I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this discussion. It's wonderfully complex and it's such a pleasure to see both sides arguing in good faith. Personally, I'd much prefer efforts to increase birth rate in developed countries like ours to focus on quality of life (parental and child) in addition to quantity. I've seen how the strategy of women being entirely devoted to child-rearing works in impoverished countries: enormous families desperately scraping by. Fathers who never spend time with their family since they must work 24/7 to support them, and mothers who are so tied to child care they lose their personality and become a drudge. I really don't think that's a model for American success. Give me the family with a Dad cheerfully making casserole and changing diapers rather than the big family with Dad at the office till nine pm and mom popping Valium in the broom closet. I do agree with Stone on one point, however. Let's work as a society to take some of those balls out of the air that American families are forced to juggle!
(disclaimer... Darby is my sister so I may have an unfairly biased viewpoint, and I, as a Dad to some healthy American kids, LOVE to make them garlic bread and lasagna dinners.)
I also respect Lyman but hate how he blithely answers "nope, that's not it" with so much certainty when reasons for low birth rates are proposed. Low birth rates are clearly a multi-factorial problem, and the factors likely interact! Like when someone (was it you?) proposed kids from larger families likely have larger families. Seems like a totally plausible piece of the puzzle, but he was like "nope, not supported by evidence." Would love to see researchers stop studying any one factor in isolation because this is not how the real world works. For example, I had a third kid both because I was married to a kind, supportive husband who does 100% of meal planning and cooking, and because I'm from a large Catholic family with a tendency for larger families, and because I could afford it, and because my first two births were vaginal so it felt safer. 🤷♀️ No one of these factors explains my choice but the combination of them made a difference.
This is such an apropos discussion for me because I was just at a mini-reunion of sorts of college friends. Many have kids, though no one has more than two. When one of the guys who doesn’t have kids suddenly expressed that he feels FOMO about not having kids, all of the kid-having folks were like no, no, no, please don’t have a kid out of FOMO. The women especially expressed that it was a lot of work and that you’re basically a parent forever. One of the dads said oh but it’s the best thing in the world! And his wife, also one of my classmates, said keep in mind this is from a guy whose wife is full time staying at home! It then became a bit of a discussion around how much the decision to be one and done was driven by the work involved (a lot). At this point I was thinking that the reason I did actually have two instead of one was that my husband pulled 50% of the load, including the mental load (while I was the party he sent me photos of kids clothes he was planning to declutter just in case I wanted to keep any of them). But there didn’t seem to be a diplomatic way to say that. But it’s true.
That's so interesting! One of my good friends has one child, and for her, having a husband who was not particularly involved with parenting is one reason she didn't push for more. (They are now separated).
Fully agree! I read his piece this morning and I was similarly uncomfortable with the whole “the only reason women feel like they’re doing an unfair amount of work is because mean feminists have told them men are bad” undertone. Very playground-level thinking, IMO. I knew a quality response would be coming from you, and without fail!
So much of the difficulty in measuring factors around birth rates, household chores etc comes down to the people who measure them having a flawed understanding of how gender and family dynamics *actually* work.
It’s a similar situation to that of polling institutions measuring “how often do people have sex?” by exclusively including penetrative intercourse, which then leads to hundreds of “Gen Z is no longer having sex” headlines. While there is indeed some decline, a huge portion of it is actually explained by the diversification of sexual practices and a gradual move away from imposed sexual scripts, which, when answering an online poll, people might not themselves classify as “intercourse” because of what they’ve been taught that intercourse is.
Stone's casual dismissal of subjective valuation feels very..... autistic Redditor? "I have logic on my side and thus we should have more children" ... is that ever going to work?
I am reminded of Kearny & Levine's recent NBER article on fertility where they talk about how researchers are loathe to attribute anything to changing preferences (because that can explain anything). But changing preferences seems like such an obvious thing when we're talking about "what society decides is fair". Is a 6 day workweek fair? Singapore only changed to a 5 day workweek in 2004, a date that sounds impossibly late to Americans. Likewise, as culture globalises via the internet and housewives in Vietnam can see what husbands in Sweden contribute norms on fairness can shift much faster than researchers can assemble datasets.
