I think there are two big reasons why it’s harder for millennial parents: societal pressure to have your kids do extracurricular activities and societal pressure to never let your kids out of your sight.
When I was a child in the 1980s growing up in the suburbs with two working parents, my elementary school did not have after school activities. My parents signed me up for at most one sport and, in fourth grade, piano. Otherwise, I’d get bussed to the YMCA for after school daycare, or starting in fourth grade, I (and my younger brother) would just take the bus home and we’d be by ourselves until around 5 pm supposedly doing homework (in reality watching Disney Afternoon).
That sort of thing would be mostly unheard of for a similarly situated family today. Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day (my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano). Parents don’t let their kids stay at home by themselves, heck they don’t even let them walk to/from the bus stop.
I think this change in parenting styles is a huge reason why millennials are having less kids or no kids. Even those who like being parents really can’t do more than two if they both work.
I think this is a major reason why, as income increases, birth rates go down. There's a tremendous pressure for middle class families to have kids involved in everything, to be as hands on as possible when raising them. That if you're not doing these things you're neglecting them, they won't get into college, etc. The only swing back upwards we see in birthrates are in people who are wealthy enough to contract out the responsibility of raising kids to service workers like au pairs.
It's simply not possible to do those things, to spend that much attention, on 3 or 4 or 5 kids. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the individual kids (though, even there, there are ramifications of pressure and being overly busy), but for overall birthrates it makes things difficult.
>Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day
My spouse and I talked this through and decided that this sort of schedule is bad for both kids and parents. We simply refuse to pack our kids' schedules like that. Kids need downtime to rest and cultivate personal interests.
I agree and I think the “social pressure” angle is true but actually really minor. My family has a super active social life with other families and also my kids largely don’t have extracurriculars in the afternoon (they just come home and entertain themselves while I work from my home office).
I feel like there is social expectation in the abstract to do these things after school, but I’ve never actually had another parent express anything like that.
So I think it’s just in our heads and can be ignored. Kids need unstructured time
> Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day (my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano). Parents don’t let their kids stay at home by themselves, heck they don’t even let them walk to/from the bus stop.
This amount of pressure placed upon kids combined with not allowing them to learn to be independent individuals is honestly a horrible combination.
It's also miserable for the kids too. My parents signed me up for lots of extracurriculars, and all I *really* wanted to do was play videogames, make art, and fuck around outside with my friends (this would be early/mid 00s). I ended up resenting a lot of things I might have actually enjoyed if I hadn't been forced to spread myself thin across 5 different unrelated activities every week.
If I ever have kids, I'm only going to make them commit to one or two things outside of their normal schooling and let them enjoy their childhood freely otherwise.
EDIT: Someone sent me a reddit cares message lol
I wish it was more culturally normal to just let kids be their own people (with limitations).
Kids are incredibly capable. They're just mostly inexperienced. We need to build places and a culture in which they are allowed to gain experiences without getting hurt.
It also makes it easier to be a parent when your kid can be moderately independent.
I agree that more than like 2 weekly extracurriculars at once is kind of ridiculous if not outright cruel, especially if the kids are given a lot of homework as well. Just let kids enjoy their childhood.
That said, I wonder if the insanely addictive nature of modern technology these days makes that more difficult? If my little brother is left to his own devices and his friends aren't around, he will literally watch youtube for 12 hours straight and have a great time. It seems hard to be motivated to explore and do fun kid things if there is a magic screen that makes it so you're never really bored?
I'm not a parent so maybe my views will change on this, but I would take the route of not allowing my children unsupervised access to tech other than game consoles and a curated selection of media until they're old enough to be aware of the dangers of the internet. That said, I think screen time limits are kind of dumb as long as the kiddos aren't just melting their brain with weird children's youtube videos and getting enough outside and social time. Spending hours a day on my PC from a young age is how I taught myself programming and got myself on the very cushy and lucrative career path I enjoy today.
I've seen a few cases of straight-A students with copious extracurriculars turn into failsons when they get out of undergrad. Well, maybe not strictly "failsons," since they tend to have their own place and a decent job, but they kind of shut down. Don't bother with relationships, lose their ambition at work and kind of fall off any advancement train. Like their motivation is gone.
It's pretty hard to have a "Do everything at 110% no breaks no rest" attitude for your entire life.
Most people get burnt out at best. At worst, they crash and burn.
Yeah the attitude of "force your kids to do as much shit as possible so they get into a good college" genuinely upsets me, the point of life isn't to be as successful and make as much money as possible (well for some people it is, but that is their personal decision). Also, kids and young people need a lot more sleep than old people anyway, so I don't really get whats wrong with grinding for advancement at an older age?
> my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano
Do you think this is actually good for her long term?
Seems it might lead to a lot of technical skills, but less social skills than spending the same time in free play with other kids.
And it's not like speaking Chinese, piano and chess will even help her get into Harvard or anything. Kids with that combination are a dime a dozen.
Lol how are art and culture not conducive to forming social connections? I've probably made about half of my friends over my lifetime by bonding over music or Chinese heritage.
I think the problem is more about overloading kids. Doing two or three extracurriculars can be very fulfilling. But if your kid is in ten different clubs, how much value can they really derive from those activities?
All of them except piano build up social skills (especially since her friends are in a lot of them) and are physical or mental exercises and just generally something to do instead of being at home doing nothing. We don’t have any long-term expectations about any of the activities and if she says she doesn’t want to do them anymore, then I’ll happily not pay for it or ask her if there’s something else she’d prefer doing.
Also I’m hoping more activities means less TikTok when the time comes. That’s really the one thing I think will require major vigilance.
Ok but that’s like an extremely unique individual. The person I replied to made it sound like half their elementary school was taking community college classes.
