I live right next to Boston in a town called Brookline---specifically the region above Rt. 9 called North Brookline. It could be better, but it checks the boxes that make it a wonderful place for families:
* Neighborhood schools over 90% of people walk to. Builds community.
* Lots of parks, both near the schools and elsewhere. Gives kids a place they can go by themselves and have some independence.
* Dense neighborhoods so it's easier to go play with your friends rather than play video games over the internet (they still do the latter sometimes of course)
* Nearby shops. Kids and parents can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bookstore, pharmacy (ie candy store for the kids)
* Wide sidewalks and relatively safe streets for kids to walk to these things.
* Bonus: we've got a trolley that stretches the neighborhood and goes into downtown Boston for the older kids.
You can find pockets like this (sans the train) across the US, but they're just that: pockets. I don't know of any city or town that has all these traits in its entirety (South Brookline for example doesn't cut it, for example). However, as long as they're scarce they'll be expensive. I hope we see a move towards building more neighborhoods like it so that more kids can grow up in them.
Everybody seems to think that sparse suburbs with large yards are ideal for children, but it seems to me that a nearby park filled with other children is far more appealing to a child than an empty back yard.
Suburbs in the 50's used to be filled with children all about the same age, but a modern suburb is filled with a very wide spread of ages. The number of children on each block the same age as your children is likely to be very low.
OTOH, apartment buildings filled with immigrants and poorer people seem to have a much higher density of children than suburban blocks.
The percentage of the population under 18 has dropped from 35% in 1970 to 22% today. Outside heavily immigrant communities, it’s probably even lower (e.g. 19% in Vermont). The suburbs are materially emptier of children than they were when they were built.
Yes, the immigrant communities tend to have lots of kids, but nobody outside those communities wants to move into them. Heck, the people in those communities want to move out. My Bangladeshi immigrant family all noped out of Queens (where there’s a large Bangladeshi enclave with recent immigrants) to Long Island the minute they could afford it.
The apartment buildings full of immigrant families with kids are almost exclusively low-SES immigrants. Higher SES immigrants don’t move to those places (and have extremely low birth rates).
You have to remember that high SES immigrants are an extremely small self selected and culturally distinct slice of their home population. Culturally distinct in ways that are hard for Americans to even understand because they don’t have a rigid class system where higher status people culturally diverge from lower status people to the degree, they do in other societies. One major difference is the pre-existing exposure to Western culture.
Extensive exposure to western colonial governments, western non-profits, and western businesses is common among the class of people who emigrate as high-SES immigrants. My family was quite Anglicized even back in Bangladesh. My grandfather’s house was a former British property (my mom comments half a century later about how solidly the British built the tennis courts). At the time I was born my parents weren’t planning on leaving Bangladesh, but my dad adopted the western practice of having a family name (instead of two given names as is our system). My first name is misspelled German, and I never had the nickname Bangladeshis universally use instead of their legal name. I went to a pre-school for British expats (“Catherine’s Playgroup”). After we immigrated, I grew up in a 90% white and asian town in the U.S., spoke English at home, have never set foot in a mosque, etc. My dad was very deliberate in forcing us to assimilate, at least in outward appearances. That’s my particular story, but if you press your high-SES immigrant friends you’ll likely learn about the ways in which they’re very distinct from others in their country—and were long before coming here.
My aunt and uncle, by contrast, live in a Canadian publicly subsidized high-rise that’s entirely low-SES immigrants. Those Bangladeshis are completely different. They’re very religious, socialize primarily within their community, practice arranged marriage and primarily marry within their community, etc. And they were very different from us even when we were all in Bangladesh!
On the northern edge of Jamaica Plain (east of Brookline in Boston proper), there's a pretty stark example of Brookline's accumulated advantages. On the Boston side of the pond that separates the two, there's Jamaica Way. It's a four lane road with few pedestrian crossings, and drivers regularly going way over the 25mph speed limit. The multi family housing on the Boston side is significantly cheaper and denser as well. It too has a trolley (the E branch of the Green Line), but unlike the Brookline side, the trolley on the Boston side isn't grade separated, so it's quite slow. It also typically runs older rolling stock.
I went to school at Northeastern and so spent plenty of time in that neighborhood. We actually looked at buying in Jamaica Plain because of the price difference. Ultimately we didn't because our kids had grown roots in Brookline and the Jamaica Way was too much of a barrier between the neighborhoods.
I think the biggest difference in the price between the two neighborhoods is the schools. Once you cross over the border (either into JP, or the less segmented allston) the prices drop. Brookline's got well-regarded schools (though they've been coasting), whereas Boston is a mixed bag with a lottery system.
Median income for a family in Brookline: $122,000. Median home price: $1.19 million. Judging by the homogenous demographics, almost no refugees or recent immigrants other than perhaps high-skilled Boston tech and education sector workers.
It’s easy to create a city that works for families as long as you use economic redlining to exclude everyone who suffers from the social problems that affect every major U.S. city.
Family friendly trends pretty hard with homogenous demographics.
Differences breed contempt, or just displays the inability to empathize with a different way of life.
A sad fact of life. People with kids tend to regress back to their familiar mothership when the kids arrive. It's instinctual protection mechanism for their children.
There’s two different issues. In the US, demographics is highly correlated with other factors. Even the most progressive parents will self-segregate to get away from these issues (under the pretext of finding a “good school district”), which in practice means the suburbs.
Apart from that, cultural differences become much more salient when you’re a parent. Because culture is how we transmit our values—what we believe about how to live a good and successful life—to our children. Culture is also highly correlated with demographics and also is a source of conflict. My kids attend a private school with affluent white and black kids (about 2/3 and 1/3). The neighboring supermajority-black county is richer than our supermajority-white county, so there are no socioeconomic divides. But there’s quite a bit of racial conflict nonetheless. A couple of kids in my daughter’s friend group wanted to kick her out of a running group chat because they wanted to make it black-only (she looks fully south asian though she’s half white). My daughter is far more accepted by her white friends who aren’t socialized from an early age to have a sense of racial identity/group solidarity.
White/asian places like Brookline have cultural problems as well. My high school was about 30% asian, the remainder white (all affluent and educated). There was a lot of conflict over cheating and the school being a “pressure cooker” that boiled down to conflict between the asian immigrant proclivity of academically grinding to get ahead and the WASP mentality of raising “well rounded” students with diverse interests. Studies show that white families move out of school districts as asian families move in: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res.... This is true even though, statistically, asians are more affluent than whites, much less likely to be arrested or imprisoned, etc.
Parenthood is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of any sociological preconceptions people may have. It’s the time when you’re faced with applying those ideas in practice in a situation that will have consequences for what you hold most dear.
It also doesn't help that any perceived error in raising a child results in a phone call to CPS (by literally anyone) and possibly you and your children being terrorized, and much of this perception is cultural. The more cultural diversity, the more chance you come across that single person that doesn't approve of the way you do it.
This has happened over as little as a kid walking home alone or playing at the park while the mom is at an interview.
I've partially chosen to raise my family in a place with people like me because I know the neighbor kids drive trucks, work in construction, explore the backcountry on dirt bikes, etc from a very young age and I don't have to worry about the local nazi mom sending the child snatchers for the sin of a child having some independence.
Yes, that’s yet another dimension! My wife is a free-range Oregonian, and that’s a reason we couldn’t raise our kids in DC where most parents would love to give their kids an ankle monitor.
I always find the comparison between the former West and East Germany super interesting. Great randomized trial where you take the same group of people, expose them to different conditions and can easily measure the results.
East Germany was also interesting in that it wