To Breed or Not to Breed?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/breed-children-climate-change.html

by rmcpherson • 5 years ago

18 64 5 years ago

I've heard this kind of commentary a lot, but I still believe it's much more of a case of "people not wanting to have kids and then giving climate change as the reason" than climate change actually being the deciding factor in not having kids. I think in most cases it's more akin to virtue signaling.

The modern world, especially in the US, is quite unfriendly to having kids. Both parents have lots of other opportunities that having children may conflict with, and having children can be horrendously expensive depending on your child rearing style. Given that, if you're subconsciously thinking "I don't want to have kids, it's just too hard", it comes across as "more virtuous" if, instead of giving the reason as you want to be more selfish with your time and money, that you want to protect a potential child from having to go through a future hellish environment.

Zababa2• 5 years ago

I feel like this may be mostly signaling, because the logical conclusion from the argument that more people means more climate change would be to either have your existence reduce climate change (which most people don't do), or to remove yourself from the equation.

Or maybe the argument is about the relative impact, and not having kids allows you to take the plane and still feel good about your actions because your total carbon impact is less than other people? I'm honestly not sure how the reasoning works.

jjj123• 5 years ago

I don’t think we should hold people to “the logical conclusion” of all of their beliefs. We are not robots. We are capable of believing something without willing to go to the ends of the earth to be consistent with that belief.

For example, I believe it’s good to go to protests for causes I care about. However, I don’t go to even a fraction of the protests near me. Does this mean I don’t actually believe protests are a good thing?

jah242• 5 years ago

'you want to be more selfish with your time and money' - from my perspective having children is up with the most selfish things an individual can do - you are spending a huge amount of time and resources replicating yourself (to as greater degree as possible with current technology) and then usually trying to give that replication as much advantage over other people's as possible.

From my experience parents are often great for their children but the trade off is they often become worse members of society, switching to focusing time and resources on their family (to give their genetic material an advantage) rather than any wider potentially more utilitarian outlets or considerations.

engineer_22• 5 years ago

I think you should reflect a little bit more on what a society is and it's goals.

To my point, a society is made up of people. They must be born before they can be useful to society.

DiggyJohnson• 5 years ago

Can you give some examples of this trade off? I have a different perspective: that non-parents have less incentive to build and maintains communities?

What sort of activities do non-parent adults engage in that is lost in this trade-off?

Dracophoenix• 5 years ago

I don't think lacking a child would make someone any more considerate of society than they are. As the poster above you mentioned, many young couples don't want to have children because the economic and QoL calculation is unfavorable to doing so. They have no concern for the utilitarian needs of society (and for that matter, most people don't).

AuryGlenz3• 5 years ago

A common thing I’ve heard is people saying “I wouldn’t want to bring a baby in to THIS world,” which I think shows that we really need to do a better job teaching history. It’s literally the best time there’s ever been to bring a child in to the world. There’s no constant threat of nuclear annihilation, no giant world wars, a large portion of childhood diseases have been eradicated, the chance of the mother dying in childbirth is incredibly low comparatively, and the list goes on and on.

langitbiru• 5 years ago

Even if this world is not ideal, it's still fine to breed or bring children to this world.

"Never feel sorry for raising dragon-slayers in a time when there are actual dragons," unknown.

confidantlake• 5 years ago

There is a constant threat of nuclear annihilation. It never went away.

errcorrectcode5• 5 years ago

There's always an existential threat. That argument is for people who won't have anyone to care for them when they get old, won't have as much joy or love in their lives, and their genes will die with them. An absolutely pointless life, in my unpopular opinion, but only my opinion nonetheless.

errcorrectcode5• 5 years ago

How to create an idiocracy and ruin the gene pool: The "smart" people worried about their "carbon footprint" or "quality of life" deciding not to have kids while the knuckle-draggers down the street have 10.

native_samples• 5 years ago

You realize Idiocracy is based on highly controversial theories of IQ, genetics and eugenics? And that you're also using a rather laughable definition of "smart" that involves deciding not to have children because of some stuff some academics said, when they've been saying the same things for decades and have been proven wrong many times before? This is not a definition of smart I'd subscribe to.

