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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

Ideology gets in the way of truth on this one.

One side doesn't want to admit that a lot of poor people have a good bit of free time available to them, particularly those who receive social services.

The other side doesn't want to admit that middle class and up folks have been working long hours at a cost to their personal lives and development, that isn't new, but now both mom and dad are doing it and households aren't really any better off.

This results in poor people with the time to make and raise children, doing so and receiving government subsidies to provide for them. The problem is the government can't give you time or your youth back so the well off just stopped having kids.

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The well-off in North America stopped having kids because it has become socially unacceptable do so; at least in youth. The young "rural hick" mother is the canonical image young women are told they must not become. We even air TV shows (e.g. Teen Mom) meant to portray the ostracization young mothers face in an effort to not let others realize the same fate. Having children is something well-off people have come to fear, believing it will leave them to become failures in the eye of society.

The narrative changes when people grow older, nearing the end of a woman's viable productive years. All of a sudden it is "Why don't you have kids yet? You're not getting any younger. The clock is ticking." Once one overcomes dealing with the conflicting messaging and the emotional toil in that, this leaves time for one, occasionally two in the best case, children and no more. For others it is simply too late.

> For others it is simply too late.

Yup... you need to start very young to have a high chance of having more than two kids.

I'm not sure. Is this sarcasm?

A woman’s biological reproductive system starts declining after around 30 if I recall correctly

Yeah, but in general it's not enough to impact having 2 kids. If getting pregnant for the first time at 30, you could wait the recommended 18 months between kids and still have two without it being a geriatric pregnancy. You don't need to start at 18 to have 2 kids.

That's not how pregnancy works. It can take quite a while to get pregnant. it's a bell curve. Certainly, a lot of couples will have another, but if you want to have another with a good chance of success (>90%), you have to start younger.

Where did you get that number? Under 35 still has a reasonably high chance of success. It's really after 35 that risks go up and likelihood goes down.

No. A few years ago, I looked at a study that said if you want three kids with >90% probability, you should marry at 23. For two kids, the age is 26-28 I think. This is the woman's age. Fertility decline rapidly after 30. Plus there's infertility between kids if you choose to breastfeed, etc. There's also a lot of other factors to consider that could delay having kids (miscarriages, difficulty conceiving, etc). Of course the father's age also matters but I don't have data on that.

> We even air TV shows (e.g. Teen Mom) meant to portray the ostracization young mothers face in an effort to not let others realize the same fate.

You don’t see any issue with people who haven’t even completed high school having children?

I have heard some suggest that the high school age has biological complications related to child birth. I have no expertise to delve into that topic.

Outside of those influences, in hindsight, the high school years would have been the perfect time to have children. They are virtually wasted years anyway, being old enough to be ready to start to spread your wings, but not considered old enough to do so. The time could be used productively to focus on the critical early years of rearing a child. Once you reach your prime, deemed ready to go out into the world and make something of yourself, your children will be starting to become independent. If you are well-off the financial supports are already in place, so that is moot.

However, in practice, it would be a challenge because of how society demonizes it. Humans are social creatures that rely on a stable society to survive. Being ostracized from that society is a complication one logically tries to avoid.

> Outside of those influences, in hindsight, the high school years would have been the perfect time to have children

Umm what? Am I offbase in assuming you dont have kids? Its absolutely not a great idea to have children in high school. And I have 2 sisters who did. Without getting into too many details, I think it would have been more stable and much, _much_ easier if they didn't have children that young. Not only are you losing out on so much as a parent, but you are not even equipped to deal with the harshness of life for yourself let alone a completely helpless other person. Whats your plan as a 16/17 year old for your kid having a 105 temperature and having to go to the ER unannounced? Whats your plan to pay for daycare? Are you moving in with your partner at this point or do you play a weird game of parents being "separated" and shuttling between the houses? Do you even own a car?

It makes no sense

> Am I offbase in assuming you dont have kids?

Yes. I do have children and in hindsight there would have been a lot of benefits having them much earlier in life.

> Not only are you losing out on so much as a parent

I lose out on so much now as a parent because I have adulting to do. When I was in high school what did I have to do with my time? Not much. Time that could have been put into the child. I also had way more energy to keep up with children, something that is much harder now that I'm older.

> Its absolutely not a great idea to have children in high school.

Yes, we firmly established in the environment where society demonizes having children, going against the grain will not lead to desirable outcomes. Going against society never ends well, no matter the topic. While your concerns are valid, they are the product of the very society that does not welcome children and ostracizes those who have them.

Again, people avoid having children young because it is socially unacceptable to do so. It is entirely logical to want to avoid fighting that given the importance of society to an individual. But, as said before, aside from those factors high school would be a great time to have children for a number of reasons. Indeed, there is never a perfect time to have children.

