8 ms·

YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize th

by Pkeod 13y ago

YMMV. Not everyone wants kids, plenty of people are already having kids, many people who do have kids regret it entirely, and many people correctly recognize that you can't live your dreams and raise your kids right. It's not just a financial lens for many people it's a time lens too. Having kids whose lives you very probably won't even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay. Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it's a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction. 10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home http://reddit.com/r/childfree http://reddit.com/r/childfree

rayiner 13y ago
This is why India is ultimately destined to overtake the western world. Either directly or from within. Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies: 1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources. 2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older? 3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime. 4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids. 5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids. 6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high). This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.
- Pkeod 13y ago
  /r/childfree is still a useful place for people to gain some perspective - that there are actually people who never want kids and have mostly good, personal reasons for this. Not everyone cares about the fact that other countries will likely dominate in the future. Hey, good for them. For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    You make an important point, which is that the value of kids is a positive externality that is not easily captured for yourself. And that's certainly true with regards to kids: you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars raising them, but it's their employers and society at large that capture their millions of dollars in productive labor. If you care more about yourself than your tribe (and there's nothing wrong with that), it does indeed make sense not to have kids. My objection, again, isn't to people who choose not to have kids. My objection is to the people (and I think they make up the bulk of /r/childfree) who rely on specious arguments to justify their decision, and act like they're doing society a big favor in not having kids so they can focus on their music career.
- john_b 13y ago
  Given 1-4, and the fact that the investment in raising a child is almost entirely borne by the parents while the returns (financial, emotional, social, etc) are distributed more widely, sperm or egg donation programs seem like a logical alternative. It's probably the only circumstance in which you can actually make money (instead of spending it) in the process of creating a human. Genetic factors could also capture some of the correlation that would otherwise be present due to #5 in a nuclear family kind of environment. Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago, it seems to me that there are few good material reasons to have children for most middle and upper-middle class people. Very high income people can reap benefits via inheritance, but most people don't have enough wealth for that benefit to outweight the costs (both actual and opportunity) involved in raising children. This isn't to say that the non-material benefits of raising children cannot be significant. But these benefits are highly individual and should average out over a sufficiently large sample, so I'd expect large scale societal trends in childbearing to closely follow the financial cost/benefit analysis inherent in the decision.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
"Why risk it if you know you can avoid it?" That's a point. Also, a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. ;)
- Pkeod 13y ago
  Friends are the family you choose. I would rather go out and make good friends than hope my kids would become good friends. I do not have kids and I do not plan to. If I had kids I would want to raise them right, and I know that I really wouldn't be able to do what I want to do in life and that. Everyone dies alone.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Friends are nothing like kids. I wouldn't trade my life without even thinking about it for my friends. It's all hormonal response, sure, but ultimately anything that gives you satisfaction is ultimately just ways of manipulating your neurotransmitter levels. Having kids just happens to be one for which your body has a built-in response that gets you seriously drugged up.
    - Pkeod 13y ago
      It is our biological imperative to reproduce, but with humanity we can rise above our animal imperatives and impulses. I choose to avoid many things which push the biological buttons. How old are your kids? Even with the special bond parents can have with their children that's not a guarantee things will be good. I know awesome parents who have raised horrible people. I know awesome kids who turned into horrible people after they left the nest. Most people seem to eject their aging parents into nursing homes when they are too old, because people would rather live their lives than take care of their parents. Good friendships last forever and don't require you to change diapers in the early years while convincing yourself its all worth it for the few golden moments if you don't happen to be forced to miss them because of work or just chaos. Convincing me to want to have kids would first require me being convinced that I should want to ever get married. :)
      - 13y ago
thesis 13y ago
Wow... you seem very jaded... or negative. "many people who do have kids regret it entirely" "can't live your dreams and raise your kids right" "reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay"
- Pkeod 13y ago
  In many polls when as if people would not have kids if they could do their life again they said they would not have kids. It's the truth. Raising children without being neglectful takes a serious amount of time and money. If you don't have the money you have to go and make the money and that means paying someone else to watch your kids to take the chance of them raising them for you. Yes, that's the reality. Statistics of divorce say so. Not only are you likely to get divorced, as there is usually more incentive to wives to ask for one, but if you live in a state which has alimony lives you could be stuck paying money. I'm not jaded or negative. I'm an an extremely realistic (data is emotional) person who is very excited to live life well and do a lot of great things - I live in the real world, but I'm also very optimistic with what I do choose to do.
  - Evbn 13y ago
    Most people regret their lives regardless of their choices, because dissatisfaction and bitterness is a human genetic tendency. Most people rage against their mortality and blame everything for it.
  - joshuahedlund 13y ago
    Sources? Two can play the polling/statistic/studies/arguments game about children: http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046501867X http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465...
    - Pkeod 13y ago
      Upbringing is much less important for development than genetics? No. Single mothers who raise kids in poverty with no father figure raise more daughters who have more kids without getting married or even involving a strong father figure (repeating the cycle), and more sons who become criminals or forever doing minimum wage jobs and going nowhere. Parenting > culture > genetics. Your genetic predisposition does not make you who you are. A person who is sheltered and not able to see the world is much worse off than a person who is given perspective about the world and able to expand their library of thoughts. Which of my opinions do you want me to show are informed by data?
loganfrederick 13y ago
"Plenty of people are already having kids" Arguably not true. Population growth rates have been decreasing in a variety of countries[1] and economists have found connections between economic growth and population growth[2]. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas/dp/0262612089 http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas... [2]: http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications
- Pkeod 13y ago
  Out of my graduating highschool class, I only know of one woman who isn't now a parent. Will it soon be my civic duty to have kids? I'll still say no.
- rhizome 13y ago
  "Plenty" is not a fact that can be disproven, it's a value judgement, and that growth rates have been decreasing does not mean the world is running out of people. Also: economic growth based on an ever-increasing number of customers is not a sustainable policy.
DanBC 13y ago
Children have a human right to see both parents unless there is a risk of harm from on of the parents. This comes from the UN convention on rights of the child. (http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html) America, along with Somalia and South Sudan, has not ratified the convention. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convent...)
- Pkeod 13y ago
  The reality in the US is a mother can move across the country while a father is forced to pay child support, if he moves he can likely lose his well paying job, and if he can't find a just as good job where he moves he could be put into jail for non-payment (debtor's jail!).
- deepdog 13y ago
  The reason we haven't signed the Declaration for the Rights of the Child is because the areas it addresses is a state issue. If the Federal government were to sign such a treaty it would become law. Which is a big no-no since the federal government can't intrude on state issues.
  - whatsreal 13y ago
    Could we have a referendum on the issue at the federal level, or would it require the states to individually ratify (through state governmental bodies or referendum) the right of an agent of the federal government to sign the treaty and allow it to become state-level law somehow? I don't know much about law, but I am a fierce advocate of state rights based mostly on the idea that it is far more feasible to have a democratic government that involves millions or tens of millions than one that involves hundreds of millions. This issue is however one place where my ideas trip up. It is kind of embarrassing that we are 1 of 3 (assuming the grandparent comment is correct) countries not to ratify the treaty and the other two are an (essentially) failed state and a brand new one that has to sort its internal self out before working on such things as UN treaties.
  - 13y ago
Evbn 13y ago
Uh, if you never get to see your kids, they aren't a time sink.

