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If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents.

My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.

Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.

My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.

I don't really have a single point here, except that I worry we've ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30's.

The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I'll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example).

Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won't be bleak if they do.

I had my first daughter when I was 20 and grew up very quickly, I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.

She is an adult now and I couldn’t be any prouder of all she has achieved in life so far.

I also had two more kids in my 30s. It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s. I do have more work responsibilities but it’s balanced by working from home so I get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school, here when they get home, etc.

There are benefits either way, but I think if you are committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more of lives too.

>I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.

the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.

> It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s.

I'm a second child with after a large age-gap. My brother was born when my mother was 16, I was born twenty years later. My parents routinely told me how much harder it was with my brother -- lack of cash and profession, the party lifestyle that comes with youth and college-life, constant moving for opportunity and cheaper housing, and an overall lack of time to dedicate to the kid due to the instability and struggle to keep afloat financially.

I was born at a time of great stability for them. They had professions, they could make their own schedules. They had time to participate in my schooling and extracurricular stuff. I had good food, good toys, good clothing, and a stable house. They let me voice my decisions because they had the time and freedom to consider options other than pure survival. I was told that I was the 'easy' one -- not because of my personality but because "The 70s sucked.", which is code for "We were young, poor, un-established and struggling."

So, after the anecdote I feel compelled to ask : Why do you think it is harder when you're older? You have more money, you have the power of flexibility within your scheduling that allows for participation in your childrens' growth and development -- is it simply a 'strength of youth' kind of thing?

I have no kids, I have no plans for them, so I ask just as a curiosity. The opinion varies wildly from person to person, and I think it's fascinating what kind of 'diversity of parenting' exists.

We had our first kid when I was about 37, and our second when I was about 43.

The part that's harder is that particularly with #2, I'm just a bit more tired, and he needs a lot of energy. It's not drastic, but I notice it.

The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely. I lost my own mom two years ago and that was very hard. Barring some advances in health care, my kids are likely to lose me in their 30s-40s as well. Losing a parent is never easy, but I think it would be easier a little later. My kids only have one grandparent left and I wish they still had two.

The part that's easier is exactly what you note: Life is pretty stable. We're financially sound. We've had years of growth and therapy to learn to communicate well and have a healthy relationship with each other and our kids. We can afford to support our kids well, be that with high quality daycare when they were young, or an emergency mid-year school shift (that was interesting), or medically, or whatnot.

Lots of tradeoffs. I plan to make the most of my time with them while they're still young. There's no clear answer on the balance other than doing one's best.

> The part that's emotionally harder is that I'm sad I won't be there when my kids are approximately my age. I'd love to be around longer to help if they have kids, etc., but statistically, I don't think it's too likely.

This bothers me a lot, too (although I had my kids a couple of years earlier than you). Not just the physical presence, but also being physically and mentally fit when they're adults. I'd like to do sports, travel with them, help them move between apartments. I'd like to be mentally on the same page, not an old grumpy fart not understanding what they're thinking about. All of that can be done, but it simply gets more difficult with a larger age difference.

As someone who's had kids at a similar age to you, yeah its not a nice thought not being around for them as long as you'd like to be. Especially the thought of them having lost their parents when still relatively young (e:g in their 30s). Your life expectancy estimate sounds possibly a little pessimistic to me. With modern healthcare, barring bad luck, trying to live to 85-90 might be not a crazy ambition? That'd involve being somewhat focused on not eating cr*p and trying to get a decent amount of exercise, nothing crazy but just a little bit of prioritisation. That's my approach anyway. I wonder if in time older parents will be found to have longer life expectancy because they have an extra incentive to look after their health?

This is exactly why I decided not to have kids. My mum had me at 40. I lost my dad when I was 23 and my mum at 44. I'm 47 now and it's frankly too late for me (I'm male, so theoretically I could father some) to have children now.

I’m sure you’re still a cool uncle and good influence to the youngins.

That's super sweet of you. Thank you. I do try my best.

Another thing not yet mentioned is that it literally becomes physically more difficult to have children as you age. Female fertility starts to rapidly drop in their thirties, and many will hit menopause in their 40s. The exact age is somewhat random, and some women will even enter menopause in their 30s.

Before I had children I thought it would be relatively easy - that's why you use birth control after all. But when you actually have children you learn things like at best you're looking at, at best, a 10-30% probability per month if you hit the ~48 hour ovulation window just perfectly. That doesn't sound so bad - because a month isn't such a long time, and ovulation is pretty predictable. But when you start late each month matters, and then if you want to actually have multiple children, then you're already looking at a years long process.

And then add in that as you age, all sorts of birth defects and disorders like Down Syndrome become much more likely, and you can't effectively test for them until about halfway through the pregnancy. It's just not a great idea to start late. I'd also add that for us to have a sustainable population, everybody needs to be having more than 2 children on average. This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.

> This is going to take a pretty substantial reshaping of society and culture, or our society and culture will simply go extinct.

It won't. You can't extrapolate the short-term recent trend to centuries. In the past, social/cultural/religious norms forced you to have children even if you didn't really have a great desire for them. This changed and now there will be selection pressure on personality traits which desire children.

I thought about replying with something exactly like this, but generally this sentiment gets downvoted to oblivion.

I’ll add that we waited longer than we should have, and while it’s hard to conclusively say we would have had an easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of thousands in fertility treatments.

You always think you have more time, but as they say “it’s later than you think.”

I've been trying to convince my wife to have at least one child, but I'm afraid it's too late already. She's 43.

You've just made me think it would be a bad idea anyway at this point :(.

Oh well, at least I have many nieces.

In a kinda similar boat, though less "trying to convince" and more "trying to decide if we want a kid". (Because really, the boat for multiple kids for us has sailed.) My wife's five years younger, but we only met three years ago, so it feels like we've been speed-running our relationship while simultaneously dealing with life and career stuff.

I live across the country from my nephew, but if I end up not having kids, he can look forward to notably more visits and funtime with the uncle.

I think it's more like start early > start late > start never. There's more hurdles, and less chance of success - but I definitely wouldn't say it's a bad idea. The worst that happens is nothing happens. I sincerely hope you two at least try. Good luck.

> The worst that happens is nothing happens.

The worst thing that happens is the woman or the child suffers complications that result in short term or even life long sacrifices.

Not that it might be 51% or even 11% likely, but the odds certainly go up for a woman, and will likely influence her decision.

The risks of childbirth for a healthy woman, even 40+, are negligible. And the worst of issues for the child, like Downs, can be screened for with perfect accuracy. The most difficult part with aging is actually getting to the point of childbirth!

I also would emphasize that it's not like not having a child is without issues. Much of the West, including the US, is already suffering with from increasing isolation, depression, and other such issues. And aging, especially without family, is likely to only exasperate these issues. Friends that will last forever, don't. And it becomes more and more difficult to meet new people as you age. Places like Japan and South Korea may be a foreshadowing of where we're headed, and it's not pretty. See things like kodukushi - lonely deaths. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

It seems like she just doesn't want to have kids.

For one, grandkids. If I live as long as my dad, I’ll have 7 fewer years than he did with me and my wife and son.

My family brings me great joy.

> the problem of course being that some individuals never hit upon that realization -- and the statistics regarding the matter make it look like that revelation is more likely to come to an individual who is older, financially secure, and mentally well.

For some it is really never.

Do you mind sharing how your brother and you turned out in terms of career, family, and general life happiness? Sorry for an overly personal question, but I'm very curious as a parent myself with my own theories about the craft.

Everyone's life is completely different, and their choices are their own. It seems you made the right choice for yourself, and I hope your kids agree.

I will say though, I think there's a chicken and egg element in this line of thinking.

A part of my thinks that being childless in twenties provides space that facilitates being a basket-case.

I think that having a child immediately makes most people at least 50% more responsible, and 85%+ within a year.

Again, there's a huge range here for people who: - Never get better - Their 85%+ still isn't really responsible enough.

Unsolicited 2 cents from a guy who had a kid in his twenties

To borrow terms from RFC 2119, "having a child makes people more responsible" is a SHOULD, but statistically, turns out to be a MAY. (#survivorBias: people are likely to acknowledge this, if they did turn out to actually be more responsible - "turned out GREAT for ME", emphasis added. The other case, not so much.)

However, I feel like the age of a parent is a factor, sure - but it's not an overwhelming factor...

Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid at 22 would’ve been a mess to say the least. Looking back at that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn’t much more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk into a bar who wouldn’t get his head screwed on quite right for another 6 years or so at minimum.

the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.

oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.

and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.

> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.

Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.

But only 20% of Indian women are in the workforce, due to culture--family honor concerns.

It is due to those Indian women not having the opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other developed countries).

But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.

Children of immigrants rapidly absorb the core culture of their new country. Especially when in grants them greater independence.

The upper classes in India are a rounding error, maybe the population of Spain at most.

Edit: you are right that it's a trade-off. In Bangladesh keeping women at home may mean starvation, so they are grudgingly allowed to work.

28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education. The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than men).[2] Since they're from different sources the participation rates might not be directly comparable shrug but the gender stats should still be applicable.

At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.

1. https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/news/news/i...

2. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta...

Sure, they go to college. Which makes the low labor force participation rate even more of a tragedy for them and the country.

> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help

That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.

> the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.

This retort is true of literally everything involved in raising kids.

Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.

The best part about being a mature parent is that you have much more control over how you raise your kids. No way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents, coaches, etc. over my actual parents.

My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.

Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.

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Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this thinking. The main argument of the article is that our experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher, getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much difference in our personalities and genetically determined proclivities in the long term. Although the article says only half of personality / psych traits are genetically determined, which is still substantial imo, so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't matter" even by the arguments in the article.

>> Research shows that inherited DNA differences account for about half of the differences for all psychological traits — including personality.

>> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth

This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental development, emotional support, getting a good education, avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out". Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about sports if they aren't, but having good parents that foster interests and development is a huge difference in "how a kid turns out".

Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy article you reference, and contradicted by all available evidence. Just one small one:

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html

Have you found any studies that show that shared environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a kid turns out? I haven't seen any.

And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any of those studies it's all correlational. So they have literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by genetics vs shared environment.

The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.

when people make this argument I think they mean "assuming the person has an approximately normal parenting style". Its a bit like saying the infra doesn't matter, only the app does (assuming the infra is built with best practices for availability and scale). When in reality, its missing the forest for the trees. You're essentially claiming that a parent who neglects feeding a child, drops them repeatedly, and lives in the drug-infested dangerous area of town, abusing drugs and alcohol while pregant "matters very little", when its obviously _the_ defining factor in how this child will grow up.

Your point holds when we assume most parenting styles are roughly equal (but this would also hold for environmental factors and genes, since most of those won't be too drastically different for most people).

Put another way: perhaps the most important factor is the one furthest from the mean. If your genes are basically average but your parents are horrible (abusive, neglectful), you may not live to 12. If parents and genes are average, but your environment is war-torn 3rd world, you may not make it to 12. If your parents and environment are average but your genes are horrible, you may not make it to 12. But its clear all the factors can be extremely important, and the claim of the GP only applies "all else being roughly equal".

Back to the app example: assuming sane infra, yes the app might be "more important" to the business. But if you have an average app, but your infra is terrible (long load times, constant outages, losing data, payment system failures), well, you aren't going to succeed.

I'm surprised that you are so ready to abandon your common sense in the face of a psychology book (Judith Rich Harris's book specifically, which asserts that how a parent treats a child has almost no influence on how the child turns out). Psychology papers and psychology books misuse and misapply statistics all the time. Surely someone as well educated as you knows this? (Maybe your wife is a psychologist, so you are overly accepting of psychology results?) The basic mistake being made here is to ignore the possibility that a parent has treated different children differently: one kid is shy: a good parent will nudge him into making friends, but avoid forcing him into unstructured situations with many children because that will tend to overwhelm him. I.e., a good parent is part of the so-called "unshared environment": the shy kid's non-shy sister is not treated the way I just described. (There is for example no need to nudge her into making friends.)

wikipedia quotes a study claiming the opposite:

parents differ in their patterns of parenting and that these patterns can have a significant impact on their children's development and well-being

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles

and from my own experience i would concur. parenting styles define the relationship parents have with their kids, and that relationship absolutely matters.

i find it worth considering however that when discussing parenting styles it gives the impression that the chosen style is a deliberate choice that parents can switch around at will, when in reality i believe most parenting styles are defined by circumstances and by the experience of the parents themselves.

I 100% disagree.

On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in, you will see a bunch of problems.

For example:

- kids turning out really poorly if they have bad parenting. Magnitude matters too.

- I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids counted?)

- some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those from older parents may not be impacted at all)

In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is so deficient, things go bad, fast.

My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on average, except that when it does, it's the main determinant for outcome.

And further, i posit that this parenting variable is increasingly worse over time.

> It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support, like Jungian archetypes and things like that.

It is that, but it's not just that; the concept is attested farther back.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola#Disputed

> Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.

If Voltaire invented it from whole cloth, that's still the 18th century.

Though on your topic, Piaget is an amazing example of someone just inventing a completely ridiculous theory, doing experiments that fail to support it, and getting it enshrined as wisdom anyway.

Oh man Piaget. Responsible for bad information on kids for both Object permanence, and abstract reasoning.

His views on egocentrism at least seem not as obviously wrong as those two; not sure what modern studies have to say.

Can confirm, have 3 kids. Parenting doesn't have much to do with how kids turn out. The genetic factor is more important. Not just genes of the two parents, but also how they recombine and surface various traits. Best thing to do is to let the kid discover who they want to be. Observe and support their explorations.

Yeah, have 4 and 90% of my psychological strength is spent in making them not do bad things like punch their siblings in the face for looking the wrong way. I'm now resigned to the Sun Tzu principle: if you cannot lose, you'll win - just want to make sure I'm eliminating the obviously losing paths and they'll need to walk the successful paths themselves or I'll end up in an institution.

> It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support

Oh please. You think the nature versus nurture argument was invented in the 60s? You think that a pop psych article from a behavioral geneticist is the last word in the matter?

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> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth.

This is honestly fascinating. It's obviously not true, just by taking into account the consequences of it being actually true.

Am I missing something? The study says, at some point "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".

Are they limiting this to the genetic composition of a person? It seems they refer to the character, behaviour, overall identity... which to me sounds unbelievably absurd.

I mean, being raised by a single mom vs. being raised by an Army dad MUST introduce some differences, right? And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence? Oh, all criminals were going to be criminals regardless?

Come on.

> "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".

If you look at twins that are raised apart this is freakishly true. Twins raised apart have outcomes that are far closer than 2 unrelated kids raised together.

> And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence?

If you look at children with an absent father vs children with a dead father you find that 80% of the effect disappears in the second group. And that still doesn't entirely eliminate the genetic component because genes influence behavior that can lead to death. This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.

