[sirwhinesalot]

The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence:

"It takes a village to raise a kid".

Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%.

When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society.

Add to that all the other factors like:

- both parents working often without the grandparents nearby or even willing to help

- unnafordable housing, even when renting

- effectively delayed adulthood (university) into the 30s

- falling fertility from whatever chemicals we're poisoning ourselves with

- anti-natalist messaging

- etc.

[ycombinete]

Yes, my wife and I live away from family. On the weekends, when there is no nanny, we are at work 100% of the time with him. One's only downtime is when he naps, or when your partner is looking after him.

Once we add a second child to that mix it'll be 100% of each of our time the entire time.

It's pretty extreme.

We both work full time (like most millennial families), so if we couldn't afford a nanny we literally could not have a child.

[chrismorgan]

If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think that two kids takes twice as much effort as one kid? People broadly agree that cost and effort both grow sublinearly. Especially effort, though it is of course much harder to quantify. But personally I suspect that even four kids (serially) may not cross the twice-as-much-effort threshold. Aging affects the amounts and types of effort required, too. Four kids in parallel (quadruplets) will definitely be more than twice as much effort for quite some time!

[sirwhinesalot]

I'm a father of 2. If not for my mother in law I would have gone insane by now. Way harder than 1. 1 was mainly hard because we had no idea what we were doing. With 1 it is pretty easy for a parent to take over while the other rests. Not so with 2 kids.

Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.

[ignoramous]

> Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.

Rowdy toddler with rowdy twins is when you start feeling the singularity.

[muro]

It gets better quite quickly though.

[koolba]

Effort is definitely sub linear. And costs even more so.

Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk. The active cook time itself does not increase much either.

Hand me down clothing and books are all shared. The kids also help watch, teach, and entertain each other.

I feel sorry for children that grow up without siblings. But even more so for parents that that choose to not have any at all.

[chrismorgan]

> Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk.

Ah, now that was a challenge when I moved out of home. In theory I knew I was buying for 1 instead of 10, but it still took me a while to adapt. I had pretty much never seen food go stale or bad before!

[dm270]

Do you have two or more kids? I say it’s different. For people with more kids, a single child seems like a walk in the park. Because in the worst case at least one parent is "free". With two or more kids the default is being fully occupied or if one partner takes all of them for the other to have free time, it’s insanely draining and the other partner feels almost pressure to make the sacrifice worth it.

This of course being said about the situation without any parents around. The step from two to three is worse for car/transportation and hotel room but I think it’s not nearly as hard as from one to two.

What you also have to consider: You’re gonna have bad nights. With one kid only, it’s fine. You can recover. With two, you simple don’t have room for that. The bad nights will eat you up.

[spaceman_2020]

It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids

I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep things in line

Now my daughter has just 3-5 kids of her age in my locality, and because they don't have any older siblings, they always have to be accompanied by adults

[koolba]

> It's also such a recursive problem

The recursive aspect is grandparents being 70+ rather than 50+ when they help out.

[ctxc]

I feel like with time, 50 is the new 70.

[Voultapher]

Honestly that resonates with me. I haven't made up my mind 100% about the topic, but I can say it would be an easier decision if there was a stronger support network. Watching single children be bored and play with their semi-enthusiastic parents makes me sad.

But it's not all doom and gloom, there are plenty of areas where families live and you see gangs of kids of various age-groups roam the streets and parks.

[lurking_swe]

feeling sorry for single children is just weird, not going to lie. I was a single child. Yes i had many boring days as a toddler. I’m not a sad adult because of that, i’m happily married and expecting my 1st soon. One of my parents passed lately, that had a much more profound impact on me than any boredom during toddlerhood. Playing by myself as a toddler fostered a lot of creativity and imagination… you need that to play by yourself after all.

Eventually my mom set up a “play date” up the street with a neighbor around my age, and that was the start of proper friendship and fun. And when i learned how to socialize and share better.

It sounds like you see many “semi-enthusiastic” parents. Children should ideally live near other children so they can make friends. Or be enrolled in some type of pre-k so they can make friends. That’s a (parent) life decision problem, not a “i have no siblings problem”. There’s also plenty of siblings who don’t get along anyway so that’s a poor reason to have a 2nd.

[missedthecue]

The "village" that used to raise kids was simply low labor force participation among women.

[ycombinete]

Grandparents, young cousins, older siblings, family friends, aunts and uncles, and extended family beyond. Simply being around frequently, and also easily available when needed. Very little of this has to do with female labour force participation.

[kixiQu]

https://wol.iza.org/articles/how-does-grandparent-childcare-...

In theory very little of it has to be about women specifically, but practice is different. (The expectations that used to exist for ~teenage girls to babysit for free for their relatives are somewhat undersold relative to adult labor, maybe)

[ycombinete]

What are we doing where looking after children is seen as a con for “the labor supply of senior workers”, and “the labor supply of young mothers”.

Won’t someone think of the labour supply!

Childcare is labour. It is work. It’s the most important work in a society.

[kixiQu]

I fully agree! It is in keeping with that sense that it is important that I object to a system where society expects non-parents to do it for free within a mesh of social obligation, and where that burden falls disproportionately on one gender.

My great-great-grandmother was made to drop out of school to take care of her nephew after the child's mother died. This, too, is what a "village" looks like – stunting a girl's future for the needs of someone else's child.

[sirwhinesalot]

It wasn't just that. Speaking from both personal experience and from second-hand experience I got from my parents and grandparents, there was a very obvious shift that went beyond that.

My mother when she was younger used to live surrounded by extended family and they were always at each other's houses doing things together (I mean the adults, not just the kids, they'd help each other out).

I still grew up with extended family around, my grandparents, parents and uncle all lived right next to each other. I also had cousins nearby but already the shift had started, people were living more isolated.

But everyone still knew everyone and it was pretty safe to just let kids roam around.

That sort of life is gone.