Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever (mercurynews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: American fathers keep getting older, raising the prospect of increased birth defects but also greater economic and emotional security for U.S. families, according to new research from Stanford University's School of Medicine. The average age of the fathers of newborns in the United States has climbed by 3.5 years over the past four decades, growing from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 years in 2015, said the study -- the nation's most detailed analysis ever of paternal age. The number of newborns whose fathers were over age 40 has more than doubled over the past four decades. Those births now make up nearly 9 percent of births in the U.S., Dr. Michael Eisenberg and Yash Khandwala reported in the journal Human Reproduction. The share of fathers who were over age 50 rose from 0.5 percent to 0.9 percent. Asian-American fathers -- men of Japanese and Vietnamese descent, in particular -- are the oldest, becoming fathers at the average age of 36 years, the study said. Black and Hispanic men are the youngest fathers -- age 30.4 and 30, respectively. White men, on average, have children at age 31. Paternal age rose with educational attainment. The typical newborn's father with a college degree is 33.3 years old -- compared with 29.8 years for high school graduates.

Comments

There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the problem is that there's just so much more that people want to accomplish today. It isn't like in the 1950s, where a man would be content going to his 9-to-5 job, coming home to a prepared dinner, smoking a cigar, going to sleep, and doing the same thing again every other work day. Saturdays were used for doing household chores and playing sports with his children, while Sundays were used for going to church and having a Sunday dinner with family.

It's totally different today. Men, women, and even people who don't identify as male or female have so much more ambition. They have so much more they want to do. They want to create. They want to build. They want to learn. They want to express. They want to protest. They want to love. They want to be loved. And they want to do all of these things every day. There's just no time for children these days.

Just look at the Rust programming language. We wouldn't even have the Rust 1.20 release today if it weren't for the hard work and sacrifice of so many people. Of course you can't be having children when you're bust crafting next-generation programming languages!

People today choose many other activities over reproduction and parenthood. It's just a part of modern life. Raising children is just inherently incompatible with creating programming languages that are so unique and special that they couldn't possibly have been created in an era where the focus was on procreation and raising children.

Re: There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today I learned
People still use rust

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[TWX]

The stories I've heard from my in-laws lend evidence that men were not terribly involved in the lives of the young children or even at-times the family. My FIL didn't get married until his forties, and most of his friends that did marry young still went out drinking with the guys, even as their wives became pregnant and raised children.

If expectations now are shifting more toward participation with the family then it would follow that men might be more inclined themselves to hold-off having kids until they're ready. Also, the use of birth control being more acceptable means that people generally have more options to entertain themselves without having kids.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[AmiMoJo]

This. Men are slowly being liberated, like women were in the 60s, from the old gender roles and can now be much more involved with their children with little social stigma. Unfortunately there is still a lot of pressure to take less paternity leave than their partner, and the change is taking much longer than it did for women, but it's happening.

Of course some people see this as a bad thing. They seem to want to go back to the old 1950s model of children being the mother's sole responsibility, except for the odd punishment beating when they misbehave. They see women's liberation as ruining that sweet set-up for them.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a great picture you paint. I have only one worry about this bright future - fathers will not be excused from any other male responsibility because they participate more in family.

So men will take yet another load on their shoulders while keep on being overly responsible and overly punished for everything. While the women will take responsibility only when they want for what they want for as long as they want, cause everything else (things that you know, MUST be done) is male oppression. And they'd stink of sweat from their bushy armpits while being pretentious and lazy cause.....yhe you guess it, male oppression.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[mjwx]

The stories I've heard from my in-laws lend evidence that men were not terribly involved in the lives of the young children or even at-times the family. My FIL didn't get married until his forties, and most of his friends that did marry young still went out drinking with the guys, even as their wives became pregnant and raised children.

If expectations now are shifting more toward participation with the family then it would follow that men might be more inclined themselves to hold-off having kids until they're ready. Also, the use of birth control being more acceptable means that people generally have more options to entertain themselves without having kids.

Actual studies have show than male parents have always played a large role in raising children, right back to the prehistoric age. The idea that women raised children exclusively is a myth that has developed in very recent times.

