On demography – Michal Leibowitz in NYT:

‘There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child onto this broken planet is too depressing. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can.’

(…)

‘I was 14 when I saw my first therapist, a middle-aged woman who worked out of her suburban home office. My parents liked her because she specialized in adolescent eating disorders and accepted our insurance. I liked her because she had a cat.
Also, she was sympathetic to me. In our first session together, she suggested that my feelings, my pain, my not eating, were reasonable and rational reactions to my family’s religious beliefs and high expectations. “That sounds very controlling,” she told me, after I’d described the rules we lived by — the fights I’d have with my father over too-tight jeans, chores, daily prayers.’

(…)

‘But Ashley Frawley, a sociologist, points out that parents continue to be blamed for their children’s hardships: “A voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or ‘baby-led weaning’) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.” Not all millennials or Gen Z-ers are in therapy, of course — though they seek out mental health counseling far more than members of other generations. But therapeutic and psychoanalytic ideas have invaded popular culture, forming the backbone of how we understand our own lives to such an extent that we may no longer even recognize them as therapeutic.
In her book “Saving the Modern Soul,” the French Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz critiques the therapeutic narrative, writing: “What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation.”’

(…)

‘But it is also true that many of today’s adult children often cut parents off for what a generation ago would have been viewed as venial sins. Anna Russell, who interviewed estranged families for The New Yorker, found that reasons for estrangement included that people “felt ignored or misunderstood by their parents or believed that a sibling had always been the family’s favorite. Several described a family member as a ‘classic narcissist’ or as ‘toxic.’”’

(…)

‘Before I became pregnant, a friend said, “Nothing changes your relationship with your mom like having a child.” It’s true. And it is also true that nothing changes your relationship with life itself, and your story around it, quite like choosing it for another person.
And there’s something perverse about the fact that one barrier to having children for members of my generation is a fear that we’ll fail them in the same ways — or perhaps different ways — that our parents failed us. Yet having a child is what can help you look at the narratives you’ve been wearing all these years, bundled around you like an old winter coat, and realize that it no longer fits.’

(…)

‘Child rearing is something you consider doing when you have extensive savings and a good career and a perfect partner and are at peace with yourself and your choices and are sure that you can guarantee your kid a life of success and happiness.’

Read the article here.

If your family is not dysfunctional you must be extremely superficial.

Having a child is like a very expensive cruise to the South Pole.

You can decide to have a child in order to have a better relationship with your own parents.

Birth rates will be low for years maybe decades to come.

AI will save us. Or not.