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Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
I got reported? I had no idea. Seems the ganders don't like the sauce they were prescribing for the geese 😁
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Not a father, but not for lack of trying. My wife and I started adoption paperwork recently.
I would have liked to have gotten married at around age 21 or 22 (so not long after returning from my missionary work) and would have happily had kids right away, or after graduation (age 23-24) at the latest. But God definitely had something else in store for me. I'm 34 now.
That said, I think OP is right about most men not wanting to have kids young. Non-religious men who want to have families at a young age are the exception, not the rule.
People who are married, want kids, and are trying for them - I have no problem there.
I realise I came on strong, but do the people suggesting how to fix the 'fertility problem' not realise who they sound like?
The Taliban. You are the Taliban. Stop women going to school. Train girls that their duties are to be good wives and mothers, and not outside the home. Discourage women from trying to step outside the home. Some of the wilder suggestions that women should be under the authority of their fathers and not allowed their own choice in mates, because women make bad decisions about wanting only the alpha males (or whatever).
You at least dangle economic advantage for being parents as the carrot, but there's plenty of stick there. I wanted to point out would men accept such restrictions? And if not, why think that women would? And that it takes two to tango, it was both sexes got us to the point where we are now, and it's all very well for men to talk about women not wanting to settle for Mr. Okay, to get married early, and to start having a lot of kids (though nowadays apparently four counts as "a lot"), when they're single/childless themselves.
Mote and beam, people. That's what I meant. I want marriage and motherhood to be restored to a place of respect, because I think both feminism and the views expressed often in these discussions that woman are leeches (either they don't want to marry, or a man is a fool to marry because the woman will divorce him and strip him of all he has earned) has helped destroy the idea of marriage and parenthood for both sexes.
You won't fix it by trying to shackle women to the kitchen sink, if men aren't willing to step up and take the same medicine of early marriage and early fatherhood.
I still am confused by your thought process. You think there are hordes of men unwilling to marry in their early 20s a girl who went to school with him either HS or college? The stats all say that 21 year old apprentice carpenter Joe can't even get a date with 21 year old hair stylist Jane. Instead she exclusively dates 28 year old attorneys in the top 10% of attractiveness, despite being average looking herself. Those 28 year old attorneys juggle 15 Janes up till Jane turns 31, then he marries 28 year old attorney and a 9.5/10 Jill and Jane is looking around wondering what went wrong. Meanwhile Joe has gone through 10 years of never getting a date.
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I'm sure the Taliban are more than willing to administer that medicine, so your accusation doesn't hold up.
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Father here, don't have a ton of time to respond -- I need to think more about what I'd want to say here, but I think @FarNearEverywhere's rant is basically right. Putting together a family with lots of kids is a lot of work and requires a total mindset change and buy-in from both spouses. It's not fair to blame it on women in #currentyear when, as best I can tell, young men aren't remotely interested in the hard work it takes to be a good husband or father -- too easy to play vidya and watch porn and bang whoever swipes the right direction on Tinder (swipes left? I actually don't know).
Or ... as we've seen in at least two responses below, too easy to say "Oh we're gonna have a family for sure, just not yet because we're waiting on the right economic conditions / career to come along / degree to finish." etc. My wife and I got married right after undergrad and had three kids while I was doing a PhD and she was in nursing school. We had help from the grandparents to pay the rent, but no childcare -- nearest grandparents were 1,000 miles away. It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.
Until you change the culture such that the sacrifice and hard work it takes to make a family actually seems worth it, you won't get buy-in from anyone ... men or women.
We have five kids now and one of them is special needs, low-functioning autistic. It's a lot of work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
That is what I was griping about; the suggestions that "don't let women go on to college, just get them married out of high school". And who will they marry? Because if you want a 19 year old wife and mother who does not work outside the home, then the man being the breadwinner is going to have to be older, as in his thirties. So young men will still be out of luck on the dating/marriage front. They'll be going to college to get the good jobs to be able to afford to marry and set up a household, and in the meantime they will date - who?
This is just as ridiculous as the marriage bar put on young men by places like the Indian Civil Service (in the time of the Raj) where you weren't permitted to marry without permission, and that could take years as your career advanced. So of course the men took up with native mistresses. What will the equivalent be for the world of young wives and mothers? The double standard of whores.
Kipling has an entire story around this very topic:
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This appears to be a common trope that has been endlessly repeated in mainstream discourse for decades without basis. Do many people actually believe that young men in droves are opting to binge online porn and video games instead of seeking long-term relationships with women because they’re just lazy and entitled, somehow brainwashed by bad actors into believing that such relationships are only for losers?
Clearly far too few people here have read The Last Psychiatrist. And he was no fan of porn users.
I think TLP's model of addiction/escapism is correct. Men are heavy users of vidya and porn because they are failing otherwise, not failing because they are heavy users. Yes, there is a feedback loop at play here, But any guy in his right mind will ditch the vidya and porn the moment he sees a glimmer of hope. When all else fails, is when they get into the vidya and porn because what the fuck else are you going to do? booze? fentanyl?