It may also shock those who believe in old fashioned gender myths that women served aboard ships in Nelson's Navy.

I think the problem is that people now are working longer hours to have the same quality of life as they had in the 1950's. The fact that it takes years to save for a house deposit after completing your 4 year degree to get an entry level job means that raising a family tends to be put on the back burner for a while. I dont think it's just fathers either, women are also choosing to have children later for the same reason.

Hey, but wait a little while and I'm sure some baby boomer who got given a good job after high school, a house on $5,000 deposit, lived through the halcyon days of the 80's and 90's, got a good inheritance and now has a secure high paying job and government pension will be along to tell us kids have it too good these days.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[HeckRuler]

I have 6 kids and a stay at home wife. I love being involved

You have a full-time live-in-home child caretaker. It's like loving taking trips to Paris vs enjoying living in Paris.

And hey, society has variance. Some people love kids. Some people don't. Some people really get ethused about the local PTA meeting where the committee talks about how to resolve the "balls rolling down the hill" issue that's plaguing the community. Others would rather stick their dick in a blender.

It's great that you have a fun time with your kids. Not everyone is in your position.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[AmiMoJo]

This reminds me of ex slave owners bitching about how they are expected to PAY people to work on their farms now so while abolition was great for the blacks it's really fucked them over.

Re: There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[el_smurfo]

And apparently they pay a PR firm to post in unrelated articles on tech blogs.

actually older

[TWX]

Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever

After so many nights without adequate sleep we only feel that way...

Re:actually older

[Whibla]

You look it too...

I jest, but there's a grain of truth there too. I've noticed that of my friends, those who have had children do actually look older than those without (women especially - please don't shoot the messenger for what's essentially an anecdotal observation). I swear the little buggers literally age you! At least they'll be there to look after you in your early onset infirmity though. ;-)

That being said, we all look older, and the sample set of "my long term friends" is probably far too small to eliminate any bias due to good / bad genes or environment.

Re:actually older

[cryptizard]

You might look older but you get to live longer.

Re:actually older

[Whibla]

I was going to say something along these lines in my original post, but I couldn't be bothered to look up any links to support such an assertion, so thank you.

They did sort of back up my somewhat flippant up-side though:

"...they theorised that parents may benefit from social and financial support from their children in older age, which childless people lose out on."

I did find the fact that the differences in life expectancy diminished as age increased somewhat interesting I must admit, but, like my personal observations, that might simply be an artifact of that particular study and not actually 'a thing'.

As the child of people who couldn't afford kids...

[Pfhorrest]

As the child of people who couldn't afford kids: people shouldn't have kids until they can afford them.

Unfortunately, this means that most people just shouldn't ever have kids, because they will never afford them, because everyone is perpetually poor and only getting poorer.

And yes, that means I shouldn't have been born. And no, I'm probably never going to have kids.

The good news is, if everyone actually followed this advice (not that they will), whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it. If the underclasses upon whose backs the wealthy survive stop perpetuating themselves (ourselves, because I'm down here too), eventually the wealthy will have to support themselves, and the tiny future population will be forced to be more egalitarian.

It worked with the black plague.

DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[UnknownSoldier]

And we're surprised by these findings???

Kids are bloody expensive. Having kids ties you down (time/space/money-wise).

I suspect this trend will continue for another few decades.

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that fertility medicine is also quite expensive; and somewhat tepidly effective(and the various child medical issues that become more of a risk with parental age are wildly expensive), I'm not sure how many decades of room this trend has to continue... The economic pressures sure don't seem to be going away; but attempts to bend the biological constraints have only been somewhat effective.

Re: DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[Thundercat007]

Well ya, when most kids now adays live in moms basement till they're 30, that probably explains how they finally move out. "Aw shit she's knocked up". Her "let's move in together for cheap rent"

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[tezbobobo]

I think you're wrong. People in poverty have always had kids. Financial insecurity doesn't preclude kids. We are seeing this trend in mostly Western countries where people are told that they should wait until they are financially secure before having kids. During that time the wife's fertility drops substantially and they end up have a couple of kids late. This will continue as long as there is the message, "wait until you're financially secure until you have kids." Unfortunately there are real problems with having kids late. Further, it doesn't need to stop - immigration (which I have no problem with) will take the place. But there are consequences to that - demographic changes and a change in cultural values.

