Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? 188
Fertility rates have fallen to historically low levels [PDF] in virtually all high-income countries due to a fundamental reordering of adult priorities rather than economic factors, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research study. Economists Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine analyzed cohort data and found rising childlessness at all observed ages alongside falling completed fertility rates.
Total fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in nearly all OECD countries, with many sustaining rates below 1.5. Some East Asian countries including South Korea, Singapore, and China now have fertility rates at or below one child per woman. The researchers concluded that period-based explanations focused on short-term income or price changes cannot explain the widespread decline. Instead, evidence points to "shifting priorities" involving changing norms, evolving economic opportunities, and broader social and cultural forces that have diminished parenthood's role in adult lives.
Total fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in nearly all OECD countries, with many sustaining rates below 1.5. Some East Asian countries including South Korea, Singapore, and China now have fertility rates at or below one child per woman. The researchers concluded that period-based explanations focused on short-term income or price changes cannot explain the widespread decline. Instead, evidence points to "shifting priorities" involving changing norms, evolving economic opportunities, and broader social and cultural forces that have diminished parenthood's role in adult lives.
Healthcare (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
Because they can afford contraceptives.
Social Change (Score:3)
Re:Social Change (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just pressure on women too, not having kids was for a long time taken as a sign of lack of moral character and wasting ones life for both genders.
I think back to about 15 years ago and the last conversation I had with a great uncle before he died a year later. My dad had called him up to include him in a family holiday and we were passing the phone around to all say hi and include him in our holiday celebration. When the phone gets to me without even a moments hesitation he starts chewing me out because I wasn't married and didn't have kids and I mean real angry stuff, not just a mild "when are you going to get married" nag.
I just took it and passed the phone off to the next family member without comment so as to not disrupt the holiday but this type of shit is how people without kids used to be thought of by many.
That is rather limited point of view (Score:3)
Easy contraceptives availability is part of it but not the most important one. There are 3 main reasons:
1) Economics. Kids cannot be used as cheap labour from around age 8 as it was in the past. Instead they are costing a lot of money to around age 18-24. Parents have retirement - kids are not that important from the point of view of taking care for aging people. ...
2) Fun. There are a lot of sources of fun besides sex now. TV, games, sports, carrier building
3) And the most important one: women do not wa
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Easy contraceptives availability is part of it but not the most important one. There are 3 main reasons:
1) Economics. Kids cannot be used as cheap labour from around age 8 as it was in the past. Instead they are costing a lot of money to around age 18-24. Parents have retirement - kids are not that important from the point of view of taking care for aging people.
2) Fun. There are a lot of sources of fun besides sex now. TV, games, sports, carrier building ...
3) And the most important one: women do not want kids as much any more. The studies have shown that the best correlation is between how much women want kids and how many kids they end up to have. Women have many alternative sources of activities when compared to 9 months of carrying a "parasite" around in their belly PLUS additional around 18-24 years of resource drainage. Kids are great fun to have but they are costly as hell. They cost resources which can be spend on alternatives which are fun as well and which are not such a long time commitment.
So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
Re:That is rather limited point of view (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm not raising a kid to go straight into the upper middle class or higher I'm gonna do them a favor and never make them.
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
"We" are no different than our great grandparents or their great grandparents. What has changed is the environment, and it would have effected them the same way.
What you call "weak", others people call "wealthy".
What you see "hedonism", others see agency and self-determination.
And the only people who ever spend time fretting about "our own civilization" are people who are unhappy with it and want it to change.
I'd also note you seem to have so internalized the "exponential growth forever" belief that you can't even see it. The earth's carrying capacity is not infinite, as we're learning a bit more every day. I'm absolutely not some Elifist or similar, but it is simply true, and those who profess to care deeply about "civilization" need to confront it if they want to be taken seriously.
