Excellent Reads

Frankly I'm surprised having children these days is even happening. In the past, you lived close to your job, you could afford to have one parent at home or you might be able to hire a housekeeper or a nanny, you lived close to your kin, you could kick your kids outside in the morning and call them back in the evening.

Our modern world is not really tailored to having kids. No financial incentive really addresses this. For example...

Having a decent standard of life and the amenities most people want to give their children often requires both parents to work. And if you work, you probably live some distance away from both your job and the daycare, and so the the daily dash to take your kids to daycare and get them home before the daycare closes, plus the commute to and from work, is a stressful race you need to run every fucking day. Having to drag your tired, hungry toddler with you to the supermarket to do your grocery shopping is harrowing. Leave your kids in the car as you used to do in the 80's? Lol nope, someone's gonna report you, you bad parent!

Even our best cities are not walkable or safe for kids, so you can't let them out by themselves or someone's gonna report you. Communities are fragmented so your friends, colleagues and relatives live far away, so most of the time the responsibility for the kid is solely on parents, whose time is stretched thin as it is, and is going to get strected even thinner as more and more societies expect adult children to care for their elderly parents as well.

So kids are a lot of daily stress even before we even address how vexing small children can be by themselves. And contrary to the past, parents don't get any material benefit from having kids. We don't need their labour at the farm or in the family business (and indeed child labour is rightly frowned on these days), we can't count on the kids to support us on our old age since they probably need to move away for work anyway. Reading the news about rising graduate unemployment, it even seems like we don't have much use for those kids even after we put them through years of expensive schooling.

So why do it? You need to be fucking dedicated to the idea of having children if you still take the plunge. Parents, I salute you, but I'm not surprised more and more people are opting out.

The most sophisticated liberal arguments interpret fertility decline as a symptom of more serious underlying problems—economic precarity and an “incomplete” gender revolution. Men and women alike struggle to provide for their families, but the participation of fathers at home has not caught up to the participation of mothers at work. A more generous welfare state, and a more equitable culture, should therefore produce more children. This does not seem to be the case. Finland famously provides all new parents with “baby boxes” full of useful, high-quality products, and Sweden has normalized extended parental leave, especially for fathers, and flexible work hours. The Nordic countries are wonderful places to be parents, but their fertility rates are lower than our own. These trends are not reducible to budgetary concerns. Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate.

So? It does not change the fact that to be a parent requires you to sacrifice and carry greater expenses than if you were child free. The sacrifice and expense may be smaller in the Nordics, but the equation remains fundamentally the same. Nor is it very practical to raise a family on a single income. I have yet to see anybody actually address this issue instead of simply brushing it off.

The world’s most lavishly pro-natalist governments spend a fortune on incentives and services, and have increased the fertility rate by approximately a fifth of a baby per woman. Some observers believe that subsidies could succeed, but they would have to be on the order of three hundred thousand dollars per child.

Sounds like a reasonable price, and a small fraction of the lifetime productivity of a person.

People may not realise it this way, but when you work a full time job and cannot make ands meet, cannot afford a home, cannot afford to get sick, cannot afford education, cannot afford leisure time, cannot afford time off you can't prioritize to have children. And even if you have children, everyone looks down to you, because you have to be absent from work some days, because they make noise and don't behave, and are societally considered a burden. Children are considered positive, only when there are job vacancies, pension funding, debt reduction and consumption of stuff. That's a worst case scenario combo of capitalism and feudalism. That is not a decent way of living. Its a torment. Tl:dr The governments are not trying to create self-actualized individuals. They're trying to create meat for the grinder. That's why almost no one wants to have children today.

That was a much more philosophical analysis than I expected, but then it is the New Yorker.

There is something to be said about the fact that by the Golden Rule, we should only categorically avoid having children if we would rather have never been born (and while that's a popular meme, I doubt people who remain alive actually believe that).