For The Future

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Today I was thinking about the birth rate, partly because of this.

He is wrong, and right, but mostly right. So I thought I would talk about it a bit. First he is wrong about economic incentives having no point in it.

Yes, you could choose to have ten kids in a hut in the middle of a national forest and you and your husband/wife hunt and live off the land. Given how most of us were raised, that’s about as likely to happen as of a large number of people suddenly sprouting wings and doing away with the need for an airline industry.

But more importantly that ridiculous agro hectoring of “People had children when they were much poorer. Shut up, you young spoiled ones. Have babies on command.” This is roughly translated as “I didn’t have kids when I could, but you should do like my ancestors and birth ten babies and till the back forty. Uphill, both ways.”

Why is it agro, and why is it ridiculous? Dudes. He’s comparing kumquats and quail.

Let’s unpack why people had packs of children when they really logically couldn’t afford it and a vast number of them died of starvation or diseases that took easy hold for being on the verge of them. My mom’s parents had five kids in a space roughly equivalent to the family room where I write blogs and the small kitchen adjacent. Into that space were crammed a small bedroom where the parents slept, a larger room that contained a double bed, a table and china cupboard and grandma’s sewing machine, and then there was a very small kitchen with cement floor, an open cooking fire, and two trunks for supplies, as well as shelves on the wall.

So, did they have children because they really wanted children, longed for them, and the culture told them children were a positive good?

You’re kidding, right? YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING. My grandmother did care for her kids, but I never got the impression she passionately longed for them, and I happen to know she made the older responsible for the younger as soon as she possibly could. My grandfather honestly couldn’t care less. (I loved him, in his old age, but he was a wicked man.)

So why oh why would they have that many? Mostly because contraception was hit or miss and mostly miss, and because grandad wouldn’t let no rhythm stand in the way of his pleasures. I very much doubt if they’d had safe, convenient contraception they’d have had more than one or two. Because grandad wouldn’t want to spend money on them.

The other thing, and the reason this comparison is specious and one more way of saying “you youngs deserve to be poors, so go and have some children and live in a hut.” is that children were a way of making money. Oh, not initially. Initially they took time, money and effort. SOMEWHAT. For instance grandad never allotted money to clothe and look after his brood, so grandma did what she could form odd sewing jobs and such (And work delivering bread, for which she forged his signature, since she couldn’t work without his permission, and he didn’t want her to work because that dented his prestige.) Which meant they were covered and not hanging in the breeze. But they went barefoot summer and winter until they entered apprenticeships at ten.

And here we go into the other point: PEOPLE. Kids earned money. Even those in apprenticeships, you might have to provide some fee up front (though not in Portugal at the time) but the kids got paid. And the money was brought home to the parents. They might be allowed to keep SOME (mom did, so she had shoes) but that was at the parent’s discretion. And kids started earning (in Portugal, in mom’s time. Other places in history it was earlier) at about ten. The end of fourth grade. Note that mom had a scholarship that would have taken her through high school, but grandad chose to send her to apprentice to seamstress instead. (What she made of it afterwards was a business in which she mostly designed and at one point had seamstresses working for her. But that’s what she made of it.) Because it paid. And he got money from it.

Children weren’t some airy-fairy “the culture tell us it’s good.” For most of human history children were economic goods, an addition to the parents comfort and their ability to survive. For a head-spinning moment, go and read colonial biographies. “I’m so sorry my four year old died. He was doing most of the work looking after the cows and horses, and he was very advanced in his study of Greek.”

Put a pin in this. In changing the culture, we need to change our conception of what children are and what they can do. But for now.

About economics: It’s not a coincidence that educated people are having fewer children. Most of them are burdened with student debt TILL PAST THEIR CHILDBEARING AGE. And please spare me the “but sacrifices.” If minimal survival requires both people in the couple to work to service the loans, no, they’re not going to make sacrifices to have children. Because what you’re asking is that they take massive loans…. again.

And again, kindly, if you or your children went through school more than 10 years ago, consider for a minute you might not have a clue what you’re talking about when you talk about how they should “pay up, you deadbeats.” It’s not just that the loans are much higher than you can imagine (when we were young and broke Dan’s relatively small loans were a serious impairment, and they were small.) it’s that starting jobs pay less — sometimes much less — than you think, and than those published “what you can expect to make” surveys say. Those surveys are mid-career salaries, or at least include them. We’ve had an influx of visas targeted to give corporations cheap skilled labor, and imported even doctors (which are trained in very different ways abroad) by the plane load. This is not so much to fulfill a need but to bring the cost of labor down over all. And it works. BOY does it work. Kids starting salaries are lower than ours were, if you account for inflation. They’re about 75% lower. And my generation started work in the post-Carter cratering (due to his insanity and the inflation of the seventies) which means we didn’t start out high. We were broke as heck. Part of this is because I couldn’t find a job for much of our early years, since no one accepted my schooling. (I’m not counting retail jobs which I did have, and without which we wouldn’t have EATEN.) But mostly it was because we weren’t being paid much, and were barely scratching a living until our mid thirties, at least. (With episodes since then, usually tied to some event or other, not what we make.)

Anyway, the kids are worse off.

BUT you’ll say, it’s the culture. If the culture valued children! If people were willing to do the work!

“You youngs deserve to be poors and overworked. Go and reproduce like the beasts of the field.”

Look, I’m not going to argue the culture values motherhood. Put a pin that too. I’ll revisit it in a moment.

But the practicalities of having children CANNOT and should not be disregarded. And kids shouldn’t be told to go ahead and give birth uphill in the snow, because it’s good for them, for humanity, for the older people who are running out of social security, or whatever.

People do things due to abstracts, yes. BUT NOT WHEN THE PRACTICAL IS DEAD SET AGAINST IT.

Look, social pressure — culture — can do a lot. And so can instincts. But they’re not everything.

I’d like to know — really know — for certain what percentage of the population desperately desires children at any given time. 20%? 90%? We don’t know. We actually have no the slightest idea.

I know I was a fairly odd duck for my generation, because I REALLY WANTED KIDS. A lot of them. And we worked very, very hard for the two we have. Including what infertility treatments cost, which weren’t cheap. (Still aren’t, but more common now, so cheaper. Our relatively trivial interventions cost us as much as IVF would cost nowadays.) But from talking to my peers, even in the eighties, when briefly it was expected you’d have children, because it was “the thing to do” I was an ODD DUCK.

So, what percentage of people truly DESIRE to have kids? I don’t know. And neither do you. Because in the past children were both inevitable if you wanted to have sex (which most people do) and an economic value add.

And what is the natural rate of infertility? Absent lack of desire and active contraception, absent abortion and infanticide? Absent cultural imperatives not to have children?

You don’t know. And neither do I. NO ONE DOES. We know now there are slightly better chances of medical science circumventing infertility. But honestly, from my acquaintance alone, even those who started trying early, the improvements achieve no better than a 25% chance of having a kid. EVEN NOW.

In the past? We here of people coming from families that birthed twelve or twenty and two survived, sure. But how much of that is survivor bias? Given most of the records we have are from baptism and marriage from the church, do we know how many couples had one or two despite really wanting many and trying hard? No. More importantly do we know how much infertility was due to marginal nutrition? (The reason I think grandma only raised five and only birthed six over 20 years of marriage.) We don’t know. All this is a blank.

But we can assume from the records of noble houses and kings and queens and even famous people (who presumably were not as inbred as royals) that the rate of infertility was fairly high.

Now look at it on the flip side, regardless of desire.

Now back to that pin we put into children and economics earlier. Children in our current culture are not an economic or material plus. They bring absolutely nothing to the family and are always and completely a drain until … well, you could say legal majority at 18, but because of extended education and the difficulties with finding jobs and supporting themselves, etc, most of our friends are supporting their kids well into their twenties if not thirties. And heck, even we ourselves would have foundered without small, but undeniable monetary help from my parents over the years. I mean, for one, we’d not have had Christmas any year. The reason we could afford the Christmas dinner, let alone gifts for the kids is that my birthday is in November and my parents usually sent me $500 for my birthday, which went for that. (And sometimes for warm coats, though we got those at thrift stores, so cheaper.)

The fact that children are not a plus value materially is partly because we’re no longer farmers, sure. Except where it’s not. Most of it if you look closely is the result of an intrusive government dictating how children and adolescents and young adults MUST be treated, for their own good as determined by experts.

These are laws and regulations established not by any sound research but through sheer alarmism.

For instance, while not advocating for “Dark Satanic Mills” do you realize that there is no proof whatsoever that sending kids to school as early as possible and teaching them as little as possible (no, really. You’re not allowed to go ahead of plan) has produced better results than having the kids, say, help in the family farm and attend school three months out of the year?

A lot of song and dance is made about kids now learning more complex things, but none of it is true. We’re graduating kids AT EIGHTEEN that have learned a complex variety of nonsense, like what pronouns to use and what the politically correct term for someone who sews is, but have no idea how to actually READ in their own language, let alone the rudimentary Greek and Latin of the past. We’re graduating kids at eighteen who KNOW that math is racist, but who can’t do change, calculate the area of a wall versus the amount of paint they need to cover it. All of these skills and far more I’d been taught by 10 in a village school that operated from 1st to 4th grade, four to five hours a day, except the teacher threw us outside to play when we were too noisy and it was fine out, and sometimes recess took two hours because she couldn’t even. In Shakespeare’s day people would know small Latin, a little Greek, a vast vocabulary and how to cypher by the time they were 10.

Sure, they didn’t know how to program computers. And they would be utterly baffled if you asked them to remember individual pronouns, because that’s what we have NAMES for. But most of our kids can’t program computers, either. They can use them, which is different.

Most kids leave High School less informed and far less educated than my mom did at fourth grade. And trust me, mom has massive holes in her knowledge of things from History to science and is weirdly susceptible to “I saw it in a movie so it must be true. They wouldn’t be allowed to make movies that way if it weren’t.” (BRIDGERTON. GAH.) But so are most of the graduates of American High Schools who spent a lot more time in school and learned no useful garment making and designing skills to go with that. And they do exactly the same mental revision of history according to movies, if you look at what they’re writing.

So, the government ONEROUSLY dictates that parents finance 18 years of non-productive learning for their kids. FURTHER MORE the jobs kids can take, which were already restrictive by the end of the last century, have grown insanely so.

It’s not that the kids CAN’T contribute economically to the family. It is that the government doesn’t allow them to, afraid that if they allow kids to take jobs — any jobs — they will magically be enslaved in Victorian mills. It has nothing to do with all of us no longer living in farms. It has to do with the fact that, say, I couldn’t ON THE BOOKS have paid my kids for cleaning the house, and deducted it as a business expense, because I was working.

More importantly, my friends couldn’t pay my kids to clean the house, or collate prints, or typeset or typo hunt for them. Therefore my kids couldn’t be making money, even in early to mid High School when they could have done so. Yeah, yeah, they did some of that anyway, but we had to pay under the table, and there’s issues with that.

Part of the barrier is also minimum wage. You’re not going to hire a fifteen year old with the judgement and attention span of a fifteen year old at $16 an hour. Pay them $5 an hour, and it’s suddenly feasible and worth it. And most American middle class parents don’t even want to take any part of that money. But it’s also good to know if they need it, the kids have SOME. (During a very bad time in my birth family, my brother’s tutoring money kept us in mortgage payments.) Arguably this is good for the kids’ self respect. It definitely is worth it for their education, but it’s verbotten.

Basically, in our regulations, we’re supposed to support our kids through an 18 year long recess, after which they’re automagically economic units and independent. Even that is profoundly unapetizing as a prospect, particularly when you’re young and insecure, and contemplating having your first child. Now add to that that most of us have eyes and see parents supporting their kids well into their thirties, and helping into their forties, and yeah, prospective parents will rightly be afraid.

