Am I the only one who thinks you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them? That includes sorting out your education and jobs.
Seriously, what actionable advice for this context are we to take from the statement that "you shouldn't have a child if you haven't yet set up a stable environment for them"?
Lots of people have children right now without a stable environment for them. Unless you have access to a time machine, I don't see anything useful coming from your statement for them.
Lots of people in the future will have children without a stable environment, for a variety of reasons ranging from just really wanting one to birth control failures to sudden disability or job loss. What's your proposal for stopping this? I assume you're aware that just going around saying "you shouldn't do it" doesn't actually stop it.
Children aren't always intentional, and birth control isn't cheap, especially for someone who works near-minimum wage jobs. Add to that the general lessening of availability of birth control due to conservative influences in the United States, and you get an environment in which birth control is hard to effectively use—especially if you're on an erratic schedule, which this woman is.
Not to mention the US, Japan, and most if Europe is already below the replacement rate. Without immigration we are a dying society suggesting we need even fewer kids is a great way to end up extinct.
Reolistically, in the long term we need to support young parents with policies that promote having more kids or accept that 'the American way of life' is a dead end doomed to failure.
Note the chart, US has been below the replacement rate ~2.1 births per woman since 1975.
PS: It's a fairly well established trend across a wide range of cultures which might change over the long term as populations shrink. However, my point is not that it's currently an issue for us, just that discouraging births is probably a bad idea.
Sorting it out requires predicting ~20 years of social and technology changes, which is a pretty high bar. A stable job today might not be stable in 5 years, if employment conditions change (as they seem to be changing in the case discussed here). I suspect in the medium-term future there will be very few stable jobs at all.
Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment. Perhaps child-bearing should be limited to people with at least $100k in the bank to cover emergencies, plus a STEM degree? Maybe a savings account and a STEM degree and N years of experience, to make sure they aren't one of those people with a CS degree who can't code?
Alternately, here is a good way of ensuring a minimum level of economic stability for everyone: a social safety net. Used successfully by countries ranging from Germany to Singapore to Sweden! I think there is some cultural difference in how to perceive kids as a starting point, though. Here (Denmark) such programs are particularly popular when aimed at parents, because parents are seen as performing a service for society, in raising the next generation. That feels to many people like something that is not only the parents' responsibility to support financially, since the kids will become the next generation of the country's citizens, not only the next generation of their specific family.
For what it's worth I wouldn't have a kid without $1 million in liquid assets set aside for him. It seems evil to me to have a kid without enough money to feel confident he'll never have to work for money. But then most people think I'm nuts.
If everybody did that it would cause a demographic crisis. Who exactly do you expect to be looking after you when you are retired (growing your food, manufacturing your medication, diagnosing your ailments etc etc) and only 0.01% of the population have had children in the last 50 years.
Other people having children is actually a vital service to the rest of society. Or at least those of us hoping to live for at least another 30-40 years, which will require a younger generation to provide the goods and services we will need to stay alive.
This point seems to be missed by a lot of libertarians (who are frequently childless single young men) in their anger about parents getting support from the government.
That's irrelevant, because developed countries (i.e. the countries that are in the position to have a social safety net) almost universally have shrinking populations, not growing ones.
It's not irrelevant. More people (especially more people in developed countries) = more CO2. You can't spin that away. Even if the US population goes from 300M to 200M, that would produce more CO2 than going from 300M to 100M.
It's a good thing for you (and all of us) that most people think you're nuts. If the threshold for having a kid was $1MM in the bank, our population would crash and our economy would be doomed.
By the time you have $1 million you will be too old to have a kid (especially if female).
People really need to start getting married earlier. If you marry in your early twenties having a child at that time is not a problem, even if you don't have tons of savings yet.
And aside from the biology of having a child late, simply raising a child is much harder when you are older (late thirties), because your energy level really starts diverging from theirs. (Obviously you can make it work, I'm only saying it gets harder.)
I'm pretty sure men can have children into their 70s. And with $1 million I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
> I'm pretty sure men can have children into their 70s.
