• TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    We have a complex and frankly fragile system of family members who care for one another’s kids and maintain specific work schedules so that one grownup is always available in my family, that we built from scratch (not really from a cultural background where this is the norm, it’s out of necessity) and it’s frankly the only way my family has been able to support any children.

    I’m genuinely not sure how a person pays for rent/mortgage, utilities, gas and food while also paying the kinds of prices that childcare costs in even low COL areas of the US.

    • operacion_ogro [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      The only happy parents I know have family who regularly watch their kids, including overnight stays. The kids love it because they spend time with more family, and my friends love it because it means they still have time to work and do things for themselves outside of childcare. I frankly don’t know how the average atomized American family copes with raising children.

  • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    I am also unsure if the world is ending. The last generation of humans may already be alive. They may already be adults with college degrees. Mad Max is fine to watch on screen, but would be a horrifying reality to live in.

    I do not want to subject people to the upcoming WW3.

    • Humanity is going to survive, perhaps in small isolated pockets that never reach the potential capitalism squandered.

      That being said, if I were to have a kid I’d be taking on the burden of finding a way to set them up for a good life. I don’t see a good life in near to mid term future for anyone not extremely lucky in birth circumstance.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Humanity is going to survive, perhaps in small isolated pockets that never reach the potential capitalism squandered.

        The neoliberal propaganda known as “Kurzgesagt” said that if 99% of humanity is wiped out, that’s still a “win” for Team Humanity™. The propaganda declined to state what the planetary conditions would look like for that 1% but assumed everything would be fine after that.

        • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          Seriously , if Kurzgesagt actually thinks that I’m absolutely disgusted, that sounds like Hitler particles shit right there.

          EDIT: disregard the stuff I said about Stalin’s quote. I double checked it and apparently that quote wasn’t even something he actually said.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            if Kurzgesagt actually thinks that I’m absolutely disgusted, that sounds like Hitler particles shit right there.

            The words Kurzgesagt said were something about a “win for team humanity” with even a 1% human survival total during some industry-driven environmental collapse. There was some weapons-grade hopium about how wonderful it’d be for “team humanity” to live on with whatever killed the other 99% on so poisoned a planet.

            • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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              3 months ago

              I think Kurzgesagt is the best example of what happens when an educational youtube channel gets big. They’ve gone from interesting science content to pure neoliberal propaganda machine.

    • coeliacmccarthy [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      The world is closer to ended than ending. More than half of complex macroscopic life is already dead or replaced by monoculture/livestock. Today’s fossil record would lbe considered post extinction event to future alien paleontologists.

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        The end of human civilization may be occurring within our lifetime. So children born today may be fighting in wars over water or killed in nuclear attacks twenty years from now. They may not be able to survive these events. Meaning, they won’t have children of their own.

        If the damage is severe enough, the human population might bottleneck to where we won’t have enough genetic diversity to repopulate the earth. Sort of like how cheetahs are going extinct because they’re all born with the same genetic disorder and there aren’t any cheetahs without it.

  • Acute_Engles [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    I hate being reminded that it costs money to go to the hospital and get your baby delivered in the US. Yeah it’s super expensive having a kid but i didn’t have to pay $10k+ to have it removed from my partner

  • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    I know a lot of people who want to have kids (or more than one kid) who won’t because it would financially ruin them, and I live in a cheap ass rust belt city.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances. Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.

    I think it’s more to do with the general sense of no future worth continuing that people have, and a cultural attitude of hating kids that seems to have built up in western countries. People didn’t hate children 30 years ago the same way they hate children today. Children were a part of everyday life outdoors on every street, you really didn’t do well in the world if you got mad about kids every time you saw them because outside of school hours they were omnipresent outdoors.

    • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.

      I think it’s more that families that have been poor for generations know how to raise kids on a budget but people who grew up middle class don’t want to have kids unless they can offer them roughly the same quality of life they had, which is increasingly inaccessible.

      • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I feel like all life advice in “the middle class” is like… Don’t have kids until you have an established career, mortgage, and can afford a babysitter/daycare.

        That’s not to say the modern situation is entirely caused by that. One thing I thought of is if you’re a peasant, kids might not actually be that helpful in the field but you can keep an eye on your kids fucking about while you plow fields or whatever. Once urbanisation and bosses happen, you can’t just bring your kid into the office while you make sales calls (unless your child is also losing fingers in the textile factory). Modern farms are also different to older farms; you don’t really want your kids to be around heavy machinery too much, though farmers kids I know spent a decent amount of time hanging out with their parents in the combine harvester etc (unlike literally every urban worker I know).

        The survey answer of global hopelessness feels a bit post-hoc to me. I know its a popular narrative, but many doomed societies that have felt doomed have had very high birthrates.

        Individualism is also another one.

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances.

      The survey posted is literally showing that it is the primary reason. And it didn’t ignore your concerns:

      Nearly a quarter (23%) of Millennials and Gen Z without children do not plan to become parents, primarily due to financial reasons. Furthermore, 31% of Millennials and Gen Z who say they don’t plan to become a parent attribute this to the social and political world their children would inherit.

      The idea that the world is so hopeless it would be wrong to bring kids into it is real, but it is absolutely not the primary reason. Unless you have a source that says otherwise.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I think it’s more to do with the general sense of no future worth continuing that people have, and a cultural attitude of hating kids

      Yeah, while finances are an issue i agree its more that sense that the future will be worse. Blaming finances is easier, not just to communicate but also for people to wrap their minds around without having to confront the dread of the future if things continue the way they are.

      Part of me feels the hatred of children and antinatalism in general is a reaction to people not being able to afford kids/feeling there’s no future for children of their own. The way antinatalists speak, there has to be something more there

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Agreed. I’ve been a teacher before and I don’t hate kids. So I think the problem is that “I hate kids” is more of a lie we tell ourselves because we cannot in good conscience have kids.

        There’s also the fact that the onus is always on women, so we know this is a proxy for something else. If more kids was that much of a priority the bourgeoisie would make some concessions in order to get it. They’d allow more building in “prime real estate” walkable cities and introduce the idea of “community” to America. They’d take a hit on their rent prices and let young people move to the walkable cities they yearn for so they can actually meet people, and you know, get laid to have kids.

        But no, their idea is that they want to mandate that women reproduce or be tossed in jail, and further hammer in the idea for men that if they don’t get laid by age 30 they’re a hopeless loser.

        • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          If more kids was that much of a priority the bourgeoisie would make some concessions in order to get it.

          They are making about as much concession as for mitigating climate change, so they are consistent.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      It might be an unpopular view here but I don’t think it really has anything to do with finances. Fertility rate goes up the poorer people are.

      The Global South has a higher birth rate than the imperial core. I don’t think it has anything to do with finances at all. Are Congolese artisanal miners and Bangladeshi sweatshop workers somehow more financially secure than some software developer living in the West?

      • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        The conditions of child rearing are so socially and economically different in the impoverished global south versus the imperial core that there’s no way to isolate those variables.

        And as I’ve said elsewhere, the headline isn’t conjecture. It’s the answer people gave to a survey. When asked why they aren’t having kids, young Americans say finances are the primary reason.

  • NeelixBiederman [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    White, married, make ~$160k/yr combined (pretax). No kids, vasectomy. Climate change and the complete lack of pro-natal infrastructure in our society is why. No nearby family to rely on, and by the time we finish our 8 hour days, neither of us has the energy to prepare a meal and care for a child. I don’t really love being alive and I’d have a lot of regret bringing in someone to a worse world and make them deal with that feeling every day

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Seriously.

      I refuse to raise any kid outside of a walkable city, even if they paid me to stay in podunk suburbia and gave me a house for free I wouldn’t have a kid. Raising anyone here would practically feel like abuse.