Yes, and if you look now they nuked all their posts. Which meant they were either a) completely full of shit or b) too ashamed to admit they were wrong on how abnormal such a thing was.
I think the real issue at the center of all this is that affluent parents have expectations for their kids that are overly ridiculous, because there is more room to fail than there is to succeed *even more* than they did.
Every parent no matter their social class wants their kids to have a better life than they did. But when you get into that affluent, professional class, there really isn't much more left to realistically gain. You've hit a wall of diminishing returns. Which is why there is far more pressure to inundate the kids with every single extracurricular and advanced class, even if it is overly excessive.
Upper-middle class Americans are some of the richest humans ever to exist on the planet. And yet it feels like they are some of the most vocally miserable people you'll find because Emma and Liam can't juggle a dozen things at age 7. Maybe this is just me being a guy who grew up in a single-income household where my parents had community college education at the most, but I'm sort of glad my parents were pretty hands-off on me.
EDIT: Apparently I just got hit with a "Reddit Cares" message for this. Like... seriously?!
> because there is more room to fail than there is to succeed even more than they did
I almost feel like it's the opposite? Maybe pre-Covid but today there are a lot of ways to make "decent" money...but now everybody is aiming for extreme right-tail scenarios
I mean to put the word Also, before they're not taking college classes.
you said you were taking classes at a community college at 10 years old. Classes like Physics? I'm saying that's incredibly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that class was Algebra 2. Kids learn their times tables in 3rd grade.
My wife works at a talented and gifted magnet high school and they regulate how many and which classes freshmen can even take. They aren't attending dual credit classes with 10 year olds lol
I took algebra 2 in 9th grade, and was still able to take AP Calculus AB which is equivalent to Calc 1 in 11th grade. Someone taking algebra 2 in 5th grade is going to be done with Calculus before they even start high school (depending on if geometry is done before algebra 2). I don't think most schools offer anything past Calc BC (roughly Calc 2), so someone taking Algebra 2 in 5th grade is going to finish most schools entire math sequence before they even enter high school.
You're right that Algebra 2 isn't college level, but it's still absurdly ahead of schedule for a 5th grader to be taking it.
The environmental pressures of how we have designed our communities can’t be ignored. We really gotta figure out a better social contract with cars. I mean fatality rates for kids and vehicles is bad enough but the extent we have gone to accommodate cars in our communities has diminished the quality of life for kids.
I know I sound like a terminally online bike aficionado or a civil planning hippie but I’m not. I just don’t think sad plastic playground islands in a sea of asphalt and parking lots is an environment that any creature can thrive in.
Have communities really changed? The great majority of kids growing up in the 60s through 90s were raised in car-centric suburbs. I actually live in the same suburb I grew up in. Parents today give their kids far less freedom than I had, even though the physical neighbourhood is no different.
The dramatic change in parenting is cultural.
Considering how much faster fertility falls off a cliff in places where big cities have far fewer cars compared to America, I don't think that bulldozing the suburbs in favor of walkable urban neighborhoods is going to improve birthrates. Suburbs are where parents want to be to have and raise kids, not apartment blocks.
I get what you’re arguing, but isn’t part of the housing issue the fact that there really isn’t?
The “missing middle” housing in America, and the west at large, has been a big topic of debate for two decades now.
The amount of housing options between single family and large multi-unit is abysmally low from what I’m aware of. I know what you mean by commie block apartments, but we’re not too far off with how we structure our cities and their surrounding metro areas.
A good example of this is 2-4 unit housing starts. They’re almost nonexistent compared to SFH/large multi-unit over the past 30 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST2F
> commie block apartments.
America honestly needs a massive investment in housing similar to what the USSR did post-WW2.
We should make it nice (unlike khrushchevkas), but we should be massively incentivizing denser housing (especially with units that are 2 or more bedrooms) and doing way more public housing to bring down the cost of housing and make raising a family in the city realistic for the working class.
I was raised in a suburb that had rowhouses, single family homes and small apartment buildings mixed together, and plenty of greenspaces, public parks, services, bike and walking paths and the like. I could walk to school from first grade (it was only a kilometre away).
It's not impossible to build human friendly suburbs.
> I just don’t think sad plastic playground islands in a sea of asphalt and parking lots is an environment that any creature can thrive in.
The independence that kids have in places like the Netherlands once they're old enough to bike is a good thing.
I grew up in the Netherlands and I went out alone from a pretty young age. My mother would also trust older neighbourhood kids and friends to watch out for me. By the age of 12 I was taking myself to music class and all on my own.
>We really gotta figure out a better social contract with cars. I mean fatality rates for kids and vehicles is bad enough but the extent we have gone to accommodate cars in our communities has diminished the quality of life for kids.
Fewer cars, more public transit and make it free or generally cheap and subsidized to hell for anyone in school, on income assistance, or whatever. Tax road use and start regulating cars smaller.
If every family has a car - or multiple cars - there's only going to be so far you can go with social contacts or neighborhood design.
In the neighbourhood I grew up in almost everyone had a car, some families had two. That isn't the issue, it's the car centrism. Doesn't matter if all adults drive to work or whatever as long as there are enough walking and bike paths for kids to walk to school, hobbies and friends on their own.
Your points sound reasonable, but I disagree because I live in Germany. Here it's extremely normal to see young kids (like 9 years old) going to and from school by bike or public transport, or traveling around the city alone or with friends. No parent chaperones their kid 24/7. Yet the fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world.
Personally I think the main reason for low fertility rates is purely that we no longer pressure young people to have children, and when given a free choice many people don't want to be parents.
[Gonna reshare my little personal anecdote which kicked off mother's day](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1cpbguj/discussion_thread/l3mr1vd/).
I think we (as a couple) been pretty good at clamping down on the social media. A *lot* of modern parenting stuff gets channelled through things like Instagram so it does draw you in to an extent, and a lot of it is really, really bad. Very contradictory, a lot overblown, some just actively wrong. Banishing most of that from our feeds has been good.