Lots of great points, Darby! The idea that even the "gold standard" time use data doesn't capture all the work involved in raising children is something I wish more folks acknowledged. It's really, really hard to quantitatively measure the cognitive and emotional dimensions of household labor. There are some studies (like yours!) starting to do that work, but we don't have anywhere near the data to look cross-nationally, longitudinally, etc.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Yes, these are tricky phenomena to measure, and spouses frequently disagree with each other. We really need observational data but that is so challenging to gather (and also doesn't capture mental load). Thanks for reminding me about that fairness article - I came across it recently and thought it was really interesting and a little bit puzzling! I'll need to give it a closer read.
I don't really understand this argument: if you look at say 75 years old trends, not even needing numbers, you know how it went anyway, the correlation is the opposite. The correlation is also the opposite when you compare countries today, the high-fertility ones are all super patriarchal and men never do housework.
LOL, it is precisely because of the reverse correlation that some anti-feminist types are saying the only way to get fertility up is to become like Morocco.
I personally think it is not that simple either, because at this point nearly every culture except Sub-Sahara experiences dropping fertility, even very "oldschool" ones Iran or India. Dropping fertility is not a Western-East Asian exclusive thing anymore.
I simply don't have a good explanation. One must notice that fertility is not a women-only issue, men are not very much into having kids either. OK imagine I am a guy in a culture like Morocco and apparently having six kids. Why would I want that? They cost a lot of money, make a lot of noise. Two are enough. Or is just people in that cultures keep doing unprotected PIV sex all the time, due to either religion or ignorance of the many alternatives? Religion cannot be the reason, super Catholic countries also have dropping birthrates, despite the church telling them every other kind of sex is wrong, they do not listen.
Perhaps I am not in the right mindset to understand them. I am a kinky type, I know zillion different versions of sex and know clearly which results in having kids and which does not. Maybe for many people especially not so modern cultures sex is just unprotected PIV and don't think much about it.
I think the critical distinction here is whether you want to be a wealthy country or a poor country. Having women in the workforce has made countries wealthier. The patriarchal countries with high birth rates are largely poor countries. But if you are a wealthy country that wants to stay wealthy, trying to restrict women's education and economic participation is a bad idea, which is why I'm suggesting we look at men's role in the home.
I agree that there's a cultural piece there too - I think we need to look at intensive parenting and the expectations on parents.
I'm really big on the "division of cognitive household labor", particularly in how that trended over time shifting the 'deal' and think very strong points in there!
however:
> there has been little discussion of male contributions to household labor
That’s a bit silly — even within natalist discourse. we’ve had over 50 years of the “Chore Wars,” endless "take out the trash" comics, and arguments over domestic labor and fertility go back over a century, from Eastman’s “voluntary motherhood” to Sanger’s “Birth Strikes.” This isn’t some overlooked issue. The constant re-litigation — even now, critiquing a 4.5-hour gap in the most “egalitarian” marriages (which still include 3.1 more hours of paid work for men!) — feels like straining at gnats. And with Nordic TFRs falling, it’s hard not to see this as a pet theory defended regardless of changing outcomes.
> If I’m the primary breadwinner working 80 hours a week, that 70% feels deeply unfair.
Absolutely, lets toss the cads, but now you’re narrowing it to the tiniest slice of the girlboss vanguard. How many actually work 80-hour weeks and are the primary breadwinner? Maybe some med residents, oil crews, or the top edge of law/finance — and among women, a few 55+ execs? handful unusual situations. You could probably fit the whole cohort in one stadium. Sure, fairness is subjective — but designing narratives or policy priorities around outliers skews the whole conversation, this is as narrow as balerinafarm. Centering their experience in fertility debates makes no sense — unless you're still trying to sell it as the ideal. Meanwhile, real pressure is on part-time moms and degree incompleters — where fertility is actually shifting and discussion is very different.
I taught at a public high school outside a major city last year and kept catching glimpses of a feminist time loop—TikTok memes recycling early 2000s wage gap stats, and a student book report on a pop-fem novel discussing her amazement around the *1980s*, women legally trapped in marriage, expected to endure mistreatment, and had no real career or legal options. It was as if the changes of the ’60s and ’70s—divorce reform, Title IX, anti-discrimination laws—had vanished, replaced by a flattened narrative where feminism starts in 2014 and everything before was just the 1950s on repeat.
