"having children is good". It occurs to me that "good" as you use it here refers to a life of duty and service to an idea greater than one's (individual) self. I've just read your previous post and will now read this one.
My comment about eight year olds was mainly due to letting them roam free and go to neighbor's houses, though as they age we encourage them to spend more of teir evening studying.
But in general, I agree very much with this post and I believe I've mentioned this concept before.
What I take a slight issue is with the term killjoy, as I believe there is no life more joyful than ours despite the hardship, lack of leisure and fun. To me this is really about learning how to prioritize long-term joy over short term desires.
(And Ha ha, for my wife too the ultimate relaxation is prayer and recital of Psalms. I used to tell here that as a mother of children she does not need to spend that much time praying but I since realized that this is her ultimate relaxation, and the children get used to going to sleep and waking up to a mother immersed in prayer.)
I also greatly appreciate your recognition of how deeply the Ultra-Orthodox are misunderstood and/or misrepresented. They are portrayed as lazy people who shirk their national duties, when in fact the primary reason they don't serve in the army is because they feel it will distract them from their primary duties, and in fact Charedim worldwide work hard and are thereby the only society which maintains high fertility within modern cities.
I think that salience plays an important role. Children are almost nowhere to be seen in the lives of young adult non-parents in the West (and probably in East Asia too). This fact itself has been nearly invisible in the fertility discussion.
Apocryphally, there is the phenomenon of contagious pregnancy. One young woman in an office gets pregnant, and before the year is out, many others also get pregnant.
If babies and toddlers were more salient in the lives of pre-parents and even in the lives of those who have had one, I think fertility would be higher.
When every office has a crèche and playroom, so young adults have a more Stone Age experience of children being all around, then personal attributes will matter far less.
Anders has told me a story from when he was 15 years old and had Child Studies in school (that discipline was removed from the curriculum very soon after, since people were no longer supposed to have children right after school anyway). He participated in a group assignment to study a toddler. Only problem: He couldn't locate a toddler. His socially well-connected parents only knew people their own age (about 40-45), and they didn't have toddlers. Eventually some other group member managed to find a real-life toddler among acquaintances. But it made Anders draw the same conclusion as you: Children aren't a salient phenomenon in most people's lives.
1. Create a society like the Orthodox Jews, except men instead of studying the Torah play video games, read and write Substack, argue online or do some other marginally useful leisure activity all day.
Ha ha, well, I guess that conformism is the missing piece in your formula. It only works as long as everybody is working very hard on the same computer game or the same Substack.
Being apparently useless is a fundamental part of religion, I guess, because uselessness is the only way to be conformist. As soon as a pursuit is said to be practically useful, people will start arguing about whether it is actually useful for real and how it can be made more useful. Bye-bye community.
I think that in the 80s & 90s at least in some Western countries we had a mini version of that, which was hitting the pub and/or watching sports on TV. Conformity was definitely a part of that ("Did you watch the game last night?"). Then, feminists told men to get their lazy assess off the couch.
Now, we are discussing the crisis of fertility, masculinity, society, community and all other things -ity. Correlation or causation?
The Amishmen got their asses off the couch already in the 16th century. They have far more children (and probably a few -ity things too) than any group of soccer-watching men in the 1990s.
In the US, people used to let their kids roam free. What I have heard is that in part this was because they knew their neighbors well enough to trust them, in part because a lot of those neighbors were kin, and in part because parents were just more comfortable with the risk of their children being harmed. I sometimes wonder and hope that Western countries can get back to that kind of parenting, because I think that overall everyone would be better off for it, and even leisure loving adults would have more kids because their would be less of a tradeoff between leisure time and time spent parenting. I have read that hunter gatherers let their kids roam around in packs like that, so I think it would benefit kids to have that kind of a childhood.
There definitely is work to save on childrearing. But the first few years are labor-intense regardless of the culture of childrearing. Especially the very first year. If people have ten children, they will have one baby under the age of one for ten years. The unpredictability of babies is in itself difficult to combine with many common leisure activities
My wife and I, shortly after we got married, met a woman who had six children. We were hoping for our first. We wondered how she managed. She said, the older children help with the younger children. A child of six can change a diaper.
Spending four to six years intensively parenting is a lot less time and sacrifice than spending 8 or 9 or more years intensively parenting. Getting people to go from one to two kids, two to three, etc., would do a lot to raise the birthrate. My impression of the US in the 1950’s and 1960’s was also that adults spent much more time around other adults even when they had young children as well. Parenting was still a lot of work, but the sense I get is that people in the US find parenting an isolating activity a lot more now than they did then. I have no idea what it is like in a country like Sweden that has a lot of paid parental leave. Is it easier for parents of young children to spend time socializing with other adults? The US may also be an outlier to other developed countries where educated professionals can make a lot of money, especially relative to people who don’t complete a university education, so the stakes of raising a child who becomes a surgeon versus one who becomes a carpenter can mean that the person that becomes a surgeon can have 10-40 times the income of the carpenter (surgeons often own a stake in the surgical facilities where they operate, effectively multiplying their income). That’s just one example, even an experienced accountant (CPA) will be making close to a six figure income in the US, or more than 50% higher than the median wage.
