The sexes are different. I think it's natural for a new mother to want to spend time with her baby and for a new father to safeguard his career, on which the livelihood of the family often depends, by working harder.
Fearing that if you don't keep working your family will starve doesn't seem like an innate gender difference but a cultural problem. The new fathers I have known have all wanted to spend time with their babies.
Yep. I structured my paternity leave as a series of Wednesdays off for several months so I only was on for two days and then off. Gave my wife a break that way.
That has very little to do with the sexes and everything to do with a predatory economic system. The fact that we have people in this country who feel this way not only about paternity leave but also general vacation / sick time should not be a reflection on those people but on the corporations and a broken society.
Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates.
And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imagine trying to go through the first couple of weeks after a baby is born without it.
For one, if your wife/partner/baby mommy has had a c-section, they will have to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth, because a c-section is nontrivial surgery that they will need to recover from.
They and you will also need to start feeding/changing/bathing/soothing the new baby. If it’s your first, you’re learning how to do all this from scratch. And sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s not. The logistics of simultaneously using a breast pump, and formula supplementation…let’s just say it’s a lot of work that nobody prepares you for.
If it’s not, you’ve also got other kids who still require the usual amount of looking after, plus a bit extra because they’re often peeved about this new bundle of pooh, wee, and crying getting all the attention.
And then you’ve got the logistics of all the friends and relatives who turn up and want to see your bundle of joy.
And then, frankly, it’s your kid, and most fathers I went through the process with at roughly the same time wanted to be involved in all of this stuff, unlike their Boomer parents. I certainly did.
I belive an equally good headline would have been: "Japan wants women to have 2.1 kids but they're too scared to make them"
Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate because those people stay single forever.
Japan also has the issue that large parts of the country will be heavily affected by global warming and you can already see the increase in typhoons right now. Parents are scared if their children will still have a safe home.
And lastly, the economy has stopped growing and turned into a zero sum game. It's a cutthroat competition for who gets promoted because new leadership positions typically only open up if someone dies or retires. That means young families are broke.
The paternity leave is catnip for western newspapers, but in my opinion almost irrelevant.
>Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate
about 0.5% of the Japanese population are estimated to live like hermits, how are they responsible for 30% in birth rate reductions? If anything this is the Western media catnip, because it's the most overhyped, Japanese stereotype I've ever seen.
I was referring to the wider movement where young people give up on normal participation in daily life. So I'd also count grass eaters, for example. The 30% came from my memory of these statistics:
"About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship."
Hikikomori are severely isolated people who basically represent Japan's analogue to homelessness. These people leave their rooms seldom and their houses never.
Herbivore men and hikikomori are very much not the same. To say they are is tantamount to saying that incels are part of a wider "hoarder" movement, these groups might be affected by similar societal dynamics but they're not related at all
Since we're discussion birth rates here, I believe it does make sense to group together 2 groups of severely isolated men who are very unlikely to procreate, even if they strongly differ in other aspects.
It worth to discuss but group it as Hikkomori is wrong. Note that Herbivore men doesn't mean that they doesn't have friends. Normal daily life, but without loving partner. Maybe you think that living without partner isn't normal, but young Japanese don't think so.
You can split hairs all you like, the fact remains that even the Japanese government recognizes the country has a problem with plummeting birth rates.
Also a lot of the, let's call it "citizen resistance" against the prevalent extremely toxic Japanese work culture, is not captured by statistics. Japanese are different people and they will not just admit "yeah I would only see my wife and kid for 1 hour before I dine and collapse, preparing for yet another 16 hour workday" if asked on the street. Written workplace surveys? Forget about it, to them it's a disgrace to badmouth their employer; never happening.
It's obvious the Japanese have a problem. You arguing doesn't change that.
Sure, they do have a problem. This thread is just horribly ignorant about those problems and we're lumping unlike groups together because to us they are like, that is what I'm arguing against.