And while abstractly there's no inherent political valence here, in this world these beliefs are mostly professed by authoritarian-natalists whose program is also wrapped around eugenics and really shitty racial beliefs as well as regressive beliefs about rights (especially those of women) and social control. I don't know if you're in that category or not, but that's a really ugly path to be treading.
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So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
Yes, we live in Nash equilibrium and not Pareto optimum. People prefer their own individual good because few "bad apples" typically exist which makes collective good impossible. And there is that pesky problem of what needs to be done for the best collective outcome. We do not know enough to predict the future so we cannot optimize our current behavior perfectly. I'm not claiming we should not try. Everybody needs to decide oneself how much "individual good" is scarified for the "collective good". The quest
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3.1 The availability of contraceptives and the effect of education, enabling women to better control their bodies.
Well, yes. But you cannot stop progress and information spreading. That is the reality we live now in. Maybe kids will be born from an an artificial womb and raised in public "kinder gardens" in the future. Or we will be gradually replaced by machines ... or die out as a civilization.
If women would want kids then availability of contraceptives would not stop them from having kids. I assume nobody is forcing people to take contraceptives against their will.
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3.1.1 Most of the 'desirable' women are already taken in what age group you pick (typically by a guy with money or a nice car, or he's great in bed, or he's all 'handsome' or muscly or was football captain or something), the ones that aren't are the 'Karen's' and less desirable (because we have been exposed to so much media to expect all women to look like Duquesne from CSI: Miami), and there's some who for whatever reason have decided not to do more than just a fling or nothing at all.
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Two words. Forever chemicals, and microplastics. Look it up, there are papers. That's why it's a worldwide problem because the cause is worldwide, much like climate change. We are the modern day petri dish unwittingly being experimented on.
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If that's true (I tend to suspect it is) the fertility rate of low income countries will also be dropping. That isn't denied by the summary, but it sure isn't indicated.
Re:Healthcare (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
Because they can afford contraceptives.
That doesn't explain everything. Fertility takes two to make babies. It doesn't explain why male fertility is also dropping. Testosterone and sperm counts have been steadily dropping in first world countries for decades now. And everyone notices. Men are getting more boyish-looking and less rugged. There's more guys firing blanks. Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be. That surely has something to do with the lower testosterone. So something else is going on. It's not just economics.
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Low sperm only matters if you are trying to have a child. If you have no desire then who cares about sperm counts?
Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be.
Where is this quantified, a lot of this is going to lean on why they are finding men less attractive. The expectation of of men today from women are quite different than they were 50 years ago.
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Low sperm only matters if you are trying to have a child. If you have no desire then who cares about sperm counts?
For the women that DO want to have children it's certainly an increasing problem.
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It's a problem for *both* people, last I checked it takes 2 to have kids. If a women by herself wants a kid it's pretty easy still.
Also do we have data that there is a stronger trend of couples "trying and cant conceive" versus "couples aren't interested in having kids at all" we should see the former far more often. These are two very different problems with very different solutions.
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Try taking a step back and looking at just the number of couples. Thanks to online dating, women are being more selective than ever and many men are noping out of dating altogether. Either of those conditions leads to fewer children but together it's a much bigger problem. And this is only one of many social changes that are contributing to decreasing birth ra
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^ This right here ^
You don't really go to the bar looking for a long-term anything... at best, maybe a roll in the hay, but that's about it. So many use dating sites, where they can be totally selective, and, yes... that super-selectiveness carries over.
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If that is true then that likely goes into the latter category as in "people aren't interested in having kids at all" because if you want kids then you are out there dating looking for a long term partner because when we talk about dating sites people are on looking for different outcomes. A person looking for a good time tonight is using different criteria then trying to find a long term partner to find a family with.
We can say women are being "more" selective but what that really means is they are lookin
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Also let "ruggedness as attractive" is and always has been just another preference throughout all of time. Boyish men have always existed and they've always been considered attractive to people.