You need to ease your mind somehow. God I hate the level of vilification video games get by serial twitter scroller and netflix watchers. Totally not the same waste of time, you are totally better than the filthy gamers.
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I am not sure about "droves." There is (or, was) a strain of thought in red pill/manosphere type places that long term relationships with women are a suckers game because she'll just divorce you and take all your stuff and so its better to have a series of casual relationships than settle down and be taken advantage of. At the extreme end this culminated in Men Going Their Own Way who would definitely agree that video games and porn are better than interacting with women.
I am not sure about the prevalence of these beliefs but they're definitely out there.
They are out there because it is a very real problem. Women consistently fail to date men in their same attractiveness percentile, and also much more often terminate relationships.
I am not sure how to interpret this part. Is it a bad thing for women to date men in a different "attractiveness percentile?" Why?
It is bad for them and society. Imagine a high school with 10 girls and 10 boys, they graduate, and pair off. Ideally, they'd find someone about as attractive and successful as them or some combination and you'd have 10 couples. What actually happens is that all 10 girls end up rejecting all but the top boy for dates. The one guy then bangs the 10 girls for a while until he ends up settling down with the #1 or #2 girl, and now there are 9 women who have spent ages 16-30 in meaningless relationships with a guy they never really had a chance with. Meanwhile, guys 2-10 have not gotten any dates at all, and now are 30 and depressed and the unlucky girls go running in search of the next version of #1 guy until they are 35 and settle for mr #5. Then they divorce him ten years later because they still, deep down, think they have a chance with Mr #1. Meanwhile guys 6-10 never get a date at all for the rest of time.
I am skeptical there is empirical data to support the idea that this is an accurate description of reality.
That aside I'm not sure I see what the problem is. If the ten women would rather spend time dating one guy than dating different guys that seems fine? It's their lives. This description makes it sound like all the women who aren't eventually going to end up with the man they are dating are wronging the other men by not dating them but I don't think that's true.
This is based on dating app data and divorce filings.
I suppose you could look at it like that, but its a cause of low fertility, and basically every woman who ends up in this situation regrets it. There is substantial polling data that women want more children (in the US) than they end up having, and a large cause of this is early-20s hypergamy loops that result in them not marrying until far too late.
Its bad for them and the men, and they are the ones in control of the situation. That is an accurate description of the situation. "Wronging" is not the word I'd use, but it is bad.
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No I think they're doing it for the same reason all sorts of socialization is falling. Dating, going to church, joining a bowling league, requires upfront investment for uncertain return in the future. Church is super boring, most dates end in rejection, the other guys at the bowling league aren't actually that interesting. Opening up your phone to scroll social media, jack off, argue with the exact sort of online weirdo you like arguing with gives consistent instantaneous positive reward for minimal expenditure of time, money effort.
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I'm very very anti the behaviour of modern progressive women but this here is absolutely true. Women shouldn't be expected to shoulder the burden for having children while men go off and be degenerate, if you want a tradwife you better be a tradhusband. The modern man truly deserves the modern woman.
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This is a pretty uncharitable reading, Would it be fair for your father's generation to scold you for not having kids until all the way at the end of your extended academic lifr? It's not some vague excuse, we're going to have kids but we just bought our first home and have some shit to get together, nursing school is tough and all but residents work 10 hour days 6 days a week for the first few years and you would be the only person in your cohort doing the thing. We have a window that makes sense for us and plan. We are making the best of the hand we were dealt.
But really do you think the stuff you wrote after is even disagreeing with what the thread was saying? The culture is not the same as it once was - there are developmental markers either new or moved by economic reality. This is the topic at hand, you don't need to sneer at us to contribute. It's great for you that you were able to have kids in that window, you could probably afford to buy a house before your thirties too. This is not how things were/are for many of us. And it's not just the economics, social media changed how men and women meet/relate to each other, it's discussed in this thread, a huge amount of women are 100% not interested in the deal you proposed to your wife in your day and would reject it if you proposed it today. If you're assuming you'd have a like minded partner you've already bypassed the largest part of the issue. And I get it, letting the part of my brain constantly worried about my status around potential partners atrophy is one of my favorite parts of being in a long term committed monogamous relationship. But you seriously have no fucking idea what you're talking about, as if some 19 year old broke college student competing with grown men with expendable resources a tinder click away is supposed to by pure force of will find a partner with which to settle down immediately.
Yes, there are exceptions. But as a whole there are concerning differences between the landscape our generations have. The landscape my generation inherited is badly broken along family formation, and we didn't build it. you did.
In my particular case, it wouldn't be fair because it wouldn't be true. We got married after undergraduate and started having kids right away and we had three children while I was doing my PhD and my wife was doing nursing school. I'm not sure what the grandparents would have thought if we had waited; I think my folks would have been sad but understanding and supportive and I think my wife's parents would have been relieved -- they were convinced I was ruining their daughter's life by marrying her young and having kids right away, but they ended up liking being grandparents a lot more than they thought and now they make jokes about how they're they only people in their friend circle who even have grandkids. My wife's brothers are firmly in the "never going to get married or have kids because I'm having too much fun doing my own stuff" camp and they have committed girlfriends who broadly feel the same way as best I can tell.
