alt Hacker NewsEnjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be taken away from you (sure visitation rights, but pratically the child grows up in the household of another man, if she remarries).
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It’s all economic, pride and ego. Once you hit a certain amount of income, the marginal cost of children seems too much. It’s not a big deal when you have nothing.
Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and social networks aren’t what they once were.
Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not new, although religious and conservative people try to imply that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.
The only thing that’s “new” is women have the ability to choose birth control.
75% of divorces are initiated by women in the US. If college educated that number jumps to 90%. Divorce as an mechanism, is almost entirely used by women.
My view - for which I have no proofs, it's just intuition - is that people are too egotistic and self centered and too hedonistic to want to have children.
From divorces among family & friends - yes, those concerns exist. But they are also worst-case scenarios, and there are many "friendlier" divorces. Or divorces after the kids grow up - where none of the paternity, left-to-raise, and visitation issues really apply.
Vs. even if marriages were magically 100% secure - the costs of having kids in most modern societies have skyrocketed over the past half-ish century or so.
The paternity issue should be easy to overcome with modern technology. There's really no reason the state shouldn't require a paternity test to ensure the accuracy of the state issued birth certificate.