Then there are other, even more onerous regulations, like the mentally handicapped “Home alone” rules that meant I couldn’t leave my nine and six year olds alone in the house, even with cell phones to be able to call me, and strict instructions not to turn on the stove and such. Again, because of one bad situation these stupid laws impose onerous takings on all the parents. I worked from home, but even so was restricted on when I could shop, when I could work, and what lectures and such I could attend by this stupidity. (Which the parents who are prone to leave the kids in dangerous situations don’t obey, anyway.)

Or add the increasingly hysterical regulations to avoid “truancy.” In Colorado there for a while, anyone could denounce you for having a child with you during school time, and leave it to you to explain that a) the kid was only 3, he only looked 6. or b) that the kid was sick and you stopped by to buy some canned soup on the way from the doctor or c) you were homeschooling and the kid was having school while out with you.

In fact the governmental “well meaning” (EH!) burden of “how to raise your child” regulations is so heavy that it adds to taking away a good half of a parent’s time, and by itself completely circumscribes the number of kids you can have.

Take the whole “Never physically punish the child.” Look, I’m not advocating beating a child, but particularly in the pre-verbal or pre-understanding years, a swat to the bottom stops dangerous behavior quicker than a time out or a philosophical discussion that can’t happen in the middle of the grocery store, anyway.

Yes, there is a thing called “Gentle parenting.” Yes, it works wonders. But it doesn’t work wonders for every child. (It worked on my second. Not my first. My second took redirection like a pro. The older one not so much.) Not every parent is capable of it. And government dictation on “you can’t do minimal physical correction” MOSTLY results in children growing up without any physical discipline whatsoever AND parents living shackled to the kids just to ensure they don’t accidentally kill themselves or others.

So what we’re rowing against is not “Parents have to be willing to make some sacrifices for children.”

It’s “Parents who have some amount of desire or at least ‘eh, wouldn’t mind’ for kids are committing to supporting another human being for possibly thirty or more years with no economic benefit and a lot of possible social and criminal liability.”

GEE! You say birth rates are falling? Shocked, shocked.

It must be lack of yelling at young people that their ancestors had kids while being much poorer, and why don’t they get with making babies?

Then there is the social. This is the part where he’s right. The culture is not just sternly against it, the culture has eliminated the image of women as a separate creature from men. No wonder we don’t know what women are, or think it’s all a construct and about clothes and stuff.

It’s not. Women’s entire biological role is built around having children. We medicalize it and thwart it at every opportunity, and treat the fact we were born female (those who were, obviously) as a condition that prevents us from being as sexually free as men, and achieving as much as men do in their “careers.”

This has been going on a long time. As I said, in the early eighties, I was an Odd duck. Furthermore, I was afraid of talking about how much I wanted children, because you see, I was a “smart woman” TM and wanting to have children, much less stay home and raise them was a-priori proof you were either stupid or abused by the men in your life.

So I kept my mouth shut.

Smart women were supposed to do what men did, sleep around and have a Splendid Career, particularly if it was in a male area.

I don’t know why. I didn’t then, and I still don’t. In retrospect, and having done it, I can’t imagine a more splendid career than raising smart and (within the limits of possible) functional kids. Or more satisfying.

Having worked as a corporate drone and as a freelancer, let me tell you, there ain’t nothing splendid about a career. Most women — and men too — trying to nourish their soul on “corporate” success meet only with grinding, boring mediocrity. And your competency and intelligence count for less than your ability to meet changing corporate fads and doctrines and a general ability to suck up. I’m not bitter or disillusioned (for a free lance writer I had more success than most, and indie has freed me further) I’m talking about what I’ve observed with friends and family over the years.

Can we change the culture? Yes. But we must stop telling various lies to people.

Lies?

Sure. We must stop telling people careers are inherently satisfying. That every job leads to a “career” instead of leading to making enough money to afford to live and build a nice life outside of work (or at least paying our own way.) That family is inferior to having some kind of material, externally defined success.

Further, through our entertainment, literature and art, we need to stop focusing on the bad parts of family. Families, like all human institutions, are flawed and can be bad, yes. But why focus on the bad? I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that this chronic depressive (Still unmedicated) would be dead as a doornail without her husband and kids. Years ago. There have been bad times, yes. I worry about the kids, yes. Sometimes I fight with my husband, yes. But on the whole, I derive more … joy, more authentic happiness from them than from anything else I’ve ever done. Sure there’s good and bad, and no one is asking you to show the good only. But why show the bad only? And why weight the bad more? It’s not artistic. It’s not mature. And culturally it’s suicidal.

More importantly, we need to stop telling people they’re going to be twenty forever and never die. I’ve seen people age. I’m aging myself. Let me tell you, sure you have friends, you have your group, but old age without descendants feels cold and bleak. As I age, I find I lean more and more on the kids emotionally if not financially or physically (YET) because I KNOW them better than I know anyone else. And because family is where they have to take you in when you show up at the door.

Look, it’s not just “someday you’ll die.” It’s “what you want will change” and “given current rates of survival, you have a good chance of being “old” and increasingly frail for about half of your life. Being a corporate go getter who sleeps around stops working more and more as those conditions set in. And having someone you saw growing up and can trust intrinsically becomes more valuable.

So, stop telling people they’ll be “forever young”. It’s not true. You can extend it to your thirties, kind of, but no further.

And yes, changing the culture will help, though the only way to do it is one on one, creator by creator, person by person. We’re not going to suddenly flip over to “and then everyone.” THAT’s not how it works.

On the other hand, there are those economic factors. And no amount of screaming at the kids they should live on less and have MORE kids is going to overcome the fact that having kids is a huge financial burden, or will consume most of the financial life for 30 years or more, depending on how many kids and how spaced. Or that for about 18 of those they’re rendering themselves criminally liable in a million ways that no human being wants to be. Like I STILL HAVE NIGHTMARES OF DROPPING MY KID AND HAVING HIM HURT HIMSELF FATALLY. The specific nightmare involves the kid suddenly throwing himself backwards, a thing toddlers do, and my not catching it in time, and kid hitting his head on the hard floor and dying. Yes, the nightmare is horrible enough, because I don’t want my child to die. BUT in the dreams I’m always also aware I’ll probably be arrested and tried, on suspicion of having done it on purpose. Because well, some people do. And the law is an ass. I usually wake up screaming. But I’ve also had friends who were called in and reported for screaming at their sixteen year old. Or because someone doesn’t approve of how they keep house. Or, yes, because they were out with a school age kid, during school hours. This doesn’t include the time husband gave younger son nursemaid’s elbow because he thought he was awake, and tried to pull him up. (He wasn’t. Arm got dislocated.) We took him to the pediatrician fully expecting to be arrested. (We weren’t. Pediatrician was sane. But that’s increasingly rare. And they’re hemmed in by mandatory snitching laws, that never seem to stop the errors but throw up a million false positives.)

NO ONE WANTS THAT. No one sane wants to put themselves in that kind of hock.

Also, no one, NO ONE knows what a joy their own kids will be till they have them. As much as I wanted kids, I had no idea how much I’d love them, or how much joy raising them would bring me. And it’s something you really can’t explain. (If I’d known I’d have tried harder. We’d have hocked the house and the cats to be more aggressive on infertility.)

So, it’s something where the rewards are unclear and hard to communicate to someone else. BUT the liabilities are clear, in your face, and often very realistically material.

Gee, I wonder why the kids aren’t having kids. Maybe if we shout at them and shame them more?

Or perhaps we can work to get government off their backs, become sane about regulations which the bad actors ignore ANYWAY, and try — to the best of our abilities — to easy young people’s path into a rewarding working life, and make it easier for them to have kids without being watched like hawks by karens every step of the way?

And perhaps, just perhaps see what we can do about forgiving or at least commuting the student loan penalties (for most people incurred when so young they could have no idea what they were doing, and a larcenous, lying business anyway. And, listen, the money has been spent. Ultimately it was the government printing more money to give to colleges. The value has been inflated away.) Help them find jobs. Train them if needed (the expensive universities don’t do that.) Introduce them to likely people of the opposite sex. (Look, I try, but I’m limited.) Help them a bit even if (only) as my parents did to us.

Lobby to ease the regulations on working from home. So mothers can do it. Lobby to ease the regulations on teens working. And allow them to get a somewhat lower wage the first years of work. (There shouldn’t be minimum wage anyway!)

AND GET THE D*MNED GOVERNMENT OFF THEIR BACKS.

Whether the young people of child bearing are yours or not — so many of us have no kids, or had fewer than we wanted — don’t shout at them. Give them a hand up. Help them feel the security needed. Make having kids less daunting. Don’t require they go live in a cabin in the forest and wash their clothes in the creek. You wouldn’t want to do it, why should they? Require no UNREASONABLE sacrifices.

And write movies and books about the joy of having and raising kids. It’s the type of thing art can convey when logic can’t.

We must, must turn this ship around. For the future.

So there will be one.

*Sorry I’m late with a free short story. I have one about a shifter squirrel started, but this post wanted out. And then it was Yuge. Sorry. – SAH*

182 thoughts on “For The Future”

  1. This is a very minor datum, but I still remember going into the local supermarket, a year or so back, and handing the cashier five twenties for a grocery bill somewhere over $90, and having her stare at me blankly. She literally did not know how to count “twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred.” Fortunately the bagger was able to help her. She looked to be in her twenties. . . .

    I think that not having children was a mistake, but we and the great majority of people we know socially made it; it was common in our fannish circles in California. Now we have 20/20 hindsight, you know?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. GAH on the counting money. It’s seriously ridiculous.
      And yeah, on that. you had to row against the cultural tide to even try it. And it was hard. Both physically and culturally.
      And then the government piled on burdens.

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      1. Senior year of high school I had plenty of credits to graduate, and my math skills have always bee minimal, so I signed up for a math class.(forty bloody years ago)

        The class was kids 16-18, and it literally started at the “1+1=2” stage, and between 1/4 and 1/2 the kids had trouble with it. After two weeks I transferred out because it was driving me nuts.

        Both the level of it, and that THESE KIDS WERE IN BLOODY HIGH SCHOOL!… And from what I’ve seen some places have not gotten any better, more important to graduate kids than make them learn the stuff, oh, ten years or more ago. Damn the bastards who did this to them.

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        1. Not new either. 50 years ago my college roommate graduated HS with barely any math. Math not required if you could pass a state mandated math test your junior year. Roommate passed the test because wasn’t required to take math her senor year (locker mate, long time friend, I’d have known). But when it came to rudimentary college algebra? Let’s just say I was a lousy algebra tutor, for her at least. Oh, those test our junior year were sure torture for me and others. Why? Three hour tests, we were done in 15 minutes, that included double checking our work, and at least the first day, we weren’t allowed to leave. Sure torture. The next year the rules were changed. Anyone enrolled in geometry or above, didn’t have to take the tests.

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      2. I recall in a Heinlein story — possibly Harsh Mistress — that children can (not that they do, but they can) learn a great deal about basic arithmetic by handling money. And it has a great deal to do with greed and proper incentives. I learned more algebra doing calculations for woodworking and printing businesses than I ever learned in Mr. Bibee’s class in eighth grade.

        So I’m constantly amazed at youthful workers in businesses where they have to handle money and can’t.

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    2. I happened to be around a friend that had been in retail for several years when someone did one of these “kids these days” stories.

      He… well, blew up.

      Shot version, nobody uses cash, and a great many stores will put you on an 8 hour shift ending at midnight, then the first shift next morning.

      Over, and over, and over. It was not uncommon for him to get the max number of hours he’d be scheduled for done in three days, counting midnight to midnight.

      So you are, at best, on a half tank of sleep, and suddenly have a complete out-of-standard-interaction event happen.

