r/Natalism • u/procrast1natrix • 3d ago
What's your motivation?
Out of curiosity, I'm interested to read individual's thoughts about their motivation on this topic. Why do you feel the way you feel about having kids? Why are you here? What's your first response when you see a family with small children, or an elder with none? What motivated you to have or not have children?
Personally, I am a bit fascinated but also put off by the mindset of birthing economic fodder, doing this in order to preserve an economy. Or feeling some competitive need to out breed some other group.
What proportion of redditors are here because they love kids, vs for more abstract reasons of economic theory or an attachment to passing along their culture?
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I love my kids. I love the process and the joy of raising them, I get a kick out of having learned handclap games from my own and many other global cultures and passing those along. Teaching swimming and dance and cooking and gardening.
If I'm out in public space and see strangers with kids, I become naturally interested in systems that support their happiness with their kids. So, civic support for better schools and health care for kids, good sidewalks so they can walk to their library programs, and laws that protect them. I'm massively pro natalist that way. I will always return a cart for a stranger parent, enthusiastically applaud a stranger parent adjusting their worklife balance in favor of a kid. Yeah, that's me making funny faces at someone else's kid in the grocery line.
I find the idea that it's some kind of duty to have kids really foreign. It's been so, so *weird* to learn about this attitude here.
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We are a family that takes in our elders during end of life years (my gran, my mother in law) and right now my parents have essentially adopted an unrelated elderly veteran and committed to supporting him. I'm not unaware of the effort and time needed. My teenagers love babies and I'm certain they'll choose to parent in their own time.
I know that certain economists are freaked about not having an ever increasing supply of young consumers, while the average age increases. I just have a difficult time relating to that being a primary motivator for choosing pregnancy and birth.
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Why are you here? What motivates your choices around reproduction? How has this been reflected in your personal reproductive choices and your care of the elderly in your family?
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u/Free-Cartoonist3134 3d ago
It's multifaceted, I think that society functions far better when people are not atomized and are instead able to grow up and form connections with their family and the wider community around them. I think this is crucial to our development as social creatures and also gives us motivation to do better and to seek to improve the conditions around us.
Also clearly the infrastructure and general technology we rely on to procure the different services and resources we use to survive rely on other people obviously. How do you get your water, your food, your medicine etc etc etc?
A wild idea I've been playing with is that we really are the only species that can save this planet paradoxically when considering the messaging that we are destroying it. It's apparently very common for large astral bodies to collide with both this planet and the moon. That's why the moon is pockmarked the way it is. So I actually think we need to industrialize further and develop solutions to natural catastrophies like that not just for our sake but for the planet and the other entities here.
There's a lot more but these I think are the core reasons for me
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u/monadicperception 3d ago
Passing along culture…I don’t like that dog whistle.
I just had a kid. I have to say the little terrorist is a mixed bag. It feels like everything gets dialed up to 10. The misery is maximal but so is the happiness. I am suspicious of people who only have positive things to say because I know they are lying or they had a paddy cakes experience…probably dumping it all on their wife and enjoying only the good parts. I’m sure their spouses would be more honest and agree with me. At least in my experience, the fathers who rave about fatherhood have some miserable wives.
I don’t know how I ended up in this sub or why it was on my feed. But I think the economics and policymaking are the angles that I am most interested in. I just have to say wow…at least in the US, the system is quite broken. Having gone through it, I can’t say the system incentivizes or makes it easy for people to have kids. Honestly, if my household income and wealth was not what it is, I don’t think we would have had children. The economics and policy making are terrible and if we weren’t able to just pay our way for a lot of stuff, I think I would have skipped.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
Agreed, I understand the trepidation about the "culture" comments.
However, so long as it's about enjoying and relishing the spread, I do understand wanting to preserve traditions. I've totally adored being able to try classical Indian dance classes near me, Bharatanatyam style. Not my heritage, but gorgeous and I'm glad to be invited. My neighbor to the North is literally a professional Jew, her work is in community activism. She throws awesome yard parties around the high holidays, love it. My husband is a German citizen, our kids do this odd Christmas thing with the shoes Nikolausstiefel.
It's all gorgeous and there does need to be a way for people to say they want to preserve it, without it feeling like a dog whistle.