> This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.

I find that the implications of this being true are very troubling.

Maybe you could attribute the outcomes to the difference between your father abandoning you vs. your father unfortunately passing away? I'm sure both cases would have different effects on a person.

I have the hope that someone with a deadbeat dad being adopted by a caring family will have a better prospect than someone thrown into the system.

Arguably you can chose other teachers and coaches and daycare

You have up to 4 grandparents to choose from (in the case where all 4 are still living, but separated).

What about crappy parents?

Exactly. That's the distinction. While you can chose other people in most roles for your kids, you cannot pick their grandparents.

Additionally, in generational cycles where you can maintain or exceed your parent's class status without moving away.

Whole swaths of the US don't have enough good jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle for kids of middle class parents.

And parents are working longer as well, meaning that overlap is less likely to happen.

I went to my grandparents every Wednesday. My mom just retired, my kids are 12 and I didn't have kids until my 30s.

There's so much about life that has changed the fabric of families in the last few decades

you can't choose your parents obviously, but having parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your experience.

for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.

my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.

but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids

> That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.

This is specious. If they are particularly awful, their kid probably won't want anything to do with them raising his/her kids.

I thought you were going to say it for a minute there - the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is missing in our US culture during the younger years is 'duty'

I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.

Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.

Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.

it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out

> Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc

I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.

There are no secrets these days.

I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.

We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.

I personally think it stems from a strong focus on individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if necessary to achieve that.

well, i think it is or was more than duty. it was necessity because your children were there to take care of you in old age. (and i have seen that in action with the great grandfather of my kids)

and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.

this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)

The boomer generation in general kind of broke this social contract. Too busy being eternal teenagers.

As someone who had his first kid at 23, you grow up real quick once you become a parent. Moreover I doubt it’s even possible for a person to fully mature if they don’t have kids. Or to really understand their own parents for that matter.

> Moreover I doubt it’s even possible for a person to fully mature if they don’t have kids.

This is my favorite of the lies parents tell, it's so obviously nonsensical

I take it you don't have kids.

I often see people settled into being more financially responsible, and it's good. But not in term of personality maturity.

I was 24 and still in college. This thread is full of people saying "I was a mess" or "I wasn't mature enough".

When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck with my friends yelling things at people walking by on the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.

Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and make less because it was easier.

So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to, and a kid has that effect.

What really cracks me up is that people have this expectation that they’ll ever be “ready” to have kids. Not going to happen. The whole thing reminds me of the first few minutes of “Idiocracy”.

I think a potential problem (depending on ones point of view) is that when parents wait till they are responsible they tend to have one, maybe two kids, which is below replacement rate. When coupled with things like costs, you end up with a rapidly shrinking population.

Cost and support networks are both big factors here. 30-somethings are probably more likely to have replacement rate or more if it’s affordable to do so and there’s family/friends around to lend a hand, but few enjoy such circumstances.

Things like remote work could’ve helped here, allowing couples to live near family instead of wherever the best employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push prevented that.

The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have been indoctrinated to place career first and only.

Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.

Is it possible women could want financial independence without being indoctrinated?

Or are they incapable of desiring power over their own lives, perhaps unlike men?

Of course a lot of people would like financial independence. Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence, because they are indebted or renters. They have to work a salary job or be out on the streets.

A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband than most working young people have today, even though they get fancy titles now.

Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.

Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.

> Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence,

A greater proportion of women today have more financial independence than they have ever had in the past.

> A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband

This is financial dependence, not independence.

> Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.

Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.

> Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.

Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family. They were and are literally married off because they were liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of daughters. And umpteen other examples.

This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms that provide women equal access to power as men, biology throws them a curveball every month with the effects of menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth.

> This is financial dependence, not independence.

Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.

> Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.

Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is massive to convince the young generations that they want to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity and still not afford to own their homes to have families.

> Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family.

Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny this even if you read about it and find out. Just say "Nonsense!" and shut it out.

We are simply living in different realities. In mine, women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent discrimination against them in the labor market. And this is not even worldwide.

In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home:

https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/real-reason-south-koreans...

>and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care.

>Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.

False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their own house outright and have supplementary income. Either in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work outside the home, or they were expected to do all the housework. There was no option to stop working (housework is work).

I think we are living in different realities yes. And also, none of us are living in the past to really know how things were. We can not rely too much on the testimony from the elderly generation, because they are known liars and cheats.

But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.

Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.

It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.

> Either in laws own it

Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.

> or they were expected to do all the housework.

If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.

Independence is cool and all that, but I'd rather go with the teamwork of marriage and family.

Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning, idealistic one.

If you want absolute power over your own life, and your goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but maybe marriage and family is not for you.

You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand. How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?

> How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?

This is a useless measure of independence in the context of this discussion since it applies to men and women. When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are discussing one gender being able to achieve more financial independence than the other due to laws/customs/discrimination.

> You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand.

Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.

Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the world for 99% of history have never had or been in families with enough wealth such that they did not have to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot at the decision making table.

But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is does my daughter have the same opportunities available to her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a high paying job?

It is possible to live well enough to raise children with "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year technical college training, instead of a four year college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for "a career". A job with flexible hours.

Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.

Independence is a complete illusion, especially in our modern globalized world. Someone has to pay you the money, so even if you go as a solo entrepreneur selling real stuff that you made yourself, you largely depend on your customers at least.

The reality is that it is extremely stressful and for most people with no guarantee of how it will work out overtime.

And the fact is that it is much better to have one person focused on getting the ressource while the other runs the household, "making" other humans in the process.

It could be the man at home, but most woman don't actually want that even if they may say so to win an argument; and there is the added problem that only woman can make other human being.

Then you have people complaining that our society doesn't make babies anymore, well maybe if we didn't push the bullshit of independence on woman we wouldn't have this problem...

The sneer of "soccer mom" isn't that she's a mother busy raising children. It's that she's too busy shuffling the kids between enrichment activities to take the downtime to be their mother. That and her children are her personality.

add that waiting longer also increases the replacement rate.

Don't worry, there's plenty of irresponsible people out there still. And the planet is thankful for a bit of steady decline in population.

The planet doesn’t care either way. The question is what’s best for the humans - and those things or beings that humans value.

Yeah, same here. I don't think I was mature enough to have a kid at 22, apart from the fact that I was still studying, and when I started working I had low salary and needed to work long hours to fight for job stability in a competitive sector. However, it would likely have worked at 30, and reading through all this makes me think that it would have been better than waiting until 36 as I did.

Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done, though.

Emotional maturity is important, but there's also financial readiness.

People don't have extended families and villages to be nannies-on-demand anymore, so older parents have a lot more financial resources to raise kids and more likely to give the kid a comfortable life.

Especially when housing prices have gone up much faster than salaries in the past 30 years, and that is reflected not only in one's own mortgage/rent but also that you have to indirectly pay the rent increases of every Chipotle worker you interact with.

It's complicated. It's definitely true that we're less mature in our 20s than we are in our 30s. But, also, maturity doesn't just accumulate on us like growth rings. You can easily be a completely immature thirty-something if you don't have the kind of challenging life experiences that cause maturity.

Probably the number one life experience that increases maturity is having kids. If you'd had kids younger, you would have grown up faster too and earned some of the maturity needed to raise them well earlier.

Of course, there's an obvious counter-argument that no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth. That's fair. But it's also reality than you can never be fully prepared for any situation until you're in it. Sometimes you just have to accept that live is one long improv scene and do your best.

I'm not saying anyone should have kids early, or at all. But I think there's pernicious, unhealthy meme in our culture today that says kids deserve perfect parents and therefore no one should have children until they're perfectly prepared, but that's just an impossible bar.

A very close friend of mine was murdered at 18, his sister was a year younger and she matured very quickly as a result of this experience. She’s now in her early 20s and you’d assume she’s 35 by her personality and view points.

I wonder if you’d mind sharing some examples of her viewpoints? It’s not obvious to me what sort of maturity a sibling murder would induce. She moved to the suburbs already?

> no one should deliberately have children as a tool for their own person growth

I’m not suggesting you’re saying this, but there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil. There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating and desiring an ancillary benefit to having children or from any other relationship for that matter. Yes, if it’s your primary goal then that is cold and inhuman since children have a right to exist and be loved and cared for for their own sake, and they and other people do not exist merely to sate your desires. However, the fact that they also sate one’s good and ordered needs and desires and that those are part of the equation of forming relationships and having children is perfectly natural and an unavoidable human experience across cultures and times.

> there seems to be an idea floating around that any motivation to have children that incorporates your own good is evil.

This is a really good observation.

Yes, there's a whole toxic thread in today's culture that if you are not 100% altruistic towards any dependent then you must be an evil person who is traumatizing them. It seems like there are a lot of people out there today who believe that no one is good enough to deserve to have kids or pets.

> The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.

You see, in a proper early childrearing situation, you would be a) near your parents and inlaws ideally b) they would share in the burden of child-rearing.

We had kids later in life (33-ish) and I think if I were to do it again, I'd have moved quicker to having kids earlier (waited 2 years to marry and 3 years before having first kid).

More and more people are living closer to their parents - which opens up this possibility.

A lot of this assumes so many things that I think people who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most on HN) take for granted.

Even if I lived close to the family I was born into, I would never let them get near my children. The years of neglect and child abuse are reason enough that they should never see them - let alone be caregivers.

Similarly, you’re assuming that your marriage would have gone smoothly still and so would the childbearing if you hadn’t waited. I was with someone for five years and we never got legally married. We talked a lot about kids and marriage. I still felt like we had years to go before we were ready for marriage and kids. We separated over financial differences once it became clear they were never going to resolve. Imagine we had ignored our intuitions and married and had kids based on arbitrary deadlines? It would have been terrible. The differences wouldn’t have solved themselves with marriage or kids - we would’ve gone separate ways and both would experience truly insane hardship due to such poor decisions.

Living near people who can take care of your kids sounds lovely if you grew up where all the jobs are. Not uncommon for many SV types here who grew up in Palo Alto and such but it’s farfetched for so many more.

We need better regulations to give better paid leave and lower the cost of housing so I’m not homeless when my spouse decides to stop working to take care of the kids.

> A lot of this assumes so many things that I think people who were born and raised in stable UMC (like most on HN) take for granted.

You don’t have to be “UMC” to take those things for granted. All those things are normal in the third world village where my dad grew up.

Right, it’s less about economic class, more about cultural values.

I'm not denying your experiences - I was reasoning using my own. I did not have a typical upbringing - I'm felt like an outsider and went to a different school for like 7 years in a row.

Clearly your circumstances dictated your options. Nowadays, in this truly oligarchic economy, most young people simply don't feel they'll ever be able to afford a home or family either (which is a massive regression). Perhaps the future means - you raise your family in your parents house (with their help)... if you trust your parents.

Agreed about better support for families and housing.

Housing affordability has little to do with an oligarchic economy and everything to do with policy decisions we made to make housing expensive.

I am so glad I waited until my late 30s to have a kid. It sucks not being as physically capable as I would've been, but being calmer and more understanding I think is a big help in child rearing.

Interesting how until recently people in their early 20s were perfectly capable of raising children, but today they’re not.

The standards of what's "acceptable parenting" shot up greatly in the past decades. In the 60s, you were a great father if you passed out drunk only sometimes, didn't beat your kids too much and brought enough income to feed/house the family.

My childhood was all about spending the whole day outside roaming the streets with very little involvement from my parents. I didn't have any after-school (organized) activities, and I don't remember a single time that my father would drive me anywhere just because I needed it. That was all just normal, but today might get social services called on you.

It used to be that the average person at 25 already had worked a full-time job for 5-7 years. Now a college education is much more important and at 25 many haven't had a full-time job at all yet and in a way haven't been exposed to the real world. I sometimes think about Robert M. Pirsig's point that young people should work and then get further education to see better where the value comes from. I do wonder if that would push children even further back though.

A high school education doesn't go as far as it used to, women have more life paths that don't involve being a stay-at-home mom, houses are harder to come by, average age at first marriage is almost a decade higher than it was in the 50s ... notable, sure, but interesting, I dunno.

True. Though until recently, children were usually allowed some adult-level duties and responsibilities before their early 20s, so they could actually grow up. My mother did all the cooking for a family of 6, on a wood stove, before she was 12 years old. In an era (and economic circumstances) when "we need more bread" meant "check that there is enough flour in the bin, and get some water from the well...".

I don’t think anyone really thinks that. The vast majority of people in their 20s are perfectly capable of raising children, it’s just not desirable.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing (why not spend your 20s exploring?) but it’s also easily explained by financial burdens that didn’t used to exist. Housing is now very expensive, can you blame people waiting until they have the right size home before they have kids?

There were a lot of incompetent parents, but they pushed ahead blindly.

Today can recognize when they'd bee a pie parent and choose not to do it anyway.

They just didn't know any better. The whole idea that everyone has to have children is frankly asinine. I want people to have fewer children. I want fewer people to have children. I want nobody to have more than two children.

The whole idea that population must grow and keep growing is silly. It is ok for the population to shrink a little.

> I want nobody to have more than two children.

> It is ok for the population to shrink a little.

The first idea is way more extreme than the second idea.

They didn't say "Nobody should be allowed to have more than two children". They simply have an opinion that people shouldn't, purposefully, have more than two children. Seems reasonable to me.

Yes, thank you. I'm not Mao. People should choose to have either no children Or ideally one or two children And not no children.

Ideally, we as a society should support people who choose to have one or two children, prioritizing these families over people who have half a dozen or more children. But that's because in my opinion people who have dozens of children have something wrong in their heads. If you choose to have a dozen children, you better be able to afford to raise them all on your own dime.

That being said, I really dislike means testing of any kind so I'd be ok with a social safety net for the wackos and their unfortunate children.

The way the trend is going, the population is going to shrink. South Korea is already down to 0.84 (2.1 means population stays the same).

That is good and I'm all for it but a problem is now is that fundamentalists still have a lot of children and at some point, they will have too much political power.

> The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child.

How common is it that people are incompetent to raise kids in their 20s, versus people who may not presently have everything together because nobody expects anything from or depends on them?

Great point. Most people are perfectly capable of raising to the occasion, but while there's no occasion they just stay in the comfort of their responsibility-free lives... I say, enjoy it while it lasts!

I'm sure you could handle nights with little sleep fine in your early twenties. Being up all night. Dealing with childish drama. Vomit.

Few are really prepared to have kids, until they have their second kid. Everyone I know who had kids shortly after college (which skews the parents a bit economically, I know, but not necessarily emotionally or in maturity) had great family lives and outcomes.

>The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. ... Generally I'd expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate,...

This is exactly why I don't think anyone should have children until they're at least 50 years old, and better yet 75-100. We just need to solve this "aging" disease problem first. 20-somethings just aren't emotionally mature enough to be good parents.