I mean cmon look at the rockstars of the 1980's when they wore more scarves clothes and makeup and used more Aquanet than the women did, and those guys had women literally throwing themselves at them. Or the lanky hippies of the 1960's or every boy band from the 1990's to say nothing of male models of the time in a
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And have the presence of mind, and the giving-a-fuck (you have something to lose!), to actually bother using them.
AFAIK I've never slipped one past the goalie, but the times I risked it, is when I was poorer and life was generally worse and I was overall (not just sexually) less risk-averse. The more comfortable my life, the more I've maintained safe practices.
Re:Healthcare (Score:5, Interesting)
Education tends to be good as well. Education for women and access to contraceptives are the two big things. They introduced them to places like Bangladesh, and the fertility rate fell from over 9 to under under 2. It's not a particularly wealthy country, but contraception is cheap and education is free.
Japan's birth rate collapsed before birth control (Score:2)
As a woman if you get married you basically exit the workforce. No one's going to hire you because you can't work somebody 60 to 70 hours a week when they have a kid.
I don't quite know what made Japan's birth rate collapse but I can tell you that here in America we forced women to work and work a lot. And we forced men to work a lot too. H
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Because they can not afford children.
You need a house or a large apartment, those are exceedingly not being built, or being built so poor quality that they become death traps after a few years. There's a pile of youtube shorts of a building inspector going through homes in arizona where he finds 100's of defects, some of them being absolutely ridiculous structural failures that all but ensures the home falls apart or needs extensive repairs in a decade.
Now assuming the housing was not the first obstacle, yo
Re:Healthcare (Score:4, Informative)
The data doesn't support what you're saying as the less money an American makes the more kids they have https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com].
Don't get me wrong though, I'm sure cost plays a part but clearly there's other stuff at play too.
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The real reason isn't too far off - high income countries can afford healthcare. This leads to the population in general being much healthier and living longer, and the biggest reason, lower infant mortality.
In poorer countries, you need to have multiple kids - this is a requirement because most of your kids will be dead before they reach adulthood. So you need to have multiple kids to have a chance that one of them will reach adulthood.
And moms, when they aren't having to constantly pop out kids for surviv
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The high income is eaten up by the amount of debt people are in from purchasing houses or condo modules.
So after all fixed costs are paid there's not much left.
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I expect the fertility rate in the US to rise due to the following:
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"Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
Because they can afford contraceptives.
True. However, the main thing is income. Women in these high income countries can get jobs that allow them to be independent and either choose to remain single or to be in a relationship without getting married or having children. Most importantly, women are still significantly penalized in their careers for getting pregnant, despite all the self-congratulatory proclamations to the contrary. So, these economies essentially heavily motivate women to not have children. Some countries offer pittances to e
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That's been present at least as far back as classical Greece.
I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score:4, Interesting)
Some humans do have a strong desire to become parents, which is unsurprising since species that don't reproduce tend not to last very long. There are exceptions, pandas being the obvious one.
The question is, how strong and how common is this desire to become a parent, and are people overcoming it due to their financial situation or some social pressure, or were we always like this and it's mostly due to contraception?
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Turns out raising kids is time consuming, expensive and hard and many prefer not to do too much of it...and now many are realising that milking the lower layers of society for all they're worth is like a snake eating it's own tail...
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That makes sense until you realize that people are also having less sexual intercourse:
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Re: I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score:2)
Creepy endoparasitism? What a ridiculous way to describe the most vital biological function that exists in humans.
The population is going to drop in Western countries becsuse they have stopped prioritizing building families in favor of selfishly catering to every individual whim and comfort a person may want.
Eventually, if the trend is not reversed via societal shifts, it will drop enough that all the egalitarian west will be displaced and/or eradicated by, well, Afghanistan basically.
All the ivory tower fu
Houses (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus mcfucking Christ it's not rocket science.
We can't afford houses.
Re: Houses (Score:2)
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
Houses are too expensive. So two parents need to work to afford the house.
