Are you insinuating that childless people never fully mature? Because as a childless person I've noticed that a lot of the distance I felt with my friends with kids disappeared as soon as their kids were grown. Essentially we're all childless now, and think of the world in the same terms.
It's not a given, but a personal anecdote is that there simply hasn't been a situation in my life prior to kids that required such a sustained focus on the happiness and wellbeing of another person before kids. It really is a type of growth that would be dare say impossible to duplicate without kids. But of course, I could say that I've never had to live through war and don't think that I could really say that I've built the fortitude that that experience gives you, so the point might be moot. Just to say, kids really give you a perspective, that choosing to be childless does not, while being childless is a perspective that all people with kids got.
> It really is a type of growth that would be dare say impossible to duplicate without kids.
Perhaps, but as a childless adult who had to take over my parents' affairs as their physical and cognitive health declined, I marvel at the wonderful hits of dopamine parents get as they watch their children grow. It's an adorable perspective on life that I didn't get to share as my mother gradually forgot who she was.
> while being childless is a perspective that all people with kids got
This is a naive view of the world. Being childless is a qualitatively different experience for those in different walks of life. A childless financially unstable young adult will have a very different experience than that of a childless financially stable middle-aged adult.
I mean, yeah at the end we're all individuals living qualitatively different lives. However, you can get a very close approximation by say dropping your kids off at their grandparents. Even during babysitting, you get nothing close to the experience of having to constantly reprioritize towards another that depends on you and giving them the tools to become independent adults capable of doing it themselves and going into the world, at least by default you don't. I feel like caveating that the human experience will be different and there are a thousand ways to add nuance to the conversation but the generalization definitely holds.
i think its incredibly difficult for a male to truly become a man without children. it is very easy and seductive to be a manchild forever, whereas society seems to force women to grow up. And its certainly possible for a father to remain a manchild, but i think without that kind of responsibility and focus of having to mentor and keep another human alive its difficult to fully mature.
I don't think it's as-different-as-it-used-to-be for men and women now but I agree with the sentiment.
Becoming an engaged father shifted my perspective on who I am, changed opinions on societal matters, and made me feel like the person I was -- despite, from a young age, spending non-trivial amounts of time on contemplating morality and society and considering myself as a youth to be "mature for my age" -- was a selfish git.
I went from "c'mon what's the harm"-ing naysayers to "HEY think big picture! LONG term!" on SO many aspects of life.
The man I was would not get along with the father I am.
Your statement won't be popular, but I agree that, statistically-speaking, it's an overt intellectual "next stage".
> Many of the parents I know are deeply and profoundly unhappy.
As a childless person, I believe this is a societal problem, not a biological one. We've broken apart the tribe and made just two people (at most) responsible for most of child rearing. And worse, we pretend the parents are directly responsible for a child's safety and development at all times, even though we all know some kids are just way easier or harder to raise, right out of the box.
Smart take. Parenting used to be more communal in some ways. Now it's up to two (maybe) working parents to deal with kids.
43-yr-old parent of 2. I love them. They're amazing. But there are so many challenging moments. So many.
In those deep/profound moments of stress, I try to remind myself that the only thing I really need to do is stay calm. Allowed to have emotions, course.
But to execute some level of calm really helps resolve so much of what you experience.
Maybe they are unhappy but on the flip side, most people with children will tell you that if you haven't been a parent you don't know what happiness is. The happiness of being a parent is just unimaginable, cannot compare with anything else.
Strangely enough, I think I do understand. As near as I can tell, life's two greatest pleasures are
1. Love (both loving and being loved)
2. Voluntary hardship
I mean, what is parenthood if not love and voluntary hardship?
On the other hand, I think you are describing your subjective experience. I've talked with some "one-and-done" parents who deeply love their child, but wouldn't want another one if you paid them.
Parenthood being the most intense happiness possible is not my subjective experience. It is probably the most obvious fact in the world, literally if it wasn't true human societies would be radically different.
Interesting, given the decline in birth rate that seems to be the inevitable consequence of widespread prosperity.
"Happiness" is one of those words that has thousands of different definitions, so I would frame it this way: Parents almost always describe their children as the greatest joy in their lives, but (in America at least) they also generally express more dissatisfaction and frustration with their lives than childless people.
The authors charted human brain and divided it into "eras" where they saw significant changes based on age. Major life events can affect brain structure, and becoming a parent is one of the most important adult life events. Becoming a parent in early 30s is common. Just these facts combined mean that being in early 30s correlates with brain changes somehow. The authors explicitly mention that they know about this, and that they didn't control for this it yet.
Back to your question, I never said anything about maturing. It is a well-known fact, that female brain changes after childbirth. There is also research that suggests that first-time fathers brain changes too. This doesn't necessarily mean becoming more mature.
People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
True. I grew up in the country, along a busy road. I never walked or biked anywhere, and it was very isolating. Moving to a city that had quiet residential streets, wide sidewalks, and actual bike paths was a game changer for me.