It makes sense from a niche advocacy angle I guess, but I don't have much confidence that women—or anyone—are uniquely immune to distorted views (especially in highly shifting cultural envs like ours!). If the goal is to address birth rates, not just score cultural points, regularly reverting back to that seems more performative than productive. ignoring real dissatisfactions, changes and missed opportunities for a needed broad natalist coalition in favor of rehashing symbolic flashpoints.
Thank you for this comment! I should have clarified re: "there has been little discussion" - yes, domestic labor has definitely been a hot topic for a long time! I'm just not seeing it acknowledged much in this most recent round of MAGA discourse about the birth rate. The lefties are generally not talking much about fertility (although that is changing), and the right-leaning folks who engage with this issue seem to place the blame/focus on women's choices rather than men's choices.
Wives are the primary breadwinner in 16% of married couples as of 2023, per Pew Research. In another 29% of couples, wives and husbands earn about the same income-- that is the fastest-growing type of family arrangement. Add those two categories together and within nearly half of couples, women are earning similar or more income than their spouses. Yet time diary data tells us that women are doing more of the housework in many of this half of couples. In couples where spouses earn similar incomes, men have about 3 more hours of leisure time a week - that adds up! So I don't think these are outlier oddball situations. They are actually quite common, and becoming more so.
I’m so tired of this discussion. No modern society has replacement level fertility besides Israel - largely thanks to their religious population. It doesn’t matter how much leave they offer or how many chores the husbands do. What makes women have more children? -Either a lack of choice in the matter or faith. The only communities within developed nations that maintain replacement rates are the faithful- and yet the secular want a hack. Keep looking, but the hack is faith. The hack is that women and men have to want to have the children. And as a religious woman I am beyond tired of secular women implying that religious women in developed free societies don’t have choice. We do. We choose faith and we choose children. I see this huge blind spot. Why not ask the women and men having children and forming families in developed societies WHY they do it. It’s not because all the conditions are right. It’s because they recognize good enough and that in RICH SOCIETIES happiness and meaning are an inside job. But yeah… maybe it’s that secular men don’t do enough chores. I wonder how many children on average families with stay at home dads are having, those dads do chores. I’ve personally never met a sahd handling more than two kids. And even in those families I have heard the moms complain that they do too much or that their husbands don’t do as much as they would do if they stayed home. Maybe we don’t find meaning is what we do and that’s the problem, not that we do too much. We have more leisure time than any other humans in history. Our perception of our work load is the problem. A crisis in meaning is the problem. When survival needs have been met we need shared narratives and rituals to give our existence meaning. It’s a need that the faithless don’t want to be a need. Faith isn’t magic, but it is a human need… for the health of the hive.
I agree that "a crisis in meaning" is a big part of the problem. That feels right to me, and connects with my point (in the post) about the societal value placed on caring for the young. I disagree that religious faith is the only way to find meaning in parenting. Even in Israel, the birth rate isn't solely driven by the Haredi - non-religious folks also have higher birth rates there too. That suggests that there are cultural factors that matter, like exposure to large families and support/ acceptance for parents. In any case, it's hard to force people to become religious without creating serious unintended consequences, so it's important to find solutions that work for non-religious folks too.
I definitely don’t want to force people to be religious; I think it’s dangerous and I don’t think it works. I have heard Louise Perry make that suggestion- that the ~ 2.1 - 2.3 children per woman secular birth rates in Israel is because they see large families. I would challenge the notion that secular Jews in Israel are comparable to other secular populations. These people still identify by their religion and take part in many of the rituals of that religion and protect their faithful. Their (Israel’s) whole reason for being is to be with people of the same faith- even if they personally are more passive participants in that culture of faith. Jewish culture has a more nuanced view of belief‘s role in religion. For Christian and Muslims belief is of supreme importance and people who don’t believe often are ostracized or reject the lifestyle. Jewish culture does not do this. It’s not just being around people with children, it’s respecting the social technology of faith and protecting faith as their most important survival strategy.
If people don’t prioritize having children, that is a choice in values, *especially* in a free society. I don’t rule out the possibility that faithless people will find a way to choose to have children. But, it’s a choice. State help, money, time off, none of that has worked and it all has been tried.
