The Middle Child Is Going Extinct

https://www.thecut.com/2018/07/the-middle-child-is-going-extinct.html

by ALee • 8 years ago

75 135 8 years ago

RhysU• 8 years ago

I knew the older and younger ones always had it in for us!

polarix• 8 years ago

I see the number of children a couple has as a vote on how many people should exist on earth. If you have 0 or 1 child as a couple, you are voting that there should be fewer people. If you have 2 children, you're voting that there should be about the same number of people. If you have more than 2 children as a couple, you're voting that there should be more people on earth.

With that context, I can clearly see why nobody in a city would want to have more than 2 children.

crooked-v• 8 years ago

You're completely overlooking people who would want more children but don't feel they could afford them.

Robotbeat2• 8 years ago

...yup. This is probably most of my generation in their early to mid 20s, which is biologically the best time. Even if they can have one or two, they’re often busy with a degree or trying to eatablish themselves professionally. To get healthcare coverage (which is the responsible thing to do with children), you kind of have to be poor (to qualify for support) or be very successful.

kaycebasques5• 8 years ago

That seems implicitly related to reducing population. E.g. I’ve heard that hunter-gatherers adjusted their populations depending on whether there was lean or bountiful food. What you’re mentioning seems to be the modern equivalent of that.

fjsolwmv3• 8 years ago

The number of people who are poor enough to choose to have fewwer kids, yet rich enough to maintain effective birth control, is a narrow sliver.

pesfandiar• 8 years ago

You're grossly overestimating how much an average person cares about anything outside of their family. The decision to have one or more children depends on many other factors (parents' character, their economic status, social safety, ...) before it even gets to any idealistic activism.

HumanDrivenDev3• 8 years ago

So much this. Altruistic, considerate people who hem and haw over how their decisions effect others grossly over estimate other human beings. Take a walk along the side of a high speed road and look at all the garbage thrown there. People don't give a shit.

Robotbeat2• 8 years ago

Disagree. There’s so many people who cannot have biological children (for many reasons), so practically speaking a large percentage of those who can should have at least 3 or the population will decline.

squarefoot2• 8 years ago

Many of us, including the planet under our feet, don't see it as a problem.

https://www.populationmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...

I don't think there was anyone in the 1960s screaming "oh crap... there's only 3 billions of us around here!". We're so used to think the now and here as normal conditions that we lose focus on the global trend which is absolutely disastrous.

learc83• 8 years ago

Beyond that fact that the Earth's future population isn't the number one factor in the decision for most couples, 2 children is still below the replacement rate.

robocat2• 8 years ago

Strangely enough 2 is not the replacement rate. One birth per death is the replacement rate.

The world population can be increased by everyone having children earlier, or dieing later.

Puzzle: Every couple in Binary Town has twins (boy and girl) at age 32. Then half the population stops reproducing, but the other half change to reproducing at age 16. What happens to the population?

notadoc• 8 years ago

Interesting way to look at it, I have never met anyone with that particular way of thinking about children.

Most people I know made decisions about having children in terms of resources. Mainly, about available time and/or money.

kaycebasques5• 8 years ago

I don’t see these two ideas as at odds with each other. Maybe people aren’t explicitly calculating that they should reduce the population, but deciding not to have children because of lack of resources seems like a subconscious vote to reduce the population, in my view.

greglindahl13• 8 years ago

As someone with 0 children, I disagree with you. I'm voting that I personally don't want to raise children, and think that people who don't want to have children should not have them. My brother and sister like raising children, and have 3 each. Doesn't that affinity play a large role in people's choices?

kaycebasques5• 8 years ago

A lot of responses disagreeing with this idea. I’ll lend some balance and mention that I’ve had the exact same reasoning in my own plans for the future. I won’t pretend to argue that I’m normal or abnormal, though. Haven’t done any research on the topic.

greglindahl13• 8 years ago

I can totally see that you are voting on that issue with your choice, however, does that mean that everyone else is doing the same?

danieltillett16• 8 years ago

No it is natural selection in action. Those that have children are of the future, those that don't are of the past.

There is a huge shortage of smart people on the planet to solve the many problems that exist. The best way we know to create more smart people is to encourage smart people to have more children. Unfortunately we seem especially good as a society at identifying smart people and discouraging them from having children.

handbanana• 8 years ago

Can you explain/expand on why you think it’s natural selection?

smt883• 8 years ago

Children per couple goes down as quality of life goes up. All developed countries see birthrates decrease. No one is actively discouraging smart people from reproducing -- they're just better off and don't need children as a safety net for retirement, and they can access good birth control.

The idea that smart people are only produced by other smart people is nonsense. Genes regress to the mean, so most smart people won't have mostly smart children. And intelligence is significantly affected by nurture, not just nature.