bagacrap• 5 years ago

have kids and raise them to be awesome enough to solve modern world problems

User232• 5 years ago

To use an analogy, human beings in general and children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities. Of course they require investment, of time, money, or both, but that's true for most if not all other investments too. And the potential payout is massively asymmetrical. One could raise the child that cracks economical nuclear fusion, discovers a cure for pancreatic cancer, becomes the next Michelangelo, or who something we can't even imagine, all for an effectively fixed up front cost.

pydry• 5 years ago

children in particular should be viewed as assets, not liabilities

maybe we could try to not see the future of the human race through a financial prism at all.

xyzzy4747• 5 years ago

Only very rich and very poor people in this world can afford to have kids.

tharne3• 5 years ago

When people cite money as a reason for not having children, they just usually just don't want children, but don't want to admit it.

The fact is there has never been a better time in human history to raise children. People talk about climate change, but back in the 50's it wasn't any better -- we were in the midst of a nuclear standoff that could have gone apocalyptic at any second. Before that, there was a world war, and another one before that, and so on.

In prior centuries anywhere from one quarter to one half of all kids born wouldn't make it to the first birthday.

Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been.

People are free to have children or not have children, but let's be honest about why.

peoplefromibiza2• 5 years ago

but back in the 50's

there were many more poor, having lots of kids.

OP didn't say that only rich people can afford to have kids, but that only rich and very poor people can.

Now that people are not as poor as in prior centuries, they can afford to not have kids to survive when they get older.

SyzygistSix• 5 years ago

Raising kids is hard, even now, but it's still easier than it's ever been.

I think the amount of two income households and longer work hours says otherwise. It's still a great time to have kids but there is a lot of time and financial pressure that we did not have in the 60s and 70s. In addition, kids commonly walked to school, went out to play without supervision, etc. I think children cost more and require more time than in the past.

psyc• 5 years ago

My reason for not having kids is simply the golden rule. Do unto potential others as I would have had my parents do unto me. Now, you might say that I can't know whether my potential kids would have been annoying optimists who could say that they love life, without sarcasm. To which I say, they would have my genes, and me for a father, and in my view that's enough to tip the scales.

tharne3• 5 years ago

These types of movements never really go anywhere, in large part because their proponents remove themselves from the genepool.

It's the same reason that people having been saying for generations that religion is going to disappear, but it never actually does. Non-religious cultures tend to have below-replacement rate births while religious ones have higher birthrates.

The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself. That could be a bad thing or a a good thing depending on how you see yourself.

bwestergard• 5 years ago

At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist? At what rate do the children of haredi Jewish parents remain haredi? What about grandchildren?

I'd be curious to see some of the demography here. My intuition is that in the U.S., these subgroups are growing their share of religiously identified persons (e.g. a larger fraction of Catholics are traditionalists today than in 1970) but they are not growing as a share of the general population.

bckr3• 5 years ago

At what rate do the children of Traditionalist Catholics remain Traditionalist?

Also, at what rate do apostates produce other apostates?

Living a happy life outside the mold of what you grew up with sets an example for others. Making babies is not a surefire way of producing like-minded people, nor is it the only way.

mikewarot2• 5 years ago

The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself.

The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.

How well have you been able to convince your friends of something? Yeah, you'll have slightly better odds with kids, because in the beginning you have full control over their environment, until school starts.

HKH2• 5 years ago

nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit.

So brainwashing doesn't work?

tharne3• 5 years ago

The first thing you need to accept if you want to have kids, is that they will NOT live the life you want them to live, nor will they accept your values at all, unless you can convince them that your values have merit

People will do what they want, but most people end up with values fairly similar to those of their family. We tend to focus all of our attention on the differences because those are more interesting and gossip worthy. But most of us are products of our genetics and our environment to a greater extent than we'd like to admit.

goodpoint4• 5 years ago

This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

rsj_hn2• 5 years ago

This is absurd. The "gene pool" has nothing to do with people's sense of ethics around having kids or not.

To think that fertility -- one of the key issues in evolution -- would not be influenced by genetics requires a massive detachment from reality as well as lack of awareness of current knowledge about genetics and human behavior.