I don’t think being around Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn raises the birth rate of their non-Jewish neighbors. It’s not just being around people or communities with large families - it’s being part of them, *belonging* to them - and well, we have a social tech for belonging to communities with shared values, social norms and human resources. We invented it around the time we started growing food. I also don’t see why low birth rates are a problem amongst people that don’t want to have many children - unless we sense that it’s not good for us on some level, which would mean that having children is good for us. And raising children well requires stable two parent homes, and healthy male and female role models- which would mean that everything uncool - basically the traditional family values, actually make practical sense.
I don’t want to force people to be religious, I want to argue for the merits of choosing to practice religion when given a choice. And i want to argue that older people who maybe wish they had valued family more when they were younger encourage today’s youth to try religion. So far, it’s the only thing that maintains replacement level birth rate in free developed societies That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact —and one worth being honest to ourselves about.
Ye it's a long article , it paints a different picture where men ignore housework, or maybe their wives don't want them involved because they don't trust them. Still the I provided the data from earlier years cuz the ones I was familiar with showed no significant changes.
Fathers spend 54 hours a week on work+chores+child care, mothers 53 hours
When accounting for dual income couples specifically, Fathers do 58 and mothers 59
As for how to increase birth rates, ignore people who have suggestions that they would like to see happening regardless of the outcome as credible fixes
That's data from 2013. Here's 2023 data - linked in my article above. I can't paste in the screenshot here but if you scroll down to the section titled "Time allocation across marriage types" and look at the graph titled, "In egalitarian marriages, husbands spend more time on paid work and leisure than wives do," you will see a breakdown of time spent in different categories, which will let you add up the hours. Importantly, that data reflects couples with _equal earnings_ which is helpful for factoring out income differences.
I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this discussion. It's wonderfully complex and it's such a pleasure to see both sides arguing in good faith. Personally, I'd much prefer efforts to increase birth rate in developed countries like ours to focus on quality of life (parental and child) in addition to quantity. I've seen how the strategy of women being entirely devoted to child-rearing works in impoverished countries: enormous families desperately scraping by. Fathers who never spend time with their family since they must work 24/7 to support them, and mothers who are so tied to child care they lose their personality and become a drudge. I really don't think that's a model for American success. Give me the family with a Dad cheerfully making casserole and changing diapers rather than the big family with Dad at the office till nine pm and mom popping Valium in the broom closet. I do agree with Stone on one point, however. Let's work as a society to take some of those balls out of the air that American families are forced to juggle!
(disclaimer... Darby is my sister so I may have an unfairly biased viewpoint, and I, as a Dad to some healthy American kids, LOVE to make them garlic bread and lasagna dinners.)
Best commenter (and dad) ever!
I also respect Lyman but hate how he blithely answers "nope, that's not it" with so much certainty when reasons for low birth rates are proposed. Low birth rates are clearly a multi-factorial problem, and the factors likely interact! Like when someone (was it you?) proposed kids from larger families likely have larger families. Seems like a totally plausible piece of the puzzle, but he was like "nope, not supported by evidence." Would love to see researchers stop studying any one factor in isolation because this is not how the real world works. For example, I had a third kid both because I was married to a kind, supportive husband who does 100% of meal planning and cooking, and because I'm from a large Catholic family with a tendency for larger families, and because I could afford it, and because my first two births were vaginal so it felt safer. 🤷♀️ No one of these factors explains my choice but the combination of them made a difference.
This is such an apropos discussion for me because I was just at a mini-reunion of sorts of college friends. Many have kids, though no one has more than two. When one of the guys who doesn’t have kids suddenly expressed that he feels FOMO about not having kids, all of the kid-having folks were like no, no, no, please don’t have a kid out of FOMO. The women especially expressed that it was a lot of work and that you’re basically a parent forever. One of the dads said oh but it’s the best thing in the world! And his wife, also one of my classmates, said keep in mind this is from a guy whose wife is full time staying at home! It then became a bit of a discussion around how much the decision to be one and done was driven by the work involved (a lot). At this point I was thinking that the reason I did actually have two instead of one was that my husband pulled 50% of the load, including the mental load (while I was the party he sent me photos of kids clothes he was planning to declutter just in case I wanted to keep any of them). But there didn’t seem to be a diplomatic way to say that. But it’s true.
That's so interesting! One of my good friends has one child, and for her, having a husband who was not particularly involved with parenting is one reason she didn't push for more. (They are now separated).