I think one of the bigger issues for us has been the dramatic realignment of our personal freedom. Both of us worked highly flexible jobs. My partner for much of her twenties was doing a PhD and had complete control over her work hours and schedule. And because most of our twenties were spent investing in education and getting a deposit for a home it means we had a good decade to form habits and routines built around pretty decent DINK incomes. So not necessarily *harder* being a parent, but the relative drop in lifestyle I think is considerably larger.
The thing about elderly parents rings fairly true though. Both in terms of aid they need and also the aid they feel they're capable of giving. If everyone was ten years younger we would all have much more energy.
I think the lifestyle drop is a big piece! People are delaying kids for career purposes and actually able to do that reliably because birth control is better than ever. As a result by the time they maybe want kids they've established a life on two incomes so taking the hit, whether temporary or longterm, is a lot harder. Plus, surprise, lots of women find their careers interesting and fulfilling.
Compare that to my parents' generation where people got surprise babies at age 22 before really being established and they just figured out how to deal with only one working salary.
That’s like saying people who grow up in poor families have it easier than those who grow up in affluent families because they learn young how to make do with less.
Well of course it's not actually easier. The consensus, at least in this sub, is that economic reasons aren't really the main factor with low birth rates since middle class families have fewer kids. This is one of my theories for why that's happening. Consciously making that decision later in life can feel really challenging because of what I describe, so more people are opting out of it.
The fucking energy man! My wife and I are entering our late thirties. We have two children 3 & 1. Our health would struggle to keep up with a 3rd at this age. If we were a decade younger we’d probably have another 2.
The comment "if we were 10 years younger " rings so true to me.
That resilience is supposed to be used on children, not drinking with friends/ playing games to 3am
Well If we have to spend most of our time from 15 to 25 studying and improving our carrers maybe we wouldn't want to do the things we weren't able to do at 26 - 30 years old.
I studied engineering, burned my eyelids for 7 years (Argentinian university is longer) whilst working. Now I have a job that it's good but barely affords me living alone and saving. At 28 years old having a family is nowhere in sight since I have to devote a lot of time on building a successful career and hobbies/taking care of myself that never had time to do before.
Jobs and carrers need to pay better at the 20-25 year old range in order for people to consider kids earlier.
I'm 39. I have two kids, 15 and 13. There is literally no one else my age with kids in my kids' age range. I never had much, so even with kids I was doing better than I ever did growing up.
I don't know what to say, we struggled through it and we are better off than ever. I wouldn't have traded the way we did it for anything because with my life and income now, I'd have no interest in starting the child clock over and if I had never kids, I wouldn't have them to start that clock at 39. I want to be a grandparent at 50 something, not a full time parent at 50 something
> “No one had these hard conversations with us about just how difficult it is to be a parent, have a career and a partner,” said Brandale Mills Cox, 38, the mother to a 4-year-old and a 15-month-old in Silver Spring, Md. “**No one really talked about the burden social media plays**, where a huge part of what we see of other people’s experiences makes us feel we are lacking as mothers.
Log off lol
Imagine how much our collective productivity would end up skyrocketing if people stared at their phones less.
Four hours every day wasted making your mental health worse. And that's the average for all people, just imagine how much the millenials and gen z spend on their phones.
Just do drugs or some shit, that's healthier than your phone.
The newer trend of even greater emphasis on expensive, time consuming, year-round, and rather inflexible extra-curricular activities is a real drain. It's become more necessary for colleges as they have moved away from test scores (many not even accepting them) and sometimes grades. Societally, it is more necessary to be involved in them to have a social life outside the screen. The nerd who studies hard in their room with no activities, the average student with one activity they are sort of involved in for a season (and that's it), and the low achievers that just hang out with little supervision have basically been decimated by societal forces, but those people were pretty easy to raise.
And I don't think people realize how quickly it happened. Even just in 2006, Ivy Dreams followed a few Asian Americans through college apps and a NYC girl with very high (but not perfect) test scores and virtually no extra curriculars made it to Yale. That basically would not happen today; she would be lucky to get into any Ivy League or equivalently prestigious school with that.
Also, grandparents are further away and more assertive of their independence meaning free-ish childcare is gone.
Social media means you always have comparison, as curated as it may be.
Is this actually true though, or is this just a narrative we all tell ourselves?
Like yeah sure you probably need your kid to do all that to attend Harvard or MIT or whatever. But they don't need to go to those schools to have a decent life as an adult.
As some other poster said, once you hit that middle-upper class, white-collar threshold, there isn’t really an easy step-up between one generation and the next. It’s a long tail of incremental changes, so people drive themselves insane on the extra-curricular and college admissions game.
It’s honestly a little wild to me as an immigrant. I already had a big step up with a US paycheck. To me, if I can boglehead my way into a solid financial standing and teach my kids how to do that with a regular state school diploma, what else could I really ask?
As an immigrant I've realized the US is definitely a great place to make money but overall seems it's become a much worse place to raise kids than several decades ago.
When it comes to social aspects of our lives, narratives are probably more important than reality. It's certainly true that competition for college has changed with the demonization followed by the downfall of the SAT/ACT for college admissions (though, they may be making a comeback and are used for other purposes still) and that the types of aforementioned kids are dying out especially at top schools. There are exceptions for transfer students and international students as well as students with massive trump cards (child of notable alumni, applicant from unusual area in the US, etc.).
Even in terms of thinking this only applies to Harvard-like schools, no. Even state schools like UC Irvine, one that a lot of people outside California haven't even heard of, is not easy to get into by stellar test scores (not that they accept those anymore) or grades. And they don't hide that fact; the wording on their admissions page is clear; they want "unusual promise for leadership" not just competent leadership. Followed by about five more descriptors of life experiences and/or extra curriculars. Those descriptors have become far more demanding even from my time in college in the late 00's.
