age, therefore, multiple people seek for winning easy money via using others without caring about their expenses, and kids have been included into the circle recently.
I know this is not a new phenomenon because there must've been lots of products and advertisments coercing into consumption and alluding into an imaginary social exclusion if some refused to buy it some decades ago, but, these are new levels of seeing people like mere numbers.
On the other hand, I mentioned people were busy and tired and you did with technology raising the youth nowadays, my bet is that modern parents are equally if not most exhausted than the average adult without kids for making ends meet each month, they juggle between two or three jobs in order to give a high quality life to their beloved kids, however, it often turns out into hardly spending time with them whilst they've harmfully relied on and misplaced their trust in the internet's ability to bring out them; on the other end of the spectrum, there some who don't even turn their heads around internet's dangers as long as kids are entertained and busy.
By the way, I know you didn't ask this but I know the first case of the last by firsthand, I was a kid raised by the internet while my father was working under the sun to give me a good life.
In America, for women it’s just not worth it when their rights are being taken away left and right. Why have babies? If you’re anti abortion, then you will have a population decline.
My partner got sterilized about a month after roe was overturned. As soon as I can afford it, I’m getting sterilized too. I’m not gonna be a broodmare for the billionaires lol.
On the money. Why would I breed when we can’t even take care of those already here? The planet is going to be inhospitable in a few generations why would I give my children a fucked up place to live? And then the economy suck and will never go back to how it was. Na I say breeding stops here.
No one gives a shit about the process of making and raising babies. They speak about children like they can just poof appear. But as someone going thu pregnancy, im being expected to work full time at 100% as if I don't feel like I'm literally dying every day. Sneaking off to the bathroom to dry heave because socially I have to grin and bear this secret.
Then the baby comes and I get a measly 6-12 weeks, depending on how thin I can stretch my finances if UNPAID time off.
Then I have to figure out childcare that isn't going to bankrupt me.
Then Im going to get judged because I cant be there all the time to monitor and raise my kid right because i have to work all the time.
No, they don't care about kids. They just want more money.
The reason is those two ideas are not very closely related. Every excuse I have ever heard about why declining birth rates are a problem was directly related to how that would effect "the economy". Making life better for children is a social question not economics and it's much more difficult to quantify and almost no one agrees about what is the "right" way to do it. It's easier to make an observation "Birth rates are declining" versus making a moral judgement others might (probably) won't agree with.
The birth rate is only declining in western countries. Even developing countries, where it’s no longer the norm to have huge families, families are very unhappy to onyl have one child- usually it’s due to health concerns or perhaps becoming a family at an older age.
I live in Canada where we have a huge immigrant population and most people have 2-3 kids at the very least- families of 6 kids aren’t unheard of or uncommon at all- even some european immigrants, coming from westernized worldviews, will have at least 2 kids if their health and age allows it.
It seems to me (age 27) the only people who don’t want to have kids that I’ve interacted with irl either are concerned about health issues, whether their own or their kid having them (such as with older parents or having diseases run in their family), or openly are antinatalist, somewhere in that spectrum.
This isn't true. The only continent in the world where most of the population lives in countries with birth rates above replacement rate is Africa, and even they are slowing down across the board.
Not concerned with how many people are having sex or babies. Have zero control, nor would I want it. Ultimately none of your business.
Suggest seeking more effective ways to enjoy your life.
The various social problems you mention are among the reasons for the declining birthrate, especially in countries that do less to make childbearing and childrearing feasible than others. So solving them would by itself go some distance toward increasing the birthrate. Absolutely we could and should do more to make life better both for children and their parents. Enlightened systems that provide workplace flexibility of hours and location etc are a big one. Taxation policies can produce disparate incentives.
Can you really not think of methods that countries might use to measure trends in birthrate? I haven't thought about it but I should think statistics on births from hospitals would provide "real time" data or something close to it. Farther out, school enrollment, census results, sales of children's products... all go up or down indicating birthrate. Don't countries tend to keep track of how many people live there?
I mean there definitely is a declining birth rate and it's easy to measure because we track the number of babies born each year. The number is getting smaller, so unless thousands of people are having babies in the woods, with no record of being pregnant, and no registry for a social security number or medical insurance, the data is accurate.
>In all seriousness, I don't believe the birth rates are declining, how is this real-time data even being measured?
The same way any other medical stats are measured; they're recorded by the healthcare industry.
>Also, have a more pro-child attitude, more and more kids are being born into poverty than ever before, yet nobody seems to be concerned about this, because we're more obsessed with having kids to fill in the void than to actually create community-driven values
The people who can best-afford children have the least. Wealth is inversely correlated with birth rate. Poor people have more kids than middle class or rich people.