I think Swedish parents are as socially isolated as parents in any Western society. More so, if anything, because people and society have a very aggressive attitude to child protection: reporting any imagined infringement is seen as a duty. This, I believe, makes parents reflexively hide away with their children as soon as they are uncertain whether they can behave ideally.
However, Swedish parents don't obsess over elite universities like American parents, for one reason: There are no elite universities in Scandinavia. Deliberately trying to make one's own children successful is frowned upon. Everything is supposed to be about wholesomeness.
> Combining work and family is hard. Combining leisure and family is even harder.
It is interesting how we got to this state, which seems so counterproductive. It is probably largely because we have isolated ourselves as individuals (or at best, as nuclear families). In tribal societies, there was much less work to do, as it was spread out, and parents didn't really have to spend much time specifically focused on taking care of their children, as they spent most of their time with other kids and the rest of the tribe.
Tribal people are known to have lots of time for leisure, but it is obviously not in the form of watching movies or all the other modern forms of entertainment, instead it is all in the form of social interaction.
I think that having a lot of children will always be brutally hard when you have to do it all yourself. Most of the social groups that still have high birthrates are very tight-knit religious societies that offer an almost tribal like level of support within their community.
Unless we can build up a future offering something like that, I don't think we should put our hopes up for higher birthrates.
In an age when necessities are fulfilled and pleasures are abundant only those who can self select against temptations are able to escape hedonistic loops.
Ah, good old religion rears its head. Time spent in pursuit of something that does not exist is wasted, it matters little how "busy" you are. A lot of time in high income economies spent "raising children" is just a form of adult entertainment, which prevents children from growing up. Extended childhood into three decades, which is where we are, is bad for everyone.
"having children is good". It occurs to me that "good" as you use it here refers to a life of duty and service to an idea greater than one's (individual) self. I've just read your previous post and will now read this one.
My comment about eight year olds was mainly due to letting them roam free and go to neighbor's houses, though as they age we encourage them to spend more of teir evening studying.
But in general, I agree very much with this post and I believe I've mentioned this concept before.
What I take a slight issue is with the term killjoy, as I believe there is no life more joyful than ours despite the hardship, lack of leisure and fun. To me this is really about learning how to prioritize long-term joy over short term desires.
(And Ha ha, for my wife too the ultimate relaxation is prayer and recital of Psalms. I used to tell here that as a mother of children she does not need to spend that much time praying but I since realized that this is her ultimate relaxation, and the children get used to going to sleep and waking up to a mother immersed in prayer.)
I also greatly appreciate your recognition of how deeply the Ultra-Orthodox are misunderstood and/or misrepresented. They are portrayed as lazy people who shirk their national duties, when in fact the primary reason they don't serve in the army is because they feel it will distract them from their primary duties, and in fact Charedim worldwide work hard and are thereby the only society which maintains high fertility within modern cities.
I think that salience plays an important role. Children are almost nowhere to be seen in the lives of young adult non-parents in the West (and probably in East Asia too). This fact itself has been nearly invisible in the fertility discussion.
Apocryphally, there is the phenomenon of contagious pregnancy. One young woman in an office gets pregnant, and before the year is out, many others also get pregnant.
If babies and toddlers were more salient in the lives of pre-parents and even in the lives of those who have had one, I think fertility would be higher.
When every office has a crèche and playroom, so young adults have a more Stone Age experience of children being all around, then personal attributes will matter far less.
The "nudge" theory of fertility, if you like.
Anders has told me a story from when he was 15 years old and had Child Studies in school (that discipline was removed from the curriculum very soon after, since people were no longer supposed to have children right after school anyway). He participated in a group assignment to study a toddler. Only problem: He couldn't locate a toddler. His socially well-connected parents only knew people their own age (about 40-45), and they didn't have toddlers. Eventually some other group member managed to find a real-life toddler among acquaintances. But it made Anders draw the same conclusion as you: Children aren't a salient phenomenon in most people's lives.
Idea for an interesting social innovation:
1. Create a society like the Orthodox Jews, except men instead of studying the Torah play video games, read and write Substack, argue online or do some other marginally useful leisure activity all day.
2. Fertility is huge.
3. Women are somehow OK with both of the above.
4. Everyone is happy.
5. ???
6. Profit!
You're welcome.
Ha ha, well, I guess that conformism is the missing piece in your formula. It only works as long as everybody is working very hard on the same computer game or the same Substack.