Is this sarcasm or a joke? I honestly can't tell, but I hope it is.

Suggesting people to have child in their 20ties, to avoid health problems, is sexist and not based in reality. This is just extrapolation of this trend.

People can totally freeze relevant body parts, and have child in their 70ties. Saying anything else would be sexist! Natural selection in action...

And somehow we've done it through hundreds of generations.

> just need to solve this "aging" disease.

Oh, please stop. This is the rhetoric of stunted men with Peter Pan syndrome. If you are too scared to face this type of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion just fine.

>If you are too scared to face this type of responsibility, plenty of other men rose to the occasion just fine.

According to the most recent fertility statistics, they're not.

You are trying to make a point against old values using "most recent statistics". Do you realize how illogical this is?

You seem to not be living in the real world, instead pining for "old values" which obviously not many people still live by.

Your "solution" to the problem that adults now are claiming to be unable to become parents is, literally, "cure aging".

Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and have them at a age where your parents can still help you."

The fact that people are forgetting these "old values" is what is bringing to this unsustainable state, and instead of accepting the reality of our limited lifespans and that people have managed to start having kids in the early 20's (or before that) for centuries just fine, you want to double down on the idea that "no one should have kids before their 50s"?

Who is "not living in the real world"?

>Mine is "accept that you can not do it on your own and have them at a age where your parents can still help you."

If people wanted to do that, they would. They obviously don't want to do that, for various reasons. What's your solution now, genius?

>Who is "not living in the real world"?

You, because you're the one telling people to go back to the "good old days" and then shaking his fist because they aren't.

If people had listened to people like you throughout human history, we'd still be living in caves.

I think the optimal strategy depends partly on your genes. Challenging kids seem to run in families, and it’s probably easier to succeed as a very young parent if your kids are naturally the quiet & obedient sort.

It’s not politically correct, but we all know a few little hellions, and they are obviously difficult to parent.

I think a lot of these “20s” lessons and better emotional regulation you learn before the child is old enough to remember, i.e. by your late twenties.

Although, I think going through that learning process + raising a baby + recently newly wed is a contributing factor to divorce.

It is arguable that the increased emotional regulation of older parents is responsible for the higher incidence of adhd as the kids have to fill the emotional void

The wording here is a bit odd, almost like blaming people for delaying childbearing. The world is complicated and a number of factors have produced this outcome in the developed world.

My parents were factory workers and they encouraged me to study a university degree as a sure way to a successful career. I finished my degree well into my 20s, but then the economic collapse of 2008 happened and I spent several years living paycheck to paycheck, lucky me who at least had a job.

In my late 20s I finally broke from economic stagnation by moving abroad. Then I spent the next 12 years moving countries every 2-3 years, which isn't good for stability. In fact I didn't meet who would become my wife until my mid 30s.

Now I approach 40 and have a good paying job in tech. However I'm in the US on a non-immigrant visa and my company has done waves of layoffs that I luckily survived. We are seriously considering having a child, but the prospects don't look great. Everything else aside, we don't really know anyone or have a support network here.

I know most of this is moaning and if we "really wanted" we could make it work. But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network.

It's not that it has gotten harder to have kids, but that people come to expect and want to provide more.

I had a perfectly decent living standard growing up, but I also remember very clearly in retrospect the economic uncertainty and the things my parents did to save money, and no uncertainty I've faced has been anywhere near that. Of course it's not like that for everyone, but overall, living standards are up massively, yet fertility rates are down, and the two are firmly correlated.

If I were to budget like my parents did, I could afford many kids. But I don't want to budget like that. Not because I resent how we had it, but because I don't want to go back to that just for the sake of having lots of kids.

I wonder if other parents waiting till they can offer the kids more creates pressure. Not only on the parents but the kids as well. I frequently couldn't get what I wanted as a kid, but that was the norm and in fact several kids I went to school with were clearly poorer. However, if I look at kids around me today, they have seemingly everything they could want. If I imagined the majority of the kids around me had had as much stuff, fancy vacations, expensive after-school activities etc. and I had what I had in actuality I would have felt much poorer. Just the after-school activities alone would ruin everything. My friends and family's kids now are always out at clubs and classes and that's where they see their friends. This would put poorer kids at a disadvantage.

But it has gotten harder in some important ways, housing costs as a % of median income have risen by multiples since then. Shelter being thing that probably makes people feel the most insecure

Housing costs have increased as much as they have because people can afford to bid them up because other things do not take up as much of income.

Those 'other things' are generally more optional than shelter, so you'll bid up shelter until you get it while sacrificing those other things. Inelastic demand and inelastic supply is a bad combo.

We see affordability and population growth in places that allow housing.

We don't see population growth without immigration anywhere but third world countries any more, and consistently dropping there too as living standards increase.

While I agree it's a bad combo and could be better, there's nothing to support any notion that cheaper housing will be enough to increase fertility rates.

I don't blame people, just noting that at least in my own youth all I heard were reasons to wait.

Good luck! Funny enough my wife and I are from the US and we waited until we knew our kids would have EU citizenship before having them. And raising kids without a support network sucks, I can't pretend otherwise.

> But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network.

It is easier, but people have been having kids in all sorts of various situations for, well, as long as the human race has been around.

Kids are way more resilient than we think.

The kids will stay alive, but they would certainly prefer stability, and their parents would've just as much loved to give their children a better life. For most of human history the parents didn't really have much control over improving their circumstances, nor did they have effective means of birth control, so they just had kids whenever. I don't think it's reasonable to just put that aside as "kids are way more resilient".

"But it doesn't discount the fact that it's easier to start a family for someone with a stable job with a support network."

Definitely. Still, sometimes you have to take risks, as you are not getting younger. Maybe moving again somewhere, where you could have a support network, even though pay is lower, might be an option?

We had grandparents around, that definitely helped. No idea, what other people do without that. If both parents get sick, the child still needs lots of care .. and you don't want some stranger to take care of your baby.

My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in their 140s-150s today, is basically unthinkable for me.

Same.

When my were in school and had friends who were visiting great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm) once. One of those children lived behind us when I was growing up, and if I'd paid better attention when helping him with his garden would have taught me how to plant by the moon and stars --- he did teach me how to gut and skin a squirrel.

feel like it is questionable to describe yourself as a sharecropper if your daddy owns the entire farm

He married one of the daughters --- two different family branches here.

My neighbour is a fifty year old guy and his grandfather was born in the 1860's. Both the grandfather and father had kids with much younger women. Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.

> Funny how we're closer to the past than we think.

I really love this recording[0] from 1941 of a photographer born in 1843, talking about the American West. It's one of Youtube's many gems.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ab5nv4Suc (video)

There's also this video interview of Bertrand Russell, whose grandfather met Napoleon as a young member of Parliament.

https://youtu.be/4OXtO92x5KA

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790 and served as the 10th President of the USA from 1841-1845.

His Grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (Born November 9, 1928), is still alive today.

According to Wikipedia, John died in 1862 and Harrison was born in 1928. So he never met his grandfather.

It makes me wonder - who is the oldest "directly-known" person? Maybe there's a better term for this. What I mean is, of all of the currently-living people, who is the person that one of them actually met who was born the earliest?

If you think about it, there are about a couple of hundred super-centenarians (110 or older) alive[1]. Surely at least one of them met a very old relative when they were young - for example, when I was 9, I met a great uncle who was 100 years old. Taking into account life expectancy, if you assume at least one of them has met someone 85 years older than them, that means this oldest "directly known person" would have been born at least 195 years ago (1829). Which means there’s a good chance someone alive has met someone born in the 1820’s.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian#Incidence

> Maybe there's a better term for this.

Seems to be the rule used in Coco.

My grandpa's mother worked as a servant in a castle that I only know as a burned-out ruin and my grandpa fought in Stalingrad as a teenager. Unfathomable

In the line I've been able (most just showed up in the New World from somewhere or other...) to trace back to 7 generations, it was a little less, but they were in the colonies before the US was a thing, so more than 35, less than 40 years per generation?

My wife can go back 7 as well, and her family has also tended towards high parental investment in offspring; next time I'm in the cellar I'll have to check but I'd easily believe they'd also be on the longer side.

(NB. age matching is a post-WWI thing. I believe the pre-WWI ideal was mid-30's men* marrying early-20's women, which seems to have been inherited from Aristotle's recommendation for 30 year olds to marry 15 year olds)

* Stefan Zweig has a chapter on how this gap influenced porn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — not that anyone in this august assemblage might wonder how the Viennese equivalent of OnlyFans worked.

I do get frustrated when I hear people saying negative or unfounded things about couples with relatively small age gaps 7-15 years. It’s the norm, not the exception.

And I say that as someone who has only dated people my own age.

Many things were historical norms, with current practices being the exception.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39851970

(it turns out my wife's family took more generations to get back into the XVIII, so that line runs ~30 years per generation)

I am shocked, shocked that Josephine Mutzenbacher didn’t reflect reality

Wait, given the age differences described here, the book very much reflected reality, no?

No, what I took away from Zweig is that 19 yo men were very much interested in 19 yo women, but (although some were for rent) they couldn't successfully date them due to competition from men "of substance".

EDIT: hmm, was it really a change in mores, or did WWI just kill off enough 20-40 yos to reset this dynamic?

Isn't that how it was in the Mutzenbacher as well? I mostly recall her having sex with much older men even before she enters prostitution

I wonder how much this change was due to the modern idea of romantic love taking over rather than older men becoming unavailable

Good question! It's on my slush list, but atm I have a lot of physical things which need to be rearranged at or near the surface of the earth, so unlikely I'll dig into this before it's slid well out of HN's attention span.

> in the Mutzenbacher

Familienname, eh? I've yet to read her, but given her reputation I'm glad that makes at least two of us who are not already per Du.

It's not just great grandparents, but the family calculus on grandparents changes significantly as well. If my parents were 35 when I was born, and I don't have children until 35, my parents are 70. With a life expectancy of 80, my children never really get a chance to know my parents. Whereas if each generation is having children at age 25, my children will likely be able to know their grandparents for 30 years.

I have no idea if it's good or bad, but it's interesting to think about. I do have to wonder if it affects how younger people perceive the past, since they have less of a direct connection to the past.

My mom's parents were relatively old when they had her, and my dad's parents were relatively young when they had him. I had a set of 'old' grandparents, and 'young' grandparents.

My mom's parents were gone by the time I was 24 - I didn't really ever get a chance to interact with them as an adult. My dad's father passed away when I was 39, but I had many visits with them as an adult while he and my grandmother were still pretty active. My grandmother is now 94 and not in great health, but still with us, still mentally there. When I was in 5th grade, they came to 'grandparents day' at my school, and she won 'youngest grandmother', but wouldn't come up on stage to accept the award! ;)

I realised last year that I'd reached the age (48) that my mums dad was when I was born. I remember him "always" being "old", but I also know that I have memories of him from before he turned 55 (he took early retirement around then, and I remember clearly the discussions about what would happen to his workplace that led up to the offer of taking early retirement). He lived another 32 years after that, and all of my grandparents were young enough through most of my childhood and teens that not only were they around but they had the energy to have us stay for whole weeks during the holidays and take us all kinds of places...

Meanwhile my son, at 14, has only one living grandparent, and it does feel weird.

Its bad. Ofc course its bad to have a smaller support network.

Support networks are not necessarily limited to blood relatives.

(in particular, I was never within 5 hours of gp or ggp until my teens, and born multiple TZ away. then again, I'm in the "come home before it gets dark" generation; ymmv)

No but its nice

We have cheap daycare, maternity leave etc etc here in Sweden but having some another dropoff for the kids is still nice for parents

One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance. There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, ....

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502822...

Increased mutations/mutation rate is not necessarily a downside. Mutations aren't inherently bad, they can be beneficial, and the vast majority actually have no effect whatsoever, as the majority of our DNA is never used. But yes increased mutations means increased chances of bad mutations happening even if it also means increased chances of good mutations happening. Anyhow, it may put evolutionary pressure for longer lifespans. Studies involving fruit flies, and selective breeding them as old as possible for successive generations, show that can be the case. And other studies involving natural selection show that high mutation rates are a good thing (ie they help species survive), when environmental change is high (but high mutation rates are detrimental if the environment remains stable).

Probably a good thing to speed up the evolutionary landscape during these rapidly changing times.

It would not speed up evolution at all.

I remember seeing a talk by Steve Jones[1] where someone asked a question like this and he said the human species has basically not evolved at all for I forget how long he said but it was at least hundreds of thousands of years. He said specifically if you took the children of someone like this dude[2] and put them in a modern school system they would not perform noticeably differently in any way from a modern child as long as they had decent food etc all the other benefits of modern society.

[1] https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/7056 (emeritus professor of human genetics and evolution at university college London and the author of a fantastic book on the subject called "In the Blood")

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi

It weirds me out a lot when people talk about parenting and family planning like this. Like, having kids should be planned around strategically based on factors like "are my parents young enough to be supplemental child care" over "do I have the mental and financial readiness to be responsible for raising a human being? And do I even want to do that?"

If people want earlier parenting, then create a society that supports it. One with living wages, universal health care, and programs to provide childcare for working people. Because those are reasons people hesitate to have kids, and those situations are not improving.

>"are my parents young enough to be supplemental child care"

My first kid(late 20s) didn't get my parents watching the kid because they were working.

My next 3 kids (early 30s) got grandparents attention because they were retired.

Although I feel like the baby/kid thing has lost its magic on the grandparents. But on the flip side, the kids are basically old enough to take care of themselves(4+ yr old).

Do you have evidence for the second paragraph? The wealthiest countries are generally those with lower birth rates, although the very lowest fertility is in upper-middle income regions like Eastern Europe and E Asia

Sweden doesn't have exactly the things that was mentioned, but it is far more supportive of parents than the United States: https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/parental-benefit-swede...

And how does their fertility rate compare? Actually I'll tell you, Sweden's is 1.66, the USA is 1.64.

South Sudan, the poorest country in the world, is 4.54

South Sudan's infant mortality rate is also significantly higher than either Sweden or the US.

Creating a society that supports it is an intractable problem. Instead, the problem that we are faced with (as organisms) is how can we raise as many successful children as possible? This problem is workable, and hopefully involves support from ones grandparents.

I’m curious how many children you have.

I refuse the idea that I need to solve the problem of raising as many successful children as possible. If a person chooses to have children, then raising them successfully is a problem they need to face. I totally refuse the idea that having children is mandatory, necessary, or even desirable for a lot of people. The world would be a happier place if we stopped placing that expectation on everyone.

