Oh, you mean back when people had children to help tend the farms and ranches that kept their families alive, when mortality and illness rates were much higher?
The idea is to provide a better life to your kids than you had, otherwise what was the point in subjecting a child to a lesser life. That's what people complain about now, boomers had it better (financially).
And yes, boomers got to have literally the best material experience for anyone ever to have lived, but we’re complaining about having maybe the 2nd, 3rd or 4th best. People who complain about the economic conditions we’re in now, have just not read history.
What we really lack is social and spiritual connection. Modern life has isolated us from each other and atomized so we’re alone, anxious and purposeless. People in the past had these things and were far happier despite far worse material conditions.
You can find these things, but you have actively push against the currents of culture to find them. First thing I would recommend people who want to have kids but are worried about finances, move back to where your parents, or some other relative, who can help with childcare. Also, find a community to help you through tough times (traditionally these have been churches, which also help with the purposelessness of our age).
Okay but people who are young adults now have lived multiple once in a lifetime events. Multiple previous and ongoing wars since the early 2000s, a worldwide financial crisis, and worldwide pandemic with additional lifetime government borrowing debt passed on to the tax payer.
The UK is also facing the highest taxation since records began, ongoing cost of living crisis with far beyond average inflation on essential like food and the highest energy costs despite substantially lower cost over europe and not to mention out of control government spending on putting up illegal migrants in hotels with 3 meals a day while cutting pensioner heating allowance.
And on the topic of children, exorbitant childcare costs.
So I wouldn't quite go as far as 2nd 3rd or even 4th best economic stability in recent decades.
I lived through all those things and what helped me most was being close to family and community. My parents help watch my kids and I was able to get connected to a job through my church. It’s about having a support structure.
Can you name a time and place that had better material conditions than millennials and Gen Z? Excluding boomers and Gen X.
You’re telling me the people having “10 kids during the Great Depression” were doing it because they thought their kids would have a better life than themselves during the worst economic period in America?
Nothing more selfish than subjecting 10 of your own children to poverty in the financial crisis because you didn't want to stop you from being responsible.
Okay but the kids born during the Great Depression did live a better lives than their parents (New Deal policies, post war boom, 50s America) so I don’t see what your point is.
Did they know that was going to be the case when they had the kids? Absolutely not. Similarly, who is to say kids born now will have a better future? Maybe they will, but we can't be sure of that.
Okay so then the whole “having kids to give them a better life than us” thing doesn’t make sense because you’re saying there’s no way to know whether they will have a better or worse life.
If born in America, those kids then probably fought in the forgotten war, Korea. That one has quite the death toll. It was WWII, Korea, and Vietnam back to back before we finally ended conscription.
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u/SwedishFlopper 1d ago
If the economy was better, I'd consider it.