I dont know why you think the whole thing is just because of some social stigma. Nothing in my rebuttal cares about what society thinks. There are 10000 other things that are legit issues with having kids young before I get to "but what would my neighbor think".

> When I was in high school what did I have to do with my time? Not much. Time that could have been put into the child

Where are you getting all this magical time and money to be a responsible parent as a completely naive/inexperienced teenager? It presumes and absolutely requires someone else being able to take up the slack and provide for you as the parent because you are completely incapable of doing it without the help. I'm all for supporting parents who need the help, but I'm nowhere near suggesting "actually its best to have kids when you arent capable of raising them yourself". Not to mention the weird generational gap that then creates where your child now has their own child but is looking to you for guidance on how to raise them but you relied on grandma/grandpa for a lot of that maturity when you had them.

Also this is without considering the strain kids add to a relationship that somehow we think is magically going to be fine for a 16/17 year old.

> Nothing in my rebuttal cares about what society thinks.

Your entire "rebuttal" is about the lack of support structures that are missing exactly because society does not condone people having children. Something which was already established throughout the thread, being the core premise raised.

> I lose out on so much now as a parent because I have adulting to do. When I was in high school what did I have to do with my time? Not much.

Interesting--I feel the exact opposite: You have much more free time as an adult than you do in high school (or college age). When I was < 22 years old, a huge part of my life was in school, studying, cramming for tests, doing extra-curriculars, applying to colleges. Then once in college, it was 18 credits a year worth of classes, labs, the whole nine yards. Absolutely everything I did was scheduled and accounted for. Class at this time, sports practice at that time, music lessons here, club meetings there, and so on. Ain't no way I had time to raise a kid! Once I became an adult, I had what? Work and maybe set aside some time for bills/chores, but otherwise I needed to get a damn hobby in order to not go insane!

As my (tiger-ish) parents would have put it: If you're bored in High School, you're not spending enough time studying.

> If you're bored in High School, you're not spending enough time studying.

Wouldn't you rather spend the time studying when you're older? I have found studying to be much more enjoyable, and useful, the older I get. Having a breadth of experience to relate it to improves things substantially.

It is not so much being unable to find things to spend time at, but often it being a waste. Like cramming for tests. Looking back, who cares? If they are feel-good activities for you, great. Don't discount what you love. But if you are someone who wanted children, I'm sure spending time with children would have been worthwhile too.

Financially yes. But the way this has traditionally worked is there is a whole familial support structure that helps raise the kid so the teen mother is financially and structurally supported. I don’t condone teens having children but babies born at that age have the least number of complications and healthier dispositions.

It certainly seems like it would have a ton of challenges, but also pros, and, in a good family, seems quite manageable.

For example, my mother in law had children as a young teen. She advised her daughters against doing that, but she also had a bad family that didn't support her. She had five kids, the youngest, now 30, cumulatively, have fewer kids than she did. One example, of a benefit to having kids young, is fecundity.

My mother in law is also younger and can help with the grandkids more and can spend more time with them. Your late teens and twenties you're better about to function on low or interrupted sleep and keep up with a rambunctious little one. A young parent will likely be closer, in an experiential sense, to their children and that may lead to a closer relationship.

The challenges - mainly not being ready emotionally or financially, seem like the kind of thing that having a supportive family would address. If my children were to get pregnant at, say, fifteen, I'd expect to be the one financially responsible (or share the responsibility with the other grandparents) and same for childcare. I would expect to hand that responsibility over to the parents over the course of a decade or so.

The government could grow a spine and start enforcing 40 hour work weeks.

In fact, they could go further: 3 day work week. "What? 3? 4 was nuts, 3 is insane!" Before you balk, note that before bringing women into the workforce a typical couple contributed 5 out of 14 days to the workforce. 3*2 is 6, and 6/14 is more than 5/14. Also, 6/14 is less than 7/14 meaning parents are allowed to raise their children again. Wouldn't that be nice? Perhaps even nice enough to fix this stupid problem we made for ourselves?

Obviously it's not the 50s, and there is the matter of international competition to consider. Just remember: China has the same problem, but worse. Cooperation may be possible.

I don't have high hopes. Capital controls the world. Policy will continue to be "labor get rekt" for the foreseeable future, and in the most shortsighted and cynical way possible, with no allowance for the possibility that healthy balances might wind up being a win for everyone. With AI... it's going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.

This is just the natural progression of the gutting of the middle class. A middle class job in the 50s and 60s was MUCH easier on the home and social life. Unions were common and life was pretty civilized on the whole.