I have two step-children. Having children of my own (biologically) was never something I wanted to do for a lot of reasons. Without getting into TMI territory, I'll just say it was apparent (no pun intended) that one of my parents never wanted the responsibility + resented it, and the other wanted to "be a parent" without actually doing the work. So I did not have the desire or background that lends itself to being a good parent early on -- whether I've made a good showing or a mess of it later in life is something that my kids would have to answer...

The economic situation of your mom having a great career is not the same as the economic situation of today; appeal to her hard work considered. People cannot afford to have kids like they used to. And yes, the older grandparents make this much worse because they’re now a costly liability rather than a useful child watcher.

I find the idea that people haven’t considered downsides of waiting to have kids to be grating personally

> I find the idea that people haven’t considered downsides of waiting to have kids to be grating personally

Why do you care about what other people do? It's not harming you.

Why does anyone care about anyone else's opinions? I think it's pretty reasonable to take issue with others assuming that you made a particular decision because you hadn't fully thought through the consequences. Do you like having people second-guess your decisions, or does it annoy you?

I think being judged feels bad. If someone thinks you haven't considered the obvious it feels pretty insulting.

Publicly asserting incorrect reasons why people do things is in fact harmful due the social dialogue it creates.

I'm in my late 20s, but my mom had me when she was 42. My Dad's father died 32 years before I was born and my Mom's father died 22 years before I was born, so I've always wondered what it must have been like to grow up with grandfathers, let alone great grandfathers or grandmothers.

On the plus side, in the early 60s, my recently windowed grandmother put herself through night school while raising 4 teenage kids, one of whom eventually worked on the national security council and traveled the world; all these years later, I still wonder how she managed it all without having a nervous breakdown. Life is strange like that, sometimes.

My story covers both ends of this.

Mom had me at 21 (dad was 30). I knew both my grandmothers and neither of my grandfathers. One was left behind when my mom's family immigrated. The other died not too long after my dad's family immigrated - just before my dad was born

I had my son (now 4) when I was 41. Both his grandmothers are around, and neither of his grandfathers. My dad died last year and my son barely remembers him. My wife's dad died when she was two.

I'm glad to say my son and my mother are very close - they spend every other weekend together. His other grandmother and my wife aren't close and so my son doesn't know her very well.

Not sure if there's much here - except to say that having kids in our thirties should still be young enough that healthy grandparents can be around for the formative years. And regardless of age, life happens, and a multi-generational family unit isn't guaranteed.

I got fairly unlucky in the great grandparent department. My grandmother had my mom at 15, and my mom had me at 19, and all my great grandparents were already dead!

oh wow, talk about having the best conditions to have your great grandparents around for quite a while, and still no luck. at what age did they have your grandmother? i am sorry they had to leave so early.

My grandmother was the 2nd youngest of 9 sisters, so they weren't that young when they had her, but I don't know the exact age. Her dad killed himself when she was a young child, alcoholism and war trauma among other things, and her mom passed from some illness.

Those sound like awful conditions.

> Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.

Starting having kids in our 20s is the best decision my wife and I ever made. When my daughter was born, my parents (then in their early 60s) got a decade younger overnight. I wish we hadn’t spaced them out so much (27-37) because indeed my parents are not able to keep up with the littlest one like they could with the first two.

Same. Easiest decision we made. I don't understand the comments about maturity. I fully agree that at 25 I would be unable to raise a 16 year old. Luckily I've never met someone who gave birth to one of those.

Good points to think about. One I consider is that traditions and family roots are often good for people to feel connected and find meaning although traditions should be questioned from time to time.

I think having family members of varying ages alive at the same time does help people feel connected, safe, and confident in having meaning and purpose. (Not that people can't have those things otherwise, it's just without that support)

I only got to meet one of my great grandparents, my great grandmother, though she died when I was five years old so I don't remember her terribly well. I am the oldest kid in my family, and my mom had me when she was 25. My oldest sister also got to meet my great grandmother, but my two youngest sisters never did.

I still have two living grandparents as well, both grandmothers, one I won't talk to, and one that I like a lot. My oldest sister had a kid almost three years ago, and he got to meet his great grandmother last October for her 90th birthday.

That grandmother is still in pretty good health for her age, so I certainly hope she lives a lot longer, but realistically she probably doesn't have that much time left. I'm not having kids, but my other sisters are planning on it and it seems unlikely that they'll get to meet their great grandmother.

Conversely even people who start young don't necessarily end up having living great grandparents let alone grandparents. My parents were both the youngest of 6 and 7 kids so my grandparents who started having kids in their early 20s had already passed or were quite old by the time I was born.

> My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them.

My mother had me when she was 20. I am not yet in my forties, but I lost my last grandparent many years ago.

:(

> it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents.

It really depends.

When I was born my youngest grandma was 50. She already had three grandchildren.

I already had only 3 grandparents, one had died when my father was young, having survived two world wars, ironic ain't it?

At the age of 10 only one grandma was still alive, but she lived to the age of 95 and managed to meet 4 great grand-children.

My cousins had children late in their lives, their parents were average for their times.

I would say that meeting your grand parents is a benefit that has become a given only for the past 2-3 generations, when life and work conditions improved so much that it became the norm.

Oh, don’t kid yourself. There are areas of the country where knowing a great grandmother is common, and even great great grandmother.

If you have kids at 15, it tends to be generational.

Same way as having kids in your 30s+ is generational.

The flip side, and I recognize this is not a privilege everyone shares, is that being an older parent may mean better financial stability and opportunities. On today's world of housing costs putting ownership out of reach of many, inflation, layoffs, that can mean a lot in terms of stability for a family.

My parents had me in their early 20s and I only met one of my grandparents. We had our kid in our late 20s and my parents aren't healthy enough to help at all. Take it from someone who never had the opportunity. If you have healthy parents do yourself and them a favor and if you're gonna have kids have them sooner.

It would be nice if our life expectancy got longer at the same pace (instead of doing exactly the opposite).

We just had our first child at 33 and I wish we had done it at 24 or 25, although it's hard to predict if we'd be as happy as we spent those years changing jobs, going back to graduate school, and traveling

I’ve had a similar thought about marriage, late marriage means you forgo the likelihood for big wedding anniversaries.

Reading all these comments I just keep thinking it's all a matter of priorities. If you really want to do something, the sooner you do it the better. Responsibly, of course.

What "responsibly" means in any case might also be influenced by your priorities. For instance, a lot of people say "We're not financially ready to have kids" but they really mean "We can't keep up the fancy holiday trips if we add a kid". If your priority is to have a family, you might cut on holidays and have the kid.

That applies to some, even plenty, of cases, but I acknowledge that not for all. At least where I'm from, it often feels everything is set up to make it difficult for people to build a family.

Doubling the child tax credit a second time could go a long way. Also making single detached family homes cheaper around good paying jobs will help a lot too.

What do you think are the chief obstacles that make it difficult to build a family?

Except grandparents in their 40s are still working, so not a great choice for childcare.

Isn't the ultimate goal of parenting that your kids shouldn't have to trust anyone but themselves?

Parents who don't have a plan and need help shouldn't have had kids. The grandparents and great grandparents would just get in the way of these goals. There shouldn't be anything magical about getting to know your family. If you got to meet them, great, but you're your own person and developing that is so much more important.

This reads like a parody of American individualism that a Chinese government newspaper might write.

The ultimate goal of my parenting is for my kids to realize they're part of a community that gave them tremendous advantages, and to which they have a duty to give back.

Not sure what bubble you're describing, but the sense of community anywhere at any time in human history is ultimately an illusion.

I'm not saying the kids should grow up to be selfish, but that the more they can do for themselves the more they can also do for others. That is a leader. We really don't need another generation of guilt ridden cogs.

It's "rugged individualism" that is the bubble, both in time and in space. Community and duty exist everywhere and have at every time, despite what it is like in 2024 America.

Is this a joke?

> this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022

I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much.

Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parents were too. It would be a huge difference in our energy levels and that's so important when you're hanging out with young kids. And it's 15 years less time that we will be able to spend together with our kids.

Yeah, the thing that kinda annoyed me about the article is that it even acknowledges this fact ("even though life expectancy at birth as I’ve used here isn’t the best proxy for this"), but then for some reason refuses to make the next rational leap that there were plenty of great grandmothers in previous generations, totally invalidating the article's main thesis.

Obviously there have been huge changes in family size, parental age at first birth, etc. over the last few decades. I'd argue the lack of great-grandmothers is going to be the least consequential of these changes.

Personally when people make mistakes like that I stop reading.

Not even the next word. I'm gone.

That is exactly what I did. I want to read things from people who have thought more about a topic than I have, not less.

Yeah that article was really thin, and at a guess I'd say that the age of great-grandparents has probably been declining since at least around the 50s or 60s and we're certainly not at peak-great-grandparent. This article reads like a young Millennial thinking they're the first one in the world to not know their great grandparents.

I’ve also adopted that policy after getting really annoyed that 90% of the time when someone mentions historical life expectancy, they make that exact same mistake and completely ignore infantile mortality.

Good on you for giving us the update that he does acknowledge it. I confess I stopped reading as soon as that stat was given.

My mother died unexpectedly when she was 73, a couple years ago, and it's one of my big regrets that she didn't get more time with my children, which were the great joy of the last few years of her life.

> I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much.

Accepting that, I'd offer that more is a value somewhere above 50%. That leaves a lot of modern people who aren't dying in their 20s-50s.

I look at a lot of death certs (genealogy) and and realize we've had a lot of advances in treatment (pneumonia), regulation (black lung) and health practices (tuberculosis, dysentery). Many routine killers from 80+ years ago are less common/less deadly now.

Last night I ran across a death from Tuberculous Meningitis and my take was - What even the frak? How did our ancestors survive millennia where life just sprayed death at us?

"Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parents were too."

All people over 30 with they were 15 years younger. Age, miles, diseases and injuries gradually makes the body worser.

Of course everyone wishes they could stay young longer. The point is that some people over 30 already have 10 year old kids, while others are just starting with newborns even at 40.

Yes the average age stat drastically skews our perception of how old people were in prior centuries because it includes infant and childhood deaths. This is valid for an average, but it doesn't relate life expectancy for someone who made it to 18.

Yeah, it seems like great grandmothers at least would have been reasonably common as women had children so much younger than today. If women have children at 18, you could be a great grandmother in your 50s. There would probably have been the odd great-great grandmother as well.

> And it's 15 years less time that we will be able to spend together with our kids.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

When kids die as infants they don't have time to have any meaningful interactions with their great-grand parents so the point of the article still stands somewhat. The age of great-grandmothers is low infant mortality + parents making kids early.

People had more kids (and then some) to compensate for the infant mortality, so I don't think it reduced the number of great grandmothers much.

They very clearly did not put that much thought into it, not sure why you are making this up.

I've always had this weird thought - that doesn't really pass the ethics test, but here it is anyway.

I was raised by my grandmother - let's just say my parents were not ready. And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. What if it would become the norm for Grandparents to raise the children? That way the second generation can focus on their careers, etc and the first generation could raise the third. That wouldn't mean the second generation wouldn't have a role and be a part of the process. Of course, there would have to be consent on each level - and if it was part of the culture maybe there would be. Also, technology may have a role in this also - if no one has to actually carry the children, the second generation could be more willing.

The whole point is that this happens all the time, but it's always seen as a break from the norm, not the norm. What if we just embraced it?

The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason.

Again, I know this doesn't really work out, but it's a thought I've always had.

> The whole point is that this happens all the time

What happens all the time is an adult raising their our children and then later on raising their grandchildren. But what you’re suggesting is having old people with zero experience raising anyone taking care of their grandchildren. I don’t quite see that as a clearcut case of success.

Wait the people that raised the kids that then had kids have no experience raising kids?

No, you misunderstood completely. Under the OP’s proposal, you have people raising their grandkids, not their kids.

So if I understand: Starting today, a pair of 20-somethings has kids, hands them off to their parents to raise - OK, their parents had experience now they are doing double-duty, but they know what they're doing raising kids.

Now... 20 years later, those children have kids and hand them off to their biological parents who ... have no experience raising children. Also, which grandparents? Mom's or dad's?

Ask the OP, I wasn’t the one who suggested the idea.

What does it change from parents with zero experience taking care of their children ?

Parents can ask their own parents for guidance. In the proposed scenario, the grandparents would have no one to ask because the previous generation is most likely dead already.

Zero? Doesn't seem a very good faith assessment of the concept proposed.

yeah, obviously they were adults when their biological kids were raised and even if the weren't the primary, they surely would be hands on most of the time.

I think you’re missing the point (but possible I am).

My understanding is that OP is proposing that since the grandparents would be raising the kids, this would incentivize people to have kids much younger, e.g. in their early 20s, or even teens.

So the “grandparents” would be in their early/mid 40s, or even late 30s.

Definitely not “old people”.

And zero experience parenting, yes (just like any new parent today), but definitely more life experience, and likely more mature.

Not saying I’d advocate for this — I think there are still some flaws with this — but an interesting hypothetical that’s fun to discuss.

Anthropologically, I think that this isn't super far from what has already happened for humans. Grandmothers specifically had a lot of repsonsibilities and importance and I believe that's why they generally live longer than grandfathers.

Instead of being about career development, it's been about specializing in hunter/gatherer stuff while still able bodied.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/grandmothers-a...

> I believe that's why they generally live longer than grandfathers.

Iirc that's at least partly due to estrogen & other female hormones. They have I think anti-infection or anti-cancer properties. (Though if your comment was from an evolutionary perspective that would make sense.)

IMHO the part about the kids not being ready is crucial.

If they're just not well off financially I'd see your idea happen (but then, we already see grand parents giving a hand financially in these kind of circumstances)

But if they're not ready mentally, there would be mountains of issues with their relationship with their child. For instance, do they even fully understand it's their child under their responsibility ? Can they continue raising their child when the grand parents can't anymore ? How well will they take it if suddenly they have to give up important things to completely focus on the kid(s) ? On the other hand will they be able to step in if the grand parents aren't fit for that ? etc.

I think it would work better if parents give it a fair try, but end up being inept and have the grandparents step in. Giving up from the start would be a worse path IMHO.

My life was a mess until we unexpectedly had our first child. I don’t think I ever would have considered myself mentally ready. The child came first, then I started growing into a suitable person.

TBF, I don't think any of us really understood what it would take or were well prepared to become parents, even when getting into it on our terms.

I don't know if I'm a suitable person, but having a kid sure pushed me out of my boundaries pretty far, in every possible direction.

I've always had an even worse idea, ethically speaking, that I think would combine well with yours : the first generation would raise the third, as you said, but that third generation would be born out of the frozen gametes of the now deceased zero generation.

That way, embryos would only be created after the death of both biological parents, which would give you whole lives to look at to decide if you wanted these persons to reproduce.

That would open the way to some interesting possibilities in directing human evolution while opening a whole new world of horrific abuse and creative eugenics.

