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Ivan Fyodorovich's avatar

Okay, I wanted more children and I am now vasectomized and stuck at two. What I noticed is different about "these days" is that the kind of discipline that my wife and I experienced, and that our parents experienced even more, is no longer an option. I was scared of my dad, my wife was scared of her dad. My children are not scared of me. I will never hit them, I will never punish them in ways that could scare or upset them too much. To be clear, it is good in ways not to be feared. My children cuddle up to me, they draw pictures and write "I love you daddy" and give them to me just because they feel like it. I get a lot more warmth and love from my children than my dad did. The problem though is that everything is a negotiation. They get dressed, the older one does her homework etc, but it requires a level of persuasion and nagging that makes handling more than two impractical. What stops me from "detaching" is that we wouldn't get to school on time and homework wouldn't happen and they would get to bed at 11pm.

The widespread availability of cheap plastic toys collides catastrophically with the lower discipline. I let my kids have an hour or two of unstructured play time this morning (it's a holiday here in Canada) and there are sticker pads covering our dining room floor. Part of why I'm always taking them places like Jane is talking about is because they are constantly making messes they don't clean up and if they are somewhere else our house stays clean.

My understanding is that the fall in fertility is almost across the board, even Mormons in Utah are having fewer kids, and I think it's because they are ultimately plugged into the same culture. The Menonites and Haredim are the only people isolated enough to resist the trend.

This website is a nice mixing board for Blue and Red tribe, John and Jane and Trads reading this, how do you manage? Is there a way of having large families without unpleasant (and in Blue tribe circles, basically illegal) discipline?

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gregvp's avatar

Excellent summary! I was nodding my head, agreeing with both of you all the way down the scroll bar. Some glosses and flourishes:-

John is not materialist enough, perhaps. Young adults are delaying childbirth. As simple as that. If you start having children at 18 or 20, you can have many more of them than if you start at 32 or 36. It's simple arithmetic and biology. People end up having fewer children than they want, because they start later than they want, or not at all.

This delay does not necessarily depend on the existence of the Pill, nor on procrastination *per se*. Especially if women exercise some agency in selecting mates. It's a consequence of urbanisation and daily lived experience.

In a village, a young woman may have a pool of say a hundred young men from whom to choose. On moving to a city, she sees thousands of men on a daily basis, and is aware of the existence of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of possibly suitable men, out there somewhere. More choice means more time spent choosing. Humans are weird that way.

Dating apps exacerbate this effect by their mere popularity, leaving aside the misaligned incentives of their makers (to keep people on the apps, not to find them a mate). The apps are an enormous virtual city in which there are suddenly millions of possible choices. That is why they are so awful for everyone (except their owners, bwahahaha jingle jingle).

You both came so close to using the c-word, credentialism, but both shied away at the last possible second. High-investment achievement-oriented parenting makes perfect sense in a credentialist world, which is inherently a zero sum arms race. It's incredibly stressful for the parents and produces damaged kids, but Moloch doesn't care.

(Credentialism explains the U shape of the curve of fertility versus income. I'm sceptical of the scepticism, it's looking like an isolated demand for rigor.)

In a credentialist world the incentives are to delay having children, once again. This explains the shift in marriage from cornerstone to capstone (Delano, 2013): from being an early event in the life of an adult to being the crowning achievement of a successful life.

Homo economicus is not a required assumption for any of this either. People copy what the people around them do.

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