Sometimes, but sperm quality declines, leading to more birth defects and it takes longer to succeed. And a 70 year old is simply not a suitable father.
I assume you were planning a may/cecember marriage? Which is pretty cruel to the wife, and to the kids who will loose their father MUCH too early.
Kids need their father very much in their 30's. If you are waiting long enough that you are dead, or even just declined you are not doing well by them.
> I don't have to raise the kid by myself like normal people. I can use nannies and boarding schools.
You don't even have kids and already you hate them?
> My parents already gave a standard middle-class upbringing. If I can't do better by my children, what's the point?
OK, now you REALLY make no sense. A sentence before you want to give them a horrible childhood (using nannies too much leads to attachment issues, and various disorders).
And now you want to do better?
I have a feeling you have no idea whatsoever about what children actually need out of childhood. It's not money. It's love, attention, and approval. Having lots of money is detrimental to all of them.
And your standard is ridiculous anyway - if every generation refused to have kids until they could do it "better" no one at all would have kids.
Without trying to poke holes in your economic assumptions (which I think I could), giving your kid 15K a year seems a lot less valuable than teaching them self reliance, logical reasoning, frugality, a love of education/learning, work ethic, etc.
You can do all of those things without being a rich parent, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that a trust fund impairs someones ability to learn these things.
The idea that teaching a kid to make their own way in the world is cruel seems downright backwards to me...
Well they didn't choose to be born so leaving them with the option of killing themselves or spending most of their lives doing things they don't enjoy just to stay alive seems cruel to me.
I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
> or spending most of their lives doing things they don't enjoy just to stay alive seems cruel to me.
I assume you mean poverty? The parent having money is associated with kids having less money later in life, but it's not the cause of it.
If you want them to do things they enjoy give them skills and confidence. If you give them money instead you do them harm.
> I would hope I could teach them all of those things you outlined and have them be happy and productive on their own terms, not some other rich guy's.
You can't. It's a reality of humanity that giving people things too easily leads to misery. People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them. If you are willing to learn from the replies you got then you'll do fine.
You can work hard and be successful at something that's not particularly economically valuable. I happen to enjoy writing software and people happen to want to pay for it but most people's lives (see TFA) consist of doing boring bullshit they hate 40h+ out of the week just to put food on the table. It's an awful waste of human life.
When you have money, you can pursue anything you want indefinitely. Even if it takes you 20 years to become a great painter or writer or bass guitarist, there's no pressure along the way to quit and get a job as a barrista to pay rent.
>I'm very tempted to advise you not to have kids because of your weird views, but I won't, because I suspect you are actually just testing out your views to see what other people think of them.
You have good perception, that's definitely part of it :)
Honestly, I never remember caring whatsoever as a child whether or not my parents spent time with me. I didn't have anything in common with them anyways. A credit card and a new Benz on my 16th birthday, however, would have completely changed my memories of what could have been the best years of my life but which were instead wasted indoors on the internet because I couldn't afford to do anything else.
> People need to WORK for their success if they are to be happy.
I would guess this is not true on average. If anything, I would guess the opposite: the Waltons, Kochs, Kennedys, etc., who inherited their money and are able to do whatever kind of bullshit they want with it, are happier.
"Ah but degrees don't guarantee you stable employment."
If the degree benefits your employment chance, you should have done it before you have kids. If the degree does not benefit your employment chance, then why do it at all? Either way, finish it before.
Look, what I don't understand is people having kids, knowing fine well that they don't have the time and/or money to support them and then whine for public funding and about a lack thereof. The whole thing is completely self-inflicted. Why should the state support people who lack the most basic amount of foresight and coerce everyone else into paying for their faults?
No, it's inflicted by a broken society. In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living. This allows both a flexible economic system (entrepreneurship, job-changing, etc.) and family life to coexist: your company going bankrupt does not mean your kid can't attend school or eat. The American solution seems to be that people should have a corporate job for life with the old IBM or Amoco, which provides both ultra-stable employment and benefits (company-provided childcare, parental leave, health insurance, etc.) and only those people are "deserving" of having kids.
