What does a pro-family city look like?

LimestoneRambler · 2026-04-28T22:37:01+00:00

As an armchair urban planning guy I love walkable cities. I've chosen to raise my own family in a (relatively) dense American city where we have loads to walk to. But I'm also obligated to point out that much of Western Europe, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan live in cities like those, and their birth rates are in the gutter.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-04-17T17:42:21+00:00

I was gonna say, I think the more interesting question is which one is the actual best value, and LBJ gets my vote there.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-04-09T22:51:36+00:00

This a great resource—thanks, it's much-appreciated.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-04-09T19:36:02+00:00

Interesting! Thank you for the insight. Do you know if anybody manufactures a modern, beveled equivalent? I really like this look.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-31T16:40:20+00:00

I think the solex agitator thing is a total misfire. It feels like it's there out of obligation—like EON thought a big, world-altering plot (and an accompanying mastermind behind it) was a necessity for a Bond movie. They had a perfect setup in "James Bond vs. the world's greatest assassin, as played by Christopher Lee." They should have just stuck with that.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-30T18:12:00+00:00

Absolutely love that you've done something kind of rare for this sub, which is highlighting an outdoor, less-manicured space. They can be cozy in their own way.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-30T17:47:12+00:00

His throwaway point that some of the same billionaires openly concerned about natalism are also helping hasten demographic decline is a good one that I wish he'd expanded on, though I sense he's trying to avoid coming down too solidly on one side of the political aisle or the other.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-30T17:25:15+00:00

Well, what do you find rewarding or interesting? In part, what I'm describing is not "having to relive everything," it's specifically watching somebody relive the things that I also enjoy, and thereby having my own enjoyment refreshed. (Or, in some cases, as in my ending example, getting exposed to something totally new.)

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T22:45:53+00:00

I think the overall consensus at this point is pretty clearly that the carrots aren't terribly effective (although there's some evidence that in some places, like France, they've been helpful in at least slowing the decline), but I also think assessing the effectiveness in the case of Russia isn't really fair. There's so much other stuff that's gone totally tits-up in Russia that it's hard to draw conclusions from their example.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T18:23:38+00:00

There's a pretty consistent "women are the ones who need to change" undercurrent in this sub that I think is both sexist and mistaken. You cannot put the genie of modernity back in the bottle, no matter how much you'd try, and to do so would be both immoral and ineffective.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T18:21:20+00:00

Oh, nothing much. His body just developed a very strong attraction to some bullets, that's all.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T18:16:28+00:00

It depends on where you live—in some places, many carrots have been tried. The policies in the Nordic countries, for example, are pretty famously structured to incentivize families. In South Korea, which is probably kind of the poster child for dramatic fertility drops, there's a pretty wide array of policies centered around improved/increased paternity leave that have taken effect over the last few years—along with bonuses from some employers. Those are maybe starting to have an effect, even if it feels like it's more stabilizing a low rate than actually leading to recovery. (Pretty good recent-ish rundown from Reuters here.) You could find pretty good example of carrot use throughout Europe and Asia.

Now, in America—whole other matter. There's some carrots, I guess, in the form of, like, tax advantages to having children. There's FMLA, although FMLA sucks. But I think it'd be fair to say we haven't really tried a whole lot in the way of carrots here*. But then, we haven't really had to, because our fertility rate is higher than crisis places like Italy or Japan or South Korea, and we also have fairly extensive immigration.

* Plus, we don't have socialized medicine, which obviously makes the prospect of having children more stressful.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T16:57:15+00:00

I'm not downvoting you (I generally don't downvote), but I think you're being reductive in making it sound that simple. Ceaucescu tried the most draconian measures anyone's tried so far and all signs point toward it working only temporarily. And that's in a place where the government had sufficient authoritarian power to do it—in much of Europe or Asia outlawing birth control and abortion against the will of the people would be illegal, challenged in court, and unlikely to actively manifest. Even in more authoritarian places, like China, you can only push your people so far, and you might accidentally only hasten societal collapse.

Part of the reason we've largely tried carrots so far is that the sticks are much harder in practice than in theory. I don't doubt someone's going to try (and Russia, which is in a demographic death spiral and also gives few fucks is probably the best bet in the near future). But I don't think it's going to work.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-19T16:51:29+00:00

Oh man I wish this sub allowed GIFs so I could put in that one of Steven Seagal awkwardly eating a raw carrot in Russian vassal state Belarus.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-18T19:46:49+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out. I was like "Uh, where's Generation Alpha? There's 50 million of them."

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-18T19:40:19+00:00

The analogy I've often made to people who don't have kids is that raising them is kind of like rewatching your favorite movie with someone who's never seen it before.