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      1. That may be. But it’s not an event I’ve seen repeated at either of the local supermarkets in that chain that I go to, in two visits a week over several years. So it’s not obvious to me that it’s a failure of the supermarket’s policies toward employees.If they’re doing that kind of stuff you’d expect it to show up more often.

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      2. Back when I was working in Dallas, over a decade ago, I liked using cash, and giving exact change if I had it. If I didn’t have it, I would try to make the change come out neatly, e.g. if I owed $9.81 then I’d hand the cashier $10.01 so she (it was almost always a woman, as it happens) could just hand me two dimes.

        I quickly learned to hand over the coins first, and then hand over the large bills. Because if I led with the $10, the cashier would punch in $10.00, start digging 19 cents out of the register, and then look puzzled at the penny I was trying to hand her. “No, no,” her expression would say, “I’m supposed to give you a dime, a nickel, and four pennies. Why are you handing me a penny?” And I’d have to wait while she dug coins out of three different slots, and I ended up with more pennies when I wanted to end up with fewer.

        This never happened when the cashier was older: when a middle-aged Hispanic lady was at the register, she could always do change in her head. But a younger person? I wasn’t willing to take that chance: I always handed over the coins first, to make sure the cashier would punch in $10.01.

        P.S. This was typically in fast food, not retail.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. We gave up. We collected change. Put it in a jar. Roll into coin rolls. Take to bank. The only things that have changed now are: Not as much change. Don’t roll it, take it the bank for the change machine to do it. We are getting the pay back. This used to be son’s “allowance”.

          We do something similar when we pay restaurant bill with tips (if we don’t leave cash). Add the tip dollars, then round the total bill to next whole dollar amount. Which means the tip left includes change. At least that way we are paying the credit charge the wait staff would have to pay on the tip.

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        3. McDonalds put in the “you must give exactly the change on the read out registers” to prevent theft well over a decade ago, now.

          Failing to follow it is a firing-for-cause offense.

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          1. I pretty much never ate at McDonald’s; my go-to was two or three bean burritos from Taco Bell, back when they used to cost 99 cents each. If Taco Bell had a similar policy, no cashier ever admitted it to me, and I vaguely recall the occasional time when the cashier did give me correct change after the fact (e.g., the change rang up as 23 cents, I handed her two pennies, and she gave me a quarter). So if Taco Bell had a similar policy at the time, it wasn’t being enforced in the locations I was visiting.

            You might or might not know this, but do the McD registers tell the cashier “give 19 cents of change”? Or do they say “give 1 dime, 1 nickel, and 4 pennies”? If it’s the latter, then do they also make the cashier record exactly which coins were in the transaction? Otherwise they could still end up with discrepancies if the customer handed over two dimes and a nickel for a $12.25 purchase, and the cash register assumed that the $0.25 would be a single quarter. You could, of course, automate that process too by having the cashier drop the coins into a hopper where a machine counts and sorts them into the right slots, but at that point you’re well on your way to eliminating the cashier job entirely. (Of course, this is now happening in California…)

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            1. I don’t buy much for cash any more, and it seems fairly common that the cashier freezes when I pay the change. The result seems to be a pocket full of change, though I’m happy to use up quarters for dollar bills. For some reason, I have the least trouble at the minimart in the city.

              Years ago, when I was working and most everything was cash, I’d throw the change in a jar. Trying to turn that into folding money made me give that up…

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              1. We used to roll the change, put the account number on it, take it to the bank and deposit it. Now there is a counting coin machine, no charge, at our credit union. No problem converting change into folding money (into our son’s account, not into ours).

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                1. In a similar fashion when my daughters were younger (they’re adults now) we’d gather the loose change over the year. Before we went on summer vacation we’d change it into cash. That amount (usually in the 40-60 dollar range) was their mad money to spend as desired on vacation (usually in various trinkets). They were quite good at combing places for change…

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                  1. We were depositing upwards of $300 a quarter. Yes, son learned quickly to not pass up a coin in a parking lot, checking cushions at home, etc.

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            2. You might or might not know this, but do the McD registers tell the cashier “give 19 cents of change”? Or do they say “give 1 dime, 1 nickel, and 4 pennies”? If it’s the latter, then do they also make the cashier record exactly which coins were in the transaction?

              I found it fascinating, so yes, I did ask.

              You hit the buttons for the exact things you’re given– so a $20 bill is different than two $10s.
              And the coins you’re to give are also indicated, exactly.

              There’s apparently a couple of different ways you can steal otherwise.

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              1. Daaaang. A month or two back, I received an Eisenhower dollar coin as change from a fast food place (not McD.) They asked first, I said, oh cool, and they handed it over.

                I did figure out later that they must have thought it was a Kennedy half-dollar, given the change I’d gotten back, but either way, it would have been a problem for them to input on a register like that.

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                1. Oh my… hadn’t even considered the monday-friday dollar coins, oh my that must just mangle the HECK out of the system!

                  (They didn’t have a spot for two dollar bills, either.)

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. They don’t have a way to take $2 bills? That would give people a way to game their system to get free meals from any location where the manager isn’t smart enough.

                    First, you double-check that the state you live in requires companies to accept cash as payment. (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legal-tender-payment/ links to a U.S. Treasury page whose URL is no longer valid (boo) but I assume the cite was correct — when Snopes gets things wrong it’s due to bias, not incorrect citations — explaining that there is no federal law requiring private businesses to accept all forms of cash, so businesses can refuse that bag of pennies if they want to. However, some states — Snopes cites Massacusetts and New Jersey, for example — do require private businesses to accept cash.)

                    Then, you go get some $2 bills from the bank, and take all your other bills out of your wallet so you’re carrying nothing but $2 bills. (Also take your credit cards out of your wallet). Then go spend $20 or so at McDonald’s, and hand them a stack of ten $2 bills. When the cashier looks puzzled and has no idea how to punch that in, ask them politely if they can call a manager. Tell the manager that you’re trying to pay for your meal, but their machine doesn’t seem to have a way to take your money. When he asks if you have any alternative forms of payment, tell him truthfully that you don’t have any on you, but you have perfectly good cash and why won’t they take your cash?

                    Now, at this point the manager might be smart about it, and take your money personally, bypassing the cash register. But if he’s not allowed to do that by the rules handed down from Corporate, then he’s stuck. Either he comps your meal, or else he opens the corporation up to a lawsuit for breaking the law requiring them to accept cash. And if he comps your meal, you post on Reddit “Hey guys, here’s a way to get free food at McDonald’s” and get hundreds of people to do it: the company will notice real quick and change their registers to accept $2 bills. Because one random guy getting free food off of them via a legal loophole is one thing. But millions of people knowing how to do it? That would add up quick.

                    However, now that I’ve typed that all out, I realize that all you’d end up doing is hassling a manager or two, which probably wouldn’t be enough to get the company to spend millions to change the keypads of their cash registers to take $2 bills. If the alternative was a lawsuit with the prospect of a large settlement, then they might decide to spend the money on the registers. But a smart manager, who just bypasses the cash registers, takes your money personally, and gives you change out of the store’s change supply… that guy would foil the plan.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. Sometimes I worry that these ways of gaming systems come so easily to me. I’m glad I’m not seriously tempted to crime, because playing so many board games (and tabletop RPG’s) teaches you to look for rules loopholes routinely.

                      For example, at one point my local library had the magnetic detectors, that verify that you’re not carrying un-checked-out books out of the library, positioned next to the checkout desk, but there was an elevator bank next to the doors, with no magnetic detectors between it and the front doors. If you wanted to take books out of the library without checking them out, you’d just need to go up the stairs to the nonfiction section on the second floor, then down the elevator and walk out the front doors.

                      I told a librarian about that and she said, “Yes, we know, please don’t tell anybody. We’re going to be remodeling this summer and that’s going to change as part of the remodel.” So they did have it covered. But it kind of bothered me how easily I thought of ways to cheat, even if I never actually did it.

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                    2. Sometimes I worry that these ways of gaming systems come so easily to me.

                      It’s fun to try to figure out how a system works!

                      We play, it’s a good thing!

                      You know who else does this kind of stuff? The guys who stop the bad guys. ^.^

                      Liked by 1 person

            3. Most McDonald’s locations I got to have the automatic change dispenser that drops the requisit coins down a chute to a cup. The rattle of the coins is a somewhat comforting sound.

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        4. …A couple of the longest arguments I have had was trying to convince a waitress (minimum wage) that she had given me too much change [that she has to account for] (I only gave a $10, not a $20). And the only time that I contested a restaurant bill with the manager was when I was charged for two meals, but we actually had three (I got a free meal for being so honest). If I had let them slip past, I would be haunted by guilt forever…

          Liked by 1 person

          1. We’ve done that too. We’ve handled both by leaving the tip of the over returned change (money still has to be accounted for out of their tips, but not out money, because we didn’t take advantage of the mistake), or not charged for meal. Latter even when we were told the meal was being taken off because of a mistake on their end, even a replaced mistake.

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        5. My wife decided decades ago to become the Janus-headed bane and savior of supermarket cashiers everywhere by ALWAYS paying with exact change. Which she has plenty of, since I’m the guy who always pays in $10 multiples, and gives the loose change to his wife. But it’s more fun to let her pay. 😜

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      3. If NOBODY uses cash, why do stores still have CASH registers?

        His rant falls down right there, at the beginning.

        Yeah, the stores could stand to hire a few more people and schedule them better, but if you take cash, the staff ought to be prepared to deal with it. Yes, even at the end of a shift.

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          1. Two jobs I’ve never done (out of many others) that I would not last a day. Not that I couldn’t do them (I think). Retail and waitstaff at restaurants. No. There would be mayhem.

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            1. We were out near Big Rock Candy Mountain in Utah, middle of typical Utah nowhere, and stopped for lunch at a small restaurant. The waitress/cashier could not make correct change and this is one of thr few things than can drive my friendly, helpful beloved to the edge. When he couldn’t get the young woman to understand, the manager came out. The manager realized there was a problem, but she made the mistake of complaining about school not teaching math.

              At that point, he told her that as the manager it was her responsibility to make sure her employees were properly trained, even if that meant teaching them arithmetic. Let’s just say we left under a bit of a cloud and it’s just as well we were passing through.

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              1. One Christmas shopping season, long ago….

                Customer was abusing the cashier, ramping up. Evil.

                11B-MC “Excuse me miss. I realize ..”

                Jackass: “Hey! I was talking…”

                11B-MC rolling merrily along: “…I realize you cant use this particular phrase, but it find it sometimes helps to communicate around this time of year.”

                (draws breath. Channels lessons from various Sergeant Majors)

                (max volume, projection max, hear/understand me on Alpha Centauri): “MERRY F(HONK!)ING CHRISTMASS!!!!”

                Cashier: (giggle)

                crowd: (Variations on laughter and MFC as manners/upbringing/prior-service dictate)

                Jackass: (cowardly slither)

                …

                Someday, I may get killed. But it will be epic.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. LOL 🤣

                  I do similar. I don’t address the cashier or the heckler directly. Just stand there talking to myself loudly. If heckler turns on me the response is along the lines of “Did I say that out loud? Oops.” Or “You heard me? Wow. No one ever hears me!” More than a few times get others in line responding and a conversation starts up (have never, knock on wood, been on the wrong side of that). More than a few times the line “Cashier has to be polite. I don’t.” (Implied “So there!”) Any retaliation? Well the phrase “Elderly Abuse” can be welded, even if just verbal (100% will take advantage of). White hair hath it’s advantages. Never gone that far, though pretty sure some have come close based on the glare. Either way, heckler is usually shut up.

                  I’ve done the same for service dog handlers against Karen’s too. Just need two phrases “Are you an employee?” Added with “Where do you get your service dog police training?” Or, “you do know you are allowed to only ask only two questions right?” And “Even misbehaving service dogs, you can ask handler to remove.” Or I don’t just support handlers, staff need support too sometimes. Might be a little more sympathetic as a handler myself for other handlers and staff. Mine is now retired. But I know the rights and responsibilities involved. I despise fake spotters even among handler communities.

