Women not having children as not enough good men

[AdamRyan]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/11/why-a-shortage-of-mr-rights-means-single-mothers-hold-the-key-to-the-falling-birthrate

Interesting article about the falling birthright.

Yet the conclusion isn't "how to encourage men to become more suitable candidates for fatherhood"

It's "support single motherhood".

I'm really interested why the author picked that angle. I'd have thought making men less shit would be a better answer personally!

The more women and girls are allowed to be educated and empowered in any country the fewer children they have. It's the answer to population reduction but at some point in the future, probably not in our life times, governments will have to massively incentivise women to have children if the population falls too much as at the moment there are more disincentives. And lots of countries already have a big population imbalance, too many economically inactive people, not enough working and paying taxes. Immigration is of course, one solution, but not always a popular one.

I thoroughly agree. I am early 40s and will end up without children now not through design, but because I wasted my fertile years with an incapable partner. He was incredibly loving, thoughtful and (ostensibly) feminist, but ultimately not someone I could commit to having a family with because he couldn't be counted on to do the basics, like complete qualifications that were well within his reach, hold down a job, do life admin or even reliably get out of bed in the morning. He is now with a woman more than a decade younger than him who I guess has plenty of time for him to get his shit together.

I am not remotely bitter, BTW. I could have left him and had children with someone else. But I agree with this sentiment. He is white, comes from a well-off family that supports him when he needs it, and there was never any pressure on him to sort his life out. It has been incredibly easy for him to find other women on the internet. He is intelligent, attractive and kind. I knew enough to look out for aggressive, unfaithful, unpleasant men, but not incompetent ones who refuse/feel unable to participate in adult life.

Is that true?

unlock.org.uk/policy-issues/key-facts/

33% of males born in 1953 and just 9% of females born the same year, according to this

Wow. I had no idea. I mean it makes logical sense given men are convicted of over 90% of crime but even so....

Great graph in here too

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2019/women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2019

@AdamRyan I've seen that statistic a few times eg www.ucas.com/file/189506/download?token=NOONtzwa

Since 1 in 3 men have a criminal record it would be interesting to see a breakdown of the type of crime for example how many are guilty of violent crime.

Men and women both have to change. Adolescent boys need to be taught parenting responsibilities. Being someone who is capable of sticking in a relationship during the rocky baby and pre-school years should become a badge of honour A sign he is a real man, not some wimp who can't hack it. We changed male attitudestowards drink driving. We could change this.

And women need to stop thinking stable, secure, kind and decentmen are boring. When I met DH I was saying how wonderful he was and a woman I know said, 'But I need a man to be exciting.' I said to her, 'It is exciting. iI is really bloody exciting to find a decent man. They are rare. It's exciting to be respected and liked and not to wonder how he's going to behave,' and she snorted at me as if I was a fool or making excuses for dating someone she thought of as dull.

There is nothing wrong with women being picky in their partners! If women were more ruthless about dumping shit guys at the first sign of disrespect they’d maybe have some incentive to improve themselves.

One thing I’ve always wondered- why don’t more single mothers team up with each other as platonic partners to create a home and raise their kids together?

Controversial view, but supporting single parents makes the issue worse. That's not to say single parents shouldn't be supported, but "encouraging" it means generations of boys with no role model of what it is to be a parent.

@Mugparrot can you expand on that? Do you mean we shouldn't be encouraging women to leave unhappy/abusive relationships? (Often abuse only starts during pregnancy) Or do you feel that single motherhood by choice via IVF shouldn't be encouraged?

@Mugparrot because in the first instance many separated parents continue to coparent affectively.

@HorribleNecktie would you like to live with a bunch of other women and their children in some sort of hippie commune?

Yes, I'm not sure my view is really so black and white. Of course mothers who find themselves single because of circumstances should be supported, but encouraging people to set out on their own deliberately won't help society's problems.

Ideally every child should have two good parents. Where that's not possible, for children who are already here, society needs to protect and support them, but it's still not an ideal situation to be gone into deliberately.

