My brother is in his mid-30s and married a mid-20s woman last year. She said the smart ones in her generation are all looking to get married in the 25-30 rannge now.
Their parents were the most selfish and self-centered generation in history and rasied them with lots of self-pitying and passive-aggressive whining. Result: The children internalized the understanding that having kids is tedius, horrible, expensive, risky, and a waste of time that could be better spent in your own service. It doesn't matter how many times they told their kids they loved them; kids know automatically to pay attention to action, not words.
Most people under 30 (under 40, really) look apon child-rearing as a cross between triple-bypass surgery and an 18-year prison sentence without possibility of parole. The fact that they can't plan rationally for their futures in an economy where people get laid off every six months or can only find temp work might also have something to do with things.
That's a good point. People do respond rationally to economic incentives en mass.
Chronic instability and the expense of raising children to be middle class coupled with a social dynamic where children don't support the parents when they're old means that you would expect childbirth rates to fall.
True, the reason why there was a baby boom at all was that the birth rate fell very sharply during the Depression and early years of WW II. THen about 1944 people started to have babies as there was finally some hope for the future.
Remember that after Pearl Harbor, while there was more employment, the American people were told to prepare for 15 year of war. Not a good time to have children. By '44 it was clear that wouldn't be the case.
Posted 2/24/2012 5:42 am
Ok lady...now I'm going to take a wild guess and say that your womb is probably as dead as the Sinoloan desert as a result of all the coke you snorted over the years. But if you did have a child...and that child happened to be a daughter, how would you feel about her taking the same sad path that you've taken over the years? Think about that before you attempt to push your bullshit agenda on the rest of the world; because it seems to me that you're just trying to rationalize your shitty life decisions.
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She thinks we're all D&D rejects. Little does she know that we are exactly the people she depends on: we cook her meals, we haul her trash, we connect her calls, we drive the ambulances, we guard her while she sleeps.
The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not talk about Project Mayhem
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