Yes, but is that the cause or merely an effect of the cause? I'd argue that the real cause is social change enabled by the availability of birth control. As society has become more egalitarian women, thanks to birth control, are now free to choose a career over having kids. This has meant that families have two incomes and so can offer more to get the house they want causing house prices to rise.
Re:Houses (Score:4, Interesting)
Having children is a choice; that choice has become easier as contraception has become more accessible and effective, and as society puts less pressure on women to have children or be seen as a failure. We're also decades from the point where it was normal for an adult to be reliant on children to support them, at least financially, in old age.
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It's not that simple, although I'm sure that plays a part;
It IS that simple. The Democratic war on suburbs and insistence on cramming people into ever-smaller shoeboxes (called "urbanism") is going to kill the democracy. It has already given us Trump.
if it was then there would be a clear positive correlation between wealth/income and number of children in the population and there isn't.
There is. It's called "reverse J-curve". It's even more apparent when you check not just fertility, but the number of families with two or more children. You can reasonably raise one child in a city, but once you have two children, all the anti-human design of modern cities (war on cars, bike lanes, road diets, lax la
Re:Houses (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, you just powered ahead without acknowledging the above, didn't you?
Poor people have more kids than people with money in America https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]. . The general trend is the more money an American has, the less kids they have. If what you're saying was true it would be the opposite as poor people are the least able to find good housing for a large family.
Way to try to turn an interesting conversation into rabid and over the top partisanship though.
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It IS that simple. The Democratic war on suburbs and insistence on cramming people into ever-smaller shoeboxes (called "urbanism") is going to kill the democracy. It has already given us Trump.
MAGA Logic. Trump is fucking up badly (and doing exactly what he campaigned on) and it's MY fault because I voted for someone else.
Can you expand on The Democratic war on suburbs and what it entails?
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That's only part of the answer. Basically society doesn't really support having children. Part of that is housing, part is expense, part is time limitations, part is contraception, part is ...
I think that every simple answer is missing so many pieces that it's more wrong that right.
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That's addressed in the summary, which obviously you didn't read. People who "can't afford housing" are having FEWER children than those who can.
Why? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the opportunity cost of raising children is just too high. Especially for the women.
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The issue is that such math is extremely short-sighted.
Children are opportunity cost, but they're also a retirement plan. Sure most people put money now in social security to get it out later as retirement money, but the truth is that it's just a game of hot potatoes. The money you put in now pays for the retirement of your parents, and the money your children will put in later will pay for your own retirement.
Social Security and the government paying for elderly care made people forget that the government
Because they are busy earning income? (Score:2)
Testable Hypothesis (Score:2)
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Conditions today are better than in the 1950s by almost every metric. .. which is around what it is today.
Home ownership rate in 1950s was below 60%, today it's 65%.
Unemployment rate was around 4.5%
Murder rate was about 4 per 100k, which was a historical low (it was well over 10 in the 1930s). Today's is about 5 per 100k and reducing.
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Now do wages versus inflation.
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Re: Testable Hypothesis (Score:3)
Re:Testable Hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
The home ownership figure is commonly used to simplistically. Home ownership in the 1950s was low for older people, home ownership now is high for older people. I'll bet a considerably lower proportion of people at the age to have children own houses now than in the 1950s.
In general I agree that today is a better time than the 50s; not least because the 50s properly sucked for minorities, but I do think there is an element of truth in the idea that it may have been more appealing for a typical, white, couple in the 50s to have kids compared to now.
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Also the newer homes are smaller. Even in suburbs the lot size has shrunk markedly, and the houses as well. I *think* the average size of a rural house has increased, but with all the open space around, that's a lots less significant.
But more importantly, this is but one of multiple factors all pushing in the same direction.
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Also,
Doesn't take a crystal ball.. (Score:2)
Doesn't take a crystal ball or time machine for many to see just how f'd the planet is, and that future generations are completely screwed in dealing with this mess.