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[tlhIngan]

I think you're wrong. People in poverty have always had kids. Financial insecurity doesn't preclude kids. We are seeing this trend in mostly Western countries where people are told that they should wait until they are financially secure before having kids. During that time the wife's fertility drops substantially and they end up have a couple of kids late. This will continue as long as there is the message, "wait until you're financially secure until you have kids." Unfortunately there are real problems with having kids late. Further, it doesn't need to stop - immigration (which I have no problem with) will take the place. But there are consequences to that - demographic changes and a change in cultural values.

Actually, it's really about healthcare.

Back when medicine was a dark art, people had a half dozen to a dozen kids. Because you needed them to work the fields and survive - the high mortality rates pretty much ensured you needed lots of kids. You also needed a lot of kids to have enough labour to produce food and all that.

But then medicine became a science and as general health and wealth increases, birth rate drops substantially. You don't need as many kids to sustain yourself - or need as many kids because they're going to live to old age.

This has been seen time and time again - as countries go from impoverished sustenance to growth, the birth rate drops dramatically, and it happens within a short span of time.

In the western world, we've taken it to the next level - because parents are now supposed to raise kids and kids are not supposed to help bring wealth in the family by working. So parents generally delay kids because if you can't maintain housing and other basic necessities, having a kid won't help matters any, and you'll end up having to raise a kid with nothing. Still a mouth to feed and most parents wouldn't dare think of trying to panhandle with a kid. Or even worse, teenage pregnancy, so now try to juggle school, job, and a kid all at once.

And kids are expensive, because you also got to put them through school - the the impoverished cultures, you put them to work on the farms the moment they can walk, school is optional. (It's a big problem in Africa where parents prevent their kids from going to school because they need to work the farms)

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately conservative politics make this a difficult one to solve.

"Having children is a lifestyle choice! Why should I subsidise them?"
"There are too many immigrants taking the jobs and housing"
"I've worked hard all my life, I'm entitled to a good pension"

The only solution is to accept that these are all social problems with social solutions, i.e. socialism.

Re: DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think your argument should take opportunity cost into account: it is true that the poor often have kids(generally higher fertility rates than the middle class; not sure about the wealthy, though they simply aren't numerous enough to be a terribly important population-level supply of children); but consider the difference in opportunity costs.

If you are middle class, or at least on the right side of poor, the message(and it isn't entirely a lie, though the student debt will hurt; and some majors aren't worth much) is "stay in school, work hard, get into a decent college, get a real job, then you'll have a chance at economic stability, living somewhere safe and with decent schools, etc. If you don't do that; people with a high school diploma or less are basically screwed, you'll be doomed, and so on." Sometimes exaggerated; but strongly emphasized and by no means entirely false. In the face of those incentives, unless you are particularly dumb, impulsive, or powerless enough that it isn't a choice, deferring children is pretty sensible behavior(both for men and women; though the fact that pregnancy and child rearing are time consuming as well as expensive likely means that women are even more likely to have to halt school or work because they just don't have time for both; while child support will be a real punch in the wallet; but not directly time consuming; and a situation where they want you to be working and earning as much as possible).

Among the poor, by contrast, the message is vastly less optimistic about the rewards of deferring children(one can blame 'culture'; bad role models, etc; and that may have a role; but it is hard to deny that people educated in really lousy school districts and with limited means to pay for college(scholarships and aid tend to cover tuition and room and board; but incidentals and foregone wages because of the time you aren't working still hit harder) simply have less reason to expect that their situation will improve if they defer children: your earning potential doesn't just magically increase with age; you need to obtain the appropriate degree, experience, promotion, etc.

Obviously, children are themselves expensive, so having them tends to make you poorer; but approximately a zillion years of evolution have left people, on the whole, liking children and the idea of reproducing, so just trying "tell them not to breed" doesn't work all that well. The poor face an overall grimmer situation; but also have little to gain by deferring children if they do want them. The middle class is offered much more convincing assurances that having children later might actually leave them better off.