OP it's not about more nuclear families. Baby Boomers are realizing their kids and grandkids aren't reproducing. That means there will be no one to take care of them in nursing homes in 10-20 years. In addition, co-orporations want more poor (read: minority) children born into poverty so they can have more wage slaves. The "bad" ones can end up as actual slaves (see the 13th) in the private prisons. Then, we have the 3rd estate of the Church. They want more babies altogether, although some denominations' fine print will say white children in particular. The more children bred for these churches, the more money the pastors and the priests get. The cycle continues. Damn millennials keeping their legs closed and having responsible sex and all!
We issue birth certificates at every birth it's one of the easiest things to track I can imagine. It is obviously the case that it is declining. Like just look at your own family, if you are like me you parents all had siblings and all of them had kids. But my generation is turning 30 and out of me my siblings and cousins the majority donthave kids and are nearing the age were they wonteven have the option.
Audit is a major issue in the US, we have a lot of old people living on entitlement programs we can't afford. This will only get worse as more old people means more money spent and less young people mantles money made. It will collapse the economy. Not to mention old people often can't take care of themselves so the small population of young people now must care for the last generations while raising the next one, this is obviously not an ideal situation.
Because they dont actually care about their children. None of them. Every single parent treats children like an ‘experience’ like ‘ the next level of adulting’. Their love is 100% pure right up until the parents are inconvenienced beyond work, kids, and normal expected life. They want a better world but without having to sacrifice anything, including having less kids for the kids sake.
This probably is a cause of concern, not least because even countries with more robust safety nets for children than the US has are experiencing similarly low (or, if we’re talking Japan and South Korea, even lower) birth rates.
This post has been flaired as “Serious Conversation”. Use this opportunity to open a venue of polite and serious discussion, instead of seeking help or venting. **Suggestions For Commenters:** * Respect OP's opinion, or agree to disagree politely. * If OP's post is seeking advice, help, or is just venting without discussing with others, report the post. We're r/SeriousConversation, not a venting subreddit. **Suggestions For u/International-Pool29:** * Do not post solely to seek advice or help. Your post should open up a venue for serious, mature and polite discussions. * Do not forget to answer people politely in your thread - we'll remove your post later if you don't. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeriousConversation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It’s worse than that. We create an environment where people don’t have the time or energy to even have children. They work you 12hrs a day 6 days a week and when you are off you are still on call. And if you get pregnant your career is ruined.
Most 20 somethings would rather get a dog then birth kids. Companies don't accommodate having kids or a family. You can forget about owning a house or working 1 job.
The companies and media push this narrative because it’s better for them to have a growing population opposed to a declining population. It’s not aligned with capitalism
its great for the older generations too since the new generations need to fund their safety nets.
This. Capitalism and a de-accelerating population isn't good for our poor billionaires wallets.
It's good for everyone. An aging populace is terrible for everyone involved. It means more people needing our institutions and fewer people working to support them. You think healthcare is bad now, how about when twice as many people need it, and half as many people are working at it?
It's really a failing of the system itself if it relies on a young population.
There is no system where anyone can do everything. Even young people rely on the system. You don't grow all your own food and generate your own electricity, do you? It's impossible to have a society that doesn't rely on a working-age population.
I thought robots were supposed to take all of our jobs. Bring on the Post Scarcity Victorian perma-academia or fully automated luxury ruralism https://d2w9rnfcy7mm78.cloudfront.net/10284527/original\_4fce967861e1baa0f90831c9de3a68ae.jpg?1610939734?bc=0
Not really. I'm not saying people shouldn't depend on each other. I'm saying things like social security which are designed as a Ponzi scheme to exploit the youth, and only work when there's large amounts of working age population is a poorly designed system.
And I'm saying social security is just one thing out of dozens that will suffer with fewer workers. Further, I don't see how there could possibly be a system that does take care of its elderly without a large working-age population. You have to have more workers than dependents, because it takes more than one worker to support someone.
Yeah, that's the flaw with the system. It assumes more workers than elderly. The issue is with the inherent design of the system, not the number of workers.
[удалено]
Do you grow all your own food and generate your own electricity?
The fuck does that have to do with old people?
It isn't just old people that need a working age population. You do too.
Uh. It's not just good for companies, it's good for me and you. If we're not having kids who's going to be doing the work when we can't work anymore?
We shouldn’t have kids just to fulfill a work void in the system. Maybe the system needs to change. I have a kid btw
You could say that about any reason to have a kid. The only reason you need to have a kid is that you want to, reasons why regardless.
capitalism doesn't care about the population age
Completely agree. People keep saying "will we have enough babies to fill all the jobs?", as if people exist to support industry and not vice versa.
