8 ms·

To Breed or Not to Breed?

18 points by rmcpherson 5y ago

bagacrap 5y ago
have kids and raise them to be awesome enough to solve modern world problems
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- User23 5y ago
  To use an analogy, human beings in general and children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities. Of course they require investment, of time, money, or both, but that's true for most if not all other investments too. And the potential payout is massively asymmetrical. One could raise the child that cracks economical nuclear fusion, discovers a cure for pancreatic cancer, becomes the next Michelangelo, or who something we can't even imagine, all for an effectively fixed up front cost.
  - pydry 5y ago
    >children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities maybe we could try to not see the future of the human race through a financial prism at all.
xyzzy4747 5y ago
Only very rich and very poor people in this world can afford to have kids.
- tharne 5y ago
  When people cite money as a reason for not having children, they just usually just don't want children, but don't want to admit it. The fact is there has never been a better time in human history to raise children. People talk about climate change, but back in the 50's it wasn't any better -- we were in the midst of a nuclear standoff that could have gone apocalyptic at any second. Before that, there was a world war, and another one before that, and so on. In prior centuries anywhere from one quarter to one half of all kids born wouldn't make it to the first birthday. Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been. People are free to have children or not have children, but let's be honest about why.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > but back in the 50's there were many more poor, having lots of kids. OP didn't say that only rich people can afford to have kids, but that only rich and very poor people can. Now that people are not as poor as in prior centuries, they can afford to not have kids to survive when they get older.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    >Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been. I think the amount of two income households and longer work hours says otherwise. It's still a great time to have kids but there is a lot of time and financial pressure that we did not have in the 60s and 70s. In addition, kids commonly walked to school, went out to play without supervision, etc. I think children cost more and require more time than in the past.
psyc 5y ago
My reason for not having kids is simply the golden rule. Do unto potential others as I would have had my parents do unto me. Now, you might say that I can't know whether my potential kids would have been annoying optimists who could say that they love life, without sarcasm. To which I say, they would have my genes, and me for a father, and in my view that's enough to tip the scales.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0xbadc0de5 5y ago
Isn't it strange that the people who claim they don't want to have children for fear of economic hardship or climate change never take the time to criticize their parents for not doing the same?
- hawaiianbrah 5y ago
  Can’t change the past, why waste the energy?
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  why strange? Children are allowed to have very different ideas than their parents, one doesn't have to criticize what has been done and is irreversible, to think and act differently.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
GOPnomics have made it too expensive to have kids. Healthcare alone which is a necessity for “breeding” makes even having a wife too expensive. Not to mention the state of the climate which they won’t do anything about let alone admit. So to hell with breeding.
gibbonsrcool 5y ago
It's the economic insecurity that does it for me. Everytime I see "we're a team not a family" or the like, I realize how dispensible I am. It's not the content of the message, it's the fact you have to say it. It's a gentle nudge that, hey, remember you don't mean shit to us, ok?
- bckr 5y ago
  > we're a team not a family I actually prefer to have boundaries at work. The whole "family" thing is often a way of saying "you'd better work you ass off to serve this business"
  - gibbonsrcool 5y ago
    The way this phrase is used, as popularized by Netflix, they mean to say they don’t hesitate to fire underperformers.
mgamache 5y ago
The strong anti-natalism doesn't surprise me. There's a lot of millennials and younger on HN. I wonder how much of that is just a cover for their pessimism about being as economically successful as their parents? There are structural disadvantages facing the youth today and not having children is a way of avoiding a rigged game. There's also the guilt about raising children at a lower socioeconomic status than they had. Just a thought...
rukshn 5y ago
I personally don’t like to have kids because the thought of responsibilities that comes with having kids scares the hell out of me I already have enough responsibilities in my life, with my work etc and I don’t want to worry further by having kids Even before having kids you have to take care of your pregnant wife, after delivering you have to take care of the kids, when they are old you have to worry about their education marriage and so on It’s just too much. I don’t have any kids at the moment but the thought just makes me feel like I’m better off getting a divorce
del_operator 5y ago
I thought this was going to address the burden of finding affordable childcare, rigors of child development, family insurance, and maybe even a stark anecdote about a toddler or teenager. Then I hear a story about climate change and feel super frustrated that’s where this conversation is starting. I see the anxiety, but I just didn’t anticipate this from the title.
octokatt 5y ago
https://archive.md/cdWMS https://archive.md/cdWMS
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I've heard this kind of commentary a lot, but I still believe it's much more of a case of "people not wanting to have kids and then giving climate change as the reason" than climate change actually being the deciding factor in not having kids. I think in most cases it's more akin to virtue signaling. The modern world, especially in the US, is quite unfriendly to having kids. Both parents have lots of other opportunities that having children may conflict with, and having children can be horrendously expensive depending on your child rearing style. Given that, if you're subconsciously thinking "I don't want to have kids, it's just too hard", it comes across as "more virtuous" if, instead of giving the reason as you want to be more selfish with your time and money, that you want to protect a potential child from having to go through a future hellish environment.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I feel like this may be mostly signaling, because the logical conclusion from the argument that more people means more climate change would be to either have your existence reduce climate change (which most people don't do), or to remove yourself from the equation. Or maybe the argument is about the relative impact, and not having kids allows you to take the plane and still feel good about your actions because your total carbon impact is less than other people? I'm honestly not sure how the reasoning works.
  - jjj123 5y ago