There are quite a few different reasons why people become reclusive. For instance the person with panic disorder stays at home because they are afraid they’ll have a panic attack if they go out. A person with social phobia looks superficially the same but they have a very different inner experience. Schizotypal people are constitutionally inclined to think everybody is out to get them and then they get bullied in school and the bullying is supported by the teachers and school administration and learn that everybody really is out to get them.
There are a number of syndromes that look superficially like the Hikikomori syndrome, of about 10 people I know in the US who are chronically depressed and fit the “NEET” (No Employment, Education or Training) criteria there is one who I think really is a Hikikomori (can’t seem to tell the difference between Hololive and reality), the rest all differ in some major way.
I’ve been in Tokyo for more than 15 years. When my son was born, my then-employer - the Tokyo office of a White Shoe NY law firm - gave me 3 days paternity leave. Told me pretty much everything I needed to know.
That's 3 more days than I got in the US... only way I got any time was unpaid days. Outside of some large corporations and government jobs, few people - even the women giving birth - get anywhere near enough time.
A lot of companies will give you at least a month, even if it isn’t mandated by law. We have a family leave pay roll tax in WA, though I’m not sure how hard it is to use for paternity leave.
Japan does much better than the USA on child care so the parents can go back to work.
Spain provides 6 weeks of mandatory paid parental leave that come into effect once the child is born, and an additional 10 weeks to be used during the year.
>Japan does much better than the USA on child care
It's great that the WA leg passed Fair Start, but it only helped the demand side of child care. So now if you needed help paying for child care you have the means to do so - but because the demand side is broken, you still can't get the child care you need. Unfortunately this is a trend in American politics on a range of issues - let's throw some money at one side of the equation, never mind the root causes of the problem.
> We have a family leave pay roll tax in WA, though I’m not sure how hard it is to use for paternity leave.
I'll admit - I don't know either, as my children of the Evergreen State were born before that came into effect. The payroll tax is a good start, but like many of these well-intentioned laws it leaves behind a lot of people.
The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
Is that really all to it? Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
>Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
Studying AND "living a little" at the same time isn't that hard with all the exchange programs EU universities provide. Traveling within Europe is also very cheap. It's mainly just an excuse for people who don't want children that much, which is now more common due to cultural changes as well.
Expensive housing on the other hand is a real problem. Requiring a long degree for nearly everything is also dumb.
I could barely survive on the money I was able to earn during uni. Bafög was denied but parents couldn't support me properly either. So no, I couldn't live a little in uni. I needed a proper salary for that.
I ask my young colleagues in their late 20s early 30s why they don't make kids.
They say they don't feel like it, they are afraid of the commitment and prefer to have fun. How long is the fun supposed to be is unclear.
I had my fun while being a student, I did my studies in a foreign country, so when I started work I didn't mind having my first child (was 28).
I keep warning them how tiring it is to raise a child, and you better do it while you're healthy.
I've never understood the whole "party it up in college" thing. Like number one, I had to go to class and then do school work. I also had to work a shit job to try and not end up drowning in debt for school. I basically did the "996" thing (12 hour days 6 days a week) between school and work for years. It was not a party for me. Also I have zero interest in putting a child through that or many aspects of the modern world.
Well, having fun is a very subjective thing. I was not a party guy neither but I must admit I did not need to work like you.
It is just that I went abroad to study. That was an adventure for me as I could barely speak English at 18.
I lived 5 years in the UK, then I worked 7 years in Germany. It fulfilled my need to discover the world and gave me a better insight about what is good or bad in a country.
Now I am having fun by doing cycling trips several days with my son. We are eagerly waiting for the sun.
I don't see what young people see, what is bad about the modern world? We are not at war, we have an incredible comfort, I don't get why it is not a good time to have children (if you want one of course).
I think people should just stop trying to plan everything and just do something and improvise.
Disclaimer: having children is a money sink and limiting factor when want to pursue your career, but it is not blocking you.
