[wise_young_man]

It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.

[nradov]

It's always been financially complicated for most people. The notion of a nuclear family prospering with a single income was mostly only possible for a limited slice of the US population during a few decades post-WWII. If you take a broader historical view that was a brief anomaly.

And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.

[ta12653421]

...and all this is only true for the last few hundred years of "belongingship" / capitalism etc.

Dense population creates all this, in reverse without dense civi you wouldnt have all the gadgets we have today :-D

[jfarina]

More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.

[mothballed]

Yes that model has been inverted.

The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.

Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.

Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.

[lotsofpulp]

What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.

[lotsofpulp]

I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.

Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.

[pessimizer]

Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.

[pbhjpbhj]

It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children. Them working at whatever you worked at was just necessary so you can help them grow, keep an eye on them, and pay for their upbringing.

[dpark]

> It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children.

Why on earth would you believe that? People have bred animals for millennia. You think they didn’t understand that sex was a required step?

I imagine people have understood that sex led to pregnancy since before Homo sapiens.

[AnimalMuppet]

I think you underestimate human intelligence. People have made that connection for a very long time.

People didn't have options besides "not having sex" that worked very well.

[dpark]

It’s amazing that the need for more hands on the farm declined at precisely the same time birth control became widely available.

[swatcoder]

> It’s a lot more complicated financially for. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive.

This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.

Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.

In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.

[SoftTalker]

Yes and I think many of us remember childhood with rose-colored glasses. My 1970s "middle-class" parents had one car. My mom had to drive my dad to work and pick him up so that she could have a car during the day. When my brother and I were older and in school she worked part time. We lived in a simple ranch-style house. We almost never ate out or went anywhere out of town. Entertainment was going outside and finding something to do. Something like going to a movie was a rare treat. I think of it all fondly today, never with a sense that I had missed out on anything.

Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine. Kids really don't care as long as they feel secure.

[dpark]

> Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine.

There’s major inflation in middle class expectations. People earning median income are expecting a very upper-middle-class lifestyle. A house bigger than their parents owned with nicer finishes, two new cars, frequent travel, eating out constantly, etc.

My parents were on the upper end of middle class when I grew up and we lived in a home with carpet and laminate countertops. Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too. A lot of folks are driving cars that cost a year of their take home pay. Cost of living is too high but expectations seem to have risen even faster.

[groundzeros2015]

> Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too.

What you’re sensing is that things that were luxuries are now not. It’s not a big deal to pay $500 for the quartz countertops when your house is $800k.

What has gone up is the cost of essentials and the base level of goods to participate in society: housing, transportation, medicine, and education.

So yeah a TV you thought was untouchable is 3 days of minimum wage work. But it’s orthogonal to why people feel economically disposssed.

[sharadov]

Capitalists figured out they needed a consumption-driven economy to keep the engine running.

Unfortunately, the music has to stop, and that's where we are now

[weakfish]

This comment is harsh, but I think important to remember for a lot of people who don’t realize that yeah maybe the hand we’re dealt sucks, but you can find joy regardless. People dance, sang, drank and found life and love through all of history, it won’t stop now.

[pbhjpbhj]

Most kids used to work as well as both their parents, school is a middle class and/or modern thing.