No, it's not. The broken society didn't make the woman pregnant and give birth. Also, 'broken' sounds really melodramatic.
"In a working society, at least a working first-world society, everyone has at least a basic standard of living."
Is having and maintaining a Ferrari a basic standard of living? No? Well, that's how expensive kids are, no, they're even more expensive.
That is a very ambitious basic standard you're setting here. Obviously, this is going to cost uninvolved people heaps of money just because everyone thinks they are entitled to make as many children as they want regardless of their ability to support them. It's a huge burden on everyone else's back. The pinnacle of selfishness.
Unlike having a nation full of Ferraris, having a nation where at least a replacement-rate of kids are born is necessary to keep it from aging and eventually dying out. Human reproduction is not a random consumer product, but an integral part of the continuation of human societies. Therefore, society puts in place a social system to ensure that kids can be raised, educated, etc., but does not put in place a system to ensure widespread Ferrari ownership.
I didn't have children until my 40's (admittedly, that's probably kind of too late). Why? Because I wanted to have a stable marital and financial situation in place for them. If you have no husband and no job, you shouldn't be having children just barely out of your teenage years. Children don't happen by "accident".
And you're very right, nowadays people feel that they're entitled to a Ferrari just for being alive. Our society sure has changed in recent decades.
Bah. Watch me get voted down along with you. I don't care. It needs to be said.
Can I guess that you grew up in an environment where you were taught, either by family or schools about birth control? That you had healthy role models about what a stable family looks like? That it was odd where you grew up for people to have children in high school? Or that you were taught how to calculate how much time/money it takes to support a child?
If so, you grew up with enormous privilege. Lots of people are born into situations where none of that is true. Some truly exceptional folks are born without any of that privilege, make what we consider to be mistakes in family planning, before learning any of that, and still strive to make their lives better. I for one would like there to be resources available to help them escape that brutal cycle.
Saying that it is self-inflicted shows a gross myopia about how much of the world lives and implying that the most vulnerable and weakest amongst us can coerce us into doing anything is laughable.
What degrees offered 15 years ago are irrelevant today? Honest question here, as someone who dropped out of college 10 years ago, I've no idea of how academia works in that direction.
No, it isn't common sense. It's a wise decision to make under a certain set of socio-economic conditions, which may not apply uniformly to everyone that you encounter.
Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job.
This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants.
Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care.
So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.
if you already know that you definitely won't be okay
This "okayness" is something people determine by looking at their community and peer group, not by looking at statistics. It's the same effect that causes the middle class to buy houses and cars that it can't really afford.
Access and funding for reproductive health care and education have been cut severely by many U.S. state legislatures in the past several years. See, for example: https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/war-women
You're not the only one; there are a great many people who have the same opinion. Not that you aren't entitled to your opinions, and this one in particular, but the fact is the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought.
"the particular opinion you've expressed is filled with assumptions and implicit assertions that aren't justified by any empirical data or analytical thought."
Do you mind explaining what you mean in particular? It sounds rather vague.
Sure. Your opinion includes implicit assertions regarding all the things that go into "sorting out education and jobs". In particular, the core assertion is that it's possible to do so and that it is something that's feasible or a reasonable expectation in all cases (hint: it's neither, in some cases and in particular cases involving poverty and families on the lower end of the income spectrum). You're implicitly asserting, almost to the point of making it tautological, that people who aren't born into privilege ought not have children.
The assumptions are the usual assumptions born of such thinking (e.g. that the poor or the uneducated are incapable of sorting out their own lives, much less of "properly" raising children).
Some people will never get the opportunity to have a stable environment... through no fault of their own. Does that mean they should never have the opportunity to be parents?
There are a bunch of people on HN who would say "Yes, people without X amount of money shouldn't be allowed to have children."
And I think that's a sad world to be in where income dictates your ability to have kids. I think having kids is a right that one should be able to exercise regardless of income and it is a problem with our society that we cannot support low-income families, not a problem with the low-income parents. The fact that we have poverty-level income families with 5 or 7 kids is a failing of the education system. Nobody wants their kids to suffer. If proper education & birth-control & social resources were available a little before high-school, I bet this issue would be nearly eliminated in that parents would know themselves not to have an inordinate number of kids.