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              2. My problem wouldn’t be doing the math. My problem is both the physical juggling (one plate at a time, and those big platters … um, no, just no …), and peopled out exhausted, too quickly. (Push come to shove, sure I’d have figured it out. Never had to. Never will.) Retail lights in any establishment get to me too. I can’t shop any Walmart for this reason (forget what others list, can’t stay in the stores long enough to personally verify that). Even Target or bigger Fred Meyers (W. 11th, and Springfield, locally) I have problems with. Albertsons for all that it isn’t that big of a store. I get disoriented. Safeway is generally “safe” (just none close). But I have no problem with Costco (? no idea why). Why I am grateful for those who are willing to do these jobs.

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                1. Maybe the distance of the lights in Costco changes them to some value of “indirect lighting” for your brain. Thinking about it, Costco tends to be well-lit but not overwhelming.

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          2. When I was careful to blame the STORE for lack of training? Oh, sweetheart, you haven’t seen harsh yet.

            Yes, I’ve worked some retail in the past. And been fired for failing at sh*t I was never trained for. Thanks awfully.

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            1. Oh, sweetheart, you are so far from getting any sympathy with a done-wrong story to justify nastiness towards folks who are dealing with the same plus worse.

              Must less ladling on the ungranted endearments; we’re several generations past the “deliberately presume familiarity to grant self authority” shtick being something besides a big red flag, and I’m not even a kid anymore.

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              1. No one–as Will pointed out–has attempted to justify nasty behavior to cashiers. Stop making feces up out of your imagination to scold us over.

                I said the stores should train better and staff should be able to do basic arithmetic. That is ALL I said. Learn to read, dammit.

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                1. “Sweetheart,” people can look at what you’ve done here and know exactly how you’d treat a cashier who dared not dance fast enough when you feel peevish, complete with assuring them how very nice you’re being.

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          3. I don’t see why empathy is even coming up. I didn’t give the young woman a hard time; I just looked on as she appealed to her co-worker, who came up with the right answer and told her. But I was genuinely astonished, both because counting by twenties is something I think of as grade school arithmetic (and the lower grades at that), and because I don’t think I had ever before seen a cashier who couldn’t do that. And I pay with cash by far the majority of the time, so I have lots of data points.

            It’s not a question of blaming or mocking the young woman. If she can’t do very simple arithmetic, or if it’s so hard that she needs to be at her sharpest to do it, that’s more testimony to the failure of her schools, and to our society’s tolerating such schools. And I don’t know if I’m inclined to empathize with schools that can’t teach simple arithmetic.

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            1. You were fine, which is why I bothered to share the friend’s rant– basically, the “error, error, not fitting established pattern” block. Most folks have been exhausted enough that a slightly different door knob can take consideration, at least if they’ve worked or raised kids. It’s not a “cannot do,” it’s a side-effect of exhaustion.

              “Mercy,” not so much.

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        2. Of course they still have cash registers.

          For the same reason you still “dial a phone number” even though phones haven’t had a dial on them for two generations now.

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        3. Amen.

          Also, training cashiers. I get it. It is hard to remember things when you first start. I hate that they get lessons, then turned loose to sink or swim. I’ve learned how to do some of the functions to make it easier on them. When I don’t use self checkout it is because I have 12 or more of one item (multiples doesn’t work under 12). I can’t use the function on self check. But I want the checker to use that feature when I use that lane (too easy to over scan count if done one by one, more accurate to enter quantity and scan once). Every new checker, and a few not so new, I’ve had to tell them how to use it. Another shortcut I’ve started doing is self bagging (I use a soft smaller cooler for cold stuff, and the “harder” soft boxes that Fred Meyers/Kroger has) because I want things bagged a certain way (why I use self check). Also let them know if I have more than one of any item (same flavor, 8 of same yogurt that doesn’t spike and crash glucose) so they don’t have to unpack everything. Just make sure they can visually inspect to verify. Not only do the checker’s appreciate this, but gotten a few “hmm” from other customers behind me (especially on the cooler tote, or other older customers who know that weight/bag and packing matters, something not taught anymore). I (usually) have help to get items from car into the house, but no help at all getting bags out of the cart into the car (Costco or Petsmart an exception, I can ask for help, and have … dang back … when my knee went out, I was not shopping).

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  2. I’d like two more kids. But I’m 65, and my wife is post-menopause and didn’t want more than the two we had. And her concept of family isn’t the same as mine. So, the line ends with our two children: one transed into non-reproductivity, the other probably won’t change until too late (he’s moved more toward the center, but still is pretty far into the Left.)

    Liked by 1 person

      1. And that ones really needs to be explained. You can give birth to as many kids as your body can produce, and not a peep unless you egregiously brutalize them (or violate one of the “rules” thought up by bureaucrats and idiots (BIRM)). But show that you actually want one that someone else doesn’t want, and you have to prove that you’re the second Immaculate Conception (or be in a gay relationship) :-x . And no, it’s not all due to the danger of “groomers” acquiring victims; that can be addressed and (mostly) avoided. It’s about morons with too much (overpaid) time on their hands who take delight in screwing over anyone more intelligent and competent than themselves, which is nearly everyone.

        Anyway, excellent post, Sarah, and much food for thought.

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        1. That IS a major problem with this country/all 50 states, when it comes to adoption. Realistically, adopting should be at LEAST half as expensive as birthing a child. It’s not fostering, so the state itself isn’t on the hook to providing monetary support. So the only thing I can think of is right back to the Marxist CONTROL aspect of the whole thing. I don’t know of any Dept of Child (Dis-)Services that doesn’t want 100% control over what any parental figures do with children that come under their sway at some point.

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          1. “I don’t know of any Dept of Child (Dis-)Services that doesn’t want 100%
            control over what any parental figures do with children that come under
            their sway at some point.”

            .

            “I don’t know of any Dept of Child (Dis-)Services that doesn’t want 100% control over what any parental figures do with” any children period.

            FIFY

            “not fostering, so the state itself isn’t on the hook to providing monetary support”

            .

            100% support no. Do know of adoptions where the adopted will receive life long medical and specialized support services (usually educational and vocational). In one case the adoptive parents paid $25k and $30k respectively for the two adoptions. Both adoptions in Oregon but through Washington child welfare (severed parental rights at birth).

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    2. We married too late to make the attempt, but we’re cheering on $NIECE’s efforts. She got an MSEE, then decided that MRS was more appropriate, and now has two littles. Haven’t seen them in real life, but we try to help. Economics are good for them AFAIK, but we have enough to share some.

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  3. Thank you Sarah. I wish this could be required reading and re-reading for everyone in the US. (I have given up on the rest of the world.)

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  4. Fantastic post. Here’s another scenario for few-to-just-one kid. My husband and I were very excited when I got pregnant. Then, at 29 weeks, we discovered I had an incompetent cervix. Basically, my body started trying to go into labor early. We caught it at the very last minute. I got into surgery the next to get everything tied closed with medical grade fishing line… and I’d already dilated 1 cm. If my appointment had even been a day later, I would have had a miscarriage.

    From there, I was in the hospital for 2 months, baby was born at 27 weeks weighting less than 3 pounds, and then he was in NICU for 5 months. He had respiratory struggles. Feeding struggles. Brain bleeds. We got fantastic care and our insurance, thankfully, covered most of it. We paid about $10k of the $4 MILLION DOLLAR TOTAL.

    We haven’t had any more kids. And I regret that. I REALLY do. But…

    I remember being in the antepartum department of the hospital and hearing the running footsteps of a little boy so excited to come see Mommy for an hour or two every few days.

    I look at our son and see the miracle of how well he’s doing. I know I helped do that because I was blessed enough to be able to go to the NICU every day. I spent at least half the day there, usually more.

    I don’t have the time to do that now. My husband certainly doesn’t, not with where he is in his career. And we have an older child who has school and things after school and-

    It could happen again. This scenario could very easily play out again should we have another kid. If we do, I have to plan to get my cervix tied closed again and be monitored weekly (mostly out of pocket) because it would be a high risk pregnancy.

    And if it happened again and the baby came early… if they had any sort of long-term health issue or if something happened and I couldn’t be there…

    I would never, ever be able to forgive myself.

    I know a lot of my own trauma goes into this. My husband could only come see me and our baby on the weekends because the week after I went into the hospital, he started a job in a different city. We didn’t have a lot of local family, and while they tried to visit as often as they could, it was only for short periods of time every few days. I was alone most of the time. Tied to my phone because I only had permission to get up and use the bathroom.

    I didn’t get to decorate the nursery myself (I had to tell my husband where to put things), I didn’t have a baby shower, and my husband’s family managed to get far enough out of the loop that they thought I was only in the hospital for a short while and then it was all fine. I’ve never felt so utterly abandoned and unimportant as I did during all of this. Thinking about baby showers still stands a decent chance of making me cry because not getting to have one manages to summarize and exemplify so much of what happened that year.

    So no, we won’t be having more than one child. And I really kind of hate that.

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    1. Niece. She now has two biological, a daughter (now 3), and a son (10 months). Both IVF. They still have frozen embryos (3 I think). She wants to try at least once more (for a total of 4, she’s the one who has the step-son too). But … it depends. Originally the plan was to have all viable embryos, But …. Both pregnancies resulted in medical issues, that resulted home rest (first working at home, because covid … so really no change). One, pregnancy diabetes (controlled with diet). Second involving the liver (requiring forced delivery at 7 months). Both pregnancies resulted in early natural deliveries. Second one a week before the scheduled induced. While the son was a week earlier than his sister, he was as long and weighted slightly more (he is a healthy chunky baby). FWIW, it helps that she has not only insane superb medical insurance through work, but equally insane unheard of fantastic maternity leave that starts after the baby is born, does not count any forced medical leave beforehand, and that she can extend by working from home.

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  5. In the past? We here of people coming from families that birthed twelve or twenty and two survived, sure. But how much of that is survivor bias? 

    My dad’s family seems to have some sort of an issue for sons having kids at all– two of five in this generation had kids at all, five of eight surviving from the generation before that which had any boys. We’ll see how my sons do.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. My family’s generational hopes are vested in my grandson, Wee Jamie, who is only 3 and a half. One of my brothers has two adopted children, now teenagers, and my sister has two adult children (but they have their father’s surname) – in any case, none of those four seem inclined to marry and have children at this point.

    I would have liked to have had four children, myself – seemed like a good number to me. Unfortunately, my Significant Other turned out to be a louse, so I had to make do with only one – and she has only the one, herself.

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    1. Paternal cousins. Exactly two male cousins, one dad’s older sister, the second to one of the “little boys” (younger by 15+ years). That cousin, 23 years younger than I am, just had, this summer, the only male that will carry on the name. A name not common in the PNW. Since grandpa died when I was 2, do not know the family history. I know he, his twin, and his twin sisters, were born in Oregon. Great-grands are buried in Oregon. Do not know when they came to Oregon, let alone if one or both were born here, or not. Grandpa was the only one to have children (7 total, 3 girls, 4 boys). Of his siblings, one great aunt died as an infant, great uncle died in his early/mid-20’s of misadventure (disappeared off of a Puget Sound Ferry in the 1920’s). The other great aunt died in her late 60s or early 70s due to complications of her childhood T1 diabetes. (FYI, it is paternal grandmother that traces back the known long family history in Oregon. It was her grandfather who came on the wagon train with his parents, slew of siblings and cousins.)

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    1. Japan’s biggest issue seems to be that young Japanese men and women often seem disinterested in meeting with each other these days. The “herbivores” are presumably dealing with their sex drives via porn. I’m not sure what the young women are doing, but presumably it’s not much better.

      Too many Japanese apparently aren’t having sex – even casual sex.

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      1. You have to be amazing.