That has no link to what I said. The article is about women deliberately setting out to be single parents from the start?

@Mugparrot I was just trying to figure out what you meant. Which you cleared up really nicely. That you don't feel becoming single parent by choice is in the best interests of children. There's a common misconception that all children of single parent families are fatherless, which isn't at all the case.

That's so interesting and I'm sorry to hear about it. I can think of examples of similar from my own relationship history and people I know.

There's definitely a secret demographic of socially advantaged adult men who never quite grow up. Most people seem to know one who lives with/ is supported by his parents, plus look at the amount of cocklodger threads on here. I would be interested if this is being studied.

Having read the article, that wasn’t exactly how I interpreted it.

Its point is that historically, spinsterhood was so miserable that many women settled for men whom they wouldn’t go with in today’s world where they have better opportunities financially and socially.

It doesn’t imply that men have got worse over time or that many are not fit to be fathers and/or need improving in some way. Perhaps that is the case and perhaps it isn’t but the article does not say it is as far as I can see.

If I found myself a single mother I would certainly consider some kind of communal supportive lifestyle. Have you ever been to Hebden Bridge? In the 70s and 80s single mothers started to congregate there to raise children in a supportive environment, it's resulted in a delightful community (although it doesn't look like that on Happy Valley! I promise it is in this respect).

Another anecdote- A close friend of mind was widowed with a newborn during the pandemic and has lived in a share house with another family and also in a next door neighbour arrangement with close friends and shared childcare of both sets of kids. It was the difference between surviving and not, for her.

There's a bit of a leap from the author's - unashamedly anecdotal - suggestion that the reason for the falling birthrate is that many women "haven't met the right man", to your conclusion that "men are shit".

There can be any number of reasons why a woman hasn't met the "right" man to settle down and have children with, where "right" is defined entirely according to her standards, wishes and preferences.

Most men have little interest in submitting their entire life and self to judgment of how well they satisfy someone else's requirements, so I doubt your suggestion of government action to convince them to would get very far.

Presumably the government action, should such a thing be considered (which it won't be) would be in the form of education for teen boys still at school. Like every other social ill, if a government did decide to address it they would just try to add it on to the workload of schools. Obviously that isn't remotely feasible in reality as schools are mostly already being asked to do too much on top of their traditional remit, with less resources than they used to have.

The attitude that men play less than a 50% role by nature in childcare and domestic responsibility is obviously the result of socialisation. The problem is that the socialisation of girls has (for the most part) moved on a bit - girls are at least theoretically told they can and should aspire to the same careers as boys. What hasn't caught up is socialising boys to expect that they can and should aspire to the same involvement in parenting their children and running their household as girls.

Until "women's work" is aspirational it's a hard sell.

No, and I do t think most people would, but an hippy commune isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m more thinking along the line of 2 friends or sisters clubbing together for a home for them and their children, rather than going it alone.

Toddler groups are nasty and competitive enough, imagine living in one 😆

@Elsanore that sounds interesting.

Personally I think communal living as a concept was a bit ruined for me by university. We had one flatmate who we nicknamed the bread bandit because she kept stealing everyone's bread for nocturnal toast feasts. This wasn't a financial issue either, we did check.

Living with other people generally involves a level of chaos/boundaries being overstepped. I think it probably would end up a lot like living at toddler group!

Personally, as a grown adult with a child, I love being able to close the door on the world and have my own little (somewhat messy) sanctuary.

I’m curious too to know what sort of interventions you would suggest to improve men.

It is well-documented now that there is a mismatch between the educational levels of men and women, with a higher proportion of graduates being female. A highly educated professional woman and a blue collar man may genuinely struggle to find sufficient compatibility for a successful long-term partnership in which to raise children. Mutually so. So evening out the proportions of male and female graduates could perhaps be one step forward.

As for men being less willing to commit than in the past, this is arguably at least partly a consequence of increased availability of reliable contraception. I’m not sure many people would want to go backwards on that.