Interesting - seems to make sense - but there is a bigger issue with fertility that won't be solved by getting men to take up more of the childcare.
It won't get solved by going back to the 1950's gender roles either...
Fully agree! I read his piece this morning and I was similarly uncomfortable with the whole “the only reason women feel like they’re doing an unfair amount of work is because mean feminists have told them men are bad” undertone. Very playground-level thinking, IMO. I knew a quality response would be coming from you, and without fail!
So much of the difficulty in measuring factors around birth rates, household chores etc comes down to the people who measure them having a flawed understanding of how gender and family dynamics *actually* work.
It’s a similar situation to that of polling institutions measuring “how often do people have sex?” by exclusively including penetrative intercourse, which then leads to hundreds of “Gen Z is no longer having sex” headlines. While there is indeed some decline, a huge portion of it is actually explained by the diversification of sexual practices and a gradual move away from imposed sexual scripts, which, when answering an online poll, people might not themselves classify as “intercourse” because of what they’ve been taught that intercourse is.
Stone's casual dismissal of subjective valuation feels very..... autistic Redditor? "I have logic on my side and thus we should have more children" ... is that ever going to work?
I am reminded of Kearny & Levine's recent NBER article on fertility where they talk about how researchers are loathe to attribute anything to changing preferences (because that can explain anything). But changing preferences seems like such an obvious thing when we're talking about "what society decides is fair". Is a 6 day workweek fair? Singapore only changed to a 5 day workweek in 2004, a date that sounds impossibly late to Americans. Likewise, as culture globalises via the internet and housewives in Vietnam can see what husbands in Sweden contribute norms on fairness can shift much faster than researchers can assemble datasets.
Lots of great points, Darby! The idea that even the "gold standard" time use data doesn't capture all the work involved in raising children is something I wish more folks acknowledged. It's really, really hard to quantitatively measure the cognitive and emotional dimensions of household labor. There are some studies (like yours!) starting to do that work, but we don't have anywhere near the data to look cross-nationally, longitudinally, etc.
There's some new work in sociology looking at fairness perceptions you might find interesting: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08912432251337416
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Yes, these are tricky phenomena to measure, and spouses frequently disagree with each other. We really need observational data but that is so challenging to gather (and also doesn't capture mental load). Thanks for reminding me about that fairness article - I came across it recently and thought it was really interesting and a little bit puzzling! I'll need to give it a closer read.
I don't really understand this argument: if you look at say 75 years old trends, not even needing numbers, you know how it went anyway, the correlation is the opposite. The correlation is also the opposite when you compare countries today, the high-fertility ones are all super patriarchal and men never do housework.
LOL, it is precisely because of the reverse correlation that some anti-feminist types are saying the only way to get fertility up is to become like Morocco.
I personally think it is not that simple either, because at this point nearly every culture except Sub-Sahara experiences dropping fertility, even very "oldschool" ones Iran or India. Dropping fertility is not a Western-East Asian exclusive thing anymore.
I simply don't have a good explanation. One must notice that fertility is not a women-only issue, men are not very much into having kids either. OK imagine I am a guy in a culture like Morocco and apparently having six kids. Why would I want that? They cost a lot of money, make a lot of noise. Two are enough. Or is just people in that cultures keep doing unprotected PIV sex all the time, due to either religion or ignorance of the many alternatives? Religion cannot be the reason, super Catholic countries also have dropping birthrates, despite the church telling them every other kind of sex is wrong, they do not listen.
Perhaps I am not in the right mindset to understand them. I am a kinky type, I know zillion different versions of sex and know clearly which results in having kids and which does not. Maybe for many people especially not so modern cultures sex is just unprotected PIV and don't think much about it.
I think the critical distinction here is whether you want to be a wealthy country or a poor country. Having women in the workforce has made countries wealthier. The patriarchal countries with high birth rates are largely poor countries. But if you are a wealthy country that wants to stay wealthy, trying to restrict women's education and economic participation is a bad idea, which is why I'm suggesting we look at men's role in the home.
I agree that there's a cultural piece there too - I think we need to look at intensive parenting and the expectations on parents.