No way I'd bring a kid into what's about to befall us.
Re: Doesn't take a crystal ball.. (Score:2)
We also see what kind of spoiled and annoying brats everyone raises these days and decide itâ(TM)s impossible to not raise an annoying child of our oen if theyâ(TM)re going to be influenced by all the other brats at daycare and school.
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Hardly anyone is ready for children early enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to have higher fertility? Make it so people in their mid to late twenties have a life stable enough that they can choose to have children without it being a major sacrifice.
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It's not greater mobility anymore (Score:2)
You are forced to move where the work is.
Also increasingly grandparents don't want to take care of the grandchildren. They want to play with them and have fun with them but when they're done they want to dump them right back on their kids and get back to their RVs and their Matloc
Wrong question (Score:2)
The question should be: "why is fertility so high in low income countries?:
Toxic environment (Score:2)
Most high income countries work their people too hard, causing them to eat fast food, made with toxic ingredients, as they try to find pleasure in toxic amounts of sugar and other substances to offset the stress of their commute and daily grind. They live in cities, breath polluted air, drink polluted water, eat toxic food. What do you expect?
US fertility is not evenly distributed (Score:5, Interesting)
We hear so much these days about young urban hipsters deciding not to have children because the world as they see it appears to be coming to an end. But when I visited Iowa this month, I was impressed by by seeing babies everywhere. So if children represent optimism about the future, look at these differences among states:
https://worldpopulationreview.... [worldpopul...review.com]
Now consider the effects, long-term, of these differentials on our culture and politics.
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Or people just don't feel comfortable raising a child in an era where unidentified masked men abduct people.
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Generally not.
People are happier when they can AFFORD the place they live. If you live in NYC or LA, you're probably happier than Dallas or Miami. If you can't afford to live in the city, then you are probably going to be miserable living somewhere cheaper where there is literately nothing to do, no jobs, no healthcare. Basically everything is in the city, and less and less are in smaller cities.
If you want to be happy, and not have to be bound to a vehicle, move to Europe or Asia, because North America is
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Working "good jobs" has whittled away my mental health over the years. It's different than getting up to work some hard labor job where somehow you wake envious of yourself in some parallel dimensions where you died in your sleep and are still laying soundly in bed.
But little by little the deadlines, reorgs, MBA double-talk, layoffs, and so forth wear you down.
People in the middle of the country, I could talk about their problems, but shit does indeed happen at a more leisurely pace, people are less guard
Work/Life non-balance. (Score:5, Insightful)
"High Income" countries tend to be profit-driven. As in, profit isn't just "a" motive, it becomes "the" motive for the entire society. Once that happens, pressure is applied from the top down to extract as much profit potential as possible from the populace. Turns out when you need everyone in the population working full time jobs just to keep the profit potential climbing, it's kinda difficult to imagine having time to properly raise a family. Who in their right mind wants to have a child when they know they'll have to hire out raising that child to either daycare, a nanny, or some other form of hired parental substitution? You can't focus an entire population on the importance of hard work for profit and/or survival and still expect child-rearing to be important to them.
We shouldn't need to study why this is happening. We should need to study how to balance the need for profit with the need to continue having a viable population. Not that we're on the verge of complete population collapse. It's not an overall bad thing for us or our environment to maybe let the population naturally slow a bit from our former frenetic population climb, but we probably should start figuring out how to turn that natural slow-down now when we hit a point where we feel we've rebalanced. Because one thing is for certain, we're not going to turn the ebb of population growth into a huge growth again in an instant, and it'd be nice to have some idea how to achieve it in a long-term balanced way when the day comes we actually need to be concerned for any reason other than the "growth is important to maintain ever growing profits" reason.
Video Games (Score:2)
I mean, would you rather have sex or run around blasting bad guys and color matching falling gems or have sex?
Re:Video Games (Score:5, Funny)
Are you asking me or my wife?