And beyond all that, smart people aren't the end-all, be-all of humanity. They make useful things, but are of course capable of great evil (or mental illness or any other issue that limits their contribution to society).

wool_gather3• 8 years ago

It's not very clear what the connection is between your two paragraphs. In fact, they seem contradictory; why does natural selection lead to fewer smart people having children?

dabbledash3• 8 years ago

I’m not sure that is the best way we know.

There are already many smart people who aren’t helping to solve those problems because they haven’t received the necessary education. I’d go so far as to say we’re probably missing out on the potential contributions of most smart people now.

What we need to do is figure out a way to radically increase access to education worldwide.

greglindahl13• 8 years ago

You should check out the history of eugenics, it sounds like you'd be interested in those concepts. Do keep in mind that almost everyone is offended by them, however.

Fnoord9• 8 years ago

How about we educate those who are not smart to become smarter?

dsnuh• 8 years ago

How many votes have you cast?

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

You could also adopt one or more children. How does that affect this calculus?

codingdave• 8 years ago

Are you under the impression that all families exactly hit their target number of children? Some people cannot have any children, but desperately want them. Some have one or two, but want more. Some people... well, not everything is planned. I know a woman who wanted one more child, and had triplets. And that isn't even getting into people who foster and adopt children.

In short, while I can see the logic in your stance... it has little bearing on the reality of creating a family.

1123581321• 8 years ago

I’m an oldest child, but my mother was a middle child and growing up loved Jane the Middle Moffat by Eleanor Estes (and all the other Moffat books.) I still think it is a peculiarly good insight into the mind, and the value, of a child with older and younger siblings in a poor family.

https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Moffat-Eleanor-Estes/dp/015202...

cncrnd• 8 years ago

What a shame, back in the day people used to have odd numbers of children.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Interestingly enough, both of my parents came from families with even numbers of children, and it was a lot.

BTW, 1 is also odd, so I'm not sure if you're just trying to say "used to have 3 children" or literally an odd number (1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, etc)

war10252• 8 years ago

I think it was supposed to be a joke about how there is only a middle child if there is an odd number of children.

greglindahl13• 8 years ago

Amusingly, both my mom and her sister had 3 children because their parents had 2. They were annoyed because one of them was "daddy's child" and one was "mommy's child" and they figured that having 3 each would prevent that. Numerology matters.

They both did end up having 3 kids, and I can report that I think the problem they thought they were preventing didn't happen. Win!

EGreg• 8 years ago

Can you describe the dynamics that did occur? Were the kids happier overall when there were 3 of them than 2? I know it’s tough to reduce everything to that one factor but still curious.

NDizzle• 8 years ago

Ha, funny they ask about August 12th. I'll be running a four team friendly tournament for my middle daughter's fast pitch softball team.

Three kids here. It's tough, sure. Not for everyone? You can say that too. Rewarding? The most rewarding thing I've yet to experience.

As others mentioned, I didn't really plan all these kids out. Life happens, I guess.

JohnnyConatus• 8 years ago

Going extinct? Typical middle-child attention getting stunt.

dqpb• 8 years ago

Technically, isn't it the youngest child going extinct and the middle child left to take on the role of the youngest?

dazzer• 8 years ago

Well no... the middle child only comes into existence upon the introduction of the younger child.

sxv• 8 years ago

can't tell if trolling or ingenious..

derefr• 8 years ago

Right. A lot clearer if we use absolute cardinals here: the second child is now the youngest, whereas before they were the middle child.

There are both cultural/traditional and [epi]genetic implications of birth order, so this might imply a better or worse suitedness of the role of youngest-child given differing birth orders of the title-holder.

wccrawford• 8 years ago

Whenever a couple has any kids at all, there is always a youngest child and an oldest child. Sometimes, they are the same child.

There is not always a "middle child" because that requires at least 2 other children to exist.

You're trying to say that the "third child" is going extinct, which matches what the article is saying in a different way.

EADGBE5• 8 years ago

Whenever a couple has any kids at all, there is always a youngest child and an oldest child. Sometimes, they are the same child.

Technically, that's an only child and that has articles all its own...

bhouston• 8 years ago

Population shrinkage is not healthy for a society.

xboxnolifes• 8 years ago

Eating chocolate is bad for dogs.

fjsolwmv3• 8 years ago

In our automation age, it is if you are labor seller and not capital owner.

HaoZeke• 8 years ago

Right because we should all emulate over populated India and China.

Keeping the population down allows for a better standard of living for those who are alive already, and allows for sustainable growth.

A population explosion is just not possible to deal with. Imagine more people trying to get into the top schools, thereby killing your chances.