I wonder how much damage that did to me, to have that lack of physical activity during my formative years.
An issue for kids nowadays is being outside unattended is basically illegal (for instance IL / Chicago, minimum age unattended is 14). Therefore they might get more activity in the country on a bigger acreage alongside an unwalkable road, than they would in the city in a walkable area, unlike an adult.
As soon as you get near people, if there is a enough, a Karen will rat the kid out as soon as they touch public property and maybe before it. They are only safe from CPS tyrants when they are out of sight.
It's not illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended in Illinois. It is however illegal to leave a child under 14 unattended for an unreasonable amount of time in Illinois.
If you follow their advice and your child is ready to reasonably able to be left alone unattended, you can leave even 8-9 year olds unattended for long periods of time. It's not odd for children to be home alone after school for 4-8+ hours.
Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.
Kids go all over the place in Chicago while under 14 without their parents. It's literally not an issue.
Illinois lawyers [0] and child's rights policy thinkers [1] had evaluated it to mean a child under 14 can not be 'reasonably' left alone, up until 2023. It looks like you are correct and they updated it recently under an amended 705 ILCS 405/2-3 in January 2023.
Unless your child was born in the past couple years or following legislation, I think most people don't realize this, as even most the law firms still have the old '14' as the min age on their neglect pages. So you are correct with the asterisk that it glosses over that it was the case up until the past couple years and you are updating us on a new development.
>Your opinion on "CPS" in Illinois (I assume you meant DCFS and not Chicago Public Schools) is based on not understanding a single paragraph of the law that is written to be readable by the general public.
My opinion is based on what legal advice I got when I last researched it a few years ago. A lot of Illinois law is read in the context of common law precedent that makes the actual text less reliable. Mea Culpa.
Your first source is trying to sell a service, namely lawsuits against your ex. The law in 2022 was the same [0] in regards to the text that I mentioned. And as far as I can tell, that's the original text of the law as it was first passed in 1987.
The 2024 update [1] was basically just fixing typos.
The 2023 update [2] was reaffirming the original text and added safeguards to prevent abuse by police and prosecutors misapplying the law. This update did remove the explicit age mentioned, but if you look at the deleted text, you had to leave a minor unattended for a very long period of time not just "a trip to the store" for the law to have been violated before the change despite what the divorce attorneys were trying to tell people on their misleading website.
Also, I'm not going to go into my rant about IPI intentionally misleading people and lying by omissions and funny ways of presenting "data". If you use them as a source for anything and expect that what you read was the truth, then that's on you. They're a propaganda organization that spreads even more disinformation than the Heritage Foundation.
Your concerns are extremely valid, but it is not _that_ bad in many places in America. I relocated my family specifically so that my kids could have a walkable community to live in, and since then (about five years), we've had no issues with them getting to schools, parks, the library, friends' houses, and downtown shops on their own.
That said, we live in the inner district of a small city that was settled in the mid 19th century, so it has a street grid, alleys, uninterrupted sidewalks, etc.... everything that makes a place as safe as possible in this day and age for kids to get around without getting hit by a car. (One exception being dedicated biking infrastructure, which would be awesome.)
In Chicago, kids start going to school by themselves between 8 and 13 depending on how comfortable their parents are with them behaving properly on the way to school.
True. Older (in the U.S., pre-war) neighborhoods actually provide kids with far more opportunities for walking than newer, cul-de-sac based suburban neighborhoods. I keep wondering when we're going to stop allowing such immobilizing, isolating neighborhoods to be built.
The first time I looked at a city map of my home town and saw the division between the prewar streetcar suburbs, and the postwar neighborhoods, was a revelation. Before the war: everything is on a grid, and there are alleys for utilities and garages down every block. Easy to walk everywhere. After: no more alleys, cul-de-sacs everywhere, traffic funneled onto arterials, unwalkable.
I'd love to see cities put efforts into connecting those isolated cultures-de-sac neighborhoods with pedestrian and bike paths.
I can understand the desire to reduce through-traffic which sometimes comes with speeding or aggressive drivers. But walking and cycling to your friends house shouldn't mean going a mile out to the entrance of your neighborhood, down the busy highway, then a mile back in to their house when they were only half a mile away to begin with.
My neighborhood was platted in the late 50s, and it has what the kids call "secret sidewalks" that cut between the houses and connect the streets. It's the best of both worlds: Minimal car traffic, but easy to get around by walking. The secret sidewalks also radiate outward from the elementary school, approximately.
Cities charge a right-of-way fee, planning, and permitting process every time you connect to a public road. The county/city planning committee often requires new neighborhoods to cover the cost (often via HOA) of roads and their easements in the neighborhood. The end result is the neighborhood private planners have their hand forced to eliminate thru-traffic and minimize connections to arterials.
