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→ Young Americans increasingly don’t want children
Dinks — the dual income, no kids cohort who have been triggering conservatives on TikTok — appear to be one of America’s fastest growing demographics.
A growing share of American adults under 50 say they never plan to have children, according to new Pew polling. In 2018, 37% of those under 50 said they are unlikely to ever have kids, but that’s jumped to 47% in under a decade. Of that proportion, 57% give the primary reason that they don’t want to.
New Pew:
Share of young adults, esp. y women, who say they are “unlikely” to have kids is surging.*
Biggest reason: “Just don’t want to”.
* Among those who are currently childless. pic.twitter.com/978vmoIyqp
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) July 25, 2024
Much to the chagrin of the oft-piled-upon millennials, it appears that wanting to buy overpriced avocado toast and the like may actually be playing a role here. Most childless under-50s say they “just don’t want to” — not climate change or a housing shortage — as their reason. Further, the vast majority of the never-parents crowd said they felt they had more time for hobbies and could spend more freely without kids. Is the US the next South Korea?
→ Application deadline for £70,000 DEI job at NHS
CVs at the ready! Today is the last day to apply for the role of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead at NHS England. With a salary between £70,000-£80,000, you’ll certainly be well remunerated.
One of the key responsibilities is ‘influencing stakeholders to foster a commitment to initiatives that advance the EDI agenda’. What’s more, you are only required to work from the office for 40% of the time.
NHS funding crisis latest: pic.twitter.com/DsEVTkBp1d
— Elliot Keck (@ElliotKeck) July 24, 2024
If you were worried about not being accepted for who you are, fear not. The NHS will “welcome your talent and enthusiasm irrespective of age, disability, neuro-divergence, sex, gender identity and gender expression, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or other personal circumstances.”
According to the Keep Our NHS Public website, the UK’s health service is “deliberately underfunded”. Well, there may be a few places where cutting costs won’t prove deadly…
→ RFK Jr to create government ‘wellness farms’ to help with addiction
RFK Jr. wants to create government-run “wellness farms” where drug addicts of all varieties — including antidepressant users — can get clean while doing agricultural labour.
“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go and get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs, other psychiatric drugs if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, get off of benzos, get off of Adderall,” he said. “No phones”, “no screens”, just living in the moment.
SCOOP: RFK Jr. plans to create government “wellness farms” where people will spend 3 or 4 years harvesting organic vegetables to cure their addiction to antidepressants and ADHD meds: https://t.co/jyn8Y5QrZh
— Kiera Butler (@kieraevebutler) July 24, 2024
It’s an avante-garde twist on the country’s existing government farms. But unlike the Angola prison plantation, you don’t have to get convicted to go there. And the crops are all organic.
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SubscribeDINKs represent the suicide of Western Civilization. They believe the world started the day they were born, is there to amuse them, and will end the day they die. They are despicable.
Bit of a sweeping statement? Does your understanding of history suggest much good ever comes of describing particular parts of the demographic as “despicable”? I’d tend to agree that the replacement rate in the West is dangerously unsustainable and that our “elites” are wilfully blind to this enormous problem, but does despising anyone really help?
Yes. It’s inspiring.
Cracks me up when people get so upset when folks choose to be child free. The concept that one must procreate for the good of society sounds a bit Chairman Mao, either that or it is coming from parents who have stupidly sacrificed their own life opportunities for a nasty little brat that will encumber them forever.
The DINKS are the offspring of earlier generations. They have the same innate desires for sex and consumption as their predecessors but now they have free contraception and live in a world of enormous material richness. The choice to have sex and not get pregnant wasn’t an option for all of humanity’s history until now. The opportunity to imbibe in all sorts of pleasure wasn’t an option for all of humanity’s history until now. In a blink of a civilisation’s eye, a mere 60 years, everything has changed for humanity except our innate desires. So we choose sex and we choose consumption. The only difference is those innate desires always led to having children, and now they don’t. We’ve opened another of Pandora’s boxes.