This is eh very common in many parts of the world. I myself have probably spent more time with my grandparents than my parents at certain times of my life. Often this happens if grandparents and parents live closeby and children cant go to daycare for whatever reason.

Even leaving aside the ethics (which...yikes) I think this kind of falls down, logically.

Parents want to become grandparents after having the experience of being parents. If you cut the "being parents" out of that cycle, why would you even want grand kids? And having been parents prepares grandparents to step in if needed. If you skip the parenting step, why would they be any better at it just because they're 20 years older?

Also, frankly, infants are hard. They're great when you can give them back. But the loss of sleep and everything is something that does not go well with being in your 40s and beyond. It's hard at any age, but doubly so later in life.

All that said, it'd be great if society placed more emphasis on extended family involvement and if we start to really embrace remote work that might be more possible. (e.g., stop making people move thousands of miles away from their families just for jobs...) But accelerating child-having just for the sake of great-grandparents... bad idea, even leaving aside the ethics.

> Also, frankly, infants are hard.

Honestly, they are as difficult as you want them to be. Some parents stress way to much about them hurting themselves in the process.

If you take everything in moderation, they are not that bad at all. There will be a few bad days ofc, but at large my kids are the best thing that happened to me, and I have two at the same age.

what are your ethical qualms?

Child-rearing approaches that weren't used where/when I grew up are unethical

This is the norm in countries like South Korea, and much of Eastern Europe

From my limited vantage point (in-laws) this is normal in the Filipino culture. My wife and I moved away from her parents so we didn't do this but her sister's kids were probably a 70/30 split in being at the grandparents' house. Her cousin's kids were the same. In fact, many of them would send the kids to the Philippines for months at a time where the grandparents lived to be raised by them. It felt really odd to me at first but that's more because it wasn't how I was raised plus I didn't have any grandparents that were still alive when I grew up.

> And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. ... The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason.

I mean, putting aside the other good comments this has received, why are the kids not ready? Because if I look around at myself and my peers, I see a lot of people who absolutely want kids but feel they can't have them, for a number of reasons, but not unimportant reasons:

- A lot of people are delaying because they don't feel financially stable enough, because of the increasing costs of lifes essentials, not the least of which is housing, and/or student loan debt which was foisted on them by the selfish decisions of the aforementioned grandparents.

- Tons of people are avoiding kids because they don't want to bring them into a world as unstable as ours, that instability expressed as some combination of: our ever worsening biosphere and the long-term threats of climate change, the aforementioned everything-getting-more-expensive-all-the-time while wages continue stagnating, the political instability with micro-wars playing out all over the place, the economic precarity as our system continues enabling bad actors, the social instability caused by deepening political divides and extremisms literally everywhere over what would otherwise be such benign things, and for flavor, a few things that absolutely deserve extremist responses...

Like, one of the first things that goes away when an animal population is stressed on a macro-scale is reproduction. It seems to me if we want to promote reproduction again, we need to make our world less... awful? Like by and large, my life is great, but I'm child-free and that decision was informed partly by the fact that I have to meter my intake of global news lest I become so depressed I can't function, and aside of that, I started making six figures 2 years ago which is legitimately a thing I never thought would happen, and yet in those subsequent 2 years I have never felt poorer because every last thing costs more now than it ever has, even asking my mother.

I think it's impossible to divorce a discussion like this from the fact that there are absolutely pages upon pages of good, rational, logical reasons one can write to not have children and commensurate with that fact, we see birth rates plummeting all over the place.

> micro-wars

That's an interesting choice of worlds, I'd just call them wars, maybe proxy wars. Some of them look like candidates for what future historians might call the early conflicts of WW3. There's also lot of noise about declaring war on China too, which honestly sounds like a bad idea, and the grievances I've seen range from fake to you're-doing-the-same-thing and what's left is not really worth fighting a war over.

From what I've seen, the loudest proponents demanding everyone have more kids are also the worst offenders in making the world a worse place to be a new kid or a new parent.

Yeah I couldn't really settle on the term. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is kind of half-proxy war, since one of the entities is Russia itself but then the other side is basically NATO plus or minus, but (to my knowledge) no NATO nations have been in direct conflict with Russia yet, they're just supplying the Ukraine. And then you have the Israel Palestine shit which isn't really a proxy war at all so much as a regular war that happens to be small in scale (compared to the world, not compared to it's combatants of course).

But yeah, this feels distinctly like the period of history right before maps get covered in flags and arrows and it's not a good vibe.

>I see a lot of people who absolutely want kids but feel they can't have them, for a number of reasons

I remember thinking about that in the street, and then be overtaken by a rom family, the father pushing the kids in a shopping cart and the mother walking alongside.

Here in NL it is quite common for grandparents to help parents out with day care on their workdays. School pickup is rife with grandparents…

yeah this is also fairly common in many East and South-Asian countries. In countries like China, many people leave their children behind in the village with the grandparents, while they go work in the cities.

Visit any WIC clinic. Grandmas are always the ones picking up the societal slack.

I would like to read the SF story fleshing this out!

Still think about this essay on the topic I saw on twitter a few years back:

https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/18/your-real-biological-clock-i...

> If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.

Alternately, you could be giving both them and yourself a better quality of life by waiting until you’re more ready.

Obviously you don’t have forever to do this.

I think this is the story people tell themselves, but as far as I can tell it's mostly just a story. Kids are resilient and don't need the material wealth college educated people tend to assume they will to have a good childhood. And as for parents, there's really a lot to be said for raising kids while you're young and energetic, it's just easier.

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their life. It's something you have to experience firsthand to understand. That's why social norms and defaults are so important here.

"The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their life."

It is also hard to convey, how hard it can be, making the transition from only taking care of yourself, to also being 100% responsible for someone else. Combine that with little sleep and relationships that were not working very good before and it is no wonder so many children end up in foster homes, or with traumatic experiences of neverending fights of their parents.

So no, the conditions don't need to be perfect, they never will be. But you have to have some stable base. And consensus with the partner on how to raise a child. Otherwise parenting won't be meaningful, but hell on earth for everyone involved.

In other words there's no "best" or "perfect" time to have a child. There is only when you feel personally ready. So maybe the conversation can turn from "everyone should have babies when they're in their 20's! It's awesome!" to "why do so many people today feel like they have to wait until they're 30 to have a baby?"

I think that would be a more constructive conversation than the one people in my cohort of people with kids wants to have.

"In other words there's no "best" or "perfect" time to have a child. There is only when you feel personally ready"

Yup. And it takes 2 to feel ready and to be sure, to do it together. At least for some time, even though a divorce is not the end of the world, if done right (very rare), but it can be for the children, if it means war between the parents and using the children as a weapon to hurt the other side. That is way too common.

So yes, having kids can be awesome and meaningful. But it is a very serious commitment, maybe the most serious there is, where my advice would be, don't do it, if you don't feel ready.

(I felt ready, but it was and still is very very tough at times)

I think consensus with the partner on how to raise a child would be a given. I don't understand how people get to late stages of a relationship before starting to talk about having kids.

And yes, parenthood is hard, it's tough, you can focus on that, but you could also focus on how meaningful it is.

I would never push parenthood on anyone, I understand it's a personal choice. Honestly though, I just feel sad about people missing out, so very often due to misconceptions.

"I think consensus with the partner on how to raise a child would be a given."

Looking around, it really isn't with many of the parents I know. There are just so many things one can disagree about. Food choices alone are very hard for some. Sugar or not, how much, and vegan diet or not, .. (We try to be as pragmatic as possible, as healthy as possible, but not dogmatic). Then, is it ok to play with toy weapons, what movies to watch at what age, how much screen time at all, ...

With my partner we were quite clear how to do it in theory before. But in reality there are many things we disagree - and then it is an art, to find a consensus about it, while the kids are watching. Otherwise it is an invitation for them for learning how to manipulate.

So good for you, if it was quite easy for you. For many it isn't for various reasons. So some probably just should have the courage to go with it, before they are too old. For others it might be better to wait.

No, I agree with you, maybe I was wrong in assuming parent meant it in a more generalistic way.

But then again, the points you bring up, I'd argue it's quite difficult to figure all that out before having a kid. Everything I said I meant as having in common some general guidelines and a direction, not every specific detail.

Having a shared, defined direction will also help you in settling all the "smaller" disagreements, but I guess my reaction comes from seeing many couples that don't have that general direction figured out yet, i.e. getting married and suddenly husband finds out wife is not that keen about having kids.

"getting married and suddenly husband finds out wife is not that keen about having kids"

Yes, stuff like this. It seems many people avoid topics that could be uncomfortable, so rather smile and go along and hope for the best ... until reality hits them hard. And then some decide to do stupid scheming how to still have babies. And this is then a really bad foundation.

It's not just a matter of giving your kid a new laptop every year vs. every couple of years, or not being able to pay for college out-of-pocket.

There are plenty of people out there who can't afford to live in anything larger than a one-bedroom apartment, who can't afford to clothe their children, or who can't even afford to feed them. Telling them to have kids because they are "resilient" and parenthood is "meaningful" isn't very helpful - it's far better to wait a few years until they're financially stable. A parent's love can't fully compensate for childhood poverty trauma.

To accept this view is to accept the idea that most of our ancestors had "childhood poverty trauma". I just don't see how it's a useful frame.

And really, it's not the actual poor who are delaying having kids into their mid-30s: it's the college educated who make way, way more money than them!

> To accept this view is to accept the idea that most of our ancestors had "childhood poverty trauma".

I 100% accept this idea. Most of my ancestors lived the miserable, short lives of impoverished alcoholics. They and their children absolutely experienced trauma from their miserable hunger and disease-ridden lives.

If I can’t see myself giving my child a good life I’m more than happy to wait until I’m able to. Bringing a child into the world isn’t an intrinsic moral good.

>To accept this view is to accept the idea that most of our ancestors had "childhood poverty trauma". I just don't see how it's a useful frame.

For most of the human population, this has genuinely been the case. Most of South/East Asian and African adults are barely 1-2 generations of separation from living in poverty. Most of them are very familiar with the struggle of giving kids a good life in much worse poverty than that experienced in much of the West, and would very much rather their grandkids not go through the same thing.

Where I live ( East Asia ) most early-child bearing parents are have wealthy grand-parent who could afford to fund the whole child raising cost. The less wealthy stay working until later in life.

The even more wealthy one marry and have kids right out of college. Delegate child-caring to grand-parent, and only then start working for their career.

You're missing the fact that class mobility has changed wildly over time. Delaying having kids is class mobility play, trying to give your a leg up socioeconomically based on your own heightened socioeconomic status. This was a VERY effective move during the 20th century, because the economy was in the biggest growth spurt in history.

In contrast, you go back 150 years, and class mobility was for the cut-throated, extremely ambitious entrepreneurs. The idea of "get a better paying job working for someone else and fundamentally change my social standing" was laughable. Go back any much further than that, and socioeconomic class was basically immutable.

The college educated also live in very expensive cities. What they make in gains of income gets subtracted by landlords.

> The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their life

I 100% believe you, but at the same time there are a lot of us out there that don't feel like we're missing anything of that sort from our lives.

On the contrary, if I was to have children, I would have to put a whole lot of faith in my biological wiring for parental love and fulfilment overcoming the stresses, worries, and relationship strains any parent will tell you is the norm.

My own experience is that most people focus on the stresses, worries and overall negative(?) aspects. Maybe I've had it easy and I'm incredibly fortunate, which I often feel like, but after becoming a father I would tell you that all the stresses, worries and overall negative aspects are nothing, NOTHING, compared to the positives.

As I said in other comments, I'd never push anyone on such a personal topic, but I'll never forget how, right after my first was born, I simply wished parenthood on everyone.

IMO the whole idea is basically bullshit when applied to everyone as a blanket statement.

I know I would not be a good parent. I know I would resent the kid. It is bizarre to me too when someone who is married says this. Marriage isn't happening either for me so I 100% would be paying child support to a woman I absolutely resent too.

On the contrary, I think people who have children can not imagine the freedom that you have with never having children after 40. Children cost a fortune in currency and opportunity cost. I don't have to help with home work, pay for someone's college, pretend to have fun at some boring kids baseball game. Most of all though I have to live my dreams myself because there is no kid to live them through instead.

There is simply no way I would have lived the life I have if I had children. The valuation between the two situations isn't even close in my mind. I suspect there is a huge amount of coping and denial on the part of parents because once the kid is on its way, what else are you going to do?

This sentiment that it's nearly impossible to convey the meaning it provides is always irritating to hear. It's an extremely condescending idea to have, when the meaning it gives people is pretty obvious to see in siblings and friends/coworkers who do have children. But that's just more reason to want to wait until you feel ready to take on the job.

I've seen how my sibling changed upon starting a family, I've seen how my PhD advisor proudly talks about every little thing his kids do.

The value it gives them is obvious, but that's just more reason not to irresponsibly pop put a baby when I barely make enough to support myself, when I don't know if I'll stay in the country I'm in, when I've had very little time being mature enough to know if my partner is someone with whom I can expect to provide a good environment for at least 18 years.

And yet it's perfectly true. Sorry you feel condescended to. People who say this are relating their own experience of being parents and how they couldn't anticipate how much it would change them.

It can be true that parents can feel that way, yet it is also true that not all parents feel that way, especially among younger parents, else abusive or neglectful parents would not be a thing.

Having a child may be meaningful to a parent, but it is not at all true that applies to all childless people. Continuing to insist on that anyway is just showing sheer disregard for the well-being of a child born to parents who turn out to not actually be all that concerned about parenthood.

Of course you can raise kids just fine without being wealthy.

But… you can give them an even better quality of life if you have wealth.

Yes I’m aware that spoiled rich brats are a thing.

> how meaningful parenthood will be to their life.

Parenthood is very obviously not meaningful to every parent's life. There are plenty of people that just don't make good parents (and who may never make good parents). Saying "you should have kids because of how meaningful it will be!" is a bad thing to say to a narcissist or someone that's overly self involved. Kids need time, attention, and love. Not everyone can or wants to give that. Yes it's sad, yes it's wrong, but it's also a fact.

I have family members in this boat, the kids greatly suffer as a result.

Social norms and defaults have a tendency to shame people into bad positions. Sure, some may benefit, but others will flounder and take their kids/family down with them.

And yet...

> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/

I'm sure it is meaningful, but not everyone is willing or able to take on the stress of raising children. Seemingly less and less are as fertility declines across developed (and even developing) world. And you can say they don't need much, but without rigorous education, their future looks pretty grim to me. Won't you encourage your kids to attend the best college they can?

IMHO opinion you have to take happiness surveys like this with a grain of salt. For one thing, there is no such thing as a happiness ruler, this is all based on survey responses and subjective ideas of what it means to be happy. The effect sizes are small and inconsistent. The same surveys frequently show industrial countries significantly less happy than developing countries, and yet few people would choose to live like a Guatemalan instead of a Canadian.