Any society that does not structure itself such that each adult can be biological parent to at least two children without significant penalty to their own quality of life is not going to be stable in the long term. That's not even a full replacement rate.
I can see a case for "People without f(N) money shouldn't be allowed to have an Nth child, for N>2." It would be quite the intrusion on liberty, but I understand how people who act as K-strategists wouldn't want their offspring to be overwhelmed by r-strategists.
It's really complex, and I can see where you're coming from, but I wouldn't call it a right.
I also agree that society should be better structured to accomodate and support parenthood. Many European countries are doing it right.
What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children (and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I've sometimes had thought experiments along the lines of: if you're in welfare or otherwise financially dependant, then you should have your ability to procreate temporally restrained (there have been some amazing advances recently in reversible contraception). That would cut hard on these cases. It's not "forced" (you want to have children? sure, but don't ask for welfare), and it would allow for resources to be distributed much better to those who chose to have children and then fell on hard times (it can be the case, though the lack of a parent in the story suggests it was a case of irresponsibility and lack of contraceptives).
>>What I'm personally ambivalent about is people forcing me to support other peoples' children, when I have delayed having my own children(and I'm in a stable relationship and we both want children) because I don't believe I'm financially able to support them.
I actually believe as a society we should be okay supporting them. But there's a caveat. The preventative measures in place we currently have in society are not working because, IMHO, we waste too much money in WarOnDrugs and questionable wars. If we could stop doing that and ramp up the education & availabilty of birthcontrol in lower income areas, I bet there wouldn't be that many of them falling through the cracks(canyons really) in the system and ending up appearing to us as being irresponsible burdens. It would be a nice small number of people that we could handle.
It's a right because people can do it, and they would also kill or die to keep doing it. It's that simple. If you tell someone they cannot reproduce, or forcibly sterilize them, they might try to escape your control or kill you.
If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.
But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
The bibliography you use depends in large part on where you want to align yourself politically.
The endless debate cycle between disaffected and disenfranchised libertarians covers the topic of human rights quite often. Most of us agree that the UN declaration is not a viable framework, because some of the enumerated rights imply that someone, somewhere, would necessarily be impressed into compulsory service to enforce them. For example, a right to adequate medical care implies that someone must become a physician and supply that care, possibly without pay. The right to food implies that someone must farm it, possibly without pay.
Even the experts can make mistakes.
So rather than read what others have said on the topic, it may be better for you to simply think it out for yourself and see what you come up with. Ideally, you will come up with a set of principles that are unambiguous, self-consistent, and able to serve as the foundation for a civilized society. It's much harder than it sounds. Good luck.
You're not alone; quite a lot of people think that.
The question is, what can you do about it. I doubt many people in the U.S. would be comfortable with a company or government telling poor people they're not allowed to have sex or have a kid. That's very personal stuff.
And unfortunately there's a puritanical streak in American culture that makes it hard to put in place systems that would help teens help themselves, like effective sex education or free contraception.
You "don't choose to have your child" only if the three main things (conceiving, birth and rising up) are forced on against your will; i.e., in cases of rape in a society that doesn't allows neither abortion nor adoption; or in cases of persons that are mentally incapable to decide for themselves (they do sometimes have kids and the ethics of those events are often unpleasant, involving their abuse).
In USA, I'd like to believe that pretty much all parents are raising their children are results of choice - perhaps a reckless choice made long ago by a different version of themselves; perhaps a difficult choice with lots of complications; perhaps an unsure choice with emotional pressure from family&friends - but in the end, still based on their own choice and own responsibility.
I applaud you for including adoption as an alternative to abortion. Finding someone to adopt and older child is hard, but it's easy to find someone to adopt an infant. (Although you should not discount how hard it is to give one away - it's very emotional.)
How is it irrelevant? Most of the lady's problems were because of her being a young single mother with a very young child. I didn't see the word "rape" in the article, and I assume the pregnancy wasn't an immaculate conception.
Most of her problems are due to this very bad decision on her part.