    I don’t think we should hold people to “the logical conclusion” of all of their beliefs. We are not robots. We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief. For example, I believe it’s good to go to protests for causes I care about. However, I don’t go to even a fraction of the protests near me. Does this mean I don’t actually believe protests are a good thing?
    - Zababa 5y ago
      We can believe something, and believe that this belief influences our actions, but that doesn't mean that it's true. For example, I don't heat my appartment. I could say that it's for the planet. But the reality is that it's not for the planet, it's that I don't need to heat my appartment for it to be at a confortable temperature for me. The consequences are still good for the planet, but this is a consequence, not a reason. If you think children are a massive pain and your rationalization for that is that it's for the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. That may be also a thing people say so they won't get asked too much questions. I've heard that people can put a lot of pressure on other people to make children, the planet argument might be a good justification/counter to avoid being constantly questioned. > We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief. I think my point here is that there's a notion of "intensity" or "importence". Having children is a strong belief in many people, and to counter it, you often seem to need a strong belief of the type "climate change is very important", instead of a less strong believe in the type of "I just don't want to".
marchingtomars 5y ago
To not read NYT or to not read NYT. Nor to subscribe to their propagandistic "journalism" ... vomits
- tharne 5y ago
  It's a sad day when the NY Post has better content than the NY Times, but here we are.
tharne 5y ago
These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool. It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates. The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. That could be a bad thing or a a good thing depending on how you see yourself.
- bwestergard 5y ago
  At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? At what rate do the children of haredi Jewish parents remain haredi? What about grandchildren? I'd be curious to see some of the demography here. My intuition is that in the U.S., these subgroups are growing their share of religiously identified persons (e.g. a larger fraction of Catholics are traditionalists today than in 1970) but they are not growing as a share of the general population.
  - bckr 5y ago
    > At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? Also, at what rate do apostates produce other apostates? Living a happy life outside the mold of what you grew up with sets an example for others. Making babies is not a surefire way of producing like-minded people, nor is it the only way.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  >The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit. How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah, you'll have slightly better odds with kids, because in the beginning you have full control over their environment, until school starts.
polalavik 5y ago
A whole article about people grappling with whether to make little copies of themselves when there are tons of kids that need adopted. The whole idea of having a kid just seems like a weird selfish ego trip. I know there’s underlying primal instincts at play - years of evolution driving you to breed, but we have the brains to take a step back and say is this the best choice I can make if I’d like to love and raise a human? Could I provide a better life for an already existing human? Or am I just on some ego trip to make a little replica of myself.
- piyh 5y ago
  I find that argument flawed since it's the ultimate form of "think of the children". It implies successful parenting is a zero sum game, and that by having a child you're taking love away from another.
- Auracle 5y ago
  I wanted a baby like my wife, and my wife wanted a baby like me. We both like each other so that makes sense. We ended up needing to do IVF. If that hadn’t panned out I don’t think we would have adopted, though I’ve always thought fostering would be rewarding.
- User23 5y ago
  I can assure you that you will not make a little replica of yourself. It will be a new and different person that inherits some of your traits, but by no means all of them. That you're thinking of a child in that way suggests that you are right to not have one, at least until your thinking on the subject matures. I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the modern world. The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype. That's just a scientific fact and no argument will change it.
  - bckr 5y ago
    > The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype "dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.
bitwize 5y ago
The major problems the human race is facing all have a single solution: fewer humans. It's like fasting for individual health: simple, and solves so much. So maybe this is just nature running its course.
throwaway292961 5y ago
Personal anecdote: My wife and I got married assuming that we would eventually want kids. We were pretty young, and that's what people do, right? We kept checking in with each other and kept not wanting to have kids. 5 years into our marriage, we were certain enough that I chose to have a vasectomy. We were so certain that my biggest fear was NOT that we'd change our minds later, but that my vasectomy would be one of the 0.1% that failed. Our reasons were mostly personal, and it ultimately wasn't a responsibility we felt equipped to take on. There's some personal traumas that we experienced as kids and didn't want to pass along. There were some "selfish" reasons and things that we gave a higher priority in life than raising children. We had enough executive dysfunction between the two of us that we didn't think we'd be able to give kids enough attention while also juggling our other priorities. There is also nothing so special about our genes that compelled us to procreate--we could have adopted if parenthood called to us later in life. The usual reason we give is "we can barely take care of our pets, we're not bringing kids into this." That's the most concise way I can put it without opening up an argument. A couple of years after the vasectomy, my wife ended up getting diagnosed with multiple chronic (but not terminal) illnesses, so that became a contributing factor after we had already made our decision. Economic concerns have also always been a factor--not something that I viewed as completely unsolvable, but it obviously requires a huge sacrifice to raise kids today. Climate change and overpopulation eventually became extra reasons to be thankful that we're not bringing kids into this mess, but if we ever felt a strong drive to have kids in the first place, I don't think that alone would be enough to deter us. The article frames the whole discussion around climate change and current events, and I suppose my personal outlook for humanity has become darker over the years, but the decision to have (or not to have) kids is largely driven by personal circumstances. Some of our closest friends are fabulous loving parents, and the world needs more parents like them. Some of us, IMO, made the right choice by opting out. People love to make value judgements about this decision, as if there should be a default choice, but one thing we don't need more of is parents who don't want to be parents.
- nkurz 5y ago
  Great comment! I'm wondering, why did you choose to post this under a throwaway? Do you fear repercussion, prefer to keep personal separate from business, or just not have an account?