Fnoord9• 8 years ago

Hong Kong's density is an excellent example of how it could look. For America though, there's enough room but for certain metropoles throughout the world as well as The Netherlands... no, they're pretty much full.

throwawaymath• 8 years ago

Why?

paulcole• 8 years ago

It might be the human race’s best longterm chance to survive the damage we’ve done to the environment.

curun1r• 8 years ago

Breeding under the replacement rate does not imply population shrinkage. It's a better strategy for a rich nation state to have lower birth rates and poach the best and brightest from other countries. That increases the wealth of native-born citizens as well as improving the lives of those who immigrate whereas overbreeding disperses accumulated inherited wealth.

kypro• 8 years ago

But I thought we need immigrants to do the low paid jobs we don't want to do, not the hard well paid ones? /s

dev_north_east• 8 years ago

And brain draining the countries of the emigrants? Maybe we should be working to fix those places up and not hoover up all the talent.

alex_young• 8 years ago

Exceptionally poor attempt to lie with statistics. Three or more is not an avg of 4 or more, and comparing women in their 40s to all mothers isn't equivalent.

There may be something to this, but the math is so intentionally misleading as to murder the credibility of the author.

Illniyar• 8 years ago

You go raise three children. I can barely handle two.

drfuchs• 8 years ago

“When you get to three kids, parents have to switch from one-on-one to zone defense.”

sarnu2• 8 years ago

The dynamic totally changes with three kids. I have three kids, and when one of them is not at home (doesn't matter which one) the atmosphere changes completely, hard to describe how. What I want to say: Having three is different from having two, but not necessarily harder. They have more things to handle between themselves. I could not bear to raise a single child. That must be really hard.

moises_silva• 8 years ago

Me and my wife decided for a second child (he's 2 months old now). I'm curious what you feel is hard about raising a single child? before deciding for the second, we were close to staying with one. If anything we feared it'd be hard for our first son growing all alone. Is that what you meant? hard for the kid not for the parents?

carlmr• 8 years ago

Yeah, this rings true from experiencing two kids at my home and visiting single children and multi-children families as a kid.

The single children where very demanding on their parents. The only source of attention and entertainment is the parents, so this makes sense.

Two children entertain themselves a bit more, but like in duopolic situations you have the most extreme competition. This leads to a lot of fights over shared resources.

With 3+ children fights over resources between 2 children don't lead to zero sum gains, so that the competition actually becomes less. Cooperation becomes more important. And the kids almost always entertain themselves.

I'd definitely say the 3+ children parents were usually the least stressed, but maybe that was just my impression. The older siblings at some point functioned as quasi parents to the younger siblings.

pavel_lishin• 8 years ago

I could not bear to raise a single child. That must be really hard.

Can you go into this a bit more? I have a single child, and just thinking of trying to raise another one makes me feel like my lungs are deflating.

(If this isn't a good venue for this conversation, you can email me - my email is in my profile.)

EADGBE5• 8 years ago

This is entirely true, also have three kids; 1 yr, 3yr and 6yr. When the little one is away, the older two are way more rambunctious and rough with each other (even fighting). When the middle is away, there's no more boy and so things tend to calm down a bit; the older does her own thing, or lets her youngest sister do anything and doesn't make a peep. When the oldest is away, the two younger ones will have similar effects on each other like having the middle away.

It's really weird.

icebraining• 8 years ago

It's interesting that the article doesn't have a comment to make about other familial arrangements brought about by shorter marriages and relationships.

For example, I'm older than my brothers, yet the oldest of them is not a middle child, because he's not a brother of my other brothers.

When families start spreading like this, a kid can be both a middle-child and a firstborn simultaneously - it becomes relative. And the attention that their position supposedly gives them becomes harder to measure.

EADGBE5• 8 years ago

Agreed, especially as normal as it is now.

I've had conversations with our daughter about friends and their families. Nuclear families are uncommon now. It's just what it is. And seeing enough unhealthy marriages; it's probably a lot better that way than the old adage to "stay together for the kids".

hawski• 8 years ago

Non-nuclear families are not "not normal" at all now.

Too much negations. Let me compile this for myself and others:

Nuclear families are not normal at all now.

shermanyo• 8 years ago

I lived as both the youngest (older brother and sister from my mother) for the first half of my childhood, and then the oldest (younger brother and stepsister from my father) for the latter half. I never once lived with both older and younger siblings, they were essentially different families.

AltVanilla• 8 years ago

As nice of a theory it is, birth order has not been shown to affect personality at all.

"Contemporary empirical research shows that birth order does not influence the Big Five personality traits."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order

The fact that such a big environmental factor doesn't effect personality at all, to me suggests that personality is mostly genetic. Anecdotally, It sure seems like kids have very distinct personalities from a very start.

Another anecdote (that personality is more nature rather than nurture), is the stories of identical twins adopted to different families. When reunited as adults, they seem to have the same personality. One such story:

"It's not just our taste in music or books; it goes beyond that. In her, I see the same basic personality. And yet, eventually we had to realize that we're different people with different life histories."

https://www.npr.org/2007/10/25/15629096/identical-strangers-...

The Middle Child Is Going Extinct

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