        There’s no room for failure, so… there’s not a lot of room for meeting and growth.

        (There’s anime on THAT, too– yes, seriously, you’re enjoying this show and then go “Wow… uh… the theme of this is that it’s OK to try, fail, try again, and then only just be basically alright, WITHOUT having to be the best of the most awesome ever, huh?)

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    2. Assuming I’m not misremembering, this is one of those anime where you maybe don’t want to read the whole manga, as it becomes important she is his adopted daughter.

      Liked by 1 person

  8. I’d seen that thread and poked on the ‘government making having kids a risk of being locked up’ but as I was reading your post I did just realize the bigger problem isn’t that couples aren’t having kids. It’s that we aren’t even having couples any more. And that is downstream of the culture and economics both.

    Oxytocin is the mammal hormone and runs a huge amount of especially the female side of the entire reproduction process. Stress shuts it down. More stress the more shut down the entire system gets, to the actual point that any oxytocin at all can make them feel like something they don’t know or control is trying to skin walk them.

    And you know what generates stress? Uncertainty and lack of control over your life. Such as working a job where you have zero agency or control over whether or not it will even be there in the morning.

    Liked by 1 person

          1. True, but a lot of that management by computer is from those regs.

            Remember how it took 5 days to clear that flight log jam a year or two back when Southwest’s computer planning system crashed? That was because all of the crew limits clear after 5 days of no flying, so they could finally figure out how to plan a legal flight schedule.

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    2. Meanwhile, the government drones are completely protected from it.

      In response to Musk’s DOGE task force, “But what if the government workers become unemployed, and don’t have an income? Wouldn’t you feel sorry for them?”

      Do you have *any* idea how many times I’ve been laid off in the past decade or so? By people who couldn’t have picked me out of a line-up, and for whom I literally only existed as an entry on a payroll at a job site half-way across the country?

      Yeah, unemployment sucks. But “it’s mean to government workers” doesn’t engender much sympathy in me if the government workers are largely useless drones to begin with. I’ve been laid off from plenty of jobs in which I was quite productive (according to my supervisors at those jobs), but the people who let me go only saw me as a cog drawing a paycheck.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Well, also men almost entirely bond through vasopresin bonds, and those function pretty much the same in a high stress environment as not. Really, they’re generated through solving stress.

        From what I understand men are 80% vasopresin, 20% oxytocin, while women are 50/50. Apparently oxytocin is a derivative of vasopresin, and it believed to have evolved from it as part of mammals splitting off from their ancestor.

        Which is probably why the oxytocin receptors can change behavior so much, even starting to receive vasopresin instead of oxytocin if the stress levels are high enough, to receiving dopamine when they’re starved for anything.

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      2. I wouldn’t, and I was one of them. I tried to get more work.

        But I also don’t feel a bit guilty about my pension. I gave the system 32 years of my life and it was turning me bitter. Retiring ( and taking a smaller pension) was the right decision.

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      3. Don’t get me started on layoffs. Heck even most lower level governmental agencies have annual layoffs for certain positions. Forest service crews. Even the crew leads, who are technically full time employees. Every year, laid off over Christmas holidays. Well if there are any crews, other than fire crews, these days (it has been 46 years since last time worked for USFS, so IDK anymore).

        Personal experience? In spades. Mine and hubby’s. In fact hubby worked for the same company for 35 years, and was laid off Every Single Year! Mostly act of god (fire closures) layoffs, and a few “in lieu of” (volunteer layoff for a month to keep lower seniority person working), the last few years. But when you are the lower seniority person after even 25 years, the last isn’t an option. I think I’ve mentioned before that company went from 279 field employees the year we were hired, to 50 – 60 field employees by the time hubby retired. Other companies that do the same work had the same type of cuts or worse (going out of business altogether).

        Yep. Color my sympathy as limited. Although I am cringing on if the major reason being not using in person office space. Really hoped that would take off. Not that I have an oar in the work market anymore. But still if that is the only reason, get rid of the office, not the person doing the job.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I know a woman who works payroll in construction. They lay everyone off from Christmas to New Year’s so you can collect unemployment.

          I note that there were questions about being in construction in the unemployment signup

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          1. “Do you expect to go back to work?” is one Oregon question because of timber and construction. Even if you don’t know the date. Also why Oregon has work share unemployment. Everyone’s hours are severely cut back and then get unemployment to compensate somewhat, for lost hours income. Better than full unemployment and do not have to look for work. Works usually for those trades that are construction adjacent.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Work share is also available for school photography. I haven’t been taking it, because it’s basically more trouble than it’s worth (mine is the discretionary income), but it’s there.

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  9. Growing up in mostly farming communities in the 70’s and earlier 80’s gave me a childhood that was a universe distant from most of my peers and their offspring. We were sources of labor and income to our relatives, and in exchange acquired broad knowledge and skills that served us a lifetime.

    And farmers aren’t the ignorant yokels that the elite and media have protray. You don’t survive for decades and generations in ag without some business smarts. I saw more books in the farm houses than I saw in many of the non-farmers in the city. Not to mention satellite TV and personal computers before 90% of the public knew of their existance.

    Recently I was at a party where the hostess had sheltered her kids to such a degree, they weren’t functional adults. Nothing is worse than a 19 year old that can’t/will not do basic household chores and refuses to learn how to drive. They have become expensive pets. At best they were house broken and didn’t poop on the carpet. I so wanted a time machine to go back and save them from their parents.

    My youngest niece managed to find jobs in the city while in high school and became independent after graduation. She complains about her peers that have no work ethic due to bad My youngest niece managed to find jobs in the city while in high school and became independent after graduation. She complains about her peers that have no work ethic due to bad parentage.

    I married too late to have kids, but I like to think that I had a mostly positive influence on all the nieces and nephews.parentage.

    I married too late to have kids, but I like to think that I had a mostly positive influence on all the nieces and nephews.

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    1. There is a manga series, Silver Spoon, that focuses on a city boy attending an agriculturally focused high school, confident that his superior education will let him breeze through . . . which leads to some marvelous humorous moments.

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      1. The local high school that my kids attend has an agricultural education path, and pigs. It’s a holdover from when this was a farming community instead of a city of 170,000, but I’m happy that not only are they not axing the program path, one of the new buildings that is going in as the high school is being rebuilt is entirely for ag. And we’re not talking about the barns, either—this will be an ag classroom building.

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        1. I don’t know where the program is at now, because of 2020 mess, but son (2007 graduate) had 2 1/2 years of what is essentially practical science and shop. First half year is required. Where basic science is done. Second year is different supervised projects, which includes racing electric car (do not get to pick your group for this year). Third year is self directed project, which can include creating another race car. End of the year season culminated in racing the cars at the Portland Speedway. Son’s senor year he double lettered in the race car because the car his group built constantly came in 1st – 3rd, in a minimum of 5 races, throughout the season, but the cars he drove (his group’s or not) came in constantly 1st – 3rd. Requirement was 5 races per season. In addition their group chose a design that all of them could drive, in particular one of the group who couldn’t drive any other cars because of her size. Car wasn’t “aerodynamic” (car still won, even with this individual driving!) Son never had a problem being asked to drive other cars from the time he qualified to drive them (driver’s license). Why? Minimum driver weight was 180#’s. Being lighter than that meant weights were added to cars he drove. Lighter the driver, the better the battery performed at higher speeds longer. Races were highest number of laps over 3 hours (I think, might have been longer). With his HS’s program all cars built for the year were built from scratch. At the end of the season the cars were dismantled.

          Minimum skills utilized: Math. Design and follow through. Welding. Wiring. Strategy. Team work and compassion.

          Liked by 1 person

  10. But Sarah, we have to stop reproduction! It’s the only way to preserve the Earth for future generations!*

    *Of what, I have no idea.

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  11. Copying my response to that one from X:
    You have to have affordable housing. Yes, our ancestors had many kids in tiny houses or cabins. No one today is going back to that. On the other hand, we don’t need 10 kids per woman to have 3 survive to adulthood. When I was a kid, you could buy an affordable station wagon that held half a dozen kids, too. Affordable healthcare. That will help families live on one income again.
    If they can live together. This whole trend of divorce, living together without marriage, cutting toxic people out of one’s life – we need a cultural shift. Of kindness, of personal tolerance and forgiveness. Commitment and endurance, willingness to stick it out and make it work.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Another reason people aren’t having kids, on top of the others: the system is rigged toward women, and men know it. Get married, have three kids, then your wife cheats on you, demands a divorce, gets full custody of the kids, full child support, full alimony, by default. Add in the fact that, in American culture, at least, women are being raised to be narcissistic psychopaths who believe they can never be wrong and will never be held accountable, and it is no wonder a large number of men are refusing to get married or get involved with American females in any way. (And no, not “all” women are like this. But it’s the direction things are going, and finding a woman who is not entitled, narcissistic, and willing to use a rigged system to enact her psychodrama when the whim takes her, is luck, and nothing but luck.)

    If half the people involved in making babies get all the downside, and have to trust to luck for any upside at all, it is hardly astonishing when they refuse to participate.

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    1. Gah. Have two extended family examples.

      Nephew-inlaw has a son by a prior relationship while he was in the Navy. Hooked up with a women he knew from HS while on leave. She got pregnant. They’ve never been married to each other. Neither has paid each other child support. 50/50 custody from (almost) day of birth. When he was deployed, his custody was handled by his mother, and later when he and niece were engaged, by niece. He is no longer in the Navy, did not re up after 10 years. Kid is now 11. There is no, never has been, a legal agreement.

      Cousin and his girlfriend at the time got pregnant, got married, because aunt insisted. Marriage lasted long enough for the baby to be born. Ex wife was ultimately pissed. What she wanted was a baby daddy to be trapped into paternity payments with no other rights. Boy did she pick the wrong guy. Not a rich family. His job wasn’t spectacular, and he didn’t have the education to get better pay. And they had a girl. Cousin is one of 3 boys, and mom wanted a girl in the worst way. Yes, he had to pay child support. Enough that with his minimum wage job he had to live with mom and dad. But grandma got 50/50 custody out of it too (since dad lived with them). Fast forward the girl reaches 18, does not go to college, child support ends. Daughter told dad “What is mom going to do? She can’t afford to pay rent now.” Dad – “Not my problem. The child support money was for you, not your mother.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Nephew-in-law is lucky, but also fortunate that there was no marriage. Baby mama could still have taken him to the cleaners, legally, but divorce would have made him more vulnerable.

        Cousin also somewhat lucked out, but yeah, that sort of story happens. A LOT.

        Hell, even women who start off genuinely loving and sane can turn psychotic and vindictive and use the court system as a weapon. I’ve watched it happen multiple times.

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        1. BIL got divorced 20 years before he died of Suddenly. Surprising nobody, X_SIL tried to get her paws on a chunk of his estate. One of his sisters (executor-drew the short straw) and lawyers finally convinced her to sod off before the probate judge was ready to issue a contempt warrant.

          I only met X a few times, and was very happy to not see her much. Her only son is in another hemisphere by choice…

          Liked by 1 person

          1. There is an author whose work I have published who died in 1949. He was married once, got a divorce in 1943 because his wife cheated on him.

            In 1955, she renewed the copyright of a novel of his that had gotten a Hollywood adaptation a year or two before. In order to do so legally, she claimed on the registration to be his “widow”.

            This sort of thing is as old as time.

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        2. The flip, and relevant, or NIL’s son’s mother thought so at least, is she is now married to another woman (yes, great-step-nephew has a dad, mom, and two step-mom’s). Thus when GSN was born was afraid she’d lose all custody VS someone currently serving. Oh. FWIW parents/grandparents were kept out of all of this, settlement wise. The exception, obviously, who had physical custody when NIL was deployed. They all, the two moms, niece and NIL, get along sharing custody despite the households having very different rules. What gets interesting is when stories are related on how she could take him to the cleaners now. That gets shut down hard by both sides, with the spouses weighing in backup. Seriously don’t mess with what is working and is good for all involved.

