| ▲ | xeonmc 2 hours ago |
| So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born? |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| > like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born? It needs to be a massive package of subsidies. Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top. In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end. |
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| ▲ | thewebguyd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc. The incentives just aren't there. |
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| ▲ | em-bee an hour ago | parent [-] | | both parents having to work fulltime, and the severe hit to your career if you pause working while the children are young is the primary hindrance in my view. |
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| ▲ | thijson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents. I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried. For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened. |
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| ▲ | em-bee 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | they didn't just happen, they were expected and demanded. there was social pressure to have children. that's still true in china today. some not yet grandparents put a lot of pressure on their children to give them grandchildren (sometimes very violently too), and i remember a comment in an earlier thread where someone told about the experience of their parents or grandparents where the local pastor was having a concerned talk with a childless couple. |
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| ▲ | submain an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear. Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs. |
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| ▲ | m_fayer an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | We need a whole new generation of fertility medicine aimed not just at conception but the rest of it as well. | |
| ▲ | bluescrn an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 'The benefits of continuing the existence of the species are not clear' | | |
| ▲ | none2585 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Unironically why care if this species continues? | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Because it will be very messy and involve a lot of suffering if unmanaged. The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos. That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'. |
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| ▲ | em-bee an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough. |
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| ▲ | happytoexplain an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Right train of thought, but as others have pointed out, this is spitting on a fire. |
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| ▲ | Henchman21 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Right why would we change the behavior that got us here? Just provide some incentives and problem solved right? How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again? |
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| ▲ | nemomarx an hour ago | parent [-] | | Why did people want to have them in the past, and what shifts do you think could undo industrialization enough to return to that? The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe? | | |
| ▲ | autoexec an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why did people want to have them in the past Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do. | | |
| ▲ | voiceofchoice 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Hard wired to want children and hard wired to want sex are two very different things. When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child. | |
| ▲ | nemomarx 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't mean it as a cost benefit thing, but people thinking that family is important, that they want and need family there for them in their old age, and so on. The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often? |
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| ▲ | em-bee an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | how about making your pension depend on the number of kids? take an average pension now: X=100%, take half of it as a base, and then add a quarter or one fifth per child. so a childless person gets half the current pension, 1 child gives you 75% or 70%, 2 children 100% or 90%, 3 children 125% or 110%, etc... |
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| ▲ | Daishiman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| More like guaranteed housing because not even having a college degree is a sufficient condition to enter the middle class in this day and age. |
