The End of Children

Wow that was long and surprisingly nuanced. One thing I’ve thought about recently looking at my own daughters is that they are bombarded with a lot of fake “this is the good life” that rarely includes children.

As a consequence perhaps the right time to have them will never eventuate. A lot of our Gen X contemporaries who put off child rearing for this reason ended up with heartbreaking fertility issues.

However I don’t think a smaller population is necessarily a bad thing.

Anecdata: I can count only a few couples in my circle of friends - who mostly had kids in their late 30s and early 40s - who didn’t end up having long and sometimes heartbreaking IVF, copious miscarriages, kids with trisomy, and in our case, stillbirth.

I think part of the problem was an assumption that modern medicine around childbirth is actually better than it is, and thus delaying having kids is a safe choice.

I consider myself very lucky indeed to have two healthy sons and my advice to my eldest is to get on with having kids as soon as you’ve met the right person, ideally in your 20s…

I suspect part of the problem is that many people think fertility is like a step function with a sharp transition by menopause age (~45 years), when it steadily decreases since much earlier, in your 30s. Biology books in school should have a nice graph showing this clearly.

Our experience was that conceiving before 30 was much easier than even early thirties. Watching our friends and colleagues struggling as you said with AI and fertility treatments was a real eye opener. I certainly don’t want to pressure my kids but they definitely should be more aware than they are.

> Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong.

Hear hear! Words to live by for even moderately complex issues.

The best you're likely to get in this is the constructed rationalizations of puppets who are blissfully unaware of the strings that tug at them. And this applies to everyone involved— the people for whom having kids is just what you do, as well as the people who have an intense anxiety about it. The decision for each individual probably happened long long before the explanation that justifies it.