Note that we have data on this, and a good rule of thumb is that most everything is about half genetic. This includes likelihood to have kids. Why? well, things like sperm counts, and personality traits are influenced by genetics, as are things like tendency to be religious[4]. Values are also strongly influenced by genetics, as is income and intelligence[5], all of which is correlated with decisions to have or delay having children. Similarly the duration of the reproductive lifespan of females is influenced by genetics[2] - something very important as women delay childbirth:

The most recent GWAS conducted in ∼370,000 women of European ancestry identified 389 independent signals explaining ∼7.4% of the population variance in age at menarche (Fig. 1), corresponding to ∼25% of the estimated heritability[2]

And even the decision to delay childbirth is influenced by many factors that have a genetic component.

We don't have a "don't have kids" gene that can get outcompeted.

An international research team, including the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, has found twelve genes that may help determine why some people have children at an early age, while others remain childless.[3]

See also [1] for an overview and discussion.

- - -

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-018-0068-1

[3] https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2016/twelve-genes-influence-ferti...

[4] https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/beliefs

[5] https://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/1000H/BouchardRev.pdf

thefz2• 5 years ago

The main thing that not having children does is ensure a future that is full of people with very different values from yourself.

Who cares? I'll be dead!

gibbonsrcool2• 5 years ago

It's the economic insecurity that does it for me. Everytime I see "we're a team not a family" or the like, I realize how dispensible I am. It's not the content of the message, it's the fact you have to say it. It's a gentle nudge that, hey, remember you don't mean shit to us, ok?

bckr3• 5 years ago

we're a team not a family

I actually prefer to have boundaries at work. The whole "family" thing is often a way of saying "you'd better work you ass off to serve this business"

gibbonsrcool2• 5 years ago

The way this phrase is used, as popularized by Netflix, they mean to say they don’t hesitate to fire underperformers.

0xbadc0de5• 5 years ago

Isn't it strange that the people who claim they don't want to have children for fear of economic hardship or climate change never take the time to criticize their parents for not doing the same?

peoplefromibiza2• 5 years ago

why strange?

Children are allowed to have very different ideas than their parents, one doesn't have to criticize what has been done and is irreversible, to think and act differently.

hawaiianbrah• 5 years ago

Can’t change the past, why waste the energy?

rukshn• 5 years ago

I personally don’t like to have kids because the thought of responsibilities that comes with having kids scares the hell out of me

I already have enough responsibilities in my life, with my work etc and I don’t want to worry further by having kids

Even before having kids you have to take care of your pregnant wife, after delivering you have to take care of the kids, when they are old you have to worry about their education marriage and so on

It’s just too much. I don’t have any kids at the moment but the thought just makes me feel like I’m better off getting a divorce

polalavik• 5 years ago

A whole article about people grappling with whether to make little copies of themselves when there are tons of kids that need adopted. The whole idea of having a kid just seems like a weird selfish ego trip. I know there’s underlying primal instincts at play - years of evolution driving you to breed, but we have the brains to take a step back and say is this the best choice I can make if I’d like to love and raise a human? Could I provide a better life for an already existing human? Or am I just on some ego trip to make a little replica of myself.

mgamache3• 5 years ago

it's not ego. It's the drive of your genes to get into the future. Helping someone else's genes (that have some overlap with yours) is also adaptive, but not as much as people more closely related to you.

goodpoint4• 5 years ago

Genes don't drive anything. They can give you a wide nose or red hairs but not your goals in life.

AuryGlenz3• 5 years ago

I wanted a baby like my wife, and my wife wanted a baby like me. We both like each other so that makes sense. We ended up needing to do IVF. If that hadn’t panned out I don’t think we would have adopted, though I’ve always thought fostering would be rewarding.

piyh• 5 years ago

I find that argument flawed since it's the ultimate form of "think of the children". It implies successful parenting is a zero sum game, and that by having a child you're taking love away from another.

User232• 5 years ago

I can assure you that you will not make a little replica of yourself. It will be a new and different person that inherits some of your traits, but by no means all of them. That you're thinking of a child in that way suggests that you are right to not have one, at least until your thinking on the subject matures.

