humans can’t breed in captivity
oof
this phenomenon happened in the 1970s to collapsing communities in the eastern coal fields when labor was broken by the automation of strip/surface mining. tons of schools “consolidated” and bussing there is still fucked, like hours and hours to get to the last school if your community fell apart first or had less political power when things died.
it has spread across most rural communities in the us as agricultural livelihood declined from crisis after crisis concentrated the land use into fewer and fewer households and hands, leading to a general collapse of rural life as everything that could be was converted into the 21st century mechanized export plantations. less automated systems (the salad bowls of central valley and the deep south) transitioned entirely to seasonal “guest” worker programs where immigrant labor is segregated from the municipal systems into trailer parks and areas with limited services and less rights.
it seems to show no sign of slowing down, even in the cities where people are internally migrating and gravitating toward for work, as the distress of an uncertain socioeconomic future makes the value proposition of having kids become more fraught.
its happening around where i am and older people try to resist it without really being able to articulate why, besides nostalgia. but i get it, that there’s something elemental about a community school closing. i don’t even have kids, but it bothers me too. i understand the math and the logic, but it feels like surrendering the infrastructure of hope for a better future.
a parent of five children
cmon. 5? wat r u doin?
We know one thing they are and a couple things they arent doing.
There is such a vicious doom loop that is happening with childcare and educational services now. As there are fewer kids in the area, there is simply less demand and political will for providing them, and in any case it’s less efficient to provide that level of service for fewer kids. And potential parents know that - it’s obviously not the single deciding factor in whether to have kids or not, but it’s another straw on the camel’s back.
i feel like a jolt to the system would be banning private and home schooling. like fuck it, get your kids back in there, and if you don’t like the quality, invest some effing time and/or resources. the private and public school bifurcation is repulsive. and so are like homeschool jesus camps. i sympathize with the people trying to do it on their own to do something better than the public option in areas where the schools are fucked, but that’s not a fix. and education is a community resource that we all should be invested in and accountable to, like health.
of course, none of this is going to happen, because Fancy Toffworthy IV will receive the western canon at 14 to prepare him for his JD at Harvard and then the 501c4 industry advocacy circuit between favorable administrations where he gets a job as special counsel to the white house king.
The quotes the Guardian decided to highlight are absolutely bonkers: a cavalcade of crypto-objectivist worms and a fucking conservative think tank that blames this on a “decrease of teen pregnancies”
Liberals are truly the handmaidens to the demise of their own world, too ideologically blinkered to realize they’re jumping off a civilizational cliff
Marx’s theory of inevitable non-reproduction is staring us in the face
a fucking conservative think tank that blames this on a “decrease of teen pregnancies”
The think tank talking head seemed to blame it moreso on “choice” than the lack of teen pregnancy. Conservatives assumed that a drop in teen pregnancy would lead to more people getting married by the time they’re 21, having a couple kids by 25, and having a half-dozen+ by the time they’re done reproducing. Instead it lead to them forgoing kids at all or only having one or two their whole life and it’s freaking them out.
Huh! It’s almost like….having the economy where only a few billionaires are tasked with being full-time customers and do all the consumer spending for us plebs is a BAD idea!
Don’t discount the looming climate apocalypse.
we know that young people have a better chance of achieving upward mobility for themselves and their children if they wait to start a family [until] after they have gotten a foothold in the labor market and gotten married
my lower-middle-class partner and i got a foothold in the labor market and bought a house at, uh, age 35, after saving for a decade to make a six figure down payment. no student loans, no debt, perfect credit. still took until our mid-30s to get enough stability that we could explore the “having kids” stage of life, but by that point, we gave up. why would i want to subject my own children to this fucked up system?
Just want to say that it’s okay to not want kids. No matter how many capitalists try to tell us the choice is destroying everything.
:me:
Id say most of the ones having kids are skipping parenting too, hyuk hhuk hyuk
It’s so foreign hearing about countries with this issue compared to Guatemala where kids are being born all the time. My town is so young that you actually are an old man past 30.
Make life unlivable
Why aren’t people having kids???
Hmmm
I’ve noticed something about these pieces.
They always trot out these economists and think tanks and other socially-acceptable vessels for conservatism to explain what’s going on.
Yaknow, people who love to say “incentives matter” when it comes to welfare spending. “If we pay people to sit around and do nothing, they’ll be spawning like mad and contributing nothing to the workforce!”
But then when they’re called in to explain why people are not spawning, and sliding further and further away from the financial conditions that would allow them to do so… Well, now it’s a matter of quirky generational trends or coincidences of individual choice.
“Incentives? Never heard of em!”
Children in school zones fluctuates all the time. In some areas it goes down, in some areas it goes up. For some reason the people making decisions or tracking this data can’t understand that children in a single geographical area has this repeating trend over like 20-25 years. They close schools in low enrollment areas, and then have to build another school 15 years later when new young families move in
Oh my god it’s just like Japan. 