          Be interesting when he has more say about where he can stay. NIL is very much into video games, which great-nephew shares. Video games not allowed at all at the other place. Toys? Again. At nieces, until *recently he’s had a whole room dedicated to his toys, in particular lego sets, and gasp Nerf and water *guns*. At the other home, toys are extremely limited. TV access is limited. TV at niece’s is so not limited. Pets? Niece and dad have a big yellow lab. No pets at the other house either.

          As far as cousin? Extended family all but fell down laughing when we learned her intended plan. Or, you know, we would have. She really, really, screwed up her research. Seriously. No property to get half of. Vehicle not worth anything. Someone who prioritizes hunting and fishing over work (no equipment here to be forced to sell, between dad’s and grandpa’s, cousin doesn’t need to go buy more). Minimum wage, and living with mom and dad, who also do not own property. Pockets so shallow they might as well not exist. Financially, now, they are good, both cousin, and aunt and uncle. But long after she had a chance to get her claws into anything.

          (*) Recent shuffling of bedrooms. New nursery. Now each of the two kids, and baby, have to share their individual bedrooms with their toys, and share space in the family room and big backyard. They have no plans to move. They have < 2% interest rate. Kid’s ages: 11, 4, and 9 months.

          Liked by 1 person

    2. The divorce-court-gives-her-half-his-stuff-plus-alimony issue is also a contributor to the “Passport Bros” phenomenon, where western men, giving up on western women entirely, are shopping for wives in places like the Phillipines, where Filipinas actually want to get married and make babies and live with the guy forever (plus there’s no divorce in the PI – you gotta get a note from the Pope).

      From a cultural context perspective:

      The current fertility rate for the Philippines in 2024 is 2.431 births per woman.

      The current fertility rate for the U.S. in 2024 is 1.786 births per woman.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I absolutely despise the “bros” label, it’s just another memetic way of attacking men who do things the labeler does not approve of.

        As to the larger point, there’s a meme going around saying that if the illegal immigrants coming over the border were supermodel teen Ukrainian girls, thicc Latinas, and petite Asians, all untainted by misandry, the lefty women of the nation would form Nazi death squads overnight.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Re “bros” it bugs me too, but in this case it appears to have been adopted by the group and turned back on the disdainful, which always makes me smile.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. I loved finding out what “macaroni” meant at the time (slang for a highly-fashionable person). Thanks to Georgette Heyer, I now understand Yankee Doodle a bit better: “Stuck a feather in his hat and called it [the height of fashion]!”

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Dr. Samuel Johnson was surprised to find out that macaroni was cheap food in Italy. But then, only rich people could do the Tour and get to the place where it was served at all.

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        2. I used to occasionally get videos popping up in my YouTube feed that had (at least, according to the title) a woman on an airplane suspecting that a male passenger was a passport bro, and laying into him verbally (and sometimes physically, as well).

          I never watched any of those videos, mind you, so I can’t comment on the contents.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Gee, busybody Karens arrogating to themselves the right to criticize strangers’ lives and “decisions” (that they’re inventing based on their own prejudices alone). And posting these diatribes to social media for group approval to feed their narcissistic supply. So shocking.

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            1. The videos in my feed appeared to be from bystanders on those airplanes, and not the women going nuts.

              But remember that I didn’t watch any of them, so I don’t know for certain.

              I did see evidence that some of the female influencers who offered women dating and relationship advice (usually of the entitled sort) saw passport bros as an actual threat

              Liked by 1 person

              1. They absolutely see men escaping the misandrist system and finding actual loving, supportive relationships as a threat.

                Much like how communist countries had to build walls to keep victims in. If what they were doing was harmless or beneficial, they would not be threatened.

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                1. There are women in vids on social media contemporaneously A) complaining men are not chatting them up anymore on the street or in bars (there are even vids of women complaining they never get catcalls on the street anymore (!!), albeit these are mostly from women in NYC, so, well…), B) complaining about MGTOW (men going their own way, basically men opting out of the pursuit-at-all-costs dating meat market to do their own thing – think gender-going-Galt, C) proclaiming that as powerful independent women they don’t actually need men AT ALL, so 4B!, that will show them! and besides they are going to cut all their hair off to also punish men, because women and minorities voted for orange man bad so he was victorious, and D) complaining about the “passport bros” phenomenon, with much belittling and disdain for guys seeking mates overseas (these complaints apparently spiking to enough of a peak about a year ago that the phenomenon came to the notice of other media).

                  Sure, not the same women saying all of these things simultaneously, but this is the marketplace of ideas landscape that young men see continuously on their phones.

                  I’m glad I’m old.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  2. To a lesser extent, there’s also, “I told him No because I wanted him to pursue me, but he quit trying, instead What’s wrong with men!?”

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      2. It’s true that it’s nearly impossible for many to get a divorce in the Philippines. From what I’ve heard, they also enforce the adultery laws… against women (men not so much). The end result is a couple who gets married, has a kid or two, and then he bails.

        I’ve seen cautions for “passport bros” in that country about getting involved with “single” moms.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Just finished getting my fiancée’s annulment done so we can get married. The process cost so much that a normal Filipino can’t afford it. It has gotten to the point where a lot of younger couples are just living together and not getting married. But they’re still having children.

          I got tired of dealing with women here who were trying to trade up and expected the man to put in all the effort into the relationship but do nothing themselves.

          My fiancée wishes we could have met earlier so we could have had children together. She’s raised two and I’ve raised four. In general, the Filipinas love children and usually want to have some.

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    3. Get married, have three kids, then your wife cheats on you, demands a divorce, gets full custody of the kids, full child support, full alimony, by default.

      Isn’t true, but everyone “knows” it– and they’re free about punishing any woman who is so horrible she didn’t get full custody, alimony and the house.

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      1. Are there women so absolutely horrible that the courts don’t side with them? Certainly. I can name one case I know of personally.

        One.

        I said “by default”, not “absolutely every time without exception.” The default is to assume that men are in the wrong, and women are the victims. Exceptions just that: exceptions.

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        1. There are entire states that default to 50/50 divorce, no support, no nothing, no matter the situation.

          And Oregon is absolutely horrible at enforcing the agreements that are reached– my sister died owed judgements, the kid’s medical bills, taxes, and even the bank account her ex wiped out, after bouncing her off of walls.

          They tend to not mention it because they get exactly this kind of bullshit abuse, treated like they’re worse than dirt– when anyone with eyes would know that the situation is set up so abusive users are still abusive users.

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          1. Sister left an abusive marriage. Because she walked, he got the house and they split custody. Demonstrated and recorded abuse made no difference. Yes, Oregon.

            Other female friends have gotten the shaft, mostly by guys who know how to game the system. Yes, she may get custody, but if he sells his highly successful business to his new gf’s parents and works at that same business as a volunteer, she ends up raising those kids on her own, with no support.

            The fact is that women who are willing to abuse the law are no more prevalent than men who are willing do the same.

            Statistically, divorce is still a relative rarity, since the numbers include people like an old friend of mine, who was on her 6th marriage while her husband was on his 4th. Neither of them thought those divorces were at all their own fault.

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          2. And things change. I still remember how much it hurt when we got notice from my beloved’s ex she was suing him for additional child support shortly after we brought our son home from the hospital. The official reason was, “to pay for his daughter’s drama club dues,” but it was obvious this was a, “You’d better not forget about my children!” sort of thing.

            However, a few months later, she did it again at the advice of her current husband (“Why didn’t you just ask me? I’ve always gotten it for you.” “Because the lawyer said we could get more this way.”) And after listening to their lawyer (who, ironically, had exactly the same name as the guy who broke into our house), the judge pretty well told her to pound sand. So the woman doesn’t always make out. Even in New Jersey.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Then there is my SIL whose husband took the dog, and the truck, and just left. She never received a penny, even though there was suppose to be payments. Yes, the girls visited him over the summer, but he had to pay the plane tickets, and required open ended flight tickets home before she’d sent them down. (Oregon and Texas.)

              Uncle step-children aunt brought into the marriage without a penny of child support from her ex. The ex was in arrears for thousands when he died. (Oregon).

              Cousin and her husband also raised not only his 6 children (his older 3 were on their own by the time they married), and her two, without child support from his ex, or her ex. Don’t know what the problem was with his ex other than maybe since she lost custody she was punished enough? Cousin’s ex scrammed for his parents home in India when they divorced, before the oldest was 5). Her two boys legally changed their to step-dad’s last name the day they each turned 18. (Cousin’s divorce was in Oregon. His divorce wasn’t, but don’t know where.)

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          3. There are entire states that default to 50/50 divorce, no support, no nothing, no matter the situation.

            Entire states. But not the majority of states. You keep straw manning my position. And, yes, bad things happen to women, too. Never said otherwise.

            When you can manage to characterize my position with some accuracy, whether directly or implicitly, then perhaps you will have something of substance to say in response to it. But all you have so far is straw-manning and dismissal.

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            1. :Snort:

              Quote:
              Another reason people aren’t having kids, on top of the others: the system is rigged toward women, and men know it. Get married, have three kids, then your wife cheats on you, demands a divorce, gets full custody of the kids, full child support, full alimony, by default.

              Quote:
              Are there women so absolutely horrible that the courts don’t side with them? Certainly. I can name one case I know of personally.

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    4. It’s not as though those stories aren’t discouraging for women too.

      How does a decent woman stop from thinking “Okay, all decent men avoid marriage because they think every woman who wants to get married does so with the intent to screw them over, therefore any guy who does want marriage must be the kind of psychopath who thinks he could win against the kind of woman who would screw her husband over, and I’m not equipped to deal with that kind of person, so I may as well not even try to look for marriage at all.”

      I mean… I get it. Divorce is traumatic. Dealing with courts in an adversarial divorce is traumatic. Being forced to support people in whose upbringing you may have not input is traumatic. Having your income drained to support someone else’s lifestyle is traumatic.

      And there are a lot of people who won’t acknowledge that trauma when the victims are men.

      But you know what? A lot of men could avoid all that if they’d stop choosing wives with their dicks.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Most of us know women who were delighted to accept a proposal from their beloved boyfriend… over a decade ago.

        And when they finally get tired of waiting for any kind of willingness to actually get married instead of playing house…..

        I’ve had to comfort friends through being “abandoned” that way several times, sadly.

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        1. I think my favorite was the guy my sister dated for a lot of years and accompanied to two different graduate schools on opposite sides of the country. He insisted that he couldn’t marry a Christian girl, that she’d have to covert to his flavor of Judaism.

          Naturally, when she succeeded – because she’s stubborn like that – he took up with another girl behind her back and painted my sister as some kind of controlling nutcase.

          She didn’t try to stick with him after that.

          Unfortunately, my sister hasn’t abandoned her conversion to return to Christ.

          Because she’s stubborn like that.

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        2. As my beloved put it, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

          The old fashioned guidance about staying celibate until after the wedding was a lot more practical than most moderns want to admit.

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          1. Yep.

            Also, the “But don’t you trust me? I love you, let’s live together and pool our money so we can afford a really good wedding of your dreams.”

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            1. These days couples don’t pool money even after marriage!

              We do (except that which we legally have to have separate, IRAs). But this is rare even in our cohort circles. Unheard of in our son’s and married nieces, and their married friends.

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              1. I’ve heard of this, too, drives my husband NUTS because I handle the bills and half the companies expect a married couple to act like two households.

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              2. Technically, we pool our money. We just have it in two separate personal accounts and can transfer to the other person.

