New study reports 1 in 5 adults don't want children, and don't regret it later
phys.org
phys.org
For the sake of unwanted children, I wish it worked that way. The article, at least, seems to conflate a bunch of things. It’s bizarre to read.
I find the lack of correlation with income surprising. My own experience has been that people of lower income tend to have more kids when they do and are more likely to be stuck in codependent relationships.
My perspective has always been that higher income individuals don't regret skipping kids because they have their investments to take care of them in old age, they're happier because they had better control of their finances and time throughout their life, and they aren't necessarily lonely because high income individuals tend to find each other and can keep it casual indefinitely... I guess I'm wrong, or is Michigan not as good of a sample as the article believes?
There is very little hope for a free future, and that won't change because too much profit backs it. All the corporations care for is profit and coercion, all the politican's care for is increasing power and grandstanding. There is no actual representation left, and politicians don't see inaction as violating oaths they swore.
The previous generation grew up having certain minimal things, and then proceeded to enrich themselves, and remove those same opportunities from future generations. Generations since have come to find out the many of these promises were not true, they were lied to and not only that, they were stolen from on a grand scale to fund benefits that only benefit one aging generation (social security).
People have choices, and for a growing number of people, they find it would be inhumane to bring a child into a world where that child would be no better than a slave and suffer. Hence we are seeing the last generation for a lot of intelligent people.
The way things are going, we are headed for an inevitable collapse on scale never before seen. A railroad track going off a cliff, and we are racing down it at full speed.
Without the most modern technology, we can only feed 2-4 billion max. When things break, and they will because current systems are engineered to be brittle with single points of failure because that is most profitable, at least half dies.
Who would ever wish this on their children, let alone engineer it such that the people that want to stop it are prevented from doing so (for profit)?
Its a race to the bottom, where only the ruthless, unethical, and lucky survive.
The opening montage of the distressingly precient Idiocracy is literally an illustration of this premise. The message is that the world gets into the state that it is 5 centuries later based on a dramatic shift in who's having children in the present era. Spoiler alert, it's not the intelligent people.
Humans do not have an objective way to rate their subjective judgement of quality of life.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
>> Focusing on adults aged 70 or older, we find that parents express more life regret (M = 3.87, SE = 0.20) than childfree adults (M = 3.30, SE = 0.39), but that the difference is not statistically significant (t127 = 1.29, p = 0.20). This suggests that childfree adults do not experience more life regret than parents in their late years of life.
Is "life regret" a 1-5 discrete measurement? I'd like to see the distribution of sample measurements. p=0.2 feels strong enough for me to at least consider the possibility of no children == more regret (correlated, if not causal)
You got the correlation backwards. In their sample, parents experienced more regret.
Having kids doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can really judge without having had kids.
Especially since you're basically manipulated by biology once the process starts.
Some kids are so much easier to raise, it's not always a fair comparison.
Because if you agree there'd variance, then you must agree that some kids would have more bad behaviour then others.
Also, do you think mental illnesses are binary?
Kids can be raised in exactly the same way and turn out vastly different. My wife is pretty similar to her siblings. I only share a couple of personality traits with my sister, and as such we’re very different people.
Most of the research points to nature being way more heavily weighted than nurture. Most people don’t want to admit this. For parents it’s hard because you feel powerless. For everyone else they want to attribute their good/bad traits to how they were raised instead of attributing it to biology.
You might be surprised. I've certainly heard it.
I am increasingly uneasy about it, though, because I feel I brought them into a world that is worse than the one I was in, and without an encouraging trendline in the medium term.
I will say that I’ve never heard it from my wealthy friends. I imagine it’s a lot easier to not regret the decision when you can outsource childrearing from infancy onward, and spoil your children rather than deal with the drama that results from saying “no, we can’t afford that.”
I bet some, very few, people do truly regret it. I best the vast majority of those who say they do will have a different answer if you ask again later.
Life-changing doesn't even begin to describe it. Everything changes.
Now he's 11, it's all about him figuring stuff out, and it's kind of awesome to see the thinking going on when he's trying for malicious compliance... Which I let him get away with, as long as it's within the rules he was given. No better way to train a brain :)
You don't do a startup because it was going to be easy. Highs and lows. In both cases you are crafting something deeply personal. Both take commitment and sheer will. Having the right co-founder is paramount.
- Tolstoy in War and Peace
It would be interesting to add to that: % of people who regret having kids
That's a statistic I'd like to see.
The demographics question is one that every industrialized country is going to have to face.
East Asia and Europe will have to reckon with it first, but the same trends are playing out in North and South America, South and West Asia, etc
If you'd read the rules when you signed up (as we all are required to), you'd have noticed its against HN rules to comment about votes. Secretly I think they have a bot that goes and does it based on keywords, but I haven't gotten any confirmation.
It happens, and breaking the rules typically will cause you to lose karma.
You have to be careful with a new account because if your karma goes negative your posts get auto hidden, and if its beyond -5 you may have the account go dead and it will be closed. Its just how it is.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, but begrudging those who do is folly.