Since then we've been on a steady regression to the industrial revolution, where employers hold all the power and can use people as they see fit (i.e. forget working only 40 hours a week), and only the aristocracy can afford leisure and child care.

I 100% disagree. With the insanely low unemployment, workers hold more power than any time in human history.

Unions were a symptom of an abusive employer. As that abuse subsided, union representation waned.

We've just had 60 years of employer propaganda outspending unions. The WFH aspect of COVID was the first positive pushback for employees in decades.

There are two reasons why managers are so scared about this development. First, middle managers get promoted by being noticed by their superiors. Hard to do when nobody is in the office. Secondly, in a world where a manager can dictate whether your retirement is funded and whether you will be able to have your medical bills covered next month, suddenly we have a sense of power arising from the lowly hourly and salaried employees who once again learned that they have the power to say "no."

Those union jobs are not coming back. Globalization destroyed that. The rest of the world became richer (good thing) while in large parts of the US because poverty areas

There's some truth to this. There's also some truth to this generation not being willing to make the sacrifices their parents did. Like those super expensive tiny home in LA were the American Dream that their forebearers moved across the country for. For whatever reason this generation is much less likely to do the same and move to cheap places with decent jobs.

Yes they have a point that it shouldn't be so hard and they shouldn't have to move across the country to scratch out a living. But I don't see how living in your parents basement is better. You can play the hand you're dealt while fighting to make it better for the next generation.

Where pray tell are the cheap places with decent jobs besides Texas?

South and the Rust Belt

You get the award for most subtle attempt at rephrasing the "welfare queen" myth I've heard in a few years.

I mean, it wasn't that subtle, but yeah, subtle enough just for distraction.

I don't know how the situation is in the USA, but in Brazil we have the myth of mothers having 10 children just to get more money for each child.

Similar. It is very common to hear the right side of US politics claim poor minority women have multiple children just to get "free stuff" from the government, yet the same folks also want to make abortion illegal. Some people even claim the government will pay for your child if you are completely poor. The lies are astonishing, but the racism is necessary for their populist political message to work.

"Some people even claim the government will pay for your child if you are completely poor."

Is this not mostly true? It seems government does pick up the tab for impoverished children. School, school lunch, Medicaid, SNAP/WIC, and easier to get housing as a woman with kids (both through charities and HUD housing and grants).

I once had a man try to sell me his food stamps at a grocery store while his little kid was running up and down the aisle. He was the second person that day who tried to sell me his stamps (both offered roughly $100 worth for $80 cash, iirc).

I'm not against food stamps at all, and at one point came close to being on them myself. I don't judge people for needing assistance. When you see such flagrant abuses of the system, however, it tends to burn a little empathy out of you.

If you were on SNAP, you might have had some understanding around how much of a hassle it is. The list of things you can't buy is mystifying. $100 in raw chicken vs $80 to go towards hot meals, Advil and dog food might be a valid trade off when you have to watch over a kid who runs around a lot.

And if he had asked me to buy specific things for him, I might have actually done so. My grandfather (a poor farmer) regularly told a story about how a man asked him for money, and he turned the man down but bought him lunch instead.

Just handing a man $80 in cash and taking his food stamps means potentially enabling behaviors- alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.- that I don't want to enable. Maybe he just though that less hassle would have been worth having $20 less to spend, I dunno. I've been around enough alcoholics, drug addicts and con artists that I'm not going to just hand money out to people.

Putting in SRE terms, do you know the whole thing that at scale you will inevitably get errors and it can be counterproductive to try to eliminate them instead of setting an error budget? I think the same applies here. Is it productive to try to control every penny people in welfare spend? And that's a question that should be answered statistically: do the benefits outweigh the bad consequences?

Statistics guarantee that there will be a lot of anecdotes like the ones you've told. The question is: how representative they truly are? Again, I can only talk about my own country, but I hear the same speech here as well. Statistically speaking, though, just giving people money was the right way to go: most will spend in what they need and yeah, that's way more than just painstakingly-controlled government-allowed list of items. Birth rates actually dropped even more amongst welfare recipients, etc...

Some other people making claims shouldn't impact mine. At no point did I say that this was some sort of welfare scam. In fact my view elevates poor people from people who couldn't make it work within our society to people who may have looked at the options available to them and made a choice that has some logic behind it.

It’s also security. If you are born middle class and get middle class income but are worse off than your parents were, and have no housing or job security, you won’t start a family unless you’re irresponsible. You are falling behind relative your status quo. People want to provide at least as much for their children as their own parents could provide: stable housing situation, safe neighborhoods, etc.

> One side doesn't want to admit that a lot of poor people have a good bit of free time available to them, particularly those who receive social services.

I don't know for Japan. People work long even for lower salary.

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