                This is because when we got married, we had two VERY different ways of keeping track, and we would have driven each other crazy if we’d had a joint account. Now it’s just handy to have a backup in case one has a hack.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Before computers and downloads we kind of took turns balancing the checking account. Kind of. Essentially one of us would do it for months, then something would happen and the other would do it for months. Every transition it would go sideways. As long as only one of did it, balanced to perfection. Transition time. Would not balance easily. At least one account, checking or credit card, would not balance. Now that we have Quicken and bank downloads, won’t say problems don’t happen, but now it is the downloading process that is the problem (one account is particularly a problem). Still have to figure it out but knowing what their problem is (irritating problem), doable.

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          2. Historically, an engagement was as binding as the marriage. Not true now. In high society, a childhood betrothal was legally binding.

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      2. The problem is that we’re kind of wired that way…

        Yes, smart guys keep it in their pants, wait until marriage, etc… But that doesn’t change the simple fact that it is *constantly* in the back of almost every guy’s head.

        There’s an article from quite a while back that I’ve mentioned here a time or two. The writer was a married woman who had gone on testosterone treatments for some reason that I don’t recall. Afterwards she wrote that while she was on the treatment, she – a happily married woman – wanted to jump the bones of every last male she saw, even if it was a downright ugly man who just happened to be walking on the far side of the street past her house as she glanced out the window.

        Guys have to deal with this constantly post-puberty, with the only saving grace being that we’ve had to deal with it constantly since puberty, which means that we’re *somewhat* used to it, and used to ignoring it. But it’s always there, at the back of our minds. And plenty of women are very much aware of that.

        I mean, look at the rape allegation against Hesgeth that resulted in a formal complaint and police investigation. According to witnesses, Hesgeth appeared to be intoxicated, while the woman did not. And also according to witnesses, the woman appeared to be actively blocking other women from getting access to Hesgeth. She had apparently decided she was going to have sex with him, despite the fact that she was at the hotel with her husband and kids (who were back in their room, unaware of what she was doing), and was actively working to keep other women away from him so that she – and only she – would end up in his bed that night. She apparently was working overtime to have sex with him. I’m guessing that if Hesgeth had been inclined to keep it in his pants that night, she would have done everything in her power to get him to change his mind.

        And then a few days later she declared rape. Suspicion is that her husband found out, so she concocted a story involving misbehavior on Hesgeth’s part, and lack of control on her own.

        Yes, smart guys keep it under control, and avoid this kind of thing (there’s a thread I was looking at recently on X about guys who picked up a woman at 21+ nightclubs, and then very fortunately dodged life-long sexual predator status when someone tipped the guy off to the fact that the “woman” in each instance was an underage girl who had sneaked into the nightclub). But it does take two to tango. And I’ve a sense that in many quarters, the problems with the modern dating scene make lots of men even more desperate to “get some action”. Scarcity makes it more desired. If a woman aggressively goes after a guy in a situation like that, it can be hard to turn her down…

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        1. Y’know, before it became “sexist” and “patriarchal”, people used to tell young women that they shouldn’t get drunk in public, lest some sexual predator take advantage of them

          It’s a sad commentary on the modern world that young men now should be told the same thing, with women in the role of the sexual predator.

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          1. Yup.

            It also doesn’t help that women are actively discouraged from taking a “wait until marriage” position, while men are taunted as “incels” if they don’t have an active sex life.

            Though a lot of people these days seem to not realize that “incel” explicitly refers to men who are “involuntarily celibate”, and not men in general who are opposed to woke stances.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. :cheery wave:

              I was a dried up virgin lesbian, per the screechers… after I was a fat male virgin….

              This made my husband utterly roar, since I was very, very pregnant with our first child when this angle of attack was so memorably launched. 😂🤣😅

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      3. This is the problem both ways. I’ve argued this with Foxfier and others. it’s not male or female. THE DECENT PERSON ALWAYS GETS STUCK. Male, female it doesn’t matter. Our system FAVORS psychopaths.

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            1. A start at repairing it is to stop promoting the idea that it favors this or that external characteristic group, especially when the patch is “well, you’ve given evidence that goes the opposite way, that person must have been even more insanely bad, to not automatically get their way.”

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      4. It’s not that every woman wants to get married with intent to screw men over. It’s that many do, and there is zero good way to tell the good ones from the bad ones, except the most obvious.

        And, again, the culture for forty years or longer has been telling men that they’re worthless, or worse.

        And look at the MeToo movement. At the first, actual monsters were exposed, like Weinstein. But very quickly, it became a means of career advancement, and actual geniuses like John Lasseter were destroyed for the sin of hugging too much, because that’s exactly the same as the systematic rape factory Weinstein was running. The outrage over Weinstein was justified. But where is the outrage over Lasseter’s character being assassinated, and who got held accountable for that?

        The message is clear: Men are guilty, by default. And when they’re not, they still face all the repercussions, and get no justice. And nobody much cares.

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        2. It’s not that every woman wants to get married with intent to screw men over. It’s that many do, and there is zero good way to tell the good ones from the bad ones, except the most obvious.

          Even if its’ not the case at the start, the option is always available to her. Yeah, it’s a “joke” that the 6 words for a happy marriage are “Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear.” It also points out that on any given day, she has the option of dropping a dime and claiming he’s “abusive”, and the law will require the cops to haul him off to jail for “domestic violence”.

          The least the law could do is require more evidence than her unsupported word.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. It also points out that on any given day, she has the option of dropping a dime and claiming he’s “abusive”, and the law will require the cops to haul him off to jail for “domestic violence”.

            And women are advised to claim abuse in court as a tactic.

            But there is no anti-male trend in the culture. I mean, the Duke LaCrosse boys were (eventually, very reluctantly) exonerated, so everything that happened leading up to that doesn’t count.

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  13. I have 3 kids and I drummed into them that success =/= career. It *can* but for most people it doesn’t. Do something you enjoy for a living if at all possible, but realize that satisfaction and happiness most often derive from happy relationships and that is the true marker of success. Oldest daughter (early 20s) has the baby fever quite badly and restructured her entire life plan once she realized that what she really wanted to be when she grew up was a mom.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Its a whole lot easier to give financial aid then change the culture.

    Its not just one cultural issue, it’s a whole lot of them.

    There are even news stories,promoting women who have stayed single and childless to 40 about how good their life style is. That they can only accept the right man not merely OK and how badly woman who have accepted an ok man have ended up.

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  16. Wow Sarah, this is a wonderful rant.

    It’s rough, I have two teens and a almost tween. I had wanted more but my wife didn’t. Yes I was one of those who always wanted kids. Many of the late Gen X and older millennial girls I dated didn’t. At the time I thought they were just saying it because kids aren’t cool. But I’ve seen that sentiment grow.

    Times are tough, I figure I’ve poured almost all of my take home pay into trying to help my kids survive and learn and become productive members of society. The diagnoses about, the stresses on them at school and socially are incredible.

    Meanwhile, we just survived me being unemployed for nine months, and the new job after inflation has a salary equivalent to what I was making seven years ago, a reduction of thirty percent.

    You’re right, as much as I wanted to stand on my own two feet, my extended family helped prop us up during that bout.

    Parenting is the best thing I’ve ever done, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I wish I had one more, but that ship seems to have sailed.

    Meanwhile I will probably be funding my kids for another fifteen years and then trying to figure out how to retire… May G_d have mercy on all of us as our population ages…

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Insty has pointed out that there’s a step function barrier in number of kids that’s built into the US regulatory state on something as simple as car seat rules. Obviously nobody wants kids to die in car crashes, but the rules as they stand force kids to stay in car seats in other than the front passenger seat until they are quite old. This becomes an issue when you try to fit three approved government car seats in any standard sedan – you really can’t – so unless you can afford a Tahoe or a ‘burban or one of the other big three row SUVs, or minivans of similar capacity, you just cannot function with three kids in car seats in one vehicle.

    Empirically I see two kids being the norm for the young families in my neck of suburbia. Would they have more if they could? No way to know. But barriers like the car seat thing are real, and they have to have an impact.

    And I will also note the higher end neighborhoods I transit seem to have lots and lots of said full size SUVs. No real way to count kids, but if the folks who can afford $4m houses want to, they can have more.

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    1. It’s one of many ways the government is “encouraging” fewer children. And don’t think that it’s not on purpose, by and large. The US government has been in the business of social engineering since the Progressive Era.

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    2. It varies from state to state, but yes, there are some very absurd car seat laws. IIRC, in one state – I think it’s Washington – the requirement is purely a height and weight one, and not age-based. Which means that some particularly petite adult women are technically still supposed to be in car seats when out for a drive.

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      1. I’d love to be in the court where that one comes up…

        “Yes, your Honor, I’m shorter/lighter than the legal limit. So I was supposed to drive from the back seat, facing backward, or be in violation?”😆

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  18. When I was a kid, we were mostly broke. Neighbors needed kid-sitter. I was rather tall for my age, and no one checked.

    Thus we had some extra income. Since I was the only kud willing to babysit, for about a 2 mile radius, I made out like a bandit. Often, decent over the official “minimum wage”. Some of the neighbors liked to party elsewhere, and had three misbehaving boys. As I was the only one willing to herd those brats, and the parents sometimes were out until dawn, I cleaned up. Even moreso when hubby came home separately and first, and wanted me to be a bit vague on when.

    LOL. Bandits weep…

    It was also farm country, and Farmers then/there could get away with much when hiring other folks kids, versus illegals.

    Babysitting delinquents for delinquents paid way better, and slapping a cow just hurts your hand, and they kick way harder than kids. (Grin)

    Early good training on concealing sources of income, and concealing available funds and resultant acquisitions. For that novel of revolution…. heh.

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  19. Oh, one more quick note: Student loans, if you dig into Obama care, it was funded by federalizing all of the college loans. While they pushed college when I was in school in the 90’s by Obama’s time everyone needed a degree. My skeptical side says that’s because they needed indentured servants to pay for their insurance racket…

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  20. I assumed for a long time I would never marry (yes, a strong hint of, “no guy would want me,” there, despite having a healthy college social life). Then when we married, my beloved had two children by a previous marriage, and wasn’t anxious for more. I’m proud that he worked three jobs (full-time, the seasonal tax practice and AF Reserve) to ensure he always paid his child support.

    So I thought I’d be childless. God had other ideas, and I am grateful. But so far as I know, none of my college peers had kids. I know one felt she woud be a poor mother and another just plain didn’t want them, but I don’t know what motivated the others. It was just something we all “knew.”

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    1. I never gave marriage a thought. HS classmates did. More than a few married right out of HS or even before graduation. For the most part I was always in the friend zone, not many dates. College. Had a few more dates, but really, nothing specific. Even hubby. We ran around in the same circles, but never in the same classes as he was ahead of me by 3 years. We met fall *early Oct ’74, had first date Jan ’78 (engaged Aug, married Dec). Part of the problem in college is I was too often the youngest. I was 17 when I started (turned 18 before Halloween). Other than my roommate, her boyfriend, and his roommate, most my forestry classmates were older by more than a year or two (hubby is just short of 5 years older). Didn’t help that when a group decide to go study at the nearby tavern or pizza (when still segregated into family VS not) I couldn’t, because I wasn’t 21, and looked it. Since hadn’t thought about marriage, didn’t think about children. Shock when we did decide it was time, learned BC shouldn’t have been working, and nothing happen.

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    2. I’m generally in the “no guy would want me” camp.

      And then this stupid impulse to be excruciatingly accurate compels me to add caveats. Like “no Christian guy would want me for a wife”

      And somehow if I tell people online that, it turns into “Well then, the fact that you’re not married is your own fault, isn’t it? You had options for a relationship and you refused to take them”

      As if “a relationship” is in anyway equivalent to “marriage”, and the whole “Don’t be unequally yoked” thing is a mere suggestion.

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      1. Before same-sex marriage, I was told that my being unmarried was in no way the same as a homosexual’s, since I could literally pick a mail-order spouse.