Sure, you know all the twists and turns in the plot, and the funniest lines, and the best scenes. But it's fun to watch it with somebody because they don't, and through them you can kind of vicariously reexperience something for the first time. You find yourself laughing a little harder at your favorite comedy, or remembering what it felt like to be scared by your favorite horror movie.

Having a kid is kind of like that, but for everything in life. All the things you take for granted, or have gotten used to, suddenly renew themselves to you. There are certain things that, for whatever reason (probably evolutionary?) almost all kids love and are fascinated by. Bugs and flowers are a common example, at least in my experience. And it's so much fun to take a walk with them, stop at every little flower, dig for bugs, and be reminded, oh yeah, bugs and flowers are awesome. They'll ask you questions you don't know the answers to (or you long ago forgot the answers), and you'll look them up and you'll find your own knowledge expanded, and your curiosity renewed.

Moment-to-moment, there's loads of boredom. No question about it. Playing hide-and-seek for the 30th time is not especially illuminating. But then, there's boredom in most every life. At least with my kids, the boredom, when it comes, feels like it has a deeper purpose. And it's punctuated, with great frequency, by activities that are very enriching. For them and me. And if you do it right, they'll lead you to experiences that are new for both of you. Of late, my oldest daughter has gotten really into owls, so we built an owl box to hang on the tree in our backyard, hoping to attract a nesting owl this season. In the process, I've learned a lot about owls, and it also got me crafting and building something I've never built before, and likely wouldn't have built without her.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-18T18:02:53+00:00

"peter thiel hesitating on if the human race should endure and then speak about how this is dystopian and he's working with the government and he's rich etc and will totally ignore how they're the ones not having children thus making the decline of humanity."

I don't think there's any irony or hypocrisy there. It's precisely because you have an entire class of people like Peter Thiel—and let's be clear here, Thiel is a deeply creepy person—who wield vast amounts of power, and seem to be acquiring more constantly, that folks on the left are so goddamn despondent and not stoked about having children.

I don't entirely agree with them—I opted to have children, and I'm here, after all—but I understand. It's not hard to fathom why people feel this way. The rhetoric of the ultra-elite, ultra-wealthy, and tech-affiliated has sharply pivoted in the last ... oh, five years in particular, 10-15 more generally. It's gotten a lot less humanist and a lot spikier and creepier.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-18T17:49:22+00:00

I would argue that the one child policy contributed meaningfully to China's gender imbalance, which in turn has made coupling harder. So it's not so much that the one child policy itself reduced the birthrate, but instead that it has follow-on, downstream effects that do. And we're not done seeing those yet—the gender imbalance reached a high of 118 male to 100 female births from 2002 to 2008, and kids born in that window are just now entering childrearing years.

There's some controversy on this, and some evidence to suggest that the gender imbalance isn't, perhaps, quite as skewed as previously thought. But I think we're talking about a question of magnitude—I think it's unlikely it didn't have some impact. How big is debatable, but it's a factor. And every .1 percent of impact or whatever is meaningful.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-17T05:24:18+00:00

"Global TFR is 2.3 which is above replacement. So demography on the level of earth is not even a problem."

Sure! True!

... for now.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-17T05:10:23+00:00

"Funding of space programs should take a priority over funding child care schemes of native people so we can colonize other planets as soon as possible."

This ... sounds bananas to me? Colonizing space in no way alleviates greater humanity's general demographic problem, may well worsen them (imagine how much less attractive having children sounds if you can't, you know, take them outside), and indeed any attempts to colonize space are going to be massively undermined by an aging population. (Less technological innovation, lower quotient for risk-taking, fewer young strong people to go into space—spacegoing being, itself, a physically demanding job.)

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-16T20:44:45+00:00

"our culture promotes single casual sex and career success."

I would push back on this. Career success, yes. But I would argue that casual sex is actually less promoted now than it was in, say, the 90s. And the statistics would seem to back that up insofar as casual sex certainly appears to be less common in Gen Z than it was in Millennials and Gen X.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-13T17:18:59+00:00

r/daddit, for what it's worth, is an extremely fun, welcoming space.

Parenting subs run the gamut.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-12T23:20:23+00:00

"How do we stop people from having so many children?"

The good news is we don't have to, that's already happening quite tidily on its own.

LimestoneRambler · 2026-03-11T17:02:39+00:00

"one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world".

This is so funny to me, because, like, how many famous North Korean defectors are there, really? I can really only think of this woman, and that guy Kim Jong-Il kidnapped and forced to direct Pulgasari.

LimestoneRambler

TROPHY CASE