This is a common phenomenon that is well studied (Score:3)
When people get rich, the need to have a lot of kids goes down. You're less likely to lose a child to disease and accident. You're more likely to spend time early in adulthood making money and/or growing skills. The cost of raising children is much higher. Women's role in public life grows.
It's well studied for decades.
Something not mentioned yet in the comments... (Score:2)
... is: Who wants to bring a kid into this f*cked-up world?
I have three adult kids. I am almost certain none of my kids will have kids and I can't say I blame them.
They are still clueless about birth rates (Score:2)
Smartphones (Score:2)
What makes you think we are high income? (Score:4)
We own cars which are expensive because we have to. But already the majority of us can't buy houses which was the primary means of building wealth in America.
Back in the sixties we have 3 billion people on this rock. It's now at least 8 billion. Might be higher if there's some evidence that we've been under counting rural people but that's pretty inconclusive.
And even going outside America every country on the planet has a growing number of working homeless.
The plastic in our balls and brains probably isn't helping but the constant pressure and stress to be more productive in order to be allowed to have the basics needed to function in society and the complete collapse that happens if you slip up even for a moment means that nobody is going to be interested in or have enough stability to have kids.
We need to be moving away from a competitive society into a cooperative one. We don't have all this free space anymore now that we have gone from 3 billion to 8 billion. Yeah there's still a lot of room on the planet but it's mostly deserts and flood zones and other places that you can't plop people down.
One more thing I remember is somebody who had moved from Colorado to Texas complaining about how they expected to come to Texas and be able to do all these cool things on the public land only the discover there was no public land. Basically everything worth having is owned by somebody.
So yeah I can go and get a really nice house for $50,000 in Detroit with no utilities and no access to jobs. Now what?
Short term? (Score:2)
What about LONG term income and price changes?
Wages haven't kept up with inflation for decades. Various social norms pressuring people to have kids have been eroding the whole time due to the simple impracticality of it.
Education Levels (Score:2)
Populations with higher education levels, most especially secondary education, have lower fertility.
But fear not, those with lower or no education levels have very high fertility rates. Much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The better question to ask is; what does your or your child's little world look like when your educated and higher socioeconomic selves are vastly outnumbered by the masses of uneducated, unemployed, and starving masses? How will you defend yourself against the masses? What will you do whe
Money. (Score:2)
In High Income Countries, it takes a High Income to educate your children. The Higher the income of the country, the more expensive the children become. But the children are not guaranteed to be a good investment - it is also expensive when they grow up. Most wealthy countries tend to have wealth inequity, - the wealth is concentrate among the few. So only the very wealthy can afford large families.
Unless you are willing to live very poor. Usually that means you have lots of children but do not support th
Intelligence, duh (Score:2)
*Expensive to properly raise them anyway.
It would be interesting to know... (Score:3)
In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.
Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.
Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.
My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.
Funny how things work (Score:4, Interesting)
I never wanted kids. Never saw the point. The cost/benefit ratio wasn't even close to favorable. It just seemed like a totally dumb thing to do.
In 2005, I got married. Wife had said she wanted kids, I still didn't want one. We had lots of discussions where I pointed out that having kids is a completely idiotic decision from an economics and personal freedom point of view.
In 2013, after 8 years of marriage, wife said I could get of vasectomy. I dragged my feet, didn't get around to it.
In 2015, after 10 years of marriage, wife said she wanted a kid and if not with me, then someone else. Good thing I didn't get the vasectomy!
In 2016, our child was born.
In 2020, my wife has become more distant and she admitted that she wished we didn't have a kid because it is just too much damned work and she never has time for herself and her own interests and social life. The very same issues I talked about when trying to convinced her it was a dumb idea! In the meantime, I am very happy to have a child. It's the highlight of my life. I'm happy to spend my time with him and have completely foregone my own hobbies and interests and social life. I am "all in" on my little boy.