Well, being somewhat homeless is an issue for me as well. While the idea of being a free spirit is nice, I suspect that society will more or less expect me to provide shelter for said children. As I said, there really are multiple problems with the whole idea.
It's a huge host of reasons and they all have a tiny cumulative effect. Also after a while it also reaches a tipping point in that "all my friends aren't having kids so why should I".
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
Most of my friends have been married or in long term relationships for at least a decade now. None are divorced. With one exception none have children and we're all approaching 40. Your list doesn't address why my peer group is choosing not to have kids.
I don't know what to tell you. My guess would be that they all enjoy the leisure lifestyle that's not disturbed by children. Maybe they're scared of having children by the possibility of them being bullied at school due to the prevalence of thug culture? School shootings? Maybe Greta and that camp have them so scared that they'll be destroying the environment by having kids? Maybe they are guilted by woke culture about being white so they want to wipe out their own race. Who knows.
At the end of the day. Ask them why. Then poke and prod till they tell you the core of why they think that way. Then see what in recent culture or happenings might have caused them to think that way.
I'm not at a loss as to why my friends aren't having kids. I'm at a loss as to why you think your list is relevant to why my friends are having kids. You've produced a fine list of culture war talking points but none of the simple stuff. No talk of economic problems or people not wanting to continue the same destructive cycles and finally feeling like they have the option. Instead it's all "Greta" and "woke culture" and "white guilt".
My comments seem not welcome to you. Speak to your friends, as I won't engage further in an antagonizing discussion that seems to be turning personal with you.
Well, in this case the choices are personal as they are effecting myself, my wife, and my friends. I suppose it's understandable to feel OK infantilizing people and making arguments around culture war hot topics if you're not personally involved, but the implication that it's something like white guilt or the war on men is detached, disrespectful, and antagonizing.
I think some elements of this are true, and yes I think culture plays a big part in it.
I am sorta on the opposite side of this I want to have kids, get married, I'm willing to support my husband if I make more then him (whenever I get one), but I feel like I'm just not stable enough yet. Most of my tech jobs are short lived, I'm also trying to run my own business and just don't have the time to do a lot right now. I grew up with parents with hugh issues with money and they divorced and I don't want that for my future. I don't want to fight over money or jobs or small stupid stuff that doesn't matter in life.
I think honestly a lot of people just don't feel like they are in a stable position, we also don't have strong communities anymore that helps out when stuff does get hard like marriage or raising kids. I think honestly a lot of people are really lonely and just live with it because they don't know how to fix it. We don't have systems or places in place that make it easy to hang out nor do we have the time nowadays. Or at least I don't. I'm in my 30's though and I'm in a long distance relationship but it sounds really hard to imagine actually getting married anytime soon I just have so much going on. I really believe people want to feel loved and have someone to love, I think a lot of our society now though is hyper competitive, commercialized and no longer built for families. People don't trust anymore and it's a fear driven culture.
Increased education requirements to not live in poverty is the #1 reason in my opinion.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
People think kids are too expensive because of the expectation of what kids cost. Not just monetarily but also in terms of time.
You see it especially in Asian countries like South Korea. Kids mean hiring tutors, violin lessons, test prep, etc. Because of course my kid won't be average, he's going to be a next Bill Gates and that costs a lot of money.
I wish countries stopped trying to "solve their fertility problem." We don't need so many people. We don't need laborers to exploit. We should focus on technological and robotic solutions to the labor shortage.
Here in Finland we have generous paternity leave that people aren't afraid to use, yet birth rates are very similar to Japan. IMO it's partially cultural, but also lack of stability in employment, having to spend too many years studying useless degrees and expensive housing (compared to wages) in cities contribute.
The basic prerogative of reproduction is predicated on the basic need for safe and secure territory.
The wealthiest oligarchs of the boomer generation have done everything they can to ensure the consequent generations are unable to attain that one entirely reasonable primal need.
Women's rights have had an affect on birth rates, yes, but I'd rather take away the oligarch's right to own all the single family homes than my girlfriend's right to decide what to do with her life.
