• There was no limit to the amount of love I could give to my second child.
• There was a limit of time and attention I could share with both children which I felt started to hamper my ability to share that love.
• The logistics of a second child made everything take exponentially more time. Meals, transport, dressing, wrangling...it all became much harder. Manageable with my wife--far more difficult when I am alone with them (which is every morning and evening since my wife has a longer commute).
At this point, I can't envision having a third child. I can't imagine splitting my time and attention into thirds. I have a minivan and I'm not sure how I'd fit the kids and requisite stuff in the car. I'm certainly not ready to handle getting three kids ready in the morning alone. And I'm not ready for the guilt when I travel for work.
How did paternity play into this? With insights from my brother who has two kids, the costs didn't take me by surprise. The effort and complete consumption of time and energy did. Would I trade it for anything? No. Do I think I can handle more children? I think I've learned about myself that no, I can't--both because I don't feel like I would be my best self in that situation and because that would then reflect on my interactions with my kids.
With a simplifying assumption of only pairs of siblings getting into fights, its C(n,2) which is 0,1,3,6,10,15 for 1-6 kids. I have a friend with 6 kids and can confirm that there are roughly 15x as many fights between the siblings as friends with 2 kids. Age differences do matter though (if your kids are much more than about 10 years apart, they tend to clash a bit less because they are less in competition with each other).
3 data points: '00, '05, and '10.
The policy came into play in '07. Yet the downward trend was already visible in '05. It barely changed for '10.
A more interesting (and honest) take of the data is in women's desire for more children. It was on a decline in '05, but ticked up sharply for '10. So if I was writing this, I would have said: "After men in Spain got paternity leave, women wanted more kids."
Those 3 data points were used in a graphic, which is not relevant to the actual experiment performed. Their experiment focused on cohorts of "parents who were (just) entitled to the new paternity leave" and "(just) ineligible parents". This design provides quasi-randomization so that any prior "downward trend" is not relevant, and clearly there are more than "3 data points" at play.
However, now the men got to see firsthand what a pain in the ass kids are, instead of being able to relegate that work to their wives, so now they don't want so many.
The problem is that both men and women are deciding to having less kids. And that trend has continued with maternity leave, paternity leave and even paying people to have children.
In poor countries, they have more kids. Is that because of your caricature or lack of it?
Europe has provided great benefits to women and men to have more kids. Birth rates have declined.
https://www.thelocal.it/20180627/italy-declining-birthrate-p...
Governments are even paying women to have kids and that hasn't helped.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/11/03/141943008/when...
The only thing that increases birth rates is an increase of poorer and less educated women. The wealthier and better educated women are, the less children they have. That is the only consistent correlation across ethnicities, cultures, religions, etc. Educate women and reach a certain level of wealth and birth rates drop.
It's true in japan
https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/japans-births-and-marriages-...
korea, china to iran and all the way to europe.
If we really wanted to increase birth rates, kicking females out of school and removing any and all benefits would be better than increasing benefits. It's counterintuitive, but it's true. Or maybe we could accept that population decline is going to happen and prepare for that? It's strange how we think we can bribe women to have more children. That's never going to happen, so we should learn to live with our current reality.
"After paternity leave was instituted, surveys of Spanish men ages 21 to 40 showed they desired fewer children than before. Farré and González think that spending more time with their children—or the prospect of having to do so—may have made men more acutely aware of the effort and costs associated with childrearing, and, as the researchers put it, “shifted their preferences from child quantity to quality.”"
And also that that the data really cannot be used to demonstrate their point, so, whatever, another research that was able to generate a media article.
The second part isn't supported by their data, since it shows the downward trend in men's desire for kids started years before the policy came into place.
This isn't science, this is politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
It's pseudoscience used by people to push ideological and political agenda. Ever since science pretty much knocked religion down a peg or two, the activists created a new form of "religion" to further political goals.
Economists studying the effects of the original 2007 policy...
On the flip side I think a lot of parents do this to themselves. Kids are not born knowing how to be polite, respectful, play well with others, etc, it has to be trained. It is an exhausting thing to train but it pays dividends. Ironically the less effort you spend on this the worse your kids get, making it even more of a misery to parent them.
Of course there are exceptions (I don't know if you were being serious/clinical with ADHD but that's one of them)
But I'm not going to try to convince you. The more people who dont want kids the more I can have!
Another (arguably more positive) reason could be that new fathers formed a better relationship with their child, and be extension felt more fulfilled in that relationship. That could potentially then lead to them not feeling the need to have more children.
TLDR: "You just wasted 5 minutes of your life".
It's a good thing in the long term, but it might suck big time short term wise.
At the same time, automation will result in lower demand. Hard to say which trend is more important. Combined, I would expect a lot fewer truck drivers and more healthcare workers.
No problem, we'll just invent robots to take care of the elderly.
