I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child".
Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.
I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us.
Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult."
I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".
Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.
My theory is that this feeling is the result of not enough socialization with people of varying ages. Their behavior towards you in aggregate grounds you to your age subconsciously, something like that.
> Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.
I think it’s more that we’re all just faking it. The thirty or fourty year old that thinks they know better than the 20 year old is deceiving themselves. The differences between individuals are much larger than the differences between the averages at those ages.
Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?
For most of human history, people didn't have to worry about
- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items
- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel
- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you
- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior
- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)
- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor
My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family
Have you seen Idiocracy, specifically the very beginning of the film?
These excuses sound similar to those made by the “prosperous yuppie couple” (who end up never having children)—contrasted with “trashy” couple, who churn out progeny without a care in the world.
Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?
Having a child under a certain age has all the health risks of a serious disease putting the life of the mother and child at much higher risks. Why shouldn't it be treated as such?
A 5% chance of your child dying when you give birth at age 15 and lower seems pretty reasonable to me? At least I’d have expected those number to be far higher.
At 16-17 it’s 4% and at 18-19 it’s 3%, which makes it even better, but 19 out of every 20 children surviving longer than 28 days is pretty good.
Yes, I think our cavalier use of antibiotics is a real problem, that could wipe a huge number of people out through the development of populations with huge immune deficiencies and uber-bacteria. Similarly for antiviral resistance.
Plus the need for such drugs itself is overplayed, most of the time the human body can take care of an infection itself. Things like clean water, hand washing, etc, helped for the rest many times over than drugs do.
Have you documented your turning down of antibiotics, vaccines, and other medicines so that others can see how tough you are and how modern medicine isn't needed? Have you encouraged your parents and grandparents to do the same? Have you denied your children modern healthcare as well?
> Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air.
Not in 99.9% of cases. It's such a twisted disrespect to millions of years of evolution of the immune system. If you had no innate immune system, even being a bubble boy in a hospital with the most advanced equipment could keep you alive only for so long. It's like saying "police lets people get murdered".
>There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age
Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path of knowing better, we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole as well*. So, we do things like birth control and education and things like that.
Which is far from bizarre, if you look at human activity as a whole. Basically every facet of life goes against "biology" or rather basic nature, if you think about it. We augment ourselves and distance ourselves from it to a very large degree - stay indoors a lot, use clothing, learn abstract knowledge, look at screens, eat processed food, observe the myriad of societal rules. Which all are kinda weird - but they also aren't, if you consider the history of humanity.
> we found that getting pregnant early actually is a detriment to the individual, their immediate surroundings, and society as a whole
You are citing a source that talks about unintended pregnancies (often as a result of sexual abuse) in developing nations. With nearly half of those being prematurely aborted in some (medically safe or not) way.
I’m inclined to believe that the support system throughout most of history was better than what these girls get.
>But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about.
You mean the kind of knowing better that led us to destroy the environment, and appears to be removing whole populations from the gene pool with way below subreplacement rates?
It's a bit tongue-in-cheek because of the multiple interpretations of "knowing better". On one hand, we "know better" in a way that we, as in all humans, constantly try to control nature and the natural flow of things. Our entire civilization and way of life is a result of that.
On the other hand, I mean it a bit sarcastically, because I'm not convinced on a philosophical level that this kind of living is morally, ethically, humanely superior than that of ancient people's living. Often it looks like that progress is just for the progress' sake, an eternal power struggle, a Prisoner's dilemma. In short, when I ask myself "is progress good", I don't feel strongly toward any answer. I meant to encapsulate this by phrasing it as "knowing better".
But the drive to "know better" is there for sure, even though the results vary. I do believe that good can come from it, and that many efforts actually resulted in lessening human suffering, which I consider a good thing. I mean here efforts like equal rights movements, reproductive health and education, and proper access to medical help (to stay on topic).
And now, while preventing and tabooing teen pregnancy, society is about to collapse on itself by lack of reproduction. We coddled our kids to extinction.
> Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable.
Raises the moral question of what kind of living is worth it, and on what level is it okay to impose on one another. Looking at how families from teen pregnancies fare*, I'm absolutely positive that mitigating these is far from the biggest contributor to "societal collapse". Doing anything to raise this number is not going to do society any good, even if it results is a larger number of children on paper. Taking proper care of this situation is not any kind of coddling, more like basic human decency.
That was a very interesting read. Even if it leaves me feeling like the reason teenage pregnancies are ‘bad’ is mostly because society is not set up for/condemns them. A teenage mother in a healthy family unit that drops the child with their parents while they continue to attend school will have significantly better outcomes.
I’m fairly certain a teenage pregnancy in Japan would work out more or less the same, because society is set up to facilitate people working 9h/day and dropping the kids off at daycare basically from several months of age. Of course, that’s combined with massive social stigma, so it wouldn’t on the balance really help things.
Yep, we are new parents and we are almost 40. There just wasn't any moment before where it was possible to start a family. We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight. Also, with the expectation that outside is for cars. So, there's 1-2 hours at the end of the day for us which is largely cleaning and de-stressing. If anyone had laid this fully out for us before we made this choice, it would have been an easy heck no.
> We are comfortable but utterly alone in our box, with no grandparents or extended family in sight.
This is how we started out too (mid 20s). Isolated rural area and no family. Both of us were youngest children and had never lived around babies. Not the highest odds to start with. We birthed at home and did cloth diapers - so that tells you a bit about our mindset then.
In our favor: This was >30years ago. It was possible to work multiple entry level jobs and scrape by. That's far from possible now.
I don't understand why population studies people don't even mention this: we're technically wild animals, competing for survival. In absence of a specific and effective imperative stipulating population must grow, we must subconsciously modify societal frameworks exactly to impede reproduction.
It's crazy that the threshold for kids/adults is right in the middle of fertile age and no one ever questions that.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?