Comment by k__
1 year ago
Could it be a hole that was created by improvements in women's rights?
My sister got three kids, but she got them after 30.
My mom and my grandma got their first child with 20.
1 year ago
Could it be a hole that was created by improvements in women's rights?
My sister got three kids, but she got them after 30.
My mom and my grandma got their first child with 20.
The women's rights movement came with both positive and negative effects that impact birth rates.
Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.
Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.
Or just birth control.
Your anecdote suggests pushing out the population but not causing it to decline.
It also causes a decline, because later pregnancies will also mean fewer children. Pregnancies after 35 are called "geriatric". (Actually, they now call it "advanced maternal age" to sound less insulting, but the older term conveys how much harder it is to get pregnant and fully gestate.)
A woman who waits until 30 to start a family is likely to not have one. It's a deeply unfortunate dilemma, because her male partner suffers much less decline.
Fair.
I just thought, maybe the decline is just temporary.
I think it's more that men's share of duties have not adapted to reflect the empowerment of women, combined with a system that continues to penalize women financially for having kids.
This suggests an optimum of 2 full-time working adults where after a long day at work they perfectly share the workload of chores.
This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.
Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.
Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.