Taking paternity leave in Japan is a giant PITA if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Because of how it's paid out I didn't see any money until I went back to work three months later. How are you meant to keep the lights on until then?
Creating options is the least important step in changing an entrenched cultural norm. What you actually need is a measure to eliminate the symbolic repercussions of using those options.
In the early 2010s, Bay Area startups were famous for "unlimited vacation" policies that resulted in less overall time off because everyone was well aware that taking even a standard amount of vacation would signal a lack of devotion.
What's the solution? Mandatory benefits: make everyone use their allotment, even if they don't want to. Many large banks force all staff to take holidays not only to combat a culture of overwork, but also to prevent fraud by making sure everyone has a block of time where they have to hand over their work to someone else.
If the Japanese government were truly serious about the "ikumen" ideal, it would pass a law requiring 6 weeks of paternity leave. Of course, I doubt that's politically or culturally feasible.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadPlenty of well intenioned policy, but its not considering the actual social stigmas/structures behind the issue.
Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates.
And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imagine trying to go through the first couple of weeks after a baby is born without it.
For one, if your wife/partner/baby mommy has had a c-section, they will have to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth, because a c-section is nontrivial surgery that they will need to recover from.
They and you will also need to start feeding/changing/bathing/soothing the new baby. If it’s your first, you’re learning how to do all this from scratch. And sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s not. The logistics of simultaneously using a breast pump, and formula supplementation…let’s just say it’s a lot of work that nobody prepares you for. If it’s not, you’ve also got other kids who still require the usual amount of looking after, plus a bit extra because they’re often peeved about this new bundle of pooh, wee, and crying getting all the attention.
And then you’ve got the logistics of all the friends and relatives who turn up and want to see your bundle of joy.
And then, frankly, it’s your kid, and most fathers I went through the process with at roughly the same time wanted to be involved in all of this stuff, unlike their Boomer parents. I certainly did.
Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate because those people stay single forever.
Japan also has the issue that large parts of the country will be heavily affected by global warming and you can already see the increase in typhoons right now. Parents are scared if their children will still have a safe home.
And lastly, the economy has stopped growing and turned into a zero sum game. It's a cutthroat competition for who gets promoted because new leadership positions typically only open up if someone dies or retires. That means young families are broke.
The paternity leave is catnip for western newspapers, but in my opinion almost irrelevant.
about 0.5% of the Japanese population are estimated to live like hermits, how are they responsible for 30% in birth rate reductions? If anything this is the Western media catnip, because it's the most overhyped, Japanese stereotype I've ever seen.
"About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship."
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-japanese-increasingly-disinter...
Herbivore men and hikikomori are very much not the same. To say they are is tantamount to saying that incels are part of a wider "hoarder" movement, these groups might be affected by similar societal dynamics but they're not related at all
Also a lot of the, let's call it "citizen resistance" against the prevalent extremely toxic Japanese work culture, is not captured by statistics. Japanese are different people and they will not just admit "yeah I would only see my wife and kid for 1 hour before I dine and collapse, preparing for yet another 16 hour workday" if asked on the street. Written workplace surveys? Forget about it, to them it's a disgrace to badmouth their employer; never happening.
It's obvious the Japanese have a problem. You arguing doesn't change that.
There are a number of syndromes that look superficially like the Hikikomori syndrome, of about 10 people I know in the US who are chronically depressed and fit the “NEET” (No Employment, Education or Training) criteria there is one who I think really is a Hikikomori (can’t seem to tell the difference between Hololive and reality), the rest all differ in some major way.
Japan does much better than the USA on child care so the parents can go back to work.
Almost any country does. If Japan gives you more freedom in something than at home, then at home doesn't give any.
Spain provides 6 weeks of mandatory paid parental leave that come into effect once the child is born, and an additional 10 weeks to be used during the year.