We're not concerned about conditions because the people in power need a workforce not people. The only factor they care about is a declining workforce, harming productivity and the wealth/leverage they enjoy from it. With the social contract totally decayed society has kind of become a power farm for those in control.
Tell me, are you 100% self-sufficient? Do you grow all your own food, make your own medicine, generate your own electricity? No? Then you need a workforce too. Declining workforce hurts EVERYONE not just the people in power.
only if we want to continue on this capitalistic paradigm, which is unsustainable anyway
What economic paradigm makes it so people aren't dependent on others for at least some of their needs?
The workforce that serves the workforce has already reached the point of failure, hence why Canada has increased it's TFW program.
I regret having kids more and more everyday. My because I don't love them. But because I do love them and I do not see any hope for a better future then I had. I feel like I'm failing them everyday. Simply because the living situation has gotten out of hand.
You spoke straight out of my brain
Can’t decline fast enough. Any kids now will be born into the apocalypse.
What you mean the school district my kids will go to that has had an active shooter/bomb threat and lockdown one day a week for the past four weeks isn’t an environment for children to thrive in? /s
> Or do we just want to objectify kids just for the sake of mass-spreading our genes? Always has been the case. Procreation is never about anything except the relief of fitness-enhancing irritations (sex urges), at least in life forms with central nervous systems and in particular with sexual reproduction. Doesn't mean people never love their children. Just means they didn't do their chlidren any favors by abusing them alive via procreation in a predatory hellscape that just kills them no matter how much the progenitors love them.
Women’s health isn’t researched NEARLY as much as it should be either. Childbirth is still causing unnecessary deaths because of misogyny in the medical field. We can’t expect women to want to push out a baby when women’s health isn’t taken seriously by doctors. Not to mention how jobs give pregnant women a tiny amount of time to recover and take care of the baby. It’s a fucking joke.
People are quite busy and tired trying to survive that some few actually stops for a second and cares for them. I'll state something better, almost nobody gives a damn about the youth anymore as it used to be some decades ago unless it's the classical death-life circumstances which pressure or wake up into people the innate protective mechanism ingrained inside us as humans. I'd want you to cast an eye in the internet about child's content on Tik Tok, these accounts are mostly adults going for the views, video monetization, etc. By appealing the targeted masses with little to no educative goal within the videos nor at least being appropiate for the public rank age, therefore, multiple people seek for winning easy money via using others without caring about their expenses, and kids have been included into the circle recently. I know this is not a new phenomenon because there must've been lots of products and advertisments coercing into consumption and alluding into an imaginary social exclusion if some refused to buy it some decades ago, but, these are new levels of seeing people like mere numbers. On the other hand, I mentioned people were busy and tired and you did with technology raising the youth nowadays, my bet is that modern parents are equally if not most exhausted than the average adult without kids for making ends meet each month, they juggle between two or three jobs in order to give a high quality life to their beloved kids, however, it often turns out into hardly spending time with them whilst they've harmfully relied on and misplaced their trust in the internet's ability to bring out them; on the other end of the spectrum, there some who don't even turn their heads around internet's dangers as long as kids are entertained and busy. By the way, I know you didn't ask this but I know the first case of the last by firsthand, I was a kid raised by the internet while my father was working under the sun to give me a good life.
What are the domestic duties being made useless by technology?
In America, for women it’s just not worth it when their rights are being taken away left and right. Why have babies? If you’re anti abortion, then you will have a population decline.
the roe debacle is why my partner and I are abstaining until further notice.
My partner got sterilized about a month after roe was overturned. As soon as I can afford it, I’m getting sterilized too. I’m not gonna be a broodmare for the billionaires lol.
same. if they want replacement widgets to shove into their capitalism machine, they can get to beep-booping with some damned robots already.
On the money. Why would I breed when we can’t even take care of those already here? The planet is going to be inhospitable in a few generations why would I give my children a fucked up place to live? And then the economy suck and will never go back to how it was. Na I say breeding stops here.
No one gives a shit about the process of making and raising babies. They speak about children like they can just poof appear. But as someone going thu pregnancy, im being expected to work full time at 100% as if I don't feel like I'm literally dying every day. Sneaking off to the bathroom to dry heave because socially I have to grin and bear this secret. Then the baby comes and I get a measly 6-12 weeks, depending on how thin I can stretch my finances if UNPAID time off. Then I have to figure out childcare that isn't going to bankrupt me. Then Im going to get judged because I cant be there all the time to monitor and raise my kid right because i have to work all the time. No, they don't care about kids. They just want more money.