We should just force women of out of the workforce and then they'll feel less mental burden of doing work at home
I'm really big on the "division of cognitive household labor", particularly in how that trended over time shifting the 'deal' and think very strong points in there!
however:
> there has been little discussion of male contributions to household labor
That’s a bit silly — even within natalist discourse. we’ve had over 50 years of the “Chore Wars,” endless "take out the trash" comics, and arguments over domestic labor and fertility go back over a century, from Eastman’s “voluntary motherhood” to Sanger’s “Birth Strikes.” This isn’t some overlooked issue. The constant re-litigation — even now, critiquing a 4.5-hour gap in the most “egalitarian” marriages (which still include 3.1 more hours of paid work for men!) — feels like straining at gnats. And with Nordic TFRs falling, it’s hard not to see this as a pet theory defended regardless of changing outcomes.
https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/English-School/1001249/English-Cartoon:-The-Ideal-Husband-(Who-Does-All-the-Laundry)---Postcard,-circa-1920.html
> If I’m the primary breadwinner working 80 hours a week, that 70% feels deeply unfair.
Absolutely, lets toss the cads, but now you’re narrowing it to the tiniest slice of the girlboss vanguard. How many actually work 80-hour weeks and are the primary breadwinner? Maybe some med residents, oil crews, or the top edge of law/finance — and among women, a few 55+ execs? handful unusual situations. You could probably fit the whole cohort in one stadium. Sure, fairness is subjective — but designing narratives or policy priorities around outliers skews the whole conversation, this is as narrow as balerinafarm. Centering their experience in fertility debates makes no sense — unless you're still trying to sell it as the ideal. Meanwhile, real pressure is on part-time moms and degree incompleters — where fertility is actually shifting and discussion is very different.
I taught at a public high school outside a major city last year and kept catching glimpses of a feminist time loop—TikTok memes recycling early 2000s wage gap stats, and a student book report on a pop-fem novel discussing her amazement around the *1980s*, women legally trapped in marriage, expected to endure mistreatment, and had no real career or legal options. It was as if the changes of the ’60s and ’70s—divorce reform, Title IX, anti-discrimination laws—had vanished, replaced by a flattened narrative where feminism starts in 2014 and everything before was just the 1950s on repeat.
It makes sense from a niche advocacy angle I guess, but I don't have much confidence that women—or anyone—are uniquely immune to distorted views (especially in highly shifting cultural envs like ours!). If the goal is to address birth rates, not just score cultural points, regularly reverting back to that seems more performative than productive. ignoring real dissatisfactions, changes and missed opportunities for a needed broad natalist coalition in favor of rehashing symbolic flashpoints.
Moderne Ehe! https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/French-School/968786/Father-Changing-a-Baby.html
Thank you for this comment! I should have clarified re: "there has been little discussion" - yes, domestic labor has definitely been a hot topic for a long time! I'm just not seeing it acknowledged much in this most recent round of MAGA discourse about the birth rate. The lefties are generally not talking much about fertility (although that is changing), and the right-leaning folks who engage with this issue seem to place the blame/focus on women's choices rather than men's choices.
Wives are the primary breadwinner in 16% of married couples as of 2023, per Pew Research. In another 29% of couples, wives and husbands earn about the same income-- that is the fastest-growing type of family arrangement. Add those two categories together and within nearly half of couples, women are earning similar or more income than their spouses. Yet time diary data tells us that women are doing more of the housework in many of this half of couples. In couples where spouses earn similar incomes, men have about 3 more hours of leisure time a week - that adds up! So I don't think these are outlier oddball situations. They are actually quite common, and becoming more so.
I’m so tired of this discussion. No modern society has replacement level fertility besides Israel - largely thanks to their religious population. It doesn’t matter how much leave they offer or how many chores the husbands do. What makes women have more children? -Either a lack of choice in the matter or faith. The only communities within developed nations that maintain replacement rates are the faithful- and yet the secular want a hack. Keep looking, but the hack is faith. The hack is that women and men have to want to have the children. And as a religious woman I am beyond tired of secular women implying that religious women in developed free societies don’t have choice. We do. We choose faith and we choose children. I see this huge blind spot. Why not ask the women and men having children and forming families in developed societies WHY they do it. It’s not because all the conditions are right. It’s because they recognize good enough and that in RICH SOCIETIES happiness and meaning are an inside job. But yeah… maybe it’s that secular men don’t do enough chores. I wonder how many children on average families with stay at home dads are having, those dads do chores. I’ve personally never met a sahd handling more than two kids. And even in those families I have heard the moms complain that they do too much or that their husbands don’t do as much as they would do if they stayed home. Maybe we don’t find meaning is what we do and that’s the problem, not that we do too much. We have more leisure time than any other humans in history. Our perception of our work load is the problem. A crisis in meaning is the problem. When survival needs have been met we need shared narratives and rituals to give our existence meaning. It’s a need that the faithless don’t want to be a need. Faith isn’t magic, but it is a human need… for the health of the hive.