It's great that the WA leg passed Fair Start, but it only helped the demand side of child care. So now if you needed help paying for child care you have the means to do so - but because the demand side is broken, you still can't get the child care you need. Unfortunately this is a trend in American politics on a range of issues - let's throw some money at one side of the equation, never mind the root causes of the problem.
> We have a family leave pay roll tax in WA, though I’m not sure how hard it is to use for paternity leave.
I'll admit - I don't know either, as my children of the Evergreen State were born before that came into effect. The payroll tax is a good start, but like many of these well-intentioned laws it leaves behind a lot of people.
I didn't know this is idiom.
My first intuition was white shoe law firm meant you wear white sneakers instead of black leather shoes. I.e. it was more of a shady, cheap law firm.
Interesting that it means the opposite.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
Expensive housing on the other hand is a real problem. Requiring a long degree for nearly everything is also dumb.
I keep warning them how tiring it is to raise a child, and you better do it while you're healthy.
I've never understood the whole "party it up in college" thing. Like number one, I had to go to class and then do school work. I also had to work a shit job to try and not end up drowning in debt for school. I basically did the "996" thing (12 hour days 6 days a week) between school and work for years. It was not a party for me. Also I have zero interest in putting a child through that or many aspects of the modern world.
Now I am having fun by doing cycling trips several days with my son. We are eagerly waiting for the sun.
I don't see what young people see, what is bad about the modern world? We are not at war, we have an incredible comfort, I don't get why it is not a good time to have children (if you want one of course). I think people should just stop trying to plan everything and just do something and improvise.
Disclaimer: having children is a money sink and limiting factor when want to pursue your career, but it is not blocking you.
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
At the end of the day. Ask them why. Then poke and prod till they tell you the core of why they think that way. Then see what in recent culture or happenings might have caused them to think that way.
I am sorta on the opposite side of this I want to have kids, get married, I'm willing to support my husband if I make more then him (whenever I get one), but I feel like I'm just not stable enough yet. Most of my tech jobs are short lived, I'm also trying to run my own business and just don't have the time to do a lot right now. I grew up with parents with hugh issues with money and they divorced and I don't want that for my future. I don't want to fight over money or jobs or small stupid stuff that doesn't matter in life.
I think honestly a lot of people just don't feel like they are in a stable position, we also don't have strong communities anymore that helps out when stuff does get hard like marriage or raising kids. I think honestly a lot of people are really lonely and just live with it because they don't know how to fix it. We don't have systems or places in place that make it easy to hang out nor do we have the time nowadays. Or at least I don't. I'm in my 30's though and I'm in a long distance relationship but it sounds really hard to imagine actually getting married anytime soon I just have so much going on. I really believe people want to feel loved and have someone to love, I think a lot of our society now though is hyper competitive, commercialized and no longer built for families. People don't trust anymore and it's a fear driven culture.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
People think kids are too expensive because of the expectation of what kids cost. Not just monetarily but also in terms of time.
You see it especially in Asian countries like South Korea. Kids mean hiring tutors, violin lessons, test prep, etc. Because of course my kid won't be average, he's going to be a next Bill Gates and that costs a lot of money.
I love this!
The wealthiest oligarchs of the boomer generation have done everything they can to ensure the consequent generations are unable to attain that one entirely reasonable primal need.
Women's rights have had an affect on birth rates, yes, but I'd rather take away the oligarch's right to own all the single family homes than my girlfriend's right to decide what to do with her life.
In the early 2010s, Bay Area startups were famous for "unlimited vacation" policies that resulted in less overall time off because everyone was well aware that taking even a standard amount of vacation would signal a lack of devotion.
What's the solution? Mandatory benefits: make everyone use their allotment, even if they don't want to. Many large banks force all staff to take holidays not only to combat a culture of overwork, but also to prevent fraud by making sure everyone has a block of time where they have to hand over their work to someone else.
If the Japanese government were truly serious about the "ikumen" ideal, it would pass a law requiring 6 weeks of paternity leave. Of course, I doubt that's politically or culturally feasible.