And despite what they may say to surveys like this, it's pretty difficult to find parents who are willing to admit they wish they hadn't had kids. Most consider their family the most important aspect of their lives.

More importantly, "happiness" is a poor metric to optimize one's life around, and hardly anyone does. Most people search for purpose and meaning, which children supply in spades.

I used to take these with a grain of salt indeed, but this is a meta study that finds effects that seem consistent.

I think that happiness probably includes meaning for a lot of people and furthermore it’s a hard sell telling them that they shouldn’t want to be happy.

I’d also turn around the statement about parents who wish they hadn’t had kids (though I did at one point accidentally date a woman who was married with children who clearly didn’t want any of that) to say that I also suspect that those who avoided having children on purpose also rarely regret that decision; some people are just different ultimately I suppose.

I guess the litmus test is would you make the same argument if the results of the study had been the opposite? If they had said industrial life and being a parent increased happiness would you be just as skeptical?

I doubt you would say woah woah there people are sleeping on Guatemala, does being childfree get the same treatment?

> don't need the material wealth college educated people tend to assume they will to have a good childhood

But you do need material wealth to launch them smoothly (a.k.a. minimize their college debt, so they aren't as financially disincentivized to make you grandchildren). A different metric from happy childhood or not.

>The problem is that it's nearly impossible to convey to a childless person how meaningful parenthood will be to their life.

Why does that even need to be conveyed? Whether you have kids or not is none of my business, and vice versa. If anything, the more I hear some variant of "maek keedz und haev famili" like some broken record the more I find the notion preposterous.

Just leave everyone to their devices. Those who want or are interested in kids will have them and those who don't won't, regardless what anyone feels obliged to tell them.

As for me personally? I consider the notion of romantic love a mental illness. I find the concept of marriage to be fundamental violations of an individual's human rights. I find the proposal of continuing my bloodline, and more broadly the human race, without value. I am happy to be single and without issue until my dying breath and I certainly couldn't care less what others do in their bedroom, so kindly take your high horse and please leave for greener pastures.

I had kids older so I’m biased but imagining my kids grow up and move away how often am I going to see them and talk to them? Or rather how often are they going to want to see or talk to me. Hopefully a lot but so I have kids when I’m 18 for a type of life that may or may not exist. If I could do it again we would have had kids maybe 8 years earlier but that still doesn’t make a huge difference. There’s such a strong sentiment in this thread that people who wait are selfish or fools or the only benefits are financial but I feel like there’s a disdain from people who had kids early .

My wife was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, we were able to travel the world and do things she wouldn’t be able to do had we had kids right away and tried to do when we were 40. Is that worth having 15 years less with our kids? I guess time will tell but I know either way we enjoy them every day as a home maker and work from home dad they get to enjoy us as young kids and we take them on all kinds of adventures since I work in the late afternoon evening.

> imagining my kids grow up and move away how often am I going to see them and talk to them?

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html

> It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.

> you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children

It's obviously both?

Yeah, if you value your life before children at 0 it’s true but if you don’t then it’s valuable time many choose to enjoy, in the only period of their lives without huge responsibilities they’ll get while they’re young.

I agree sentimentally that people tend to overly avoid commitment and don’t really think about these things, but for me I don’t think it was an unfair trade.

This is a great way of putting it, and I think about this a lot.

My wife's ancestors had kids at younger ages, and my ancestors had kids at later ages. Her grandparents are all still alive, mine have all been gone for more than ten years.

My spouse and I are on track to have kids in our mid/late 30s. My wife's parents are both in their mid 50s, and realistically they'll probably have 20 years of overlap with our children.

My parents, though, are in their mid 70s. I have to hope they have at least another 10 years of good health so that they can forge a bond with our children. Even with good health, though, the way a 75-year old interacts with a young kid is going to be very different from the way a 55-year old does.

I made the same choice as my parents and will likely face the same future, where I may have little or no overlap with my grandchildren. Since my generation has delayed childbearing for so long, I think this is something we'll see largely as a mistake in about 20-30 years.

Yes, I'm in a similar boat. We had our first kid in our early 30s, basically the same age my parents had me. My parents probably aren't going to be around much longer. We chose to live close to them so they see our kids a lot, but we are very aware of how little time they probably have left with them, and it's sad.

If you think you want kids in your mid/late 30's, you might want to have your genetic material frozen as soon as possible. Insurance often covers it.

Reading this reminded me of the feeling I had when I first understood what it means for spacetime to be four-dimensional and how an object that appears stationary is actually moving at the speed of light, but in the direction of time.

So, in reality, nothing’s ever just sitting still, everything’s always moving at speed c. You can't just "stop". We just have to choose how we’re moving that speed around—through the x, y, z, or t direction.

If you ever sit down and really think about it, it is absolutely wild how profoundly the invention of the birth control pill has changed the course of human history, our cultures, and human society.

It's gotta be up there with, like, writing and fire, in terms of shaping the destiny of our species.

Farming machines changed it more so than birth control. Also farming practices like using fertilizer.

The Green Revolution is top five, definitely.

But farming is an incredibly long series of incremental improvements since prehistoric times: agriculture, selective breeding, crop rotation, etc.

The pill was like a technological and societal step function.

Why that and not other contraceptives?

Because it is used. Others are easy to forget or use wrong. Many are enough worse from a pleasure standpoint that I rather obstain then use them. (of course I'm married so I have an easy outlet without worrying about stds)

The pill is also easy to misuse, I think it just has a higher tolerance for misuse in terms of continued effectiveness, but it does change if you're inconsistent

1. Scale of adoption.

2. Consistent effectiveness.

3. Able to be unilaterally adopted by women without consent of men (aside from systemic legal prohibition).

The pill, to a greater degree than any other contraceptive, enables the people who are most responsible for the consequences of pregnancy to have the most control over pregnancy.

I sometimes wonder what society would look like today without it. It would be vastly different.

Can’t imagine that much less unwanted children is anything but net positive though..

Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chances of parents living beyond 47.

Exactly. While life expectancy from adulthood (say 20 yo) has increased (i.e. UK males have gone from expected average 60y to 80y between 1841 to 2011 [1]), it hasn't increased nearly as much as the life expectancy from birth (i.e. 33% vs 98% increase over that period).

[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

The increase for a 40 year old is still nearly 14 years of extra life, though. That's a big difference.

This is such a rookie mistake to make (by the author). Can’t believe that people who write about this topic still don’t know this in this day and age.

I thought this as well, but I did a little research before responding, and it looks like even though this is broadly true, people still weren't living particularly long before the modern era. For example, in Ancient Greece, a man who lived to 15 would expect to live to 37-41 years, in Rome if a man made it to 20 they could expect to live to 60, in the late medieval if you made it to 25 you could expect to live to ~48 [0]. You still need to make it to 60 to be a great grandparent, assuming you and your kids are having kids at ~15 years of age (edit: and that might be a friendly assumption given how high infant mortality was).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

There's some uncertainty about this, and while not properly controlled for obvious reasons, a study of lives of men of renown in 5th and 4th century Greece found a median life expectancy of around 70: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

Pretty sure the probability of making it to adulthood has never been below 50% excluding war, plague, or famine (which were common, so hard to normalize)

Wikipedia seems to suggest you might be wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over...

For example, for Ancient Rome it says “ while the ~50% reaching age 10 could expect another 40 years of life”.

Hmm I’m surprised.

But if 50% reaches an average age of, say 2, assuming it’s right skewed for those who died before 10; then an average life expectancy of 50 for the remainder means the average life expectancy overall just 26. That squares with the numbers stated I suppose.

Not only. Check the mortality rates. They've gone down for the higher ages. People really live longer past childhood.

I think it was not just infants but young kids as well but yeah.

"Infant mortality" refers to the mortality rate for those under 10 years of age.

When I was about 16 years old it became my life dream to get married young and to have kids young. My inspiring thought was that I could be a young grandparent and that my kids would be able to know their parents for a long time as well as their grandparents and great grandparents. I did get married at 19 and had my first son at 20. 3 years later I had my daughter. 5 months into my daughters life, the kids mother left us and I was stranded alone as a single father of 2 at age 23. That was 4 years ago and it was the most difficult time of my life. I moved back in with my parents and my then recently "empty cage" mother had to become a "mum" again while I slowly got back on my feet. I've been remarried for about a year now and everything is going very well. My daughter is about to turn 4 and my son turns 7 this year. I love thinking about how when I'm 30 my son will be 10 and when I'm 40 he'll be 20 etc.

Before the divorce, I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea... but I am a lot more open minded and less critical. Life is so unique and never goes according to plan. I wouldn't recommend my exact life to anyone as it has its own unique and undesirable difficulties. When my own children grow up, I will strongly recommend against rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in place.

My kids know and love their grandparents. They know their great grandparents. I am prepared physically and mentally for 2 more kids (yes I know, but I think I know better than I did at 19), but I cannot imagine doing the whole baby thing in my mid 30s or early 40s... I think my current age is a good time to just get it all out of the way. I like to think of it as delayed gratification and that having adult children at a relatively young age is a huge blessing. Let's see how it goes.

Thanks for sharing. On a tangent...

> I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea... ... Life is so unique and never goes according to plan ... rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in place

Among other reasons, social media can suddenly change a person in very unexpected ways at an unexpected pace.

Ppl are more connected to the infinite-scroll than ever before, more than to other ppl around them. It is no longer even our friends we watch and envy - its all "influencer" content.

The framing of this essay bothers me, because it suggests that losing great-grandmothers is a bad thing.

But why can't we focus on the enormous positive effect of girls having the option to fully mature into women before bearing their children?

Maybe instead of focusing what we lose with the absence of great-grandmothers, we should focus on what we gain with the decline of girl-mothers.

There’s a huge and well thought out consensus teenage parenthood is bad.

It’s talked about a lot. Not as much as it used to be, but that’s because it’s become common sense. People don’t talk about common sense consensus positions.

But good things can have bad side effects, and people can be so happy about the good thing, they don’t see the bad thing.

Talk about the advantages of delayed child bearing all you want, but it won’t be a particularly original conversation.

I don't really care if the conversation is original, if it means we live in a world where girls are granted the opportunity to grow in knowledge and experience before sacrificing their bodies and lives to childbearing and childrearing.

And posting articles like this doesn’t take away from that in any way.

We need more good examples of what “old parents” look like in modern society. Having a first child in your 40s is often painted as a pessimistic, undesirable situation to be in, where you will “lack energy” and patience to take care of a small child.

But why? If we’re serious about extending lifespans the average age of parents should be going up. People should be using their younger years to establish themselves in society and build a sustainable lifestyle. By the time you are 40, the costs and demands of a small child should be effortless, easily solved with the riches you’ve accumulated. By the time you hit 60s, your child is graduating college and getting on with life. If you’re lucky maybe you live to 90 and even see them reach well into middle age. This doesn’t sound like a bad timeline.

This sounds horrifying to me. If everyone has their first child at 40, then grandparents are always 80+ years old, leaving little (if any) overlap in time and rarely good overlap as those usually aren't high quality of life years. I think many people find the grandparent relationship very important, and diminishing it so strongly seems pretty harmful.

Extending lifespan misses the point and is reasoned from the individual, and not the child. Lifespan extension adds to your maximum age but maximum age isn't the most pressing issue to begin with.

When you're born and you have parents that are 20 versus 40, that is a dramatically different situation. Likewise if you have grandparents that are 50-60 versus 70 or already dead. Sure, more lifespan means you'll have more years together but you're completely dismissing the quality of those years.

I feel the same way about relationships. Some people willingly only seriously settle in their mid 30s or even later. That means you did not share the other person's most energetic, adventurous, and exciting life phase. You're 40 and have zero shared history together, no stories, nothing. But hey, you're finally "comfortable".

Fuck comfortable. The clock is ticking, hurry the hell up. You're wasting the defining and most valuable years of your life.

My motto is "live slow, die whenever."

It's a very parochial article I think. Sure, there are some numbers for the trends and such, but I suspect that people will continue to have kids both when they are younger and when they are older to some extent. Which is more likely for you is probably heavily influenced by your socioeconomic status. This is just going to vary significantly from person to person. Examples from my own family:

A great grandmother to my children died last year. Her oldest great grandchild at the time was 13. She missed meeting the youngest by a couple of months.

This same oldest great grandchild also has a living great grandmother still, and one that died in 2003 and one that died in 2005. So even within the same family, and even for the same person, the experience of having a great grandmother can be quite different.

The article got one thing wrong. Life expectancy of 45 doesn't mean that people drop dead at that age. High infant mortality is one main reason for low life expectancy. That's why you have many people of old age even in the middle ages when life expectancy was abysmal. So I am not convinced that great-grand parents is such a recent thing.

Research confirms a narrowing of families with fewer children and fewer cousins, but it also notes it's more likely for people to know their ancestors:

In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shrinking-family-...

Another thing to keep in mind: there is a lot of variability depending on the community and social standards. People in Utah will have a different experience than folks in the Bay Area. In rural northern New York and Ohio, the Amish population has exploded with couples marrying in their early 20s and families typically having at least 5 or 6 kids, sometimes more than 10.

My spouse had our kids in her late 30s, but they have no first cousins on either of the side of the family (of the 6 people in our generation, we're the only two who had kids). Of all of our kids' dozens of friends growing up, only one had more than two siblings and they were an immigrant family.

OTOH, my wife works with people who had kids in their late teens and early 20s and are grandparents by the age of 40, and that's typical in the community.

Standard comment about how one shouldn't use raw life expectancy in this kind of argument. Here you should use the life expectancy of people with at least one child. It's irrelevant to the argument how many people die before having children or at what age they die.

In my case, my grandfather did become a great grandfather, even though he, my parents and my sister all had children pretty late. He just lived a very long time.

It's interesting to compare this some research which says that children of older fathers and grandfathers live longer. If I understand this article correctly, it's saying that if the paternal grandfather was also older when becoming a father, that's even better.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-18392873

Huh, anecdotal as heck, but my great-great grandfather (the only one I know about) had the line that led to me in his 50's after his first wife succumbed to Spanish Flu. I buried his youngest daughter at the foot of his grave 154 years after he was born; she lived to be 94 and so did my grandfather.

Thinking about it even more, the women on that side of my family also had no problem having kids into their 40's.

In Christmas 2021, as COVID was winding down, we rented a house on the Oregon coast to see my wife’s family. My wife’s grandmother surreptitiously messaged me on Facebook to pick her up from her house so she could see our youngest, her newest great grand. Much to the consternation of my COVID-wary father in law. In her view, the point of living the 87 was to count up the great grandchildren (10 total). She died the next year (not of COVID).