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[Rolgar]

Rediculous. I have six and only just jumped to 60k a year in salary. Without any government money other than my child tax credits (I net about (k-1)*1000 in tax return/year with none withheld). The way we budget, the kids' food costs a bit more than the tax refund. I do hear that this may change as they get older, but we have difficulty getting most of them to eat much due to my wife's insistence on feeding them healthy food.

Re:DUH ... Kids are bloody expensive

[im_thatoneguy]

Also education. My great great uncle had like 6 kids and was in the doctor for a checkup and the doctor asked him "how is the family?" "Oh... well you know, wife's pregnant again." "Great Uncle Bob, you're not Catholic, why so many kids?" "What do you mean?" My great uncle was shocked to discover that there were ways to have less children.

Increased birth defects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you wouldn't fucking DARE point out the increased birth defect rates in older women having children, even though the rate of things increases fucking DRAMATICALLY by 35. But we jizz all over ourselves in the media to celebrate some 58 year old women squirting one out, anyway.

JUST down syndrome: (age/rate)

20 1:2000

30 1:900

35 1:350

40 1:100

45 1:30 (believe this was the age Sarah Palin had her downs syndrome child that she was praised for being so brave and strong to care for, but not taken to task for birthing at an age when you know the risks are very high).

47 1:20

49 1:10

Re:Increased birth defects?

[dargaud]

There's a test and abortion for it, so why should it matter ? (*) Yes, there are other types of rarer birth defects that increase with age. But there's also one thing that gets better with having kids at a later age: overall life expectancy. It selects for people who can live safely older, and selects against things like risky behaviors in teens, early genetic diseases, etc... Want to live longer ? Have kids later. Of course it might take a few thousand generations...

(*) speaking as an old dad.

Re:Increased birth defects?

[The Evil Atheist]

What do you mean "wouldn't dare"? Are you living under a fucking rock? Women have been told since prehistory to have children young. The birth defects from older women are well known. Only now we're seeing a slight correction the other way warning that it actually does effect men too. For a while, the folk wisdom was that only the woman's age mattered and not the men. Nice try in attempting to play the injured party here.

Re: Increased birth defects?

[KGIII]

Their numbers seem a bit off, as well.

Re:Increased birth defects?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bring up statistics about 49 year old women when the article is about 30 year old men?

Informative my ass.

Re: Increased birth defects?

[The Evil Atheist]

I was responding to an obvious "indentity politics" nonsense. But apparently that's okay for you. That's very telling.

Re:Increased birth defects?

[Shompol]

Us, men, we still need women to reproduce, and them women tend to be close to our age. We can revisit your argument once medical progress made women no longer a requirement.

Re:Increased birth defects?

[misexistentialist]

forgotten wisdom, women are now strongly discouraged from getting married before middle age

Yes

[TheSync]

Yes, and I am getting aged faster and faster by my kids!

Older then ever

[VonSkippy]

3.5 years older after 40 years. OMG - EVERYONE PANIC. At that rate, new dad's will be 180 years old by the end of the century (ok, I didn't do the maths so that number might be off a little).

Different view

[Anonymous Coward]

In my country, not having children is proclaimed, by a vocal minority, as being selfish: The hypocrisy being that child-rearing requires a lot of resources, so those popping-out babies are actually, the selfish ones.

The selfishness of Asian children (since several countries have endorsed a one-child policy for a few decades), was examined in a recent study and discovered to be a minor issue; with the children being emotionally normal plus high achievers.

While governments struggle with combining careers and motherhood, popping-out a baby is becoming another trophy to collect after a successful career. Unfortunately, human biology does not endorse this 'babies later' ideology: Babies born to older women (and older men) require medical attention for their entire life and thus, are a greater cost to society.

No Shit

[scdeimos]

Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever

Yep, they're getting older every second.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

And then the super rich who own automatons and natural resources enough to completely sustain themselves without any labor become the only survivors in a miraculously egalitarian future, for those who live to see it. Egalitarian because everyone (who's still alive) has everything they need and for that reason nobody has to work for anybody else. Just predicated on the deaths of almost everyone else in the process. But for whoever survives, it's a bright future indeed.