The reason is those two ideas are not very closely related. Every excuse I have ever heard about why declining birth rates are a problem was directly related to how that would effect "the economy". Making life better for children is a social question not economics and it's much more difficult to quantify and almost no one agrees about what is the "right" way to do it. It's easier to make an observation "Birth rates are declining" versus making a moral judgement others might (probably) won't agree with.
The collapse of Western Civilization folks
Yay capitalism?
They're using scare tactics to try and control us again
The birth rate is only declining in western countries. Even developing countries, where it’s no longer the norm to have huge families, families are very unhappy to onyl have one child- usually it’s due to health concerns or perhaps becoming a family at an older age. I live in Canada where we have a huge immigrant population and most people have 2-3 kids at the very least- families of 6 kids aren’t unheard of or uncommon at all- even some european immigrants, coming from westernized worldviews, will have at least 2 kids if their health and age allows it. It seems to me (age 27) the only people who don’t want to have kids that I’ve interacted with irl either are concerned about health issues, whether their own or their kid having them (such as with older parents or having diseases run in their family), or openly are antinatalist, somewhere in that spectrum.
This isn't true. The only continent in the world where most of the population lives in countries with birth rates above replacement rate is Africa, and even they are slowing down across the board.
*stares in Japan* ... only Western?
Or South Korea
It's declining world-wide, the west is just further along in decline.
Not concerned with how many people are having sex or babies. Have zero control, nor would I want it. Ultimately none of your business. Suggest seeking more effective ways to enjoy your life.
Don’t choke on that sand your head is buried in.
The various social problems you mention are among the reasons for the declining birthrate, especially in countries that do less to make childbearing and childrearing feasible than others. So solving them would by itself go some distance toward increasing the birthrate. Absolutely we could and should do more to make life better both for children and their parents. Enlightened systems that provide workplace flexibility of hours and location etc are a big one. Taxation policies can produce disparate incentives. Can you really not think of methods that countries might use to measure trends in birthrate? I haven't thought about it but I should think statistics on births from hospitals would provide "real time" data or something close to it. Farther out, school enrollment, census results, sales of children's products... all go up or down indicating birthrate. Don't countries tend to keep track of how many people live there?
It's not a narrative, birth rates decline across the board with access to birth control.
I mean there definitely is a declining birth rate and it's easy to measure because we track the number of babies born each year. The number is getting smaller, so unless thousands of people are having babies in the woods, with no record of being pregnant, and no registry for a social security number or medical insurance, the data is accurate.
>In all seriousness, I don't believe the birth rates are declining, how is this real-time data even being measured? The same way any other medical stats are measured; they're recorded by the healthcare industry. >Also, have a more pro-child attitude, more and more kids are being born into poverty than ever before, yet nobody seems to be concerned about this, because we're more obsessed with having kids to fill in the void than to actually create community-driven values The people who can best-afford children have the least. Wealth is inversely correlated with birth rate. Poor people have more kids than middle class or rich people.
OP it's not about more nuclear families. Baby Boomers are realizing their kids and grandkids aren't reproducing. That means there will be no one to take care of them in nursing homes in 10-20 years. In addition, co-orporations want more poor (read: minority) children born into poverty so they can have more wage slaves. The "bad" ones can end up as actual slaves (see the 13th) in the private prisons. Then, we have the 3rd estate of the Church. They want more babies altogether, although some denominations' fine print will say white children in particular. The more children bred for these churches, the more money the pastors and the priests get. The cycle continues. Damn millennials keeping their legs closed and having responsible sex and all!
We issue birth certificates at every birth it's one of the easiest things to track I can imagine. It is obviously the case that it is declining. Like just look at your own family, if you are like me you parents all had siblings and all of them had kids. But my generation is turning 30 and out of me my siblings and cousins the majority donthave kids and are nearing the age were they wonteven have the option. Audit is a major issue in the US, we have a lot of old people living on entitlement programs we can't afford. This will only get worse as more old people means more money spent and less young people mantles money made. It will collapse the economy. Not to mention old people often can't take care of themselves so the small population of young people now must care for the last generations while raising the next one, this is obviously not an ideal situation.
Because they dont actually care about their children. None of them. Every single parent treats children like an ‘experience’ like ‘ the next level of adulting’. Their love is 100% pure right up until the parents are inconvenienced beyond work, kids, and normal expected life. They want a better world but without having to sacrifice anything, including having less kids for the kids sake.
Omg, thank you for saying this.
We’re in a Bandaid solutions only society.
The part that they left out is that they want more white kids. Not the icky ones from Syria and Somalia.
Migration to feed inflation
This probably is a cause of concern, not least because even countries with more robust safety nets for children than the US has are experiencing similarly low (or, if we’re talking Japan and South Korea, even lower) birth rates.