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  21. I would love to have got married (or even lived with a woman in a long-term relationship; I’m a bit wary of formal marriage due to the way the divorce laws are set up) and had kids. But I was behind my age group at boy-girl stuff in high school (no money and no car equaled no status and therefore no girlfriend, or so I believed at the time—I’ve been told since I was wrong, but I cannot read minds) and the college I went to wasn’t the best place in the world to get caught up. After college, I was trapped in my poky small town, and have been struggling financially ever since. I do have a girlfriend, but she has to live a thousand miles away and we can’t see each other very often.

    One thing I could definitely have used would have been some sort of financial aid and guidance to get me to a major metro and help me find a job and place to live there. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on campus my senior year of college and my college doesn’t have (or, frankly, need) much of a placement service.

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  22. …my sister can’t have kids. Seizures and physical issues. Her medication for her seizures is the kind that her doctor made it very clear that she wasn’t to have kids and was to use contraceptives, always. (And she can’t switch her meds to a different kind-she tried that once and the seizures came back and worse.)(1)

    I went into fandom. I had issues taking off and getting my college degree and getting work and then finally dating and… well, short of a miracle I’m probably not going to be having kids of my own.

    I don’t know if I would be a good parent. I know I wouldn’t be a bad parent, which is something. But I think I would have wanted Mom to have seen her grandkids before she passed. I think she should have seen them.

    I want to think, as well, that third and fourth-wave feminism, more than anything else, helped to keep more kids from being born. When the feminists can call upon the environmentalists that “too many kids are eating the planet alive!” and the idea of having children-let alone having sex with men-is absolutely disgusting…what did people expect?

    I hope, fondly, that fixing this problem won’t require the usual ways nature deals with population issues-forced gene mixing (i.e. rapes, lots of them, by the conquering populations).

    (1-Thinking about this, it makes me think that the theory that some kinds of autism are due to brain damage from birth issues makes far too much sense. Sister has a club foot, and issues going on with herself…)

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    1. The comments about feminism remind me…

      There was a thread I saw on X a couple of weeks ago that seems relevant. Margot Robbie had apparently announced that she was pregnant. With a *boy*. And she was keeping it. The thread noted (and gave examples of) that there was a large number of women on social media who were outraged by this.

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      1. Fanatics always seem to think that the personal decisions of others are the fanatic’s business. Learning otherwise (by various methods, some not even kinetic) can be a substantial shock to them.

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        1. It’s not even that. The real issue is that there were women outraged because an expectant mother wanted to give birth to a *male*, and not abort the fetus instead. If that’s a person’s attitude, then it doesn’t matter how loud or how quiet that person is about the matter. That individual is screwed up.

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          1. Notable is that a lot of this dumb is found on social media.

            And mostly vanishes, for a while, when there are bot-blocks, or funding reductions. Or, when, like our hostess, they block a range of IP addresses that go to Russia and China….

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        2. All true, and those replying opinions are certifiably insane, but the question of why the current status of any anatomical aspect of one Margot Robbie is any conceivable matter for public proclamation, online or otherwise, is a point as well.

          If Margot Robbie or her paid publicists did not want people opining the details of her reproductive status, Margot Robbie or her paid publicists could have abstained from publishing said details of that status.

          If she only wanted positive feedback, well, has she been comatose the past twenty years and missed what online culture has become? Thinking that for some reason today’s toxic online culture would only return positive opinions is just delusional.

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  23. Women’s magazines have been pushing the idea that it wasn’t good for women’s health and for society to have too many kids since the Victorian days.

    In my direct family, it has been 4 or 5 generations since there were lots of kids born to couples . . . we’ve had long generations, too, so the two women who had many were themselves born prior to the American Civil War. One of the ladies had her first child in her mid-teens and continued into her forties, but she lost quite a few of the children (including at least one set of twins). The other lady evidently had secondary infertility (a copy of a letter survives that basically says that after having children who were getting to school age, she had no baby and no prospect of one — but eventually more started appearing).

    The generation after those ladies didn’t have so many children. In some cases, a loss of a spouse caused it; in other cases, I don’t know the particulars but suspect infertility may have played a role.

    Fast forward to World War II, and the men in our family who had already delayed marriage in order to get college educations then delayed marriage and/or becoming parents again because of going off to war. Although I’m sure there were a couple of exceptions, most of the men returning had zero to 2 children.

    Anecdotally, a lot of the women of my grandmother’s and mother’s generations were told by their doctors that it was too dangerous to keep having children and/or their mothers and grandmothers tried to discourage them from having/having more children. (Not in our family, but I have read part of a biography by a couple who in the mid-1900s thought they were doing the “Lord’s work” by getting people not to have kids . . . never mind about “be fruitful and multiply”.)

    I wanted to have a large family, haven’t found a guy who felt likewise, unlikely now due to age. But even my relatives who did have kids may not get many (or even any) grandkids — due to certain conditions in the family some of their children sadly are unlikely to have kids.

    And there is the constant drumbeat on social media that it would be idiotic to want kids, don’t bring them into the world to suffer, etc. that also discourages births.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Ahh the Harrison Bergeron model of education. Sadly this has been the way of some educators since the ’70’s. I indeed experienced it (having been a bit like Hermione in Harry Potter but without the redeeming features) from an annoying social studies teacher who made me a scapegoat.

      Our education system is designed based on the Prussian system mixed with ideas from Henry Fords production lines. It deals poorly with either those who are gifted or those who have learning disabilities as it is aimed at the center of the bell curve.

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      1. It was apparently starting in the late ’50s, if not before. When I was in 7th grade, at Annapolis Jr. High, classes were populated/segregated based on academic record, so all abilities could be effectively taught; it caused almost no issues for anyone. When we moved to Florida for my next year, they weren’t, but teaching to “the lowest common denominator” hadn’t taken hold yet; slow learners got remedial instruction. It progressed from there; my daughter had to deal with it somewhat in the late ’70s after we moved back to MD, which was the main reason we scrimped to send her to private schools, where sanity still (pretty much) prevailed. Now? Fuggeddiboutit; public schools are a crapshoot, some good, but no way to tell; my granddaughter was self/home schooled, and did very well (as had her mother, in both HS and college in the late ’70s-mid-’80s).

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    3. I have ranted here before on the looting and then extermination of “gifted” programs way back in my own skool days. The way we treat kids on the upper end of the bell curve is shameful.

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    1. Amen.

      And not even just to the folks you’re an aunt to– I cannot convey how much it helps to hear folks not only not abuse me for having kids, but grin and be supportive about how they were from a big family/had a lot of kids/ “oh I loved those years!”.

      I also can’t convey how the little head-rats can get going that only other deluded folks who are saying this, and it’s not real, it’s a cult, folks are defending their bad choices.

      Maiden aunts and honorary uncles gut that.

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      2. Plus being that uncle/honorary uncle is a proud role with a longstanding tradition of encouraging behavior at which the parents have to stifle laughs at so as to remain parental.

        Who else would help teach babies to make new rude noises, or toddlers to run around the house yelling “RED RUM! RED RUM!”

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  26. There’s a cultural component that’s missing right now. We’ve had several generations of social disruption—birth control, feminism, technology, bureaucracy—and no one has figured out how to stitch the pieces back together into something functional.

    The best we’ve been able to offer the last couple of generations has been hedonism (hookup culture), biological delusions (freeze your eggs), specialty solutions (passport bros), and dated advice that no longer applies that well due to economic and cultural shifts.

    Meanwhile, the traditional sources of guidance (church and family) have gradually dissolved, politics has fractured things further, and the various generations have set up a circular firing squad blaming each other for it all going wrong.

    Not that all hope is lost. I suspect that most people, once you get past the conditioning and the economic/regulatory burden, still want to find a husband or wife and have kids. It’s just a question of re-establishing the social support for it, so that it feels like an attainable life goal rather than something optional and vaguely frowned upon that you can’t quite figure out.

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  27. The elephant in the room not mentioned here is the bio weapon shots are meant to induce mass infertility among humans around the world besides mass depopulation and every other evil intention one could imagine.

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  28. THAT’S what this title was subliminally reminding me of! Babylon 5 Season 1 episode 9 ‘Deathwalker’:

    Kosh: “Reflection. Surprise. Terror. For the future.”

    Because Kosh could tell ‘Talia Winters’ wasn’t a real person, just a mental overlay created by the Psi-Cops.

    Lennier has a killer quote, too:

    “Of course we could not reveal it then. And like all secrets long kept, we can not bear the shame of admitting it now.”

    Makes sense of a whole lot of left-wing insanity, no?

    Liked by 1 person

  29. Oh man, those student loans. My generation (graduation around the millennium) was the one to start really feeling the pain, partly because tricks available to older siblings were nixed (after two years in college, my older sisters could declare themselves “financially independent” and get their aid revisited, gone in the early 90s), and partly because if the federalization of student loans had institutions passing the loans off to groups that slapped some nasty interest on there. Yes, they said that wasn’t going to happen. But anyone who still had a loan ten years ago often owed as much as they did at the start, if not more. And it has gotten FAR worse.

    I do have some friends who got their student loans “forgiven.” By calculation, they had paid off not only the original balance, but a hefty interest surcharge, so I have encouraged them to think of it as “agreement that the loan was paid.” One such friend did have kids. It’s definitely been a relief to her that the loans were forgiven before the kids are grown.

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  30. The fall in birth rates actually is a government-created problem. Specifically, Social Security is the cause. It was first introduced in the 1870s in Bismarck’s Germany.

    Before SS, if you wanted to keep eating after you became too old, sick, or disabled to continue working, the only way to do it was to have some children still living. Infant mortality was so high that the average (not median) lifespan was 40 until Semmelweis’ discovery, also in the 19th century, started taking hold. The upshot was that everyone was more or less forced to marry at puberty and start cranking out a kid every year until you reached menopause or died giving birth.

    It also meant extended families had to stay together. No nuclear families were possible unless you had a job elite enough to carry a pension with it before SS.

    So you want people to start breeding again, shut down SS. Preferably in an orderly way, but letting it crash and burn like any other Ponzi scheme will work too, if you don’t mind it taking the currency down with it.

    Another way with bad side effects is to do nothing and let the Great Replacement happen, and Chinese or Muslims will be living here in our place in a century. If it’s too late to prevent this, maybe we of the coming American diaspora won’t be misunderstood and hated any more than the Jewish diaspora was.

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    1. a) Social Security is at this point a self-terminating problem, And you’re GROSSLY oversimplifying. Yes, it’s a contributing factor. NOT all of it. (And I’m for abolishing it. Always was.)
      B) bullshit. You’re falling for their propaganda. Their birthrates are WAY worse than ours.

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    2. Holy shit. It takes some truly Guinness World Records staggering level stupidity to list FREAKING CHINA OF ALL PLACES as “they’ll totally outbreed us!!!”.

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    4. The Chinese are within a couple decades of demographic collapse. I mean, have you *seen* their birthrates? Their population pyramid isn’t so much inverted as it is a thin pole with a plate on top. The only people worse off are the Russians.

      And African as well as Mideast birthrates have gone through the floor. Apparently, women discovered the *rhythm method* ((chuckles))

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    5. It also meant extended families had to stay together. No nuclear families were possible unless you had a job elite enough to carry a pension with it before SS.

      Heh, believe me, that is a non-zero consideration for why SS is not a bad idea. On balance, it’s a terrible plan, but it’s not without benefits. The folks who benefited from SS at every step– raised by parents not paying for their parents, not having to pay for their parents, and now getting paid for if they had kids or not– would not hesitate to go “yes, let’s eat the young so we stay kept in our accustomed style. More seed corn!”

      For the fear of replacement, though– China’s numbers are infamously bad, and Muslim birth rates have the issue of being based on stopping guys in the street and publicly questioning their masculinity.

      It doesn’t matter if he’s an incel, he’s gonna say he’s got a half dozen daughters and sons.

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