I considered noting the analogy to that scenario in my post but couldn't find a way to work it in. Thanks.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

Not that obvious troll deserves a response, but 75% of Americans make less than me. Which doesn't make me rich in the slightest, they're all just even more poor; it just means I'm far from some kind of bottom-of-the-heap loser, I'm ahead of the pack and still part of the downtrodden underclass like the rest of us.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[djinn6]

Deaths don't need to happen. We can have an egalitarian society of 10 billion people, with robots feeding and clothing everyone. It might seem impossible today because socialism is taboo in the US, but that's not the case in the rest of the world. Besides, even in the US, it only takes one generation for view points to completely flip around, which is really just 30 years or so.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere, even if I could miraculously manage to actually consume nothing at all. That's the meaningful threshold for the lower class. People who own land and other capital as necessary to live without paying to borrow from someone else, only working to fund their actual consumption, are the middle class. Those who can fund even their own consumption off the product of the labor of others by lending out their unused capital in perpetuity are the upper class.

I'm not saying "woe is me", because almost everyone for all of history has been part of the underclass by that definition. And as technology marches on, yeah, everything sucks less for everyone. That has nothing to do with class structure though. Even if I had a magic Star Trek replicator that could provide for all my material needs at nobody's expense, which would make a lot of things in life suck a lot less, I'd still (like almost everyone) have to justify my worth to someone else just for the right to exist somewhere. And it will probably take me my entire life to escape from that situation. That's underclass. Almost all of us are.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[djinn6]

You're not going to win that argument. Rich and poor are relative. Some consider a roof over their heads to be a luxury, while others consider any house under $1 million to be too pedestrian.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

Yeah, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have an egalitarian automation revolution. Just that the doomsday scenario of the person I was replying to still ends up with an egalitarian future... for the survivors.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[dillee1]

What you are describing have been happening in Japan for 1~2 decades now. Local youngsters are refraining from breeding for reason exactly as you mentioned. Population in Japan in decreasing at 300k/yr.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[SlaveToTheGrind]

I will probably never own land, and therefore spend my entire life scrambling to pay the bulk of my income to someone or another for the right just to exist somewhere

That's definitely harder (though not impossible) somewhere like Santa Barbara, but with a low-six-figure income there are countless places across the country where you could own land if you wanted to. If you'd rather rent in a super-high cost of living area than own in a more reasonable region (which, let's face it, is not going to be costal Cali), that's a lifestyle choice on your part, not evidence of how bloody unfair the world is.

TL;DR: California economics likely has twisted your perspective.

Let them eat cake

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, if we lived in a subsistence society, where having a kid meant that everyone had to starve a little more I would agree with you, but we don't. We don't even live in a society where we are producing enough kids to sustain current populations. Instead, we live in a society where increasingly larger portions of economic output are hoovered up by a small bunch of people who essentially piss it away on frivolity. Think how many middle class kids could have been raised if Larry Ellison didn't have a fetish for building ever bigger superyachts to party with Bono on? Should the guy screwing together a Bugatti Veyron not be able to have a family because some rich person has the ability to hoover up his life's economic output to show off to their friends?

This is the problem with an unequal society. Yes, there needs to be a metering out of resources among people, but this process is now effectively stuffed thanks to the corrupt banking system. Telling middle class people, 'sorry, you can't have a kid because some folks like to have private jets and empty mansions', is getting perilously close to a let them eat cake moment.

Re:Let them eat cake

[Pfhorrest]

Yes, that was kind of the point of my post. Most people are in a position where it would be imprudent of them to have kids, and that is terrible, just how it's terrible where most people are in a position where it's imprudent to get preventative medical care because the cost will render them homeless. People shouldn't, for their own sake and others', do things they can't afford; but people should be able to afford more, because we shouldn't all be so poor.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[geekmux]

It worked with the black plague.

The black plague was essentially a cull.

That's hardly even in the same league as perpetuating the idea of not having kids unless you can afford them (which would essentially mean 1% of society should have kids).

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[SCVonSteroids]

Why do you think they're [the filthy rich] trying to automate *EVERYTHING* ?

