The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Were fertility rates higher before because it was easier to raise children (to some required standard) then?
People smarter and better paid than I have speculated on the global, secular decrease in TFR and there's no single conclusive answer I'm aware of.
That being said, I personally lean towards a decrease in community and family support being major issues. Having siblings and parents nearby to help with looking after kids is a big help. Add in delayed child rearing (often due to lengthy higher education eating up potential fertile years) and people, like me, being concerned about how they're going to handle the time costs (or make enough money that they can trade it for other people's time). And to a degree, the heightened expectations and demand to micromanage worsen things as you contemplate, you can't just kick kids out till sundown to make their own entertainment these days in many places.
I'm confident I can bite the bullet if need be and have kids despite how daunting a prospect it seems, but it's looking like a damn hard thing to pull off.
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