Being apparently useless is a fundamental part of religion, I guess, because uselessness is the only way to be conformist. As soon as a pursuit is said to be practically useful, people will start arguing about whether it is actually useful for real and how it can be made more useful. Bye-bye community.
I think that in the 80s & 90s at least in some Western countries we had a mini version of that, which was hitting the pub and/or watching sports on TV. Conformity was definitely a part of that ("Did you watch the game last night?"). Then, feminists told men to get their lazy assess off the couch.
Now, we are discussing the crisis of fertility, masculinity, society, community and all other things -ity. Correlation or causation?
The Amishmen got their asses off the couch already in the 16th century. They have far more children (and probably a few -ity things too) than any group of soccer-watching men in the 1990s.
My guess is that it was not feminism that caused low male reliability, but low male reliability that caused feminism. I wrote about it a long time ago: https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/is-feminism-caused-by-a-lack-of-male?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
In the US, people used to let their kids roam free. What I have heard is that in part this was because they knew their neighbors well enough to trust them, in part because a lot of those neighbors were kin, and in part because parents were just more comfortable with the risk of their children being harmed. I sometimes wonder and hope that Western countries can get back to that kind of parenting, because I think that overall everyone would be better off for it, and even leisure loving adults would have more kids because their would be less of a tradeoff between leisure time and time spent parenting. I have read that hunter gatherers let their kids roam around in packs like that, so I think it would benefit kids to have that kind of a childhood.
There definitely is work to save on childrearing. But the first few years are labor-intense regardless of the culture of childrearing. Especially the very first year. If people have ten children, they will have one baby under the age of one for ten years. The unpredictability of babies is in itself difficult to combine with many common leisure activities
My wife and I, shortly after we got married, met a woman who had six children. We were hoping for our first. We wondered how she managed. She said, the older children help with the younger children. A child of six can change a diaper.
Spending four to six years intensively parenting is a lot less time and sacrifice than spending 8 or 9 or more years intensively parenting. Getting people to go from one to two kids, two to three, etc., would do a lot to raise the birthrate. My impression of the US in the 1950’s and 1960’s was also that adults spent much more time around other adults even when they had young children as well. Parenting was still a lot of work, but the sense I get is that people in the US find parenting an isolating activity a lot more now than they did then. I have no idea what it is like in a country like Sweden that has a lot of paid parental leave. Is it easier for parents of young children to spend time socializing with other adults? The US may also be an outlier to other developed countries where educated professionals can make a lot of money, especially relative to people who don’t complete a university education, so the stakes of raising a child who becomes a surgeon versus one who becomes a carpenter can mean that the person that becomes a surgeon can have 10-40 times the income of the carpenter (surgeons often own a stake in the surgical facilities where they operate, effectively multiplying their income). That’s just one example, even an experienced accountant (CPA) will be making close to a six figure income in the US, or more than 50% higher than the median wage.
I think Swedish parents are as socially isolated as parents in any Western society. More so, if anything, because people and society have a very aggressive attitude to child protection: reporting any imagined infringement is seen as a duty. This, I believe, makes parents reflexively hide away with their children as soon as they are uncertain whether they can behave ideally.
However, Swedish parents don't obsess over elite universities like American parents, for one reason: There are no elite universities in Scandinavia. Deliberately trying to make one's own children successful is frowned upon. Everything is supposed to be about wholesomeness.
> Combining work and family is hard. Combining leisure and family is even harder.
It is interesting how we got to this state, which seems so counterproductive. It is probably largely because we have isolated ourselves as individuals (or at best, as nuclear families). In tribal societies, there was much less work to do, as it was spread out, and parents didn't really have to spend much time specifically focused on taking care of their children, as they spent most of their time with other kids and the rest of the tribe.
Tribal people are known to have lots of time for leisure, but it is obviously not in the form of watching movies or all the other modern forms of entertainment, instead it is all in the form of social interaction.
I think that having a lot of children will always be brutally hard when you have to do it all yourself. Most of the social groups that still have high birthrates are very tight-knit religious societies that offer an almost tribal like level of support within their community.
Unless we can build up a future offering something like that, I don't think we should put our hopes up for higher birthrates.
>Unless we can build up a future offering something like that, I don't think we should put our hopes up for higher birthrates.
Birth rates will increase due to high fertility sub-groups becoming majority populations. Israel is living in this future already.
In an age when necessities are fulfilled and pleasures are abundant only those who can self select against temptations are able to escape hedonistic loops.
A nicely succinct explanation, though the distinct details of different cultures will determine actual fertility.
Ah, good old religion rears its head. Time spent in pursuit of something that does not exist is wasted, it matters little how "busy" you are. A lot of time in high income economies spent "raising children" is just a form of adult entertainment, which prevents children from growing up. Extended childhood into three decades, which is where we are, is bad for everyone.