I don't see any point in arguing with the child-free types, I just see it as evolution at work in the modern world. The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype. That's just a scientific fact and no argument will change it.

bckr3• 5 years ago

The future is going to be dominated by those with the desires-to-reproduce phenotype

"dominated", for sure, and yet we also have a tremendous number of gay people. It's not quite so simple.

bradlys• 5 years ago

As far as I know - there’s no lack of adoptions for babies. The lack of adoption is for people past toddler age. Which makes sense - at that age they’re never gonna be just the product of your nature. They’ll always be a product of whatever came before them.

People like to start with a fresh slate. If they didn’t - they’d run a foster care.

thefz2• 5 years ago

years of evolution driving you to breed

The more I think about it the more sense this makes to me: there is no innate urge to breed, only to mate. It's what tricks you into breeding.

throwaway19937• 5 years ago

One complication for this theory is that fertility affects sexual behavior; women are more likely to have sex during their most fertile time of the month (https://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/news/20040609/sex-he...). A breeding urge explains this phenomenon, a mating urge doesn't.

mgamache3• 5 years ago

The strong anti-natalism doesn't surprise me. There's a lot of millennials and younger on HN. I wonder how much of that is just a cover for their pessimism about being as economically successful as their parents? There are structural disadvantages facing the youth today and not having children is a way of avoiding a rigged game. There's also the guilt about raising children at a lower socioeconomic status than they had. Just a thought...

octokatt• 5 years ago

https://archive.md/cdWMS

bitwize• 5 years ago

The major problems the human race is facing all have a single solution: fewer humans. It's like fasting for individual health: simple, and solves so much. So maybe this is just nature running its course.

del_operator• 5 years ago

I thought this was going to address the burden of finding affordable childcare, rigors of child development, family insurance, and maybe even a stark anecdote about a toddler or teenager. Then I hear a story about climate change and feel super frustrated that’s where this conversation is starting.

I see the anxiety, but I just didn’t anticipate this from the title.

throwaway2929612• 5 years ago

Personal anecdote: My wife and I got married assuming that we would eventually want kids. We were pretty young, and that's what people do, right? We kept checking in with each other and kept not wanting to have kids. 5 years into our marriage, we were certain enough that I chose to have a vasectomy. We were so certain that my biggest fear was NOT that we'd change our minds later, but that my vasectomy would be one of the 0.1% that failed.

Our reasons were mostly personal, and it ultimately wasn't a responsibility we felt equipped to take on. There's some personal traumas that we experienced as kids and didn't want to pass along. There were some "selfish" reasons and things that we gave a higher priority in life than raising children. We had enough executive dysfunction between the two of us that we didn't think we'd be able to give kids enough attention while also juggling our other priorities. There is also nothing so special about our genes that compelled us to procreate--we could have adopted if parenthood called to us later in life. The usual reason we give is "we can barely take care of our pets, we're not bringing kids into this." That's the most concise way I can put it without opening up an argument.

A couple of years after the vasectomy, my wife ended up getting diagnosed with multiple chronic (but not terminal) illnesses, so that became a contributing factor after we had already made our decision. Economic concerns have also always been a factor--not something that I viewed as completely unsolvable, but it obviously requires a huge sacrifice to raise kids today. Climate change and overpopulation eventually became extra reasons to be thankful that we're not bringing kids into this mess, but if we ever felt a strong drive to have kids in the first place, I don't think that alone would be enough to deter us.

The article frames the whole discussion around climate change and current events, and I suppose my personal outlook for humanity has become darker over the years, but the decision to have (or not to have) kids is largely driven by personal circumstances. Some of our closest friends are fabulous loving parents, and the world needs more parents like them. Some of us, IMO, made the right choice by opting out. People love to make value judgements about this decision, as if there should be a default choice, but one thing we don't need more of is parents who don't want to be parents.

nkurz• 5 years ago

Great comment! I'm wondering, why did you choose to post this under a throwaway? Do you fear repercussion, prefer to keep personal separate from business, or just not have an account?

throwaway2929612• 5 years ago

Thanks :) I wanted to add some perspective, but felt some of the details were a little too personal to have it permanently tied to my professional identity. So more of a preference to keep personal separate from business.

To Breed or Not to Breed?

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