If my kids have kids the same time I did, as do those kids, then within the expected Asian male lifespan I should see at least one and hopefully two great grands.

I wish I lived in a society where I could have a kid at 25 rather than 35 without messing up my life. I feel like we ignore how nice it must be to have another 10 years with your parents in your life.

Why can't you have a kid at 25 without messing up your life? Some people do.

That deadline has passed, but I was living in a one bedroom flat making no money at all at 25, as were most of my friends.

Apologies, I probably misunderstood your comment and I'm sorry if you missed out on something you hoped for.

I agree, today's society in many places can make it very hard for young people to start a family.

i think an interesting orthogonal trend is how changes in family size affect grandparent relationships.

my grandparents were in the generation that had lots of kids, which leads to lots of grandkids. that meant that family gatherings were huge crowds where they served as a figureheads and i didn't really develop a one-on-one relationship with them.

but when i look just one generation removed, i see smaller family sizes so grandparents have far fewer grandkids. and they're developing actual relationships with their grandchildren in a completely different way.

Although life expectancy was a lot lower in the past than today that was mostly due to infant mortality. It's true that a lot of women died during childbirth, which meant that the life expectancy of women was less than that of men (I think), but I would guess that a woman who survived giving birth to at least one child who survived probably had a "reasonable" chance of surviving to 60 or 70. So I don't think great-grandmothers would have been that unusual in the past.

> It’s slightly paradoxical — in the past, I’ve thought about how since life expectancy is increasing, there probably will be more great-grandmothers. But on the other hand, people are having children much later too.

Apparently two or more independent variables create a paradox.

Just a little point that the life expectancy given there is "at birth" and unless I'm mistaken, it's the mean. Which means infant mortality contributes enormously to this figure. It's a misconception that in the past you would only rarely see someone much older than 50. I'm not sure how this would affect the analysis. But it's worth bearing in mind. I'm sure there were plenty of great grandparents before 1900. That usage of great seems to stem from the 1500s. https://www.etymonline.com/word/great-grandfather#etymonline...

Not necessarily false, but the author jump a bit quickly to the conclusion with the data it takes for granted. It’s well known that life expectancy was far lower before due to high rate of child mortality. This means that the main cause of the life expectancy is more people reached adulthood.

All the more, great-grandmothers always had far less chance to die early by being turned into a cannon fodder or driven to suicide through toxic masculinity social pressure (though it’s not like having more chance to be raped by invaders or beaten/abused/repudiated by your own relatives was much more fun). Still to this days, on the average women have generally a higher life expectancy in most countries.

My wife is only a few years younger than I am, but she still has all of her grandparents. They are around age 80.

I didn't have my first child until I was almost 40, and my grandmother on my father's side died the week we were going to tell everyone that we were having a kid. My other three grandparents all died in the 1990's.

Also, many of my cousins had kids before they were 20, some of them became grandparents before I even became a parent. And likewise, I ended up with aunts/uncles that became great-grandparents before my dad became a grandparent.

Some of my high school friends (a married couple, for the obvious reason) were grandparents before I had my first child. The great grandmother in this story was 50. Getting knocked up at 17 runs in families. I just checked the CDC stats and Oklahoma still has the 2nd-lowest age of mother at first birth for non-Hispanic whites, which is because that state has way too many churches and nowhere near enough sex education in schools.

My last-living great-grandparent died when I was about a month old. I hope he got to meet me, though of course I wouldn't remember. The odd thing is that my parents (to my recollection) never spoke of him.

My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's parents died when I was around 10 years old. With the exception of my great-grandfather, my other great-grandparents died in the 1940s and '50s. They barely got to know their own grandchildren before they passed.

My parents were unusual for their generation in that they waited until their mid 30s to start having kids (despite having been married for 9 years already). On my dad's side, he was the final child of my grandmother's third marriage; she was 42 when my dad was born (again, unusual for the time).

No real point to this post, I guess. I just think it's interesting that people's experiences can differ so much. I only knew half of my grandparents, and even then only as a child; the idea of people being able to meet their great-grandparents wasn't even something I ever considered when I was younger. I don't recall for sure, but I don't think many if any of my grade-school friends had great-grandparents around either. I've always had a very small extended family, and hearing stories from friends as a kid about family gatherings always made me feel like I was missing out.

Most people don't know _the names_ of all 8 grandparents, but those people are the root culture of the family you grew up in.

One kid is good enough so I don't regret getting one at 38. Letting grand parents help with child caring also carries a lot of downsides, especially if they live in.

"a lot of downsides"

Can you give a few examples? I only see upsides.

For a start, they have their own ideas of raising kids. This is already an everyday headache.

I read a statistic years ago that said that taking care of grandkids had a u-shaped mortality response. If you took care of them 2 days a weeks, it was optimal for mortality. More than that and you died younger. Less than that and you died younger.

Yes, correlation is not causation, but that correlation is interesting.

My siblings and I did unusually well at school (relative to cousins and peers) - and it’s possible this was due to having an “older” father.

There’s a 2017 study that older parents produce kids with a higher Geek Index —

https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2017125

Seems “truthy” to me.

I see a lot of comments here focused on their individual experiences and opinions, which is fine. But on those comments I see a lot of people saying they won't have kids. Which individually is their choice, but collectively, combined with people who do have kids have them older which can lead to fertility issues when they want to have them, combined with the increase in the number of people who is LGBTQ+ which again it's their choice and nothing wrong with that individually, but as a species we can see how these factors combined, and other factors, are the cause of drop in number of children born in all countries. I recently read that in Japan there are more adult diapers sold than baby diapers because of drop in births and increase of aging population. This seems to be driving us to extinction as a species, just food for thought.

> are the cause of drop in number of children born in all countries.

Yes.

> This seems to be driving us to extinction as a species

No.

There are more people alive now than there ever has been. Ever.

This will continue until at least 2100 when numbers may finally peak and then fall.

When human populations numbers fall there is no sane reason to think that they will plummet to zero.

It is far more likely numbers will decrease to the mid 10 billions and more or less stabilise.

> This will continue until at least 2100 when numbers may finally peak and then fall.

That's due to the higher fertility rate of countries like Niger, Angola etc which far outpace the declining rates of most of the rest of the world like China, Russia, Europe, Japan, South Corea, USA, etc.

After reading the comments I understand this MUST mean people in Niger, Angola, etc. are more financially ready to have kids than people in Europe, Japan, USA, South Corea, etc.

>the increase in the number of people who is LGBTQ+ which again it's their choice

Choice?

I have an example that helps underscore the lesson here.

I was adopted by older parents, in their mid-40s when I was adopted around 2 years old. They were the "youngsters" in their families, so it meant I was exceedingly young compared to my cousins and other relatives.

Fast forward a few decades and my adoptive parents are deceased, and we have lost touch with the few relatives I have. My wife is in a similar situation.

We adopted two older children, 7 and 3 at the time, when I was in my mid 40's. It has been great for us and for the kids, a challenge and an adventure, but the biggest miss is lack of family. We have no grand parents to fall back on, let alone great grand parents. It is incredibly difficult to raise kids without an extended family to help out. We manage, but boy do I envy those who have bigger families to lean into. Not to mention the network of cousins, etc that the kids can relate to.

With the economy as it is, grandparents tend to work longer and both work, so the early retirement and single-wage of yesteryear are largely gone. This trend seems to be increasing. The value of intergenerational bonds and knowledge transfer will be lost as a result.

My great-grandfather was widowed and remarried in late 1940ies to a woman who was his university-age daughter's friend (that daughter was my grandmother). Yeah, he was considerably older (late 40ies/early 50ies?) than her (like 23?). That lady is my great-grandmother (sure, she's not blood related to me but they had children and they are all my various uncles/aunts and cousins). When I brought in my children to see the family, they got to meet their both of their great-grandmothers, great-grandfather, and on top of that their great-great-grandmother. Now THAT's rare.

Our children had several years with their great-grandmother. We treasured that time for them and even arranged for her (my wife's grandmother) to live with us for a few days a week after she could no longer stay in her home alone. We were able to keep this arrangement for a few years. Our children aren't adults yet, so we don't know if our children will have children young enough that our parents could meet their great-grandchildren, but we're glad we didn't prevent the possibiliy by starting our family late.

The author says that shorter life expectancies in the past means that there weren't many great-grandparents back in the day.

I don't think that's the case: the shorter average life expectancy is due to infant and youth mortality. As long as you didn't die from what would nowadays be a preventable disease, people still got old: that's where the term "three score years and ten" comes from.

So I think there were probably many 70yo great grandparents.

Apple will soon include A.I. in iPhones that will in essence provide an eternal simulation of each of us. Progeny will be able to interact with us in our own voices and likely in 3D. When openAI and its humanoid robots align, your AI clone will be uploaded to the unit. Unfortunately “you” won’t be able to enjoy or reciprocate “their” enjoyment. Similar to if you recorded a video to your family today and they watched it after you passed away.

My kids got to meet four of their great grandparents, although they were still very young when they did pass away - I have pictures of them with their great-grandparents, but they don't have any memories of them. Mine were all long gone before I was born... I don't know that anything is being "lost" in the sense that it was something we used to have. Meeting one's great grandparents was very rare in generations past and continues to be.

We just said goodbye to my kid's great grandmother. They knew her very well and treated her like a their regular grandma. When my eldest son was just under 1 year old he met his great-great grandmother (who died shortly after meeting him at 105). I think me and my wife's parents will live to see their great grand children. It's not too far fetched to imagine.

Great-grandparents? The window for grandparents might be closing! If you have your kids at 35, and your kids have their kids 35, you are 75 by the time the grandchild turns 5. The amount of quality time you might have to spend with your grandchild could be approximately zero (depends of course on your health).

At this rate even grandparents...

Most of my (37) friends in Italy does not have children. Some of us are late children so the parents are between 70 and 80.

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties.

That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

What you wrote sounds superficially plausible, but you're overcorrecting.

It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir....

The US is not the most extreme country in this regard either.

So yes, there will probably be fewer great-grandmothers in the future, though of course there still will be some.

2016 looks almost binomial. We also need to take into account population size (significantly more in 2016 compared to 1980). It could be that there are just as many young women having children - but there are now more mothers >30. So maybe there won't be less great grandmothers, just a lesser percent of the population.

Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters.

I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible?

My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?

Well, it's about averages really. If scientists were having eight kid families and creationists having one kid families the same logic would apply. Most people have value systems reasonably close to their parents'.

You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?

You don’t need to wait the answer to take into account that they most likely aren’t farmer for most of them. Though of course it doesn’t mean they all topped the social pyramid as it is by definition structurally unclimbable for most with its power distribution.

"More like" not "exactly like". I'm not expecting them to all be farmers. But say, having similar-ish religious views, similar-ish social views, etc.

And how should we measure that?

There are literally hundreds of ways to slice population statistics other than just primary occupation. Practically any of those, maybe!

Do you find your primary occupation entirely defines every aspect of yourself?

"yourself" is mostly nonsense illusion throw at current present attention. ;)

The thing with statistics, is that you have to gather data which have some consistency before you apply any statistics tool and try to draw some conclusions.

We can agree that any individual is more than the indefinitely various number of categories under which we can label this individual, but at the end of the day there only a limited amount of data we actually really have on any person that ever existed, and even less consistent set of data other many people under any category we can think of.

Less than 10%. The outliers are the ones who have stayed similar to our great-grandparents, not the ones who are different.

Of course your great grandfather worked on a farm, a majority of people before mechanization worked on or around farm related tasks. Now, when it came to the 10 generations before your grandfather, it's pretty damned likely they worked on a farm.

The industrial revolution shook things up.

Well it's good that the world has stopped changing and we can rest assured on our assumptions about how children will obviously follow their parents in most things.

>Well it's good that the world has stopped changing

I'm not sure you're paying much attention to politics, but there are massive movements that want exactly that, if not to drag us back to the past kicking and screaming.

I think the premise of we are like our parents is actually incorrect.... Our parents are like our culture would be the more correct assessment. In conservative more hierarchy based cultures you're much more likely to be like your parents, because if you are not you'll be shunned or worse.

Western culture in general has more of a "make your own path" ideology that increases the chances you'll be different from your parents.

Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense.

Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?

Because of ecological overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.

Some see people as burdens, some as assets.

I think this is a very important world view conflict.

The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel they consume.

For most of those things, people produce as much as they consume. So more people doesn't make things worse.

Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out.

Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.

Land for housing isn't the concern, land for livestock the person eats is.

Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More humans is absolutely a net-good.

I generally agree, but a key issue here is fairness. Telling someone in India they can't have three kids because Johnny techbro wants to feel ok about flying 100,000 miles a year isn't great.

A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet is so far below replacement-level fertility that human extinction is now closer than the ice caps being completely 100% melted.

This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing.

Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.

Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal."

Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity.

For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.

Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem.

The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.

While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.

Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.

In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.

I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?

>I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population

The problem is collective action. It's ALWAYS collective action. As long as people keep lapping up petrochemical lobby propaganda, it doesn't matter that we could pretty easily solve our climate crisis, nobody is going to DO it.

> 2100

Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong ones.

Just a sidenote, I know.

question for you: how many species have already gone extinct without us really noticing because the impact on humanity was too small to measure? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000?

It is unknowable by definition, how many undocumented species have gone extinct.

All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to say.

Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds are overfished.

(1) these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill

I posted links because I've had this conversation many times over. The short version is: yeah, I used to be a techno-utopian too, 20 years ago. But none of those magic technologies are realistic, we aren't on the path to them being widely deployed, the population and emissions and resource consumption are all worse, as summarized in the conclusions of the experts who put together the Earth Overshoot Day report. If you want to argue about it, take it up with them.

> the invention of fertilizer

Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.

While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....

It's estimated that green ammonia costs between $800 and $1500 per ton today to produce [1]. While this is higher than conventional ammonia, it is less than how much ammonia cost in the 2022 energy crisis [2] and likely to decrease further in the future.

Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing microbes are an emerging technology [4].

I am not convinced that we're all going to die.

[1] https://itif.org/publications/2023/04/17/climate-tech-to-wat... [2] https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/09/fertilizer-prices-... [3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/07/nutrient-challeng... [4] pivotbio.com

Anybody who argues that "we're all going to die" is, from where I sit, clearly delusional.

So that's not really a problem worth refuting.

On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying, 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive migration causing chaos in our current understanding of "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment and destruction of many of the world's great cities ... these are actual likely problems. The human race will still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?

Hundreds of millions of people die from war, and avoiding war is a lot easier than what the (well-meaning) climate change evangelists/zealots want us to do. You don't need to destroy the entire modern economy and western civilization to avoid war.

Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to be underwater within their lifetime, if true?

Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of their own country above those of non-citizens.

Your blithe dismissal of migration seems likely to me to put severely to the test.