By the by, I'm not sure how old you thought I am, but I'm 32. We got married at age 21 and you are completely, totally right about the landscape changing, trying to date nowadays with dating apps seems like a complete nightmare.
Upvoted for correctly calling me out on the snark. I appreciate the rest of your post, and I wrote my response quickly and without having read the rest of the thread in detail, so let me try this again:
The initial, top-level post was made in the larger context of how to fix declining TFR. My own perception is that the vast majority of responses center on changing incentives for women and critiquing their behavior and I don't see the top-level post in this thread as deviating much from that.
@FarNearEverywhere wrote a snippy (and, apparently, reported) response saying that it's very silly to complain about changing women's incentives and their role in the problem when it takes two to tango and you could just as easily complain about men's incentives and their role in the problem. I agree with other posters that there are some legitimate asymmetries here, but I am in complete agreement with FarNearEverywhere's sentiment because as best I can tell, modern men aren't exactly lining up to be husbands and fathers either. The post ended with a call-out saying if you aren't the married father of 3+ kids, you shouldn't be whining about women because you aren't pulling your weight either. I read that and thought I should reply at some point.
As the discussion developed, a few posters (you and someone else below) chimed in with their own situations of intending to have kids in a stable marriage, but wanting to wait out a particularly challenging time in someone's career / school. This is where I was the most sarcastic, so let me try to say this more clearly and with more charity:
My sense is that one reason TFR is low is because the culture writ large doesn't prioritize, reward, or glorify parenthood. I think this is true across both sexes. It takes a lot of hard work and a total mindset change and devotion to the your spouse and the family to be a good father or mother and it increasingly seems to me that modern men and women just aren't interested in that. The idea that you should make sacrifices generously of yourself in service of the larger goal of your family just ... isn't an idea out there, at the moment.
I think there's always going to be a sense in which kids are scary. There's always going to be some financial insecurity or relationship concern or thing you enjoy doing that you'd have to give up; you can always justify why it would be better to hold off for just a little bit longer. However, it was wrong of me to throw shade at your specific situation. We've had times of avoiding pregnancy and we've had times where we're actively trying to have another kid. Far be it from me to judge you without knowing the specifics and I'm sorry for doing that.
I think the broader point I'd try to make is that at the end of the day, if parenthood is something our culture wants to value, there has to be an overriding attitude of "Just have the kids anyway, it will be okay" because raising a family is a good valued above economic security or self-actualization or maximizing utility or what have you.
But right now, I don't think the culture or most individuals value raising a family in that way, men and women alike.
(posting without editing, because I gotta run and teach)
I regret getting snippy as well, there is something about being critiqued for not reaching mile stones you desperately wanted to reach earlier but were prevented for reasons that at least from a first person perspective don't appear as if they were within your control. Perhaps this is a source of @FarNearEverywhere's consternation as well.
I think we are broadly in agreement about the general shape of the problem, the culture simultaneously makes having kids before settling into a career swimming against the grain and at the same time has pushed that "settled into your career" date back further and further. There is a pervasive meme about getting knocked up young and it upsetting the compounding interests of your life, it's presented like eating the seed corn of your potential, this is present in tons of media and we're bombarded with sentiments like 'you should enjoy your youth and not be in a hurry to settle down'. I'm not sure where this meme comes from but it seems at least complementary to a set of clearly feminist derived memes pushing the importance of women having careers and grabbing and 'equitable' amount of power, as if raising the next generation is not a seat of immense cultural power. These memes vilify the past where men and women struggled mightily together to support families as some kind of trap women were caught in and women seem to have taken the lesson as avoiding getting caught.
At the same time their compliment mgtow/pua memes that also distort the picture and make supporting a wife seem like a bad deal to men. I think this is also wrong but would at least point to the total lack of institutional support of these memes while acknowledging that the likes of Tate are more widely followed than I'd like. It's all so toxic and I think it says bad things about western society that it sets the sexes against each other instead of leveraging or differences for the greater good.
But, and I understand this undermines the centrist framing I just established, but it really does seem like the balls is in the court of women. If a woman decides she wants to get married early and start a family the option is available to her in a way that it simply isn't for nearly all men. Men are certainly not perfect in making this as attractive of an option as they theoretically could, but I'd hazard it's at least as attractive as it's ever been. I can't just ignore that it is pretty obviously that case that if we want enough babies to continue our civilization then women need to make different choices than the ones they are largely making. Nothing men can reasonably expected to do can get around that fact.
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Very true, but what are you doing to fix it for the next generation? Family formation is a fundamental building block of society and it being broken is a symptom of a societal disease. Sure, you didn't catch the disease yourself, but your generation is content to let the disease continue.
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Father of four here and I am pretty much in agreement with you. It does make me sound old to complain about the young'uns of today not having what it takes but I suppose that is one of the few advantages of the passing years. I think the "women are too picky" is just an excuse just as much as the "Oh we're gonna have kids when the time is right"
If you really want a wife/husband and kids in the West, most people can, you just have to push for it, and prioritize it above other things.
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