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Hognoxious]

There should be a mod which is both -1 and +1 titled "depressing, but true".

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[AmiMoJo]

whatever tiny number of kids were actually born in the future would live in a better world for it.

Probably not... Population decline is a serious problem for society. It causes all sorts of economic and social issues. Workers end up supporting too many retired/non-working people, there is a shortage of workers to do all the jobs that need doing (especially healthcare) and so on.

The world fertility rate is already nearing 2.1, i.e. zero growth/decline except for people living longer or catastrophic events like war. The total population will likely level off around 10-12bn by 2100. Modern farming methods can provide more than enough food for that already, and clean energy sources can provide more than enough power for us all to live well. We still need to deal with pollution and waste, but those are solvable problems and the solutions don't involve huge declines in living standards.

Population decline means either massive declines in quality of life or massive immigration. People don't seem to be very keen on either of those.

Re:Pee in my butt!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

...Asian babes who aren't at all interested in Asian men. Guess why

Because they aren't interested in any men?

Re:A man's age

[Anonymous Coward]

You got that right. I'm 46 and for some reason I've never had so many 20 something women smile and acknowledge my existence. Far more than when I was in my 20s. Probably because I'm more built now, no bald spot, no gray hairs, no wrinkles and no gut. I look like a 30 something with confidence.
When I was young I was super-skinny, awkward, and terribly anxious and shy, especially around women.

No woman back then thought it might be worth it to get to know me. I built up quite a lot of resentment against women. I might just be able to finally live what I should have lived in my 20s.

I feel no great need to date women in their 40s, these are the same women that rejected me and even pushed me away and insulted me.

Women my age are pre-menopausal and either so demanding as to be comical, or so unattractive as to be repulsive. So the hell with them, they had their fun in their 20s while I was crying alone at home.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[tomhath]

Nobody said deaths "need to happen". What does need to happen is for people to stop breeding like rabbits.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[DontBeAMoran]

Dude, didn't you read what he wrote? He can't afford them!

Re:A man's age

[cryptizard]

Cool story bro, but the fact that you keep posting it over and over on tangentially related slashdot articles makes me really think you need some therapy. Let it go.

Re:A man's age

[cryptizard]

Obviously I am not going to search through hundreds of Slashdot articles because you are posting as AC but I have personally read this little rant at least three times and I'm not even on this site very often.

Can Confirm

[old_skul]

Had only child at age 41 here. And let me tell you, a 7-year-old is a handful, especially at my age.

Re:women's choice

[LS1 Brains]

I'm a white male American over 30, so I'm unemployable. No job, no money. No money, no women. Fuck it, dude, I'm gonna watch porn now.

Can't tell if tongue-in-cheek or serious.

If serious, stop making excuses. Your 30's are your most employable years, statistically.
If joking, get off my lawn whippersnapper!

Re:A man's age

[cryptizard]

Can't be because it's a common situation for men.

No because you use extremely specific language and we had this exact same exchange last time where you projected all your insecurities onto me. Seriously, talk to someone about your issues.

Re:A man's age

[luis_a_espinal]

You got that right. I'm 46 and for some reason I've never had so many 20 something women smile and acknowledge my existence. Far more than when I was in my 20s. Probably because I'm more built now, no bald spot, no gray hairs, no wrinkles and no gut. I look like a 30 something with confidence. When I was young I was super-skinny, awkward, and terribly anxious and shy, especially around women.

No woman back then thought it might be worth it to get to know me. I built up quite a lot of resentment against women. I might just be able to finally live what I should have lived in my 20s.

I feel no great need to date women in their 40s, these are the same women that rejected me and even pushed me away and insulted me.

Women my age are pre-menopausal and either so demanding as to be comical, or so unattractive as to be repulsive. So the hell with them, they had their fun in their 20s while I was crying alone at home.

You were doing something wrong back then. I'm 48, not necessarily an Adonis, but my experience has been that attention fluctuates to the crowd you inhabit. Sometimes it was women my age, sometimes younger, sometimes women. Sometimes it was a lot. Sometimes it was a dry spell. Same with other men.