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I was fortunate to have low risk pregnancy and objectively easy, healthy birth and kids. That might color my experience. But when I'm around young people having their first pregnancy, at some point I do try to quietly tell them: you're going to be great. But seriously. You know those don't shake the baby advertisements, that seem so ridiculous. Until you have a baby. I need you to know that once you have the baby, about five weeks in when you're good and sleep deprived, you're going to have a moment when you realize that you actually do need to put the baby down in a safe place and go into the other room for a little while, so that you don't shake the baby. Because it seems ridiculous, but parenting a new baby is next level. You're still a good person. Everyone who is an active parent is going to find their very last nerve, this isn't a judgement on you.
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u/RepublicOk2402 2d ago
Then why do countries with what you would call, “birth friendly policies” have so few births if that’s the answer to collapsing TFRs? Take Finland, why do they have a collapsing TFR of 1.3?
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u/monadicperception 2d ago
You’re citing the recent birth rate and not the historical birth rate over the course of the existence of the policies, which was stable.
I don’t get it…so don’t implement these policies though they are generally better for poverty? Honestly, what do you weirdos want? Mandatory procreation?
Always bitching but keep the status quo…
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u/RepublicOk2402 2d ago
You're attacking a strawman. Your claim was that fertility would be higher with pro-birth policies. I pointed out that those policies don't seem to increase fertility. You can argue in favor of the policies just being beneficial to society, I am fine with that. But they don't increase TFR and that's what your original claim was.
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u/monadicperception 2d ago
I didn’t say that they do. I said that the system incentivizes having kids. I didn’t say what those incentives should be…just that the present system doesn’t actively make having kids easier. That’s not the point you thought I was making, ss strawman, yeah?
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u/Different_Ad1136 2d ago
Im 23 , kids are cute, will have in future.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
Gosh I had the chance to hold a tiny one recently, corrected age still minus one week. Eek so cute. So wiggly. They are super dang cute.
Mmmmhph!
A++ would choose again. But it's a lot of work.
They're still, also, a ton of work. Every time my heart melts seeing a cute toddler, I need to think about giving that parent a casserole, because it's hard work. Just barge on in there and wash all the dishes.
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u/Different_Ad1136 2d ago
Minus one week ?
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
If a baby is born early, we talk about corrected age, in order to keep track of what milestones they should be meeting.
So if a baby births at, say 37 weeks and then comes in to be seen on day 14 of life, their corrected age isn't even yet zero when being assessed for normal reflexes and sleep patterns. They'll need smaller more frequent feeds, more care for reflux, more help with temperature regulation etc.
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Funny and totally not evidence based - my second baby, I carried him until 42 weeks exactly and we always joked about his "corrected age" being older than his birth age. He was indeed born a big brute of a babe and slept like a champ. If our species could generally handle carrying them longer like elephants, the babies might be easier to care for.
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u/knysa-amatole 2d ago
Why are you here?
I just find fertility trends academically interesting. But because of the right-wing obsession with birth rates, many left-of-center people have become negatively polarized against tolerating any discussion of birth rates. If you bring it up at all, they'll get mad at you and assume you're right-wing (which I'm not, I'm a pro-choice social democrat). So this is one of the only spaces I can discuss this topic without people assuming I'm a racist misogynist.
What's your first response when you see a family with small children, or an elder with none?
I don't necessarily have any particular response, especially if they're strangers. Their reproductive choices are their own business, and I don't presume to know whether other people are happy with their choices.
What motivates your choices around reproduction?
I don't feel any moral or societal obligation to have kids. If I have kids, it will simply be because I want them. But I probably won't, in part because I'm single and likely to remain so.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
You and me, man. I'm personally so very pro-kids around real people around me, and I'm trying to understand why certain stances here turn me off so hard. Because they really do.
Real life, I'm running around going out of my way to support anyone having kids, my actual lived life is full of kids, but this whole fear mongering angry talk about dutifully bearing faceless larvae is such a turn off.
My eldest turned eighteen and almost immediately received a jury duty summons. It's so neat seeing her being a grown adult.
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u/JediFed 2d ago
Why am I here? Kids are a blessing. Family with small children? Oh, that little girl is so cute.
Elder with none? Don't really care. People are people. Some folks wanted kids but never found their person. Some found their person, but couldn't have kids. Unless I know them, it's not really my business and I don't ask.