18 points by rmcpherson 5y ago

bagacrap 5y ago

have kids and raise them to be awesome enough to solve modern world problems

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
User23 5y ago
To use an analogy, human beings in general and children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities. Of course they require investment, of time, money, or both, but that's true for most if not all other investments too. And the potential payout is massively asymmetrical. One could raise the child that cracks economical nuclear fusion, discovers a cure for pancreatic cancer, becomes the next Michelangelo, or who something we can't even imagine, all for an effectively fixed up front cost.
- pydry 5y ago
  >children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities maybe we could try to not see the future of the human race through a financial prism at all.

xyzzy4747 5y ago

Only very rich and very poor people in this world can afford to have kids.

tharne 5y ago
When people cite money as a reason for not having children, they just usually just don't want children, but don't want to admit it. The fact is there has never been a better time in human history to raise children. People talk about climate change, but back in the 50's it wasn't any better -- we were in the midst of a nuclear standoff that could have gone apocalyptic at any second. Before that, there was a world war, and another one before that, and so on. In prior centuries anywhere from one quarter to one half of all kids born wouldn't make it to the first birthday. Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been. People are free to have children or not have children, but let's be honest about why.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > but back in the 50's there were many more poor, having lots of kids. OP didn't say that only rich people can afford to have kids, but that only rich and very poor people can. Now that people are not as poor as in prior centuries, they can afford to not have kids to survive when they get older.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  >Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been. I think the amount of two income households and longer work hours says otherwise. It's still a great time to have kids but there is a lot of time and financial pressure that we did not have in the 60s and 70s. In addition, kids commonly walked to school, went out to play without supervision, etc. I think children cost more and require more time than in the past.

psyc 5y ago

My reason for not having kids is simply the golden rule. Do unto potential others as I would have had my parents do unto me. Now, you might say that I can't know whether my potential kids would have been annoying optimists who could say that they love life, without sarcasm. To which I say, they would have my genes, and me for a father, and in my view that's enough to tip the scales.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0xbadc0de5 5y ago

Isn't it strange that the people who claim they don't want to have children for fear of economic hardship or climate change never take the time to criticize their parents for not doing the same?

