US Birthrate Hits Record Low

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http://www.cnbc.com/id/102257571

Not my fault!! Hubby and I did our bit for the birthrate by keeping me home and having four!! !

OK, I have a cousin whose health is too poor to have a baby, and two friends who decided that kids are too expensive and too much trouble. Technically if you count all of them up (one cousin, one single friend, one friend and said friend's spouse, plus Hubby and me), I'd have had to have six to replace us...

...but I did my bit. I think four is all my "tragically disabled" self can manage.

Seriously, though, I don't think I'd get too bent out of shape over a sociopolitical rant by yet another self-righteous right-wingnut with lousy grammar and not even a manipulated statistic to give himself the illusion of scientific validity. I feel better knowing that I'm probably not going to kill the Earth (or humanity) tomorrow with my enormous brood and all, but still.

I have what I consider to be a surprising number of friends who don't have children. I was always under the impression, growing up, that most people I knew would eventually marry and have children. This has been true for most of the people from my high school with whom I'm still in touch. I can only think of two who don't have kids. For my college friends, however, it is quite a different story. Almost NONE of them have children, and we are all in our late thirties now. A lot of them seem to be emotionally stuck, as well. Their posts on social media revolve around the craft beers they're trying, what they made for dinner (as if cooking dinner is some kind of novel accomplishment), and the college courses they're (still) taking. Perhaps the craziest thing is that most of them talk about having kids "someday". Now, I'm a woman and my friends are pretty much all women. These college-educated women seem to have no concept of a biological clock whatsoever. When is this someday?! They baffle me.

Being a woman, I hate to say this. But, being a woman, I also think it's true. Certainly it is true of my experience.

The "educated people not having kids" thing is part of the dogma of liberal feminism. I remember CLEARLY being taught that having kids should be on the bottom of my priority list, that it was a frivolity and a stupid thing, not an achievement or a worthwhile labor (OK, HAVING kids isn't an achievement-- it takes no intelligence or work to make baby grow in uterus and come out hole-- but RAISING them sure is). I remember CLEARLY being taught that getting pregnant was just about the worst thing a woman could do to herself-- the end of her career, the end of her personal life, the end of her freedom, just about the end of her personhood.

We won't discuss the attitude my professors had toward me when I came back after a year sabbatical dragging a toddler. I think it would have been better with them if I had clearly hated being a mother (I tried to hate it, thought I was supposed to hate it). But I didn't, and at that point academia and I mutually gave up on each other. I finished my degree, because I was THAT CLOSE, and basically said "f**k it." "I'm smart enough to realize what my husband's career is going to be like. I'm staying home and raising the kids."

And I liked the second one so much that we had a third. And when all the layers of birth control failed, I wasn't exactly looking up the abortion clinic. I could have-- I was 10 weeks pregnant when I found out-- but I wanted her. You have NO IDEA how many nasty comments were made about a pregnant woman waddling through a suburban WalMart (or an OB's office) with three kids in tow-- and those were from people who DIDN'T know that I'm "not normal."

Then there's the whole hyping of fertility treatments. To read the hype, you'd think that any woman can take a few hormone shots (a nightmare in and of itself), harvest a few eggs, and have a baby at 45. Or 50. In reality, it's a good bit more difficult, and the success rate is pretty damn low (<20%).

Hell, I got fixed after the fourth one for two reasons-- the good reason (that I didn't know how I was going to jam raising all of them into my lousy-executive-function, need-my-downtime days) and the bad reason (I was embarrassed to walk down the street with that many kids in tow, tired of having people assume I was stupid).

So, yes, I can understand why bright women would keep putting it off, and keep putting it off, and keep putting it off. I'm not surprised that the birthrate is dropping off, and I'm definitely not surprised that it's dropping off the fastest among the educated.

One could say that smart people aren't breeding because they're, well, smart. They see the state our world is in. They believe in ACC (or at least look around and know that the average American lifestyle amounts to sh*****g in the spring we drink from). They had an extended taste of fun, and they want to keep having fun. Craft beers, gourmet dinners, shows whenever the mood takes them, three-day mountain-biking tours.

Or you could say it's liberal feminist dogma. Personally, I think I got the better end of the deal. I would trade all the craft beer, gourmet cooking, culture, and Appalachian-trail hiking in the world for picking daisies in a field with any one of my kids. That's my opinion.

You could say that uneducated people breed because they're stupid, uneducated people who don't realize what's going down in the world. And we're heading for living in Idiocracy, feeding the crops GatorAde and wondering why they're dying.

Or you could say that there are different kinds of intelligence. I've met lots and lots of stupid people, and lots and lots of uneducated people. Most of the time, I've discovered, they're not the same people. The intelligence to make the world run properly doesn't have to come out of a lab in an ivory tower, handed down by someone with a dozen letters after their name.

Sometimes, after all those years in college, I think it might be in the human race's best interests if most of the intelligentsia DON'T breed.

This is a bad thing anyway you dice it, hard to imagine it reversing too that's the thing. Culturally I think we've evolved to be so much more self involved and obsessed about our own lives that having kids seems like a burden and the world right now is the world I was born into, it's not a world that I'd really want to bring a child into.

Why? The world isn't the best it will ever be, but it's as good as it's ever been. Though that particularly optimism is typically found most in millenials. Maybe it's the optimism of youth, or maybe it's an actual sincere belief, not found in the few preceding generations, that things are, indeed, looking up.

Don't forget that there was a millenial boom in the birthrate. It's natural for the birthrate to ebb and flow. The birthrate was low when Gen X was born; it rose again in the 90s.

Still not enough to afford to pay for generous pensions for baby boomers though. They'll just have to deal with it.

Looking at my parents doing housework I used to feel sorry for them, and hated helping. Now Im older I dont mind doing housework.

Same goes for kids, you see the negative side when you go out like loud kids in the restaurant. Kids being hit in the supermarket.
When you have them for yourself your attitude changes and you dont mind the lack of doing single-person fun things and the occasional annoying behaviour.

The irony of a consumption based society (they all are).

You need kiddies to work for stuff (make and consume), then another lot to look after those when they get older.

But, it's hard as hell to keep the balance, so you have baby-booms [that can't be tapped off] for the near term fix (too many kids, and hello global warming), immigration (go-go social tensions), or not enough and you have various implosions.