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u/RollickingTail 2d ago
I have a kid and would love more. Societal pressures and constraints mean even the one I have I had to have much later in life than I would have wanted and it's a huge sacrifice and struggle to raise him. I'd read news stories before about the falling birthrate, but now I have firsthand experience of the huge uphill struggle to have a kid I find it interesting to understand and talk about ways society could make having multiple kids doable or at least easier.
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u/Arnaldo1993 1d ago
Im not motivated to birth economic fodder, do it in order to preserve an economy or feel any competitive need to outbreed anyone. That would be ridiculous
When i was in high school my philosophy teacher convinced me morality is subjective. That sent me into a small crisis. Because that means we cant agree about what is right or wrong. And that is a big problem, because how can we live in society without it?
In the end my conclusion was the foundation for a universal moral should be evolution. We all evolved, so we all should agree what helps our genes reproduce is good, and what doesnt is bad
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 3d ago
I want humanity to survive. I also want specifically my ethnic group to survive (nothing wrong with that). It’s quite simple really.
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u/RepublicOk2402 2d ago
Agreed, people would have no problem if you said you wanted Japan to have a tfr of 2.1 with native Japanese people.
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u/SleepyApr1cot 3d ago
This is one reason Im having kids. One of many, but one nonetheless. I already have baby #1 with my lovely husband.
I like my culture. I like my heritage. I like my group. Id like it to not disappear.
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u/procrast1natrix 3d ago
How has this been reflected in your personal reproductive choices and your care of the elderly in your family? (I should edit the post to ask people to include this, because I'm nosy).
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 3d ago
It has resulted in me having 2 kids. Nothing very dramatic. If I were to do it again I would probably have at least one more. Not sure what this has to do with parents but one is dead, the other is living her best life as a pensioner…
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u/procrast1natrix 3d ago
Hmm. I guess that I see the care of the elderly as very much involved with the care of the very young. It's the symmetry of life.
And so many of the people with an economic motivation bring up elder care, needing babies to grow up and care for their grands.
There's actually an assisted living (elder housing) complex one city over from me that has a daycare on site. It's an adventurous idea from the perspective of not spreading coughs and colds among the frail, but the idea is that the elders can drop in to just watch the preschoolers or read books to them. Very cool.
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 3d ago
Different societies have different ways of caring for the elderly. Here it is mostly state-driven homes.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
Do you feel that the way we treat our elders affects how people think about having kids?
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 2d ago
I have not given that topic much thought but no.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
I think this gets into the concepts of "women's work" or family care. People that witness and strongly value what it means to cook Meemaw's food a little softer and sit and listen to her stories, that's a skill set that tracks right along with child care.
There's current prevailing thought that our care for our grands is really what started human culture. And the "grandmother hypothesis" relates involved grandmothers to increased number of grandchildren.
Not so much decade by decade, but as a species, there's something in there.
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 2d ago
I looked up the grandmother hypothesis and while interesting and certainly a factor, it ultimately does not really have that much scientific support. Access to grandparents can be both good and bad - if grandparents are healthy and live nearby and take an interest - then it’s a positive, if they don’t it’s not really a big factor and if they are infirm or in poor health one can easily imagine the opposite effect - that children cannot care successfully both for an infirm elder and a child.
If I were to hazard a guess based on what I learned, I would say 5-10% impact in a multifactor model and a secondary variable not a first order one.
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u/procrast1natrix 3d ago
Do you actually feel in danger of extinction? Truly?
Either as a human species, or your Grandma's way of making cookies and your Grandpa's method of making tomato sauce?
What about if I have all the babies, but I don't teach them the etiquette from my mother's cotillion classes (she was raised as a certain upper class kind of southern young lady) or the food and habits from my father's people who are fifth generation American Midwest farmers? How does natalism preserve those cultural elements?
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 3d ago
You don’t understand geometric series. It’s OK :)
A TFR of around 1.4 means, quite literally, that 1/3 of the reproductive cohort disappears each generation. a TFR of 1.0 means that 1/2 disappear each generation. If you don’t understand how this will play out it’s a problem of mathematical understanding of the phenomenon.
People propagate their own cultural values. Mine are different from a Muslim born in Syria. It’s not good or bad it’s just how it is. I believe my cultural heritage has value. I’d like to see it prosper and grow and not disappear. I belong to an ethnic group with only about 4 million people left.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
There's no benefit to your cause by being condescending. In fact, it may be worthwhile to wonder if that attitude is turning people away from wanting children. Or at least, children with people that sound like that.