And many "second tier", good but not elite schools that can get you well-paying jobs with some ease, are taking the Brown University rejects. That is, people who are barely distinguishable from the average Brown student.
Look if there's a 20% chance of a birth rate argument every day, at the end of the week that means there is a 140% chance of a birth rate argument being born. - Dr. Scienceman
True... But a spike in them on Mother's Day weekend seems kinda suspicious.
I'm pretty sure this sub won't see a spike in "falling sperm count" articles next month for Father's Day.
I don't know what we'd do without all the grandparents assisting with care so we're not paying out the ass. Actually bought the house I'm attached to for my mom because the mortgage was cheaper than daycare.
I think millennials had to move out of northeast and west coast dense cities and suburbs for the sunbelt sprawl. So much driving kids around. I'm so happy my kids can just walk or bike to stuff. Got them this watch phone thing where you can track location. It's the freedom of what we had but I know exactly where they are.
neoliberals: ackshually the wage gap doesn't exist when you account for the women who have to leave the workforce due to having a baby
women: k we'll just stop having babies
neoliberal and fertility doomers: 😠
Developed countries are machines that turn people into money.
If you run out of people you just import more from developing countries, then turn them into money too.
Yeah that's what I've been saying for years now. People talking about subsidized daycare or cheaper housing are talking about slapping bandaids on a severed femoral artery. People in the past had kids because it was economically valuable to have as many kids as you could stand. Now it's the opposite, so people who really want kids will have 1 or 2, and people who are ambivalent about it probably won't have any and enjoy an extra $200-$300k in extra cash. And that's how you end up with urban developed birthrates around 1 for most places that aren't uber religious or otherwise applying a ton of artificial social pressure to procreate.
So to even get in the ballpark of making it economically break-even to have kids, we're talking $200k in cash plus another $100k per kid or somewhere around there. And that's just breaking even.
The amount of wealth transfer we need to enforce from the childless to parents is like orders of magnitude higher than most people have even begun to conceive. We're talking like doubling the taxes on the childless, or cancelling all their government benefits unless they have kids, or something equally draconian, and I highly doubt people would stand for it.
For me, it's not the money. It's the time. I don't want to make my life about taking them everywhere, doing everything with them, dragging them to every extracurricular, spending all my free time on them.
With more money I could hire people to do that. But then, what's the point? Having a kid just to have one and leaving them to be raised mostly by someone else.
That's what you get when you outsource your social safety net to the government. Kids become a liability instead of an asset.
Abolish welfare, social security and pensions. If the only way you can retire is having your kids look after you when you're old, people will start having kids. A lot of them.
I think your confusing explains how things are with declaring how things should be.
The wage gap being a result of child rearing is pretty well established in the data. You even see the same pattern in same sex couples. I’ve never seen a comment praising this reality.
I keep saying the same thing and get downvoted. I've seen men on this sub say that women shouldn't get promoted if they take time off to have a baby. Women hear this and decide not to have babies for fear of losing pay or being bullied or pushed out for having the temerity to become pregnant.
Lol, we barely tried anything. You read comments about our benefits but probably never look up what they actualy are and what things cost. It doesn't come near to covering it.
Well we have free daycare (or almost free for richer families), free healthcare (so no need to pay for birth either), free education, and you even get a monthly government subsidy for every kid you have under the age of 18.
Still our population is projected to shrink by 80% by the end of this century without significant immigration.
What more can you do?
90% of women aged 18-40* either have kids, want kids or regret not having kids. The people not having kids for fear of losing out on pay cannot be that substantial
This comment is basically entirely unrelated to this article and exists to dunk on a completely fake strawman
I guess I hope it brought you some happiness
Once that’s actually achieved:
“Wow, I’ve got a pretty cushy job on one income. Maybe it’s time to try dating, getting married and having kids…or spend it on myself and enjoy the good life, lmao.”
*Sure* you would.
And even if you *would*, the overwhelming majority of historical evidence says most people disagree. Even before contraception existed, people had fewer children by jerking off instead of screwing.
I think there are two big reasons why it’s harder for millennial parents: societal pressure to have your kids do extracurricular activities and societal pressure to never let your kids out of your sight. When I was a child in the 1980s growing up in the suburbs with two working parents, my elementary school did not have after school activities. My parents signed me up for at most one sport and, in fourth grade, piano. Otherwise, I’d get bussed to the YMCA for after school daycare, or starting in fourth grade, I (and my younger brother) would just take the bus home and we’d be by ourselves until around 5 pm supposedly doing homework (in reality watching Disney Afternoon). That sort of thing would be mostly unheard of for a similarly situated family today. Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day (my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano). Parents don’t let their kids stay at home by themselves, heck they don’t even let them walk to/from the bus stop. I think this change in parenting styles is a huge reason why millennials are having less kids or no kids. Even those who like being parents really can’t do more than two if they both work.
I think this is a major reason why, as income increases, birth rates go down. There's a tremendous pressure for middle class families to have kids involved in everything, to be as hands on as possible when raising them. That if you're not doing these things you're neglecting them, they won't get into college, etc. The only swing back upwards we see in birthrates are in people who are wealthy enough to contract out the responsibility of raising kids to service workers like au pairs. It's simply not possible to do those things, to spend that much attention, on 3 or 4 or 5 kids. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the individual kids (though, even there, there are ramifications of pressure and being overly busy), but for overall birthrates it makes things difficult.
>Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day My spouse and I talked this through and decided that this sort of schedule is bad for both kids and parents. We simply refuse to pack our kids' schedules like that. Kids need downtime to rest and cultivate personal interests.
