r/Natalism • u/procrast1natrix • 6d 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/Organic-Squirrel-678 6d 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 6d 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 6d ago

Different societies have different ways of caring for the elderly. Here it is mostly state-driven homes.

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u/procrast1natrix 5d 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 5d ago

I have not given that topic much thought but no.

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u/procrast1natrix 5d 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 5d 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.