The county would basically have to do the opposite to change things; provide low-cost/low-overhead process for connecting to public road and pay neighborhoods/HOA for connecting to arterials to offload the traffick and provide thru-routes. Otherwise the public is just leaching off the private roads, and due to neighborhood planning requirements they usually can't charge a toll to get it back, so it gets designed to avoid that.
I'm suggesting not limiting foot and bike traffic just because we choose to limit car traffic. There are lots of routes between places in my town that would be much more direct, and safe, on a bike if there were small connecting paths between neighborhoods, including those built at different times by different developers, instead of being forced out onto the arterials.
Yeah, I think that's the part that I was suggesting should be "banned". All neighborhoods should connect with all adjacent neighborhoods via pedestrian or multiuse paths. And yes, that means across arterials as well -- either have an official surface crossing with appropriate traffic calming measures / pedestrian islands, or build a tunnel.
I don’t like cul-de-sacs in general but they can be walkable if there are shortcuts for pedestrians/cyclists and only cars has to follow a long way. You also need amenities in a walking distance. One can find such neighbourhoods in the UK.
I don't know much about what Germany is experiencing, but even Germany's neighbors in the Netherlands and France seem to be having a renaissance predicated upon getting people out of their personal automobiles. Perhaps the problem is actually the outsized influence of the auto industry in Germany?
No, auto industry is dying in Germany and was more powerful in the past. German railway collapse is a recent phenomenon. It's the inverse: the Green push to make everyone use public transport is collapsing both the auto industry and public transit there.
Actual Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems are in place all over the world, where there are physical barriers protecting the bus lane, and transit signal priority along the entire route. They work extremely well when they don't rely on motorists being on their best behavior.
I'm going to guess that you're a fellow American. That's our answer to everything - build a ghetto. Why make anything nice for everybody when you can make it suck for 79% of us, Hell on Earth for another 20+%, and nice for the privileged few?
Most ghettos aren't built to be ghettos. They were built as nice neighborhoods and have nothing structurally wrong with them, but then had criminals and shitbags wreck the place. Ghettoification can in fact be reversed without any changes to infrastructure by simply having nice people move in who give a shit and make an effort to clean up and maintain their properties. This is derogatorily called "gentrification".
Also, your ratios are absurdly out of wack. 79% of the country doesn't live in a ghetto and you don't need to be economically or socially privileged to maintain a nice neighborhood. Most working class neighborhoods are not ghettos, nor even resemble one in the slightest.
The ghetto is that bottom 20% living in Hell, not the 79% who merely deal with things that suck.
Although I was more referring to our systems more broadly (health care, education, transportation - the topic of this post), let's go with neighborhoods. Are you really trying to pretend that red-lining didn't happen? Or that de facto sundown towns didn't exist at least into the 1980s?
While things are bad for some people, calling the bottom 20% living in Hell is an exaggeration that is nowhere near correct. People always complain about their situation and think it is somehow much worse than other people, so if you see someone who is in worse shape you can think it is a living hell. However the reality is very different, and if you step back and look you discover most people in that bottom 20% are happy overall despite having imperfections.
I mean in the US a bunch of them are still the remaining product of redlining policies where racial minorities were allowed to live but banks would not give loans. Housing segregation was planned and enforced. That sounds a lot like intentional creation of a ghetto. And later when cities need to invest in building amenities, or raze neighborhoods to make way for infrastructure, often it's been the minority neighborhoods that are neglected or destroyed respectively. Of _course_ ghettos are the result of planning and intentional policy.
To be very clear, redlining didn't happen just because a bunch of individual bankers happened to be racist. It was a consequence of federal policy -- the FHA would insure loans in white neighborhoods but not in minority neighborhoods, so even for a rational banker uninterested in race, it made sense to issue the loans for white home buyers, and not minority home buyers, even if they were financially qualified. The "redline" choices were not where a bunch of separate banks had independently decided that some "bad risk" threshold was crossed -- they were picked by HOLC/FHA. The FHA also subsidized construction of white housing developments, but not minority ones.
When people refer to "systemic racism", the "systemic" part is typically literal.
Also, I invite you to take a step back and interrogate the examine the implicit premises of your question. I think you're saying that _in a free market of rational agents_, it doesn't make economic sense to not issue loans to people who _aren't_ credit risks, and I would agree -- except housing segregation was always about a heavily artificially manipulated (not free) market, in which people of color couldn't purchase a home in a white neighborhood regardless of their willingness to pay. Public policy bent over backwards to coerce all parties to maintain segregation (e.g. sundown towns, racial covenants, etc), ironically including during cold-war years when the US simultaneously tried to be a global advocate for free markets.
Do you mean today or in 1950? In 1950 I'll go with racists for the majority of banks. Today race is not a factor, but credit risks are still important.
I think this person explained a lot about how things get done in the real world. They just don’t like it. What’s not to like about society spending itself into oblivion?