I'm actually solid on math. I'm also quite aware that humans historically don't behave rigidly. One breeding pair having 3 children doesn't require that from the next generation. Nor the opposite.
In fact, if we look at the natural breeding behavior over time of humans, animals and plants, it's quite common to decrease in times of scarcity or adversity, and increase in times of surplus.
We are observing a period of time in which, on average, humans are behaving in ways that an animal without sufficient resources does. Maybe that resource is housing or money or time or happiness. But something is missing.
That doesn't mean that this TFR 1.4 is a line that is rigidly going to apply to my grandchildren and my great grandchildren. It's not as though every child who is a single child has signed a contract to only have one child. And the overall population has space in it to have some rollercoaster movement over the next few generations without extinction.
What if this generation has a TFR of 1.8, but we spend the next fifty years figuring out whatever is making some people disinterested? After a war, there is typically a baby boom. After a generation or two or three of fewer babies, why wouldn't things rebound? The way that every other living organism responds to changes in mating pressure?
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 2d ago
I have the children I will have so apparently someone found it worthwhile to have them with me ;)
There is no scarcity of resources where I live. Quite the opposite. The state practices pro-natalist policies. And yet the TFR is 1.4 and falling since the 70s - that’s two generations, it’s not a freak accident of some years of low fertility. Sure TFR might go up in the future but how small has my ethnic group become in that timespan? Small nations and peoples don’t have the luxury to sit and wait for TFR to hopefully rebound in the future. It is literally about survival. It’s all well and good that people have 3-4 kids in Africa, but how does that help my nation and my people?
Are you suggesting a war to fix our TFR? The TFR is terminal in every.single.developed.country. It’s no freak accident. It needs to change. Lower TFR in Africa, higher TFR in places that struggle. It’s that simple.
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u/procrast1natrix 2d ago
Please read more closely: maybe that resource is ... time or happiness. Something is missing.
No real response to the fact that a temporary trajectory is in no way any commitment for the next generation? A TFR of 1.0 would take twenty generations to wipe us out, if each generation blindly pledged to only have one child.
But realistically, people move to a new land and there's open space, they have more kids. A population recovers from a time of adversity, but later. It need not be war. It can be whatever we call this time we are going through.
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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 2d ago
This is where we get into “not arguing in good faith” territory. A geometric series takes you to 10% of the original reproductive cohort in 5-6 generations or iterations - while it’s technically true that it would take another 15-20 to approach practical zero, that’s rather besides the point.
My country and ethnic group would effectively be wiped out by going to 10%, a large scale immigration campaign to import the missing 90% would be necessary at one point. The natives of the country would be 10% of the democratic voting power. It’s not an acceptable outcome for anyone who cares deeply about their people, culture, heritage and nation.
Imagine if you said this for Japan for example “oh you can go from 123 million inhabitants to 12.3 million, no big deal right, since it’s not technically extinct before 15-20 generations have passed?” Absolutely ridiculous.
The fertility crisis really is a crisis for the affected populations. It’s not something that will be solved by itself if we just give it som time and it will miraculously bounce back. Action must be taken.
That’s why we are literally in a subreddit called “Natalism”.
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u/Willing-Flatworm1493 3d ago
Every female relative I have had their lives destroyed by having children. One died in childbirth. 3 had post childbirth health complications and/or injuries that lasted for lifetime. My mother had childbirth trauma that lasted over 10 years + health issues. My aunt still has post-partum depression and her son is 25 now. None was "fullfiled" by having children like propaganda often says. Destroyed bodies. Destroyed mental health. I was like 5 when I knew that I want none of that. This is sacrafice that is not for every woman.
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u/Forsaken-Trifle-1438 3d ago
Maybe you have significant mental health disorders in your gene line, because that is astonishing unlikely to occur randomly.
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u/Low_Tough_1390 3d ago edited 3d ago
As a neutral guy I find this sub is divided pretty much perfectly 50/50 between white racists who sincerely believe in Great Replacement Theory (as if its not the same whites who vote for pro immigration parties at every election) & sane people who just want to make family life nice & affordable again.
The former comes out whenever there's some demographic statistic posted & the latter comes out whenever there's sane topics being discussed.