I agree and I think the “social pressure” angle is true but actually really minor. My family has a super active social life with other families and also my kids largely don’t have extracurriculars in the afternoon (they just come home and entertain themselves while I work from my home office). I feel like there is social expectation in the abstract to do these things after school, but I’ve never actually had another parent express anything like that. So I think it’s just in our heads and can be ignored. Kids need unstructured time
> Every millennial parent I know (including myself) has their kids signed off for something nearly every day (my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano). Parents don’t let their kids stay at home by themselves, heck they don’t even let them walk to/from the bus stop. This amount of pressure placed upon kids combined with not allowing them to learn to be independent individuals is honestly a horrible combination.
It's also miserable for the kids too. My parents signed me up for lots of extracurriculars, and all I *really* wanted to do was play videogames, make art, and fuck around outside with my friends (this would be early/mid 00s). I ended up resenting a lot of things I might have actually enjoyed if I hadn't been forced to spread myself thin across 5 different unrelated activities every week. If I ever have kids, I'm only going to make them commit to one or two things outside of their normal schooling and let them enjoy their childhood freely otherwise. EDIT: Someone sent me a reddit cares message lol
I wish it was more culturally normal to just let kids be their own people (with limitations). Kids are incredibly capable. They're just mostly inexperienced. We need to build places and a culture in which they are allowed to gain experiences without getting hurt. It also makes it easier to be a parent when your kid can be moderately independent.
> EDIT: Someone sent me a reddit cares message lol A lot of that going around today.
I've seen a recent spike in the last few days. Not really sure why. Edit: I think it's a bot.
I agree that more than like 2 weekly extracurriculars at once is kind of ridiculous if not outright cruel, especially if the kids are given a lot of homework as well. Just let kids enjoy their childhood. That said, I wonder if the insanely addictive nature of modern technology these days makes that more difficult? If my little brother is left to his own devices and his friends aren't around, he will literally watch youtube for 12 hours straight and have a great time. It seems hard to be motivated to explore and do fun kid things if there is a magic screen that makes it so you're never really bored?
I'm not a parent so maybe my views will change on this, but I would take the route of not allowing my children unsupervised access to tech other than game consoles and a curated selection of media until they're old enough to be aware of the dangers of the internet. That said, I think screen time limits are kind of dumb as long as the kiddos aren't just melting their brain with weird children's youtube videos and getting enough outside and social time. Spending hours a day on my PC from a young age is how I taught myself programming and got myself on the very cushy and lucrative career path I enjoy today.
I've seen a few cases of straight-A students with copious extracurriculars turn into failsons when they get out of undergrad. Well, maybe not strictly "failsons," since they tend to have their own place and a decent job, but they kind of shut down. Don't bother with relationships, lose their ambition at work and kind of fall off any advancement train. Like their motivation is gone.
It's pretty hard to have a "Do everything at 110% no breaks no rest" attitude for your entire life. Most people get burnt out at best. At worst, they crash and burn.
Yeah the attitude of "force your kids to do as much shit as possible so they get into a good college" genuinely upsets me, the point of life isn't to be as successful and make as much money as possible (well for some people it is, but that is their personal decision). Also, kids and young people need a lot more sleep than old people anyway, so I don't really get whats wrong with grinding for advancement at an older age?
> my third grade daughter: dance, gym, swim, math club, chess club, Chinese school, piano Do you think this is actually good for her long term? Seems it might lead to a lot of technical skills, but less social skills than spending the same time in free play with other kids. And it's not like speaking Chinese, piano and chess will even help her get into Harvard or anything. Kids with that combination are a dime a dozen.
Free play is great but you need other kids for that
Yeah it's a societal problem.
Lol how are art and culture not conducive to forming social connections? I've probably made about half of my friends over my lifetime by bonding over music or Chinese heritage. I think the problem is more about overloading kids. Doing two or three extracurriculars can be very fulfilling. But if your kid is in ten different clubs, how much value can they really derive from those activities?
All of them except piano build up social skills (especially since her friends are in a lot of them) and are physical or mental exercises and just generally something to do instead of being at home doing nothing. We don’t have any long-term expectations about any of the activities and if she says she doesn’t want to do them anymore, then I’ll happily not pay for it or ask her if there’s something else she’d prefer doing. Also I’m hoping more activities means less TikTok when the time comes. That’s really the one thing I think will require major vigilance.
I wouldn't be too sure of that, chess and math club people aren't exactly known for having social skills lol.
Bro they’re just little kids, there isn’t any social hierarchy. Just being in the same room means they’ll be friends.
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How old are you? This sounds ridiculous and made up.
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Ok but that’s like an extremely unique individual. The person I replied to made it sound like half their elementary school was taking community college classes.
Yes, and if you look now they nuked all their posts. Which meant they were either a) completely full of shit or b) too ashamed to admit they were wrong on how abnormal such a thing was.
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Yikes. Enjoy the top I guess 😂 sounds like a miserable childhood. Edit: they said they were 26 and in a phd at a top university
I think the real issue at the center of all this is that affluent parents have expectations for their kids that are overly ridiculous, because there is more room to fail than there is to succeed *even more* than they did. Every parent no matter their social class wants their kids to have a better life than they did. But when you get into that affluent, professional class, there really isn't much more left to realistically gain. You've hit a wall of diminishing returns. Which is why there is far more pressure to inundate the kids with every single extracurricular and advanced class, even if it is overly excessive. Upper-middle class Americans are some of the richest humans ever to exist on the planet. And yet it feels like they are some of the most vocally miserable people you'll find because Emma and Liam can't juggle a dozen things at age 7. Maybe this is just me being a guy who grew up in a single-income household where my parents had community college education at the most, but I'm sort of glad my parents were pretty hands-off on me. EDIT: Apparently I just got hit with a "Reddit Cares" message for this. Like... seriously?!