According to the US Republican Party, the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.

What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone" ?

Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.

>According to the US Republican Party

You're losing credibility quickly

>the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.

Okay, A. What's happening at the southern border isn't any more of an "invasion" than the J6 riots. If only 1/500 people in your "invasion" even has a firearm, let alone training with it, it ain't much of an invasion.

B. What's happening at the southern border has absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change, it's strictly economic.

>What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone"?

What if there were some kind of relatively safe, yet impassable barrier? The kind that doesn't exercise force against anyone, ever. One that's so safe that the only people who get injured by it are those stupid enough to delibarately decide to try to scale it, while being incompetent enough to be incapable of doing so safely. Perhaps one that was tall enough that it couldn't be scaled by 20 or 40 foot ladders? Besides, this is a ridiculous question. Even under the president with the highest amount of illegal immigration in US history, Joe Biden (10,000,000 and counting!), we barely hit a tenth of that figure across 3.5 years.

Sadly, there's just no way we're gonna be able to afford such a barrier. That would have to cost what, $10bn? $50bn? Except that's still less than we've spent securing the border of a country on the other side of the planet that almost no Americans have any real, significant, substantial interests in (besides Hunter Biden, of course, who made millions of dollars per year as a Ukrainian energy executive thanks to his deep expertise and demonstrated thought leadership in the hydrocarbon exploration and extraction business... /s)

>Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.

No, what I'm asserting is that the people screeching about the oceans rising and the sky falling are the same ones buying up all the properties being sold by the people who are afraid of oceans rising. It's a racket.

Well, at least I can thank you for being clear about your understanding of the world.

> This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating.

Of course it will continue to accelerate. There's a mechanism that causes this. Some conspiracy theorists mistake this for an active, purposeful goal, but it may be as simple as children growing up in environments where childlessness has become a norm, internalizing that same norm. Since there are fewer children with each successive generation, the norm is amplified for the next.

> In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.

There are some who seem to want to kill humanity. They don't come right out and say it, of course, that would sound weird and awkward. If you're oblivious to that widespread sentiment, they're perfectly ok with that. The curricula they design for your children in school will slowly be modified so that they aren't quite so fond of your Star Trek visions for the future.

How does your second paragraph ("they design") not directly fly in the face of your first ("mistake this for an active, purposeful goal")?

Because the two aren't connected. They do want to design school curricula... "to make it better". But they're neither smart enough nor quite so self-aware that it's designed to deliberately lower fertility rates. One might say they're doing it subconsciously, but that seems more like mumbo jumbo to me.

> But they're neither smart enough nor quite so self-aware that it's designed to deliberately lower fertility rates

So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the same breath.

No, you've confused my words. Happens in threads that stretch past a few hours.

There is a desire that humanity go extinct. But this isn't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not actively working towards it, and they don't like to say it out loud.

They do design curricula (they're in positions where that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday, instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why, and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100 answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and there is no actual conspiracy.

If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out, rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple coordination can take place, they're all innocent. There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister mastermind.

Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it. People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak. Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple negation of that idea.

Deliciously rich to claim I'm the one stirring shit up while you accuse me of desiring the end of humanity. Get some help man.

Hanlon's Razor always seemed like the perfect cover for deliberately committing malicious acts without others being able to identify the activity as deliberately malicious. You do evil shit and then you just play dumb.

How can anyone prove your intents if you fully conceal them?

That said, I do find your argument here pretty compelling. Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason, at the end of the day.

"Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to McDonald's a few times a week.

Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.

FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents.

However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.

There's nothing wrong with having 6 kids but I think more people used to because effective birth control didn't exist. People had lots of sex back then too and wife's were getting knocked up frequently and at a younger age when vastly more fertile. My mother had ~40 cousins. I have 12. My kids have 4. It's no shock that the birth control pill was invented between the time my parent were born and started a family. Throw in the 64,000,000 abortions in the USA (and the ~70 millions per year globally!) since it was legalized and this is why we don't have big families anymore.

You see, the thing is, it's deeply classist. It's also misplaced outrage. The poors have been doing this for millenia and we still have a society that progresses rapidly and much of the heavy lifting that moves us forward is done by folks you and others here are denigrating. If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved.

Using your education to feel better than others doesn't serve us to advance as a society. I suggest that if you're as smart as you think you are then you find a way to frame the issue such that you're lifting up those people and not punching down.

> If they believe the things you disparage it's because the governments and systems that the "smart" and wealthy have created have utterly failed at getting those people educated and involved.

I think the issue is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people.

There's a mid-level of people who are happy to have more than they need and don't have the Machiavellian drive to extract every last ounce of money and power.

And there's an upper-level who are fine exploiting anyone and everything.

There are of course altruistic people who are extremely wealthy. But sort of by definition, the middle-level is never going to have the drive & energy to fight that upper-level, who's willing to do anything.

I guess my point is that there are two groups of smart & wealthy people, and the ones complaining about the lower class being exploited are not the ones who are doing the exploiting. It's a classic setup where the upper class keeps the middle class happy enough to not make it worth the middle class joining the lower class in revolution. And they aim the ire of the lower class at the middle class while they exploit the lower class.

I'm pretty sure it was Mondays episode of the Daily Show that covered this pretty well in the intro. There are a lot of different groups out there, but the rich and greedy group does seem to lock up a huge amount of resources and propaganda.

yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are having too many kids!" always has this assumption that class and values are perfectly presevred across generations and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children are capable of making their own path and not just following in their footsteps.

children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views. just look at any subreddit that has youths are complaining about the backwards views of the parents/uncles/grand-parents -- i know it's not a representative sample, but children challenging their elders views is not an anomaly.

on the flipside, there's the trope of only children raised being raised by high-class, open-minded families turning into spoiled, selfish brats.

Of the big households I've personally experienced that most would consider closed-minded parents might have a few of their kids complaining about the backwards views, but not necessarily the majority of the kids. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics other than assuming the people ranting on reddit about their families are the majority of that population.

The kids who agree with their closed-minded parents probably aren't going online to rant about it.

yeah, that's why i said it wasn't a representative sample.

the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.

But then you say "children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espouse different views". So non-zero proportion becomes often...

The idiocracy thesis supposes that children will mirror their parents behavior and beliefs. As a former teenager and a parent that is very much not the likeliest outcome. It’s also on the wider society to lift all the kids to roughly a level playing field

The poors have been doing this for millenia [...]

Why the poor? And is poor the correct label or is this just strongly correlated with the actual reason? In the past children were desirable as sources of additional income and for support at old age, is this still relevant? Otherwise it seems that you would want fewer children if you are poor because they obviously come with additional costs. Is it the cost of contraceptives or abortions instead of a deliberate choice? If it is not poverty directly but worse education because of poverty, how exactly would that work? How much education do you need to realize that additional children will cause additional costs? What other mechanisms are there? In the end it will probably be a mix of factors, but the phenomenon seems more complex than it looks like at first glance.

Is it better to be one of those 0 to 1 kids, science valuing types who fear insiders? They're not okay with a significant fraction of their peers, which does look maladaptive to me.

> I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.

“Classist” is a faux-woke term for the belief that certain socioeconomic groups are better than others. If you believe that certain socioeconomic groups are inferior compared to [probably upper-middle class people] then that is by definition classist.

What about the wealthy assholes that think climate change is fake, pay thousands of dollars to have the catalytic converter removed from their own vehicle to deliberately increase it's exhaust emissions, eat hundreds of pounds of top-grade beef per year, are flying around seemingly constantly on their private jet, but have zero children?

Are those otherwise-horrible people comparatively cleansed of their sins solely from their decision to not have kids?

Is it not classist to hold more contempt for the poor rednecks in some flyover state with the traits you describe than the conservative millionaires and billionaires hiding among us?

If you don't have children who will live in the future world, why would you deserve an opinion on how that future world should operate?

It's very anecdotal.

There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30.

Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to happen because there is a natural cap to this figure.

Longevity plays a big role. My grandmother is 96 and grandfather 94, so even with a first child at 29 they’ve still had over a decade with their great grands. I had 6 great grandparents still alive when I was growing up. My parents were young, so will probably be in their 70s for great grand kids and if they make it near 100, could see great-greats (wild!).

If that were the case, then the demographics data would not show a major shift. It would just bias of a relatively small group.

However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries.

On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago.

That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population.

This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

I don't think mean is a good measurement for this. It's probably also being skewed by new science and treatments enabling more mothers to have children in their mid 40's. I want to see distributions!

> While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties.

On average, birth rates have been shrinking virtually everywhere on this planet over the last decades.

> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.

"Don't look up" is a sort of spiritual successor. Of course, as you said, there's room for more, now that half the population is TikTok'ed.

Satire is a cathartic tool that helps us reflect on the absurdities of daily life. Critically, satire challenges us to introspect beyond the facile projection of its themes and subjects. Cynical acceptance and refusal to engage with the source material is another exercise in anti-intellectualism.

That being said, Don't Look Up wasn't good satire for me. It was funny and well made, but negligently validates emotional ignorance.

I remember that scene. But I think it’s more about neurosis bias: thinking that there will ever be a perfect time to have children. Which never comes. So it just never happens. Contrast that with having children young. Maybe you might be financially worse off in the long run. But most people seem to make it work.

So if the goal is to have children eventually? The young parents win.

In any case. Shouldn’t people be a bit embarrassed to embrace such an upper-middle class sneerfest in current year? Idiocracy? Christ.

There may be "many" people not thinking about it, but there are measurably and verifiably not plenty, which has a definition something like "more than enough". Fertility rates in western countries, including the United States, are below replacement level. There is a far more disturbing dystopia waiting for us than Idiocracy.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

- Jesus

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I once read that the significant growth of life expectancy could be attributed to lowering rate of child mortality, and that life expectancy for adults has changed less dramatically. If that’s the case, the point that overall life expectancy going from 47 to 72 affected the “grandmother window” is probably inaccurate.

US Rep. Lauren Boebert is a grandma at 37, and her mother (if alive - I don't know) will turn 56 this year.

one of my childhood friends is a grand father at 47. He'll probably make it to great-great grandfather to someone if those trends continue.

Ah just what I needed, more anxiety.

Later, fewer kids. Another more prominent trend is the death of the cousin:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...

For that matter, a small change in number of siblings makes a much larger change in the number of cousins. That is, if every family has N children, you have N-1 siblings and 2N(N-1) cousins. (Corrected thanks to comment)

My great-grandfather, whom I met a few times in the ‘50s, was born during the Civil War.

Some of my relatives had told their toddler "we're going to granny of your grand-dad".

Yep, that's 5 generations at once. That particular sub-branch has children later so they are a full generation ahead of my own branch, so I've told.

I'm 47. My grandparents were born in 1908. My father was born in 1939, and I was born when he was 38. I have no kids, but we didn't get around to trying IVF until I was over 40 (my father would have been 78)

My grandfather was born in 1904, his son (my father) was born in 1941, I was born in 1979, my son in 2020. Great-grandparents have been out of the picture for awhile on my side of the family.

Heh. I knew a guy in his late thirties that was already a grandfather (do the math). I would bet that there's a good chance he's still around (I knew him about 40 years ago).

Both of my great-grandmothers died by the time by 12 months old. A message to my children - hurry up, make my living parents great-grandparents!

I attended my great-great-grandmother's 100th birthday party when I was 8 or 9.

Came here to say something similar: I didn't realize how rare this was until this thread, but as I kid I knew not only four of my great-grandparents, but even a great-great-grandmother. She died at 96 years old, but I was old enough to hang out with her a few times, and remember her.

My great-grandfather is still alive and turned 100 last year. Since I'm already much older than any of my progenitors when they had their children, even if I live to his age it is unlikely I'll get to spend time with my own great-great-grandchildren.

Agreed ... At this point I'm hoping to meet one of my grandchildren but my kids don't seem to be in any hurry.

My kid didn't get to meet his grandmother (my mom). She had me at 30, I had him at 46, one year too late.

One of the problems with capitalism is that the highest achieving people (somewhat likely the actual "fittest" people in terms of genetic selection) don't have kids until they are much later, if at all. I don't want this to get too elitist, but this country (actually the entire first world aside from France) needs to figure out how to incentivize productive people to have kids.

I always thought what we should do with the people in retirement for longer and longer periods of time is encourage them to provide some child care, even if it isn't their own. Especially in some countries (Japan, holy shit South Korea) that really are imbalanced.

Although, tangentially, I think South Korea will solve its demographic bomb by toppling North Korea's government and immigrating a massive number of shellshocked North Koreans.

Count everyone on earth as your relative.

https://xkcd.com/2608/

Yeah, that is a pity.

There's a saying (Chinese proverb maybe) regarding a having a healthy family tree

* May you live to see seven generations *

Which I took as mean grandparents to grandkids (with one "great" on either side)

Good luck all

For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this:

> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.

I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.

> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.

Much clearer!

0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.

I no longer read anything in parentheses for this exact reason. It seems people tend to write their "live-edits" and "related thoughts" in parentheses rather than spending a moment to figure out what they want to say and writing it clearly. I've found skipping anything within parentheses tends to improve my understanding while reading.

This is my take on writing as well, I consider everything in parentheses as optional. If I want to write something in parentheses, I try to reconsider: either drop it, or write it without parentheses.

Really? You don't read anything in parentheses? I think that would be harder to do (I'm joking, don't take it seriously) than actually reading the parenthetical information.

> I think that would be harder to do than actually reading the parenthetical information.

You must be joking, right?

For a substack called "memoirs & rambles", I think writing in a style that conveys a bit of the writer's own personality is fine, even if it comes at the expense of clarity. Not everything has to be an Argument Paper.

i would have said it like this:

my grandmother became a grandma to my cousin at 45

Append to that "x years before I was born"

I would have been more distracted wondering where the link went.

I kind of enjoyed the riddle.

I'd just move the parenthetical to a separate sentence, or leave it out.

How is this unclear from what he wrote?

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Not everything has to be clear and to the point. The sentence's murkiness adds emotion to the text. I'm not a native speaker (just like the writer isn't) and maybe that's why we're not so bothered.

But this comment is exactly what I expected from HN.

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Its sad and a crisis. However I have money saved and a comfy job. Yet I am exhausted. Domapnied burned out mess adhd riddled anxiety kissless virgin

I don't know if this is the right time for you to hear this, but don't establish your identity around things that you haven't done. Or fine, do it, but once you have done them, you'll immediately realize how dumb it was to let not having done them define you.

Its more I work 8h and I am exhausted and sit on youtube for 5h until bedtime and repeat thats my life

Some people still get pregnant with 14, and the next generation makes the same "mistake", as that led to not an ideal family situation and wise parenting. (German here, so no foul play / illegal intercourse happening in most of such cases.)