by Pkeod 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

This is why India is ultimately destined to overtake the western world. Either directly or from within. Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies: 1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources. 2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older? 3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime. 4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids. 5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids. 6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high). This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.

Pkeod 13y ago
/r/childfree is still a useful place for people to gain some perspective - that there are actually people who never want kids and have mostly good, personal reasons for this. Not everyone cares about the fact that other countries will likely dominate in the future. Hey, good for them. For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.
- rayiner 13y ago
  You make an important point, which is that the value of kids is a positive externality that is not easily captured for yourself. And that's certainly true with regards to kids: you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars raising them, but it's their employers and society at large that capture their millions of dollars in productive labor. If you care more about yourself than your tribe (and there's nothing wrong with that), it does indeed make sense not to have kids. My objection, again, isn't to people who choose not to have kids. My objection is to the people (and I think they make up the bulk of /r/childfree) who rely on specious arguments to justify their decision, and act like they're doing society a big favor in not having kids so they can focus on their music career.
john_b 13y ago
Given 1-4, and the fact that the investment in raising a child is almost entirely borne by the parents while the returns (financial, emotional, social, etc) are distributed more widely, sperm or egg donation programs seem like a logical alternative. It's probably the only circumstance in which you can actually make money (instead of spending it) in the process of creating a human. Genetic factors could also capture some of the correlation that would otherwise be present due to #5 in a nuclear family kind of environment. Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago, it seems to me that there are few good material reasons to have children for most middle and upper-middle class people. Very high income people can reap benefits via inheritance, but most people don't have enough wealth for that benefit to outweight the costs (both actual and opportunity) involved in raising children. This isn't to say that the non-material benefits of raising children cannot be significant. But these benefits are highly individual and should average out over a sufficiently large sample, so I'd expect large scale societal trends in childbearing to closely follow the financial cost/benefit analysis inherent in the decision.

fennecfoxen 13y ago

"Why risk it if you know you can avoid it?" That's a point. Also, a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. ;)