And none of them are the offspring of DINKs! You’d think that would be thought-provoking, but no…
I mean, “I just don’t want to”, nebulous as it is, definitely leaves room for a general sense of decline being part of the reason. I truly just don’t want to, and never have (and certainly wouldn’t want to bother getting into the myriad reasons why with a random pollster) – but I know a lot of people who came around to just not wanting to, more because the only way they can have an OK quality of life overall is to not. I honestly don’t know how my friends with kids, who actually have quite high salaries, pay for everything, and they still can’t afford anywhere near what our parents could afford to do for us.
It’s much easier to blame people for responding to a declining quality of life (albeit perhaps ambiguously) than it is to actually work harder to fix it systemically, isn’t it?
There were five kids in my family (born 1946-1960), and what I remember is how small our houses were (we moved a lot—military). It was one bathroom for seven people more often than not. My parents only bought us things—other than school clothes—for Christmas. We never ate out. That was just the norm back then. No one I knew had a big house. I think we live in a culture where everyone has to have their McMansions and we have to have what we want NOW. No waiting for Santa. Some people, though manage to live more modest lives and are happy. I’m sure they struggle with childcare like everyone else, but they seem to think it’s worth it. Wealthier people seem to think kids are worth it , too.
Who do they think is going to look after them in old age? Or do they just not think?
Of all the reasons to have kids, that’s just about the most vacuous, not to mention selfish. Being a parent is about enabling them to have live their own lives, not prepare them for being carers. Yeah, and i understand the demographics, before anyone asks.
‘Just’ a carer?
Someone will care for them in old age. The state. And it might not do it too well. These ‘economically inactive’.
Confucius once upbraided a student for not wanting to perform the expected period of mourning for his parents. Did not his parents care for him as a child for three years?
No, THAT is the most vacuous reaction. Living one’s own life is exactly the problem. Lives are multigenerational and intertwined.
By not having children they will be left with enough to pay for the very best of care!
Cared for by someone else’s child.
I was once acquainted with a man who asked with genuine puzzlement, “What are children for?”
If anyone has to ask that question, even rhetorically, they do not know what life is for. For hobbies and amusements? The rich man fades away in the midst of his pursuits. (James i.11).
Those couples who have never had children but who wanted them, or whose children died in infancy leaving them without a family, are often far more caring of children than those who did not want any. Couples who decide to have a child realise that their child will change them.
The simple fact is that before the 1960s (later in many places) birth control was limited or non-existent. Our foremothers and forefathers had a choice of abstinence or risk pregnancy. We’ll never know how many “chose” to have families, but we can be certain that very few of them actively planned against it. Having children was not a virtuous choice but an inevitability (bar illness) of sexual desire. With so many facing this inevitability, naturally society organised itself around this normal and having children was considered an economic blessing – more hands to work.
With the arrival of freely available birth control for the first time, casual sex and delaying having children became possible and easy for everyone. Sex is great and having no responsibility for others is far easier. Like all new things, the effects have not been instant but nonetheless today almost all young women choose birth control for their early sexual experiences. Not having children is not a virtuous choice but one of material desire. But with so many (at least at first) making this choice, naturally society has reorganised itself around this new normal and, by young women at least, not having children is now often considered an economic blessing.
Thus a new normal has been established. Today society broadly divides itself into roughly three camps: the religious-pro-natalist-or-anti-contraception, the delay-kids-until-the-right-time, and the never-want-kids. The window of fertility is either significantly narrowed or completely shut by contraception plus economic considerations unless there is a militant religious countervail that demands women to have children and expects men to provide. If demographics is destiny, then the children born into the militant religions will inherit the earth. Ironically, that is what they promise. Perhaps there is a god after all…
What would children be to the DINKS? Someone to look after them in old age and remember them.
Once again, youth being wasted on the young. Now in my 60s, with four loinfruits in their 30s, I regret only my dismay at their births. I wish we’d had at least eight. But there’s no point in ranting at clouds; I can only resolve to enjoy the natural progression of life as it comes, from this point on.