In 2022, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was given a 91% chance of being dead within 5 years. I offered my wife the opportunity to exit the marriage so she does not have to bother with this. She said no. I made the same offer a few times over the next couple of years, she said no each time.
In 2025, my wife has obviously fallen out of love with me. Over the last two years or so, she has said she no longer has romantic feelings for me and has "emotional disengaged" from me. Our marriage is over in all but name. She has not yet admitted that, but her actions and feelings are very clear. I know that she is kind, compassionate, and full of empathy, she takes good care of me on my "bad days", but she just doesn't love me anymore. I know she is only still with me due to some combination of a strong sense of duty and for our child's benefit, and possibly pity.
Over the last few years, I've considered that it would better for everyone if I just died sooner, rather than latter, so that she can get on with her life and the process of finding a new father for our little boy. I've also considered that it would be better for him too, to get a replacement father while he is still young enough to mostly forget about me and adapt to a new situation. She denies this.
In the last week, after just over 3 years of cancer treatments, it has become clear to me that I'm no longer a suitable father, due to my health and limited ability to interact with him in an appropriate fashion. I'm just too worn out and beat up to be a proper parent. I stopped living for the sake of a loving wife over a year ago. All I had since is the love and well-being of my little boy, and now it seems to me that my continued existence may be more harmful than it is helpful. My feeling is that I have a few things left to wrap up and then I should just get it over with, without much more delay.
So, there you have it. Views on children and parenthood can change. People going from wanting kids to wishing they didn't have them. Others go from not wanting kids to realizing that they're all they have in this world, they're the best thing ever and wish they had more and had them earlier.
It's a funny world, isn't it?
Nobody wants to hear the answers (Score:3)
The answer can be found in dating apps. Most women compete for a small percentage of men. They'd rather share than date down, and women no longer require getting married to survive.
Now do fertility rates by political leaning.
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What are consequences for the parent you can levy that don't end up punishing the children?
why not have sex with lots of different women, have lots of kids? It costs him exactly nothing.
I mean, welcome to the advantage men have enjoyed since time began? Are we really treating deadbeat dads like it's a new trend? Like c'mon, the old "Dad went out for cigarettes 40 years ago" is an old joke for a reason.
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No just you. The rest of us are able to remember that the paragraph started "Finally, on a non-PC note: the "wrong" people are still having plenty of kids.`" for longer than it takes to read the whole thing.
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So is a person wrong because they had multiple kids with multiple moms and supports them or had one kid and left it for dead with the mother?
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So is a person wrong because they had multiple kids with multiple moms and supports them or had one kid and left it for dead with the mother?
My experience with guys who have multiple kids with multiple women is that they are selfish toxic assholes who whine and complain about having to pay child support for all their other kids because their pay is hardly enough to support their latest kid and baby-mama. Why, baby-mama number 5 is now married some other guy, why can't her new husband just pay for the two kids that you made with her before cheating on her and running off with baby-mama number 6?? Neither of the assholes you describe is an example
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Sure I can agree a guy having multiple kids with multiple women isn't a societal good but to circle back to my original point, it's not really any of the kids fault so how do we assign "consequences" (by law) to this behavior that doesn't end up just punishing the kids who really had no choice in any of this?
I am not even saying it's an easy answer, isn't a very difficult answer without getting completely draconian but really this isn't an issue directly solvable by law, it's a cultural one. All the governm
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So what job pays enough to afford multi bedroom homes and doesn't required any secondary education?
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Your bubble is showing
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Can you link to any of these man hating curriculums? I'd love to see
People talk a lot about the horrible hatred of Andrew Tate and co, but they happily ignore the horrible hatred of modern "feminists", which has a much larger effect on society as a whole
So you're a consumer of incel propaganda? Very telling.
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I followed your link and found an article written in 2001. Is this part of any lesson plans or taught in any classrooms? You’re spouting off propaganda and offer no evidence of man hating being taught to children.