re: Increased Childlessness in the US

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When?

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Straight up: if you don’t have or have had kids you can’t possibly understand or remotely understand what it’s like. No furbaby is going to help you.

We are built to do it but we’ve become a weak society that lacks individual accountability. We have to live in the now and seek immediate gratification.

Once the opportunity to do this has passed it’s permanent. I believe we generally grow wiser as we age and many of these people will look at there lives as unfulfilled and lacking.

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God help me if I were single. I’d be beating my wiener even though I make 200k a year. I’m built like a stump. I am the moped of the dating pool. Yeah I can take you somewhere fun but your friends can’t know about it.

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Basically where I’m at. Had I been born in a previous generation with less competition I would probably be a father by now (and much more fulfilled). But instead here we are in this over competitive hellscape. If it gets bad enough I’ll go the foreign route, but I would prefer not to.

I think women not having work outside the home is the ideal. I agree with you that the practical need for that is common and not really the fault of either "side" of this. But I certainly think the societal expectation on women to do so (rather than the financial need to do so) comes predominantly from women.

So, I think as a starting place, men and women agreeing that men wanting to position themselves so their wives can work in the home is a generally good thing. I'm not sure most women - progressive women in particular - would agree. It leaves these conversations in a strange spot where "we're expected to work" is a premise of the issue, but "well how about we move society to a point where women can stay home" is politically incorrect.

To cut to the chase, I don't think women are "causing the problem." I think women have plenty of valid complaints about the status of M-F relationships and the impacts on families and the ability to have families. I genuinely do.

I do think women are frustrating conversations about the problem, because many women (the ones who dominate these conversations in the public square) tend to be traditional when they're finding complaints and non-traditional when describing solutions. That's an impasse that seems impossible to bridge.

As for expectations, I think women tend to say "expectations for men are less" when speaking generally about men in the aggregate, based on media and entertainment. But among the type of women who have conversations about this stuff at a meaningful level (presumably you) their expectations for their own husbands are much higher, and their husbands (and their peers and friends) tend to fulfill those expectations reasonably well.

Narcissism and egocentrism.

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Once the opportunity to do this has passed it’s permanent. I believe we generally grow wiser as we age and many of these people will look at there lives as unfulfilled and lacking.

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Most want to continue living the life they had in college and are unfit to be parents.

We should be grateful they dont breed.

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There is always adoption

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Of course but at some point you really wont be able to do that.

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but you'll never know what growing older without kids is like, so how can you possibly understand what it's like

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If it’s part of we were built to do, not doing it will have it’s consequences

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This will always be idiotic. I don't need to experience getting stabbed in the eyeball to know I don't want that to happen.

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You just proved my point.

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how old are you? Hang the frick in there. Keep casting your net. Put yourself in situations where you have the opportunity to meet people in person. Be confident. You deserve it, and there is someone out there for you.

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31. Thanks baw

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I posit that the increase in fertility issues has more to do with environmental toxins than maternal age.

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As an ardent pro-natalist, I'm for identifying whatever the problem is.

But to me, the fact that women are waiting to start having kids until their mid-30s is an obvious (and significant) part of the issue. I also think it's the case that people who may not ultimately need fertility treatments are seeking them earlier (as in earlier in the process, not necessarily age) because they have the resources to do so.

Ie, a 35 year old woman and her husband start trying in earnest and quickly jump to fertility treatment because they're worried about the clock and are at a later stage in life where they have more resources. Whereas a 25 year old woman may slog it out for longer because the pressure is less and they have less money to throw at the issue. In short, that may be somewhat skewing numbers, in my opinion.