I basically agree with your list, but disagree with the idea that social shaming is the problem. I have five kids. Our house has basically 2 bedrooms (and a home office). Three of the kids(teens) share the master bedroom. Two of the kids (the little ones) share the smaller bedroom with us parents.
I basically agree with your list, but disagree with the idea that social shaming is the problem. I have five kids. Our house has basically 2 bedrooms (and a home office). Three of the kids(teens) share the master bedroom. Two of the kids (the little ones) share the smaller bedroom with us parents.
Our extracurriculars are limited to free activities that multiple kids can do at once (such things exist, yes!)
Their clothes are by and large hand-me-downs. Holiday and birthday gifts are mostly whatever their relatives provide; parties are basically gatherings with said relatives + homemade cake. (My eldest finally got a cell phone at 16, and then only because he inherited it from his grandfather, sadly.)
We don't go out to restaurants or go on big vacations.
I admit that my teens don't have jobs, but there aren't a whole lot of jobs available for teens within walking distance of our house.
Despite our frugal lifestyle, people don't criticize or shame us for it. (My mother did once tell me that each of my kids should be doing two extra curriculars a week, but I'm good at ignoring my mother.) How would strangers know how many extra curriculars my kids do, anyway? Or the size of our birthday celebrations?
If people feel anxious about how they "have" to spend money on these things, it's generally not because other people are out there shaming them, but because they are shaming themselves.
Even this sounds like a lot of effort and money to me. How much time/expense would you say it saves compared to the average? 20 maybe%? I think you'd need a norm that cut back even further than this to get fertility back over replacement.
I think most people are a lot more sensitive to shame compared to you and me. And I think it is that lack of sensitivity that allows us to have more children than average. Normal people don't need to be shamed in person. All it takes is the anticipation that something would probably count as vaguely shameful.
> I think most people are a lot more sensitive to shame compared to you and me.
Yeah, I thought of this at first too - "the real problem is that all these people that want to shame other parents have the CPS at their beck and call, and can enforce their shaming with violence."
But then I thought about it, and I think social pressure is more than enough even without the capacity for violence / legal action behind it.
You would move birth rates trivially if CPS could no longer take kids away so easily, because only a small portion of the iconoclasts who don't care about social opinion but DO care about legal threats of kidnapping would have more kids, so it's certainly no solution.
I basically agree with your list, but disagree with the idea that social shaming is the problem. I have five kids. Our house has basically 2 bedrooms (and a home office). Three of the kids(teens) share the master bedroom. Two of the kids (the little ones) share the smaller bedroom with us parents.
Our extracurriculars are limited to free activities that multiple kids can do at once (such things exist, yes!)
Their clothes are by and large hand-me-downs. Holiday and birthday gifts are mostly whatever their relatives provide; parties are basically gatherings with said relatives + homemade cake. (My eldest finally got a cell phone at 16, and then only because he inherited it from his grandfather, sadly.)
We don't go out to restaurants or go on big vacations.
I admit that my teens don't have jobs, but there aren't a whole lot of jobs available for teens within walking distance of our house.
Despite our frugal lifestyle, people don't criticize or shame us for it. (My mother did once tell me that each of my kids should be doing two extra curriculars a week, but I'm good at ignoring my mother.) How would strangers know how many extra curriculars my kids do, anyway? Or the size of our birthday celebrations?
If people feel anxious about how they "have" to spend money on these things, it's generally not because other people are out there shaming them, but because they are shaming themselves.
Even this sounds like a lot of effort and money to me. How much time/expense would you say it saves compared to the average? 20 maybe%? I think you'd need a norm that cut back even further than this to get fertility back over replacement.
What part of what I described sounds like a lot of effort/expense beyond just having infants to care for?
I think most people are a lot more sensitive to shame compared to you and me. And I think it is that lack of sensitivity that allows us to have more children than average. Normal people don't need to be shamed in person. All it takes is the anticipation that something would probably count as vaguely shameful.
> I think most people are a lot more sensitive to shame compared to you and me.
Yeah, I thought of this at first too - "the real problem is that all these people that want to shame other parents have the CPS at their beck and call, and can enforce their shaming with violence."
But then I thought about it, and I think social pressure is more than enough even without the capacity for violence / legal action behind it.
You would move birth rates trivially if CPS could no longer take kids away so easily, because only a small portion of the iconoclasts who don't care about social opinion but DO care about legal threats of kidnapping would have more kids, so it's certainly no solution.
I always want to kick people for that. "You aren't actually being pressured! You're doing it to yourself!"