Pkeod 13y ago
Friends are the family you choose. I would rather go out and make good friends than hope my kids would become good friends. I do not have kids and I do not plan to. If I had kids I would want to raise them right, and I know that I really wouldn't be able to do what I want to do in life and that. Everyone dies alone.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Friends are nothing like kids. I wouldn't trade my life without even thinking about it for my friends. It's all hormonal response, sure, but ultimately anything that gives you satisfaction is ultimately just ways of manipulating your neurotransmitter levels. Having kids just happens to be one for which your body has a built-in response that gets you seriously drugged up.
  - Pkeod 13y ago
    It is our biological imperative to reproduce, but with humanity we can rise above our animal imperatives and impulses. I choose to avoid many things which push the biological buttons. How old are your kids? Even with the special bond parents can have with their children that's not a guarantee things will be good. I know awesome parents who have raised horrible people. I know awesome kids who turned into horrible people after they left the nest. Most people seem to eject their aging parents into nursing homes when they are too old, because people would rather live their lives than take care of their parents. Good friendships last forever and don't require you to change diapers in the early years while convincing yourself its all worth it for the few golden moments if you don't happen to be forced to miss them because of work or just chaos. Convincing me to want to have kids would first require me being convinced that I should want to ever get married. :)
    - 13y ago

thesis 13y ago

Wow... you seem very jaded... or negative. "many people who do have kids regret it entirely" "can't live your dreams and raise your kids right" "reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay"

Pkeod 13y ago
In many polls when as if people would not have kids if they could do their life again they said they would not have kids. It's the truth. Raising children without being neglectful takes a serious amount of time and money. If you don't have the money you have to go and make the money and that means paying someone else to watch your kids to take the chance of them raising them for you. Yes, that's the reality. Statistics of divorce say so. Not only are you likely to get divorced, as there is usually more incentive to wives to ask for one, but if you live in a state which has alimony lives you could be stuck paying money. I'm not jaded or negative. I'm an an extremely realistic (data is emotional) person who is very excited to live life well and do a lot of great things - I live in the real world, but I'm also very optimistic with what I do choose to do.
- Evbn 13y ago
  Most people regret their lives regardless of their choices, because dissatisfaction and bitterness is a human genetic tendency. Most people rage against their mortality and blame everything for it.
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  Sources? Two can play the polling/statistic/studies/arguments game about children: http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046501867X http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465...
  - Pkeod 13y ago
    Upbringing is much less important for development than genetics? No. Single mothers who raise kids in poverty with no father figure raise more daughters who have more kids without getting married or even involving a strong father figure (repeating the cycle), and more sons who become criminals or forever doing minimum wage jobs and going nowhere. Parenting > culture > genetics. Your genetic predisposition does not make you who you are. A person who is sheltered and not able to see the world is much worse off than a person who is given perspective about the world and able to expand their library of thoughts. Which of my opinions do you want me to show are informed by data?

loganfrederick 13y ago

"Plenty of people are already having kids" Arguably not true. Population growth rates have been decreasing in a variety of countries[1] and economists have found connections between economic growth and population growth[2]. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas/dp/0262612089 http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas... [2]: http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications

Pkeod 13y ago
Out of my graduating highschool class, I only know of one woman who isn't now a parent. Will it soon be my civic duty to have kids? I'll still say no.
rhizome 13y ago
"Plenty" is not a fact that can be disproven, it's a value judgement, and that growth rates have been decreasing does not mean the world is running out of people. Also: economic growth based on an ever-increasing number of customers is not a sustainable policy.

DanBC 13y ago

Children have a human right to see both parents unless there is a risk of harm from on of the parents. This comes from the UN convention on rights of the child. (http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html) America, along with Somalia and South Sudan, has not ratified the convention. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convent...)

Pkeod 13y ago
The reality in the US is a mother can move across the country while a father is forced to pay child support, if he moves he can likely lose his well paying job, and if he can't find a just as good job where he moves he could be put into jail for non-payment (debtor's jail!).
deepdog 13y ago
The reason we haven't signed the Declaration for the Rights of the Child is because the areas it addresses is a state issue. If the Federal government were to sign such a treaty it would become law. Which is a big no-no since the federal government can't intrude on state issues.
- whatsreal 13y ago
  Could we have a referendum on the issue at the federal level, or would it require the states to individually ratify (through state governmental bodies or referendum) the right of an agent of the federal government to sign the treaty and allow it to become state-level law somehow? I don't know much about law, but I am a fierce advocate of state rights based mostly on the idea that it is far more feasible to have a democratic government that involves millions or tens of millions than one that involves hundreds of millions. This issue is however one place where my ideas trip up. It is kind of embarrassing that we are 1 of 3 (assuming the grandparent comment is correct) countries not to ratify the treaty and the other two are an (essentially) failed state and a brand new one that has to sort its internal self out before working on such things as UN treaties.
- 13y ago

Evbn 13y ago

Uh, if you never get to see your kids, they aren't a time sink.