Comment by wyager
5 years ago
The problem creating demand for later-in-life fertility services for women is that the current structure of our society heavily penalizes women who don’t career-optimize during the years in which child-rearing would be (physically and mentally) least taxing and difficult. Long-term, I suspect the best answer will involve changing this structure rather than relying on complex medical interventions.
One scheme I think might make sense for the modern life trajectory is to have child-rearing skip a generation. This has a lot of medical, social, professional, and economic upside, and I suspect it more closely mirrors the way humans evolved to manage family groups.
In certain cultures rearing by grandparents already happens. I’d be interested in any longitudinal studies, though it’s hard to disentangle confounders.
That said, I don’t know that economic factors are important as social ones. If they were you’d expect to see something different in couples where the husband earns much more than the wife, but in my observation those women wait about as long as their friends in marriages where the salaries are more similar. The social context seems far more determinative.
To be fair, I would rather have me at 40 instead of 20 raising my own kids, instead of relying on my parents.
Why’s that? NB You’d also have your spouse’s parents.
You think pre-historic humans skipped generations?
More like the older people would probably be less likely to be out hunting elk or whatever physical activities and more likely to be watching the children. I doubt it would have been codified or anything.
I still don't understand the distinction you are making. At first I thought that you meant that literally a generation would not procreate. But now I think you are trying to say that young adults would not be doing child rearing. Are you suggesting that mothers would return to physical labor right after birth to defer child rearing to elders, or after breast-feeding? That mothers would somehow not be present as much as elders?
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