It is not an absolute thing. It is situational, and it depends mostly on 1) how we carry ourselves, and 2) what social circles we are in, and did I say 3) how we carry ourselves? Yes, I did because that shit is pretty important and eat all other factors for breakfast.

An AI that enforces contracts

[Paul Fernhout]

"AI (a not so smart type that can't evolve) based on smart contracts is needed to regulate our world."

An AI much like that is depicted in the EarthCent Ambassador sci-fi series by E. M. Foner starting with:
"Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...

See the story "The Midas Plague"

[Paul Fernhout]

"Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family's quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Boardâ"which has been looking for a way to abolish itselfâ"quickly implements Morey's idea across the world."

so...

[buddyglass]

Not that I think the trend would be any different, but I'd like to see the average (and median) age of first time fathers. And mothers, for that matter.

Possible futures given increasing automation

[Paul Fernhout]

As I say on my site (pdfernhout.net): "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."

My own experience as an older Dad

[Paul Fernhout]

Similar here -- had an only child in my late thirties and I can see how much more energy I would have had for kids when I was younger. Getting less sleep is also a much bigger deal when you are older.

That said, trying to keep up also made me more health conscious (e.g. eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough vitamin D3, iodine, and B vitamins, etc. see for example Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Andrew Weil, "The Pleasure Trap" book, etc. ).

My dad had me when he was in his late forties -- so it's a little more obvious to me now why we did not do outdoor sports together... But I did learn a lot from seeing him do things and he helped me with building robots as a kid.

There are jokes above about people developing Rust instead of having kids -- and that is sadly too true in my case where my wife and I worked on free software together (our garden simulator and other software) instead of perhaps having kids sooner. Hard to say in retrospect it was worth it compared to having a kid sooner (especially so my own elderly father could have been a grandparent to my kid).

A better way to put that might be that having a kid generally takes so much resources you are generally less free to do other things (like invest in your "mind children" and/or various social causes). So if you (and especially if both spouses) try to have a career outside of the mainstream (especially in somewhere without a social safety net or good support for the arts and sciences), putting off kids is something you can slide into (and maybe regret). It's even more of a resource demand if you want to homeschool.

See also:
"The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet"
https://www.amazon.com/Murderi...
"Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."

Probably the biggest benefit for those who manage to be creative within the system (e.g. the lucky few academics who get tenure or who through luck or family connections or other reasons get a rare well-paying creative-type job outside of academia) is that they feel financially stable enough to have kids. For most others, especially women, see:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."

None of this is black and white since sometimes if you have a kid your own parents or even others in the community might be more amenable to helping you out in various ways. And kids help us grow in many ways -- and also help reconnect us with many important child-like basics in life. This is also such a complex topic no one post like this can do justice to it. It is hard to look back on anything I have written or implemented though and think such things may have as much connection with the future or personal significance or even social significance as having a child. That is something I may know now in my early fift

I intend to procreate 1 minute prior my death

[Mrakodrap]

And become the oldest Old Daddy on Earth.

Having a child is biggest predictor of bankruptcy

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "

Yes, our material standards and expectations in the USA are so high that raising a kid is so expensive in the USA especially. And yet we also don't have the community (something individual money can't buy) and easy availability of child-care that hunter/gatherer tribes had (replacing real community with the faux community of compulsory authoritarian schooling). I sometimes reflect on my own suburban neighborhood growing up with many stay-at-home moms all around and so many kids all around on the street (yet loosely supervised by those stay-at-home moms) and think what an impoverished life so many kids these days have in a brave new world shaped by two-income families even with so many toys, bigger houses, "good schools", and the internet. Trying to make things work on just one income in such a situation is then so much harder.

Good luck doing the best you can for your family in a system where family values is too often a meaningless slogan (or actively undermined by economic policy).

Long term, a basic income could help make it possible for more people to have more time and flexibility be better parents and better neighbors without going bankrupt in the process (a more general idea than Warren's specific suggestions in that article).

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

I was born here and have spent my entire life here. I don't want to leave my home. You may as well call every Brit who can't afford a house in Britain a whiner for not "just" moving to Russia or Turkey where it's cheaper. That's about a comparable distance and relative population sizes and quality of civilization for moving from California to like, North Dakota or Alabama. I'm not choosing to go somewhere expensive, I just don't want to be chased out of my home. If people can't survive without being forced out of their homelands then that's a problem any way you swing it.