hawaiianbrah 5y ago
Can’t change the past, why waste the energy?
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
why strange? Children are allowed to have very different ideas than their parents, one doesn't have to criticize what has been done and is irreversible, to think and act differently.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

GOPnomics have made it too expensive to have kids. Healthcare alone which is a necessity for “breeding” makes even having a wife too expensive. Not to mention the state of the climate which they won’t do anything about let alone admit. So to hell with breeding.

gibbonsrcool 5y ago

It's the economic insecurity that does it for me. Everytime I see "we're a team not a family" or the like, I realize how dispensible I am. It's not the content of the message, it's the fact you have to say it. It's a gentle nudge that, hey, remember you don't mean shit to us, ok?

bckr 5y ago
> we're a team not a family I actually prefer to have boundaries at work. The whole "family" thing is often a way of saying "you'd better work you ass off to serve this business"
- gibbonsrcool 5y ago
  The way this phrase is used, as popularized by Netflix, they mean to say they don’t hesitate to fire underperformers.

mgamache 5y ago

The strong anti-natalism doesn't surprise me. There's a lot of millennials and younger on HN. I wonder how much of that is just a cover for their pessimism about being as economically successful as their parents? There are structural disadvantages facing the youth today and not having children is a way of avoiding a rigged game. There's also the guilt about raising children at a lower socioeconomic status than they had. Just a thought...

rukshn 5y ago

I personally don’t like to have kids because the thought of responsibilities that comes with having kids scares the hell out of me I already have enough responsibilities in my life, with my work etc and I don’t want to worry further by having kids Even before having kids you have to take care of your pregnant wife, after delivering you have to take care of the kids, when they are old you have to worry about their education marriage and so on It’s just too much. I don’t have any kids at the moment but the thought just makes me feel like I’m better off getting a divorce

del_operator 5y ago

I thought this was going to address the burden of finding affordable childcare, rigors of child development, family insurance, and maybe even a stark anecdote about a toddler or teenager. Then I hear a story about climate change and feel super frustrated that’s where this conversation is starting. I see the anxiety, but I just didn’t anticipate this from the title.

octokatt 5y ago

https://archive.md/cdWMS https://archive.md/cdWMS

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I've heard this kind of commentary a lot, but I still believe it's much more of a case of "people not wanting to have kids and then giving climate change as the reason" than climate change actually being the deciding factor in not having kids. I think in most cases it's more akin to virtue signaling. The modern world, especially in the US, is quite unfriendly to having kids. Both parents have lots of other opportunities that having children may conflict with, and having children can be horrendously expensive depending on your child rearing style. Given that, if you're subconsciously thinking "I don't want to have kids, it's just too hard", it comes across as "more virtuous" if, instead of giving the reason as you want to be more selfish with your time and money, that you want to protect a potential child from having to go through a future hellish environment.

Zababa 5y ago
I feel like this may be mostly signaling, because the logical conclusion from the argument that more people means more climate change would be to either have your existence reduce climate change (which most people don't do), or to remove yourself from the equation. Or maybe the argument is about the relative impact, and not having kids allows you to take the plane and still feel good about your actions because your total carbon impact is less than other people? I'm honestly not sure how the reasoning works.
- jjj123 5y ago
  I don’t think we should hold people to “the logical conclusion” of all of their beliefs. We are not robots. We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief. For example, I believe it’s good to go to protests for causes I care about. However, I don’t go to even a fraction of the protests near me. Does this mean I don’t actually believe protests are a good thing?
  - Zababa 5y ago
    We can believe something, and believe that this belief influences our actions, but that doesn't mean that it's true. For example, I don't heat my appartment. I could say that it's for the planet. But the reality is that it's not for the planet, it's that I don't need to heat my appartment for it to be at a confortable temperature for me. The consequences are still good for the planet, but this is a consequence, not a reason. If you think children are a massive pain and your rationalization for that is that it's for the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. That may be also a thing people say so they won't get asked too much questions. I've heard that people can put a lot of pressure on other people to make children, the planet argument might be a good justification/counter to avoid being constantly questioned. > We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief. I think my point here is that there's a notion of "intensity" or "importence". Having children is a strong belief in many people, and to counter it, you often seem to need a strong belief of the type "climate change is very important", instead of a less strong believe in the type of "I just don't want to".