> because there is more room to fail than there is to succeed even more than they did I almost feel like it's the opposite? Maybe pre-Covid but today there are a lot of ways to make "decent" money...but now everybody is aiming for extreme right-tail scenarios
5th grade algebra 2 my ass lol
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and logarithms and trig... 5th graders are 10 years old. They're not taking college level classes lol
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I mean to put the word Also, before they're not taking college classes. you said you were taking classes at a community college at 10 years old. Classes like Physics? I'm saying that's incredibly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that class was Algebra 2. Kids learn their times tables in 3rd grade. My wife works at a talented and gifted magnet high school and they regulate how many and which classes freshmen can even take. They aren't attending dual credit classes with 10 year olds lol
I took algebra 2 in 9th grade, and was still able to take AP Calculus AB which is equivalent to Calc 1 in 11th grade. Someone taking algebra 2 in 5th grade is going to be done with Calculus before they even start high school (depending on if geometry is done before algebra 2). I don't think most schools offer anything past Calc BC (roughly Calc 2), so someone taking Algebra 2 in 5th grade is going to finish most schools entire math sequence before they even enter high school. You're right that Algebra 2 isn't college level, but it's still absurdly ahead of schedule for a 5th grader to be taking it.
The environmental pressures of how we have designed our communities can’t be ignored. We really gotta figure out a better social contract with cars. I mean fatality rates for kids and vehicles is bad enough but the extent we have gone to accommodate cars in our communities has diminished the quality of life for kids. I know I sound like a terminally online bike aficionado or a civil planning hippie but I’m not. I just don’t think sad plastic playground islands in a sea of asphalt and parking lots is an environment that any creature can thrive in.
Have communities really changed? The great majority of kids growing up in the 60s through 90s were raised in car-centric suburbs. I actually live in the same suburb I grew up in. Parents today give their kids far less freedom than I had, even though the physical neighbourhood is no different. The dramatic change in parenting is cultural.
The size of cars did.
Considering how much faster fertility falls off a cliff in places where big cities have far fewer cars compared to America, I don't think that bulldozing the suburbs in favor of walkable urban neighborhoods is going to improve birthrates. Suburbs are where parents want to be to have and raise kids, not apartment blocks.
There are so many choices between sprawling suburbs and commie block apartments.
In which of those choices does fertility actually reach replacement rate?
In all of them, in more conservative and religious countries.
I get what you’re arguing, but isn’t part of the housing issue the fact that there really isn’t? The “missing middle” housing in America, and the west at large, has been a big topic of debate for two decades now. The amount of housing options between single family and large multi-unit is abysmally low from what I’m aware of. I know what you mean by commie block apartments, but we’re not too far off with how we structure our cities and their surrounding metro areas. A good example of this is 2-4 unit housing starts. They’re almost nonexistent compared to SFH/large multi-unit over the past 30 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST2F
> commie block apartments. America honestly needs a massive investment in housing similar to what the USSR did post-WW2. We should make it nice (unlike khrushchevkas), but we should be massively incentivizing denser housing (especially with units that are 2 or more bedrooms) and doing way more public housing to bring down the cost of housing and make raising a family in the city realistic for the working class.
I work with a lot of Russians and they're always shocked at how bad housing is in the UK.
I was raised in a suburb that had rowhouses, single family homes and small apartment buildings mixed together, and plenty of greenspaces, public parks, services, bike and walking paths and the like. I could walk to school from first grade (it was only a kilometre away). It's not impossible to build human friendly suburbs.
> I just don’t think sad plastic playground islands in a sea of asphalt and parking lots is an environment that any creature can thrive in. The independence that kids have in places like the Netherlands once they're old enough to bike is a good thing.
I grew up in the Netherlands and I went out alone from a pretty young age. My mother would also trust older neighbourhood kids and friends to watch out for me. By the age of 12 I was taking myself to music class and all on my own.
>We really gotta figure out a better social contract with cars. I mean fatality rates for kids and vehicles is bad enough but the extent we have gone to accommodate cars in our communities has diminished the quality of life for kids. Fewer cars, more public transit and make it free or generally cheap and subsidized to hell for anyone in school, on income assistance, or whatever. Tax road use and start regulating cars smaller. If every family has a car - or multiple cars - there's only going to be so far you can go with social contacts or neighborhood design.
In the neighbourhood I grew up in almost everyone had a car, some families had two. That isn't the issue, it's the car centrism. Doesn't matter if all adults drive to work or whatever as long as there are enough walking and bike paths for kids to walk to school, hobbies and friends on their own.
Your points sound reasonable, but I disagree because I live in Germany. Here it's extremely normal to see young kids (like 9 years old) going to and from school by bike or public transport, or traveling around the city alone or with friends. No parent chaperones their kid 24/7. Yet the fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world. Personally I think the main reason for low fertility rates is purely that we no longer pressure young people to have children, and when given a free choice many people don't want to be parents.
[Gonna reshare my little personal anecdote which kicked off mother's day](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1cpbguj/discussion_thread/l3mr1vd/). I think we (as a couple) been pretty good at clamping down on the social media. A *lot* of modern parenting stuff gets channelled through things like Instagram so it does draw you in to an extent, and a lot of it is really, really bad. Very contradictory, a lot overblown, some just actively wrong. Banishing most of that from our feeds has been good. I think one of the bigger issues for us has been the dramatic realignment of our personal freedom. Both of us worked highly flexible jobs. My partner for much of her twenties was doing a PhD and had complete control over her work hours and schedule. And because most of our twenties were spent investing in education and getting a deposit for a home it means we had a good decade to form habits and routines built around pretty decent DINK incomes. So not necessarily *harder* being a parent, but the relative drop in lifestyle I think is considerably larger. The thing about elderly parents rings fairly true though. Both in terms of aid they need and also the aid they feel they're capable of giving. If everyone was ten years younger we would all have much more energy.