I agree that "a crisis in meaning" is a big part of the problem. That feels right to me, and connects with my point (in the post) about the societal value placed on caring for the young. I disagree that religious faith is the only way to find meaning in parenting. Even in Israel, the birth rate isn't solely driven by the Haredi - non-religious folks also have higher birth rates there too. That suggests that there are cultural factors that matter, like exposure to large families and support/ acceptance for parents. In any case, it's hard to force people to become religious without creating serious unintended consequences, so it's important to find solutions that work for non-religious folks too.
I definitely don’t want to force people to be religious; I think it’s dangerous and I don’t think it works. I have heard Louise Perry make that suggestion- that the ~ 2.1 - 2.3 children per woman secular birth rates in Israel is because they see large families. I would challenge the notion that secular Jews in Israel are comparable to other secular populations. These people still identify by their religion and take part in many of the rituals of that religion and protect their faithful. Their (Israel’s) whole reason for being is to be with people of the same faith- even if they personally are more passive participants in that culture of faith. Jewish culture has a more nuanced view of belief‘s role in religion. For Christian and Muslims belief is of supreme importance and people who don’t believe often are ostracized or reject the lifestyle. Jewish culture does not do this. It’s not just being around people with children, it’s respecting the social technology of faith and protecting faith as their most important survival strategy.
If people don’t prioritize having children, that is a choice in values, *especially* in a free society. I don’t rule out the possibility that faithless people will find a way to choose to have children. But, it’s a choice. State help, money, time off, none of that has worked and it all has been tried.
I don’t think being around Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn raises the birth rate of their non-Jewish neighbors. It’s not just being around people or communities with large families - it’s being part of them, *belonging* to them - and well, we have a social tech for belonging to communities with shared values, social norms and human resources. We invented it around the time we started growing food. I also don’t see why low birth rates are a problem amongst people that don’t want to have many children - unless we sense that it’s not good for us on some level, which would mean that having children is good for us. And raising children well requires stable two parent homes, and healthy male and female role models- which would mean that everything uncool - basically the traditional family values, actually make practical sense.
I don’t want to force people to be religious, I want to argue for the merits of choosing to practice religion when given a choice. And i want to argue that older people who maybe wish they had valued family more when they were younger encourage today’s youth to try religion. So far, it’s the only thing that maintains replacement level birth rate in free developed societies That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact —and one worth being honest to ourselves about.
Ye it's a long article , it paints a different picture where men ignore housework, or maybe their wives don't want them involved because they don't trust them. Still the I provided the data from earlier years cuz the ones I was familiar with showed no significant changes.
I provided the data because there was no significant change in the trend up to 2022 .https://aibm.org/research/dads-rock-the-evidence/
Perfectly egalitarian marriages are rare to focus on and make conclusions.
They represent 29% of marriages and are the fastest growing type of marriage, as noted in the Pew survey I just linked above.
Fathers spend 54 hours a week on work+chores+child care, mothers 53 hours
When accounting for dual income couples specifically, Fathers do 58 and mothers 59
As for how to increase birth rates, ignore people who have suggestions that they would like to see happening regardless of the outcome as credible fixes
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family/
That's data from 2013. Here's 2023 data - linked in my article above. I can't paste in the screenshot here but if you scroll down to the section titled "Time allocation across marriage types" and look at the graph titled, "In egalitarian marriages, husbands spend more time on paid work and leisure than wives do," you will see a breakdown of time spent in different categories, which will let you add up the hours. Importantly, that data reflects couples with _equal earnings_ which is helpful for factoring out income differences.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/
here's an article about it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/13/more-women-out-earn-their-husbands-but-still-do-more-work-at-home.html