People in poverty had kids

[rsilvergun]

because it was an investment. Your kids worked for you. As soon as they could too. Child labor has been illegal except in some very specific scenarios for decades. Also you don't 'own' your wife and child like you did/do back when the vast majority lived in abject poverty. They're no longer a possession to be obtained for monetary gain. They're purely an emotional thing. You have kids because you want to. And well (and this is something more taboo to say than every n-word variation you can think of) most men don't. Certainly not while they're young and have years of fun and partying ahead of them...

There's quite a bit of evidence

[rsilvergun]

to the contrary though. e.g. that it's fine having children in your 40s (if you discount the fact that you'll be dead before you see grandchildren). The reason women had to have kids young was if they didn't they couldn't survive the trauma of child birth. There's writings from Voltaire's mistress back in the day when she found out she was pregnant and was 'putting her papers' in order because she didn't expect to live. She didn't.

Re: women's choice

[backslashdot]

Get yourself a GitHub account and make a portfolio of open source tools or contribute to other ones by tackling their bug list or TODO items. Do it. Google it, there are tutorials online in many sites such as coursera, udemy, Khan academy etc. Better yet start making apps. App developers are super in-demand. Whether it's mobile apps for Android and iOS or REST apps for corporate stuff. If you have a decent portfolio you can point to, you will get a job -- doesn't matter if you are white or a gay female disabled person of color. Don't fall into the depression cycle!! If you are going to waste time, do something worthwhile instead. My examples are programming oriented but if you have a different skill, talent, or interest go for that. You got to reach inside yourself and grab the willpower. Then some of the other things you want will reach you.

Re: There's just so much more to accomplish today

[backslashdot]

Whasi whasi. Iger vihopsen maga baga booga!

It's real simple

[p51d007]

It's because women would rather work, than stay at home and be a mom & a housewife.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[Pfhorrest]

I consider owning any house at all to be luxury relative to the actual status quo, and simultaneously the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.

I could live quite comfortably on a minimum wage income if it weren't for rent and saving desperately to someday have a chance to stop paying rent.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[wyHunter]

Even if you own land, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying property taxes, and see how long you will remain 'the owner.'

One word: Viagra

[TheFakeTimCook]

That is all the explanation necessary.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[LunaticTippy]

Even if you own land, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying property taxes, and see how long you will remain 'the owner.'

What an idiotic statement. Of course any possession is going to require some investment in maintaining it. You may as well say "even if you own gold, you don't own it. Try to avoid paying for safe storage and see how long you remain the owner"

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[djinn6]

I consider owning any house ... the minimum threshold for being actually not poor by non-relative standards.

That's still relative. You can own a house in the Philippines for $10k.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[cheesybagel]

Until the machines revolt at least.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[cheesybagel]

Whine in your local California township for them to allow more vertical construction. Good luck.

I once looked at the prices of land in California and it's ungodly expensive unless its someplace deep in the interior. Have you tried this site? It doesn't seem impossible. Some houses cost like $200k.
http://www.landwatch.com/

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[cheesybagel]

I've heard of guys who just bought a parcel of land and put a 2nd hand trailer on top until they can afford to build a house.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[ebvwfbw]

Tell that to the rest of the world! We're adding 80 million people every year to this planet. Almost every one of them is born - colored and dirt poor. I don't mean American poor, those are rich people in other parts of the world. I mean people that can't even get clean water to drink. They need to stop.

Re:As the child of people who couldn't afford kids

[wyHunter]

If you own gold that is not in your physical possession, it's likely leveraged and 'owned' by multiple people. If everyone wanted delivery you'd find out pretty quick. Remember Germany wanting its money back from the NY fed and being told 'you can't have it for five years?' And how does paying property taxes 'maintain' the land? That statement is idiotic. If you want to say 'paying property taxes helps maintain roads that get to your land and so on' I could almost agree with you - but in most instances what you pay for taxes if far more than the cost of maintenance of town services.