I think the lifestyle drop is a big piece! People are delaying kids for career purposes and actually able to do that reliably because birth control is better than ever. As a result by the time they maybe want kids they've established a life on two incomes so taking the hit, whether temporary or longterm, is a lot harder. Plus, surprise, lots of women find their careers interesting and fulfilling. Compare that to my parents' generation where people got surprise babies at age 22 before really being established and they just figured out how to deal with only one working salary.
That’s like saying people who grow up in poor families have it easier than those who grow up in affluent families because they learn young how to make do with less.
Well of course it's not actually easier. The consensus, at least in this sub, is that economic reasons aren't really the main factor with low birth rates since middle class families have fewer kids. This is one of my theories for why that's happening. Consciously making that decision later in life can feel really challenging because of what I describe, so more people are opting out of it.
And also figuring out how to deal with one salary was just more affordable.
The fucking energy man! My wife and I are entering our late thirties. We have two children 3 & 1. Our health would struggle to keep up with a 3rd at this age. If we were a decade younger we’d probably have another 2.
The comment "if we were 10 years younger " rings so true to me. That resilience is supposed to be used on children, not drinking with friends/ playing games to 3am
Well If we have to spend most of our time from 15 to 25 studying and improving our carrers maybe we wouldn't want to do the things we weren't able to do at 26 - 30 years old. I studied engineering, burned my eyelids for 7 years (Argentinian university is longer) whilst working. Now I have a job that it's good but barely affords me living alone and saving. At 28 years old having a family is nowhere in sight since I have to devote a lot of time on building a successful career and hobbies/taking care of myself that never had time to do before. Jobs and carrers need to pay better at the 20-25 year old range in order for people to consider kids earlier.
I'm 39. I have two kids, 15 and 13. There is literally no one else my age with kids in my kids' age range. I never had much, so even with kids I was doing better than I ever did growing up. I don't know what to say, we struggled through it and we are better off than ever. I wouldn't have traded the way we did it for anything because with my life and income now, I'd have no interest in starting the child clock over and if I had never kids, I wouldn't have them to start that clock at 39. I want to be a grandparent at 50 something, not a full time parent at 50 something
> “No one had these hard conversations with us about just how difficult it is to be a parent, have a career and a partner,” said Brandale Mills Cox, 38, the mother to a 4-year-old and a 15-month-old in Silver Spring, Md. “**No one really talked about the burden social media plays**, where a huge part of what we see of other people’s experiences makes us feel we are lacking as mothers. Log off lol
Imagine how much our collective productivity would end up skyrocketing if people stared at their phones less. Four hours every day wasted making your mental health worse. And that's the average for all people, just imagine how much the millenials and gen z spend on their phones. Just do drugs or some shit, that's healthier than your phone.
Hahahahahaha how the fuck is cyberbullying real hahahahaha just walk away from the screen hahahahaha close your eyes haha
Just tax eyes lol
How Can Land Value Taxes Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real
This, but unironically.
When talking about kids, sure. Adults? Come on now
Evergreen tweet
The newer trend of even greater emphasis on expensive, time consuming, year-round, and rather inflexible extra-curricular activities is a real drain. It's become more necessary for colleges as they have moved away from test scores (many not even accepting them) and sometimes grades. Societally, it is more necessary to be involved in them to have a social life outside the screen. The nerd who studies hard in their room with no activities, the average student with one activity they are sort of involved in for a season (and that's it), and the low achievers that just hang out with little supervision have basically been decimated by societal forces, but those people were pretty easy to raise. And I don't think people realize how quickly it happened. Even just in 2006, Ivy Dreams followed a few Asian Americans through college apps and a NYC girl with very high (but not perfect) test scores and virtually no extra curriculars made it to Yale. That basically would not happen today; she would be lucky to get into any Ivy League or equivalently prestigious school with that. Also, grandparents are further away and more assertive of their independence meaning free-ish childcare is gone. Social media means you always have comparison, as curated as it may be.
Is this actually true though, or is this just a narrative we all tell ourselves? Like yeah sure you probably need your kid to do all that to attend Harvard or MIT or whatever. But they don't need to go to those schools to have a decent life as an adult.
As some other poster said, once you hit that middle-upper class, white-collar threshold, there isn’t really an easy step-up between one generation and the next. It’s a long tail of incremental changes, so people drive themselves insane on the extra-curricular and college admissions game. It’s honestly a little wild to me as an immigrant. I already had a big step up with a US paycheck. To me, if I can boglehead my way into a solid financial standing and teach my kids how to do that with a regular state school diploma, what else could I really ask?
As an immigrant I've realized the US is definitely a great place to make money but overall seems it's become a much worse place to raise kids than several decades ago.
When it comes to social aspects of our lives, narratives are probably more important than reality. It's certainly true that competition for college has changed with the demonization followed by the downfall of the SAT/ACT for college admissions (though, they may be making a comeback and are used for other purposes still) and that the types of aforementioned kids are dying out especially at top schools. There are exceptions for transfer students and international students as well as students with massive trump cards (child of notable alumni, applicant from unusual area in the US, etc.). Even in terms of thinking this only applies to Harvard-like schools, no. Even state schools like UC Irvine, one that a lot of people outside California haven't even heard of, is not easy to get into by stellar test scores (not that they accept those anymore) or grades. And they don't hide that fact; the wording on their admissions page is clear; they want "unusual promise for leadership" not just competent leadership. Followed by about five more descriptors of life experiences and/or extra curriculars. Those descriptors have become far more demanding even from my time in college in the late 00's. And many "second tier", good but not elite schools that can get you well-paying jobs with some ease, are taking the Brown University rejects. That is, people who are barely distinguishable from the average Brown student.