marchingtomars 5y ago

To not read NYT or to not read NYT. Nor to subscribe to their propagandistic "journalism" ... vomits

tharne 5y ago
It's a sad day when the NY Post has better content than the NY Times, but here we are.

tharne 5y ago

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool. It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates. The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. That could be a bad thing or a a good thing depending on how you see yourself.

bwestergard 5y ago
At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? At what rate do the children of haredi Jewish parents remain haredi? What about grandchildren? I'd be curious to see some of the demography here. My intuition is that in the U.S., these subgroups are growing their share of religiously identified persons (e.g. a larger fraction of Catholics are traditionalists today than in 1970) but they are not growing as a share of the general population.
- bckr 5y ago
  > At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? Also, at what rate do apostates produce other apostates? Living a happy life outside the mold of what you grew up with sets an example for others. Making babies is not a surefire way of producing like-minded people, nor is it the only way.
mikewarot 5y ago
>The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit. How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah, you'll have slightly better odds with kids, because in the beginning you have full control over their environment, until school starts.

polalavik 5y ago

A whole article about people grappling with whether to make little copies of themselves when there are tons of kids that need adopted. The whole idea of having a kid just seems like a weird selfish ego trip. I know there’s underlying primal instincts at play - years of evolution driving you to breed, but we have the brains to take a step back and say is this the best choice I can make if I’d like to love and raise a human? Could I provide a better life for an already existing human? Or am I just on some ego trip to make a little replica of myself.

piyh 5y ago
I find that argument flawed since it's the ultimate form of "think of the children". It implies successful parenting is a zero sum game, and that by having a child you're taking love away from another.
Auracle 5y ago
I wanted a baby like my wife, and my wife wanted a baby like me. We both like each other so that makes sense. We ended up needing to do IVF. If that hadn’t panned out I don’t think we would have adopted, though I’ve always thought fostering would be rewarding.
User23 5y ago
I can assure you that you will not make a little replica of yourself. It will be a new and different person that inherits some of your traits, but by no means all of them. That you're thinking of a child in that way suggests that you are right to not have one, at least until your thinking on the subject matures. I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the modern world. The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype. That's just a scientific fact and no argument will change it.
- bckr 5y ago
  > The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype "dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.

bitwize 5y ago

The major problems the human race is facing all have a single solution: fewer humans. It's like fasting for individual health: simple, and solves so much. So maybe this is just nature running its course.

throwaway292961 5y ago

Personal anecdote: My wife and I got married assuming that we would eventually want kids. We were pretty young, and that's what people do, right? We kept checking in with each other and kept not wanting to have kids. 5 years into our marriage, we were certain enough that I chose to have a vasectomy. We were so certain that my biggest fear was NOT that we'd change our minds later, but that my vasectomy would be one of the 0.1% that failed. Our reasons were mostly personal, and it ultimately wasn't a responsibility we felt equipped to take on. There's some personal traumas that we experienced as kids and didn't want to pass along. There were some "selfish" reasons and things that we gave a higher priority in life than raising children. We had enough executive dysfunction between the two of us that we didn't think we'd be able to give kids enough attention while also juggling our other priorities. There is also nothing so special about our genes that compelled us to procreate--we could have adopted if parenthood called to us later in life. The usual reason we give is "we can barely take care of our pets, we're not bringing kids into this." That's the most concise way I can put it without opening up an argument. A couple of years after the vasectomy, my wife ended up getting diagnosed with multiple chronic (but not terminal) illnesses, so that became a contributing factor after we had already made our decision. Economic concerns have also always been a factor--not something that I viewed as completely unsolvable, but it obviously requires a huge sacrifice to raise kids today. Climate change and overpopulation eventually became extra reasons to be thankful that we're not bringing kids into this mess, but if we ever felt a strong drive to have kids in the first place, I don't think that alone would be enough to deter us. The article frames the whole discussion around climate change and current events, and I suppose my personal outlook for humanity has become darker over the years, but the decision to have (or not to have) kids is largely driven by personal circumstances. Some of our closest friends are fabulous loving parents, and the world needs more parents like them. Some of us, IMO, made the right choice by opting out. People love to make value judgements about this decision, as if there should be a default choice, but one thing we don't need more of is parents who don't want to be parents.

nkurz 5y ago
Great comment! I'm wondering, why did you choose to post this under a throwaway? Do you fear repercussion, prefer to keep personal separate from business, or just not have an account?