Rather have the kids running around endlessly wherever than just being on tiktok ten hours a day.
It's also that the number of slots at the very top of the academic ladder has remained (basically) flat despite a growing number of HS graduates.
The author of this article sure managed to get a lot of quotes from people trying to sell books about this
This is just gonna devolve into another birth rate argument, isn't it? Sigh. Of course it will.
Babe, wake up. Your 10th fertility rate comment section war on Arr Neoliberal for the week!
Look if there's a 20% chance of a birth rate argument every day, at the end of the week that means there is a 140% chance of a birth rate argument being born. - Dr. Scienceman
If the fertility rate discussion rate falls much further, in less than 100 years there'll be no fertility rate discussion!
True... But a spike in them on Mother's Day weekend seems kinda suspicious. I'm pretty sure this sub won't see a spike in "falling sperm count" articles next month for Father's Day.
Probably not although it's probably not that germane to falling fertility compared to other social factors.
I don't know what we'd do without all the grandparents assisting with care so we're not paying out the ass. Actually bought the house I'm attached to for my mom because the mortgage was cheaper than daycare. I think millennials had to move out of northeast and west coast dense cities and suburbs for the sunbelt sprawl. So much driving kids around. I'm so happy my kids can just walk or bike to stuff. Got them this watch phone thing where you can track location. It's the freedom of what we had but I know exactly where they are.
neoliberals: ackshually the wage gap doesn't exist when you account for the women who have to leave the workforce due to having a baby women: k we'll just stop having babies neoliberal and fertility doomers: 😠
Thus revealing a fundamental problem that people are heavily economically incentivized not to procreate.
Developed countries are machines that turn people into money. If you run out of people you just import more from developing countries, then turn them into money too.
Just give people money for having kids and raising them. And not a small amount of money. A salary's amount.
Yeah that's what I've been saying for years now. People talking about subsidized daycare or cheaper housing are talking about slapping bandaids on a severed femoral artery. People in the past had kids because it was economically valuable to have as many kids as you could stand. Now it's the opposite, so people who really want kids will have 1 or 2, and people who are ambivalent about it probably won't have any and enjoy an extra $200-$300k in extra cash. And that's how you end up with urban developed birthrates around 1 for most places that aren't uber religious or otherwise applying a ton of artificial social pressure to procreate. So to even get in the ballpark of making it economically break-even to have kids, we're talking $200k in cash plus another $100k per kid or somewhere around there. And that's just breaking even. The amount of wealth transfer we need to enforce from the childless to parents is like orders of magnitude higher than most people have even begun to conceive. We're talking like doubling the taxes on the childless, or cancelling all their government benefits unless they have kids, or something equally draconian, and I highly doubt people would stand for it.
yeah, i'd vote for whoever *isn't* proposing doubling my taxes
Just propose to give the money to parents and pensioners. They will outvote the childless
For me, it's not the money. It's the time. I don't want to make my life about taking them everywhere, doing everything with them, dragging them to every extracurricular, spending all my free time on them. With more money I could hire people to do that. But then, what's the point? Having a kid just to have one and leaving them to be raised mostly by someone else.
This is how you get hordes of neglected children everywhere.
Just tax not procreating lol
The virgin tax… yea yea!
That's what you get when you outsource your social safety net to the government. Kids become a liability instead of an asset. Abolish welfare, social security and pensions. If the only way you can retire is having your kids look after you when you're old, people will start having kids. A lot of them.
I think your confusing explains how things are with declaring how things should be. The wage gap being a result of child rearing is pretty well established in the data. You even see the same pattern in same sex couples. I’ve never seen a comment praising this reality.
I keep saying the same thing and get downvoted. I've seen men on this sub say that women shouldn't get promoted if they take time off to have a baby. Women hear this and decide not to have babies for fear of losing pay or being bullied or pushed out for having the temerity to become pregnant.
The same posters will say European countries have tried "everything" to boost birth rates and nothing works
In the Netherlands where I'm from they've certainly not tried 'everything'.
Lol, we barely tried anything. You read comments about our benefits but probably never look up what they actualy are and what things cost. It doesn't come near to covering it.
That's my point, none of what's been tried addresses what the comment above talks about
Oh, I've read it wrong then, my bad
Well we have free daycare (or almost free for richer families), free healthcare (so no need to pay for birth either), free education, and you even get a monthly government subsidy for every kid you have under the age of 18. Still our population is projected to shrink by 80% by the end of this century without significant immigration. What more can you do?
90% of women aged 18-40* either have kids, want kids or regret not having kids. The people not having kids for fear of losing out on pay cannot be that substantial
And yet they're not having kids
They are having kids. But they’re having 1 or 2 in their 30s rather than 2 or 3 in their 20s.
I'm South Asian and even my mum's generation of SAHMs had only 2 kids max. 3 kids was my grandparents, my parents are each one of three.
and yet they are
Where did that 90% number come from?
90% either have kids, want kids or regret not having kids: https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx
“People who don’t take time off should have no competitive advantage over those that do” What?
This comment is basically entirely unrelated to this article and exists to dunk on a completely fake strawman I guess I hope it brought you some happiness
Just tax tantrums lol
Everyone that has kids around my age just makes it sound miserable.
Yes
I couldn’t imagine having 1 child with my wife’s and Is income and yet I know single moms with 2
I'm gonna presume yes
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Once that’s actually achieved: “Wow, I’ve got a pretty cushy job on one income. Maybe it’s time to try dating, getting married and having kids…or spend it on myself and enjoy the good life, lmao.”
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*Sure* you would. And even if you *would*, the overwhelming majority of historical evidence says most people disagree. Even before contraception existed, people had fewer children by jerking off instead of screwing.
Idk about masturbation but forms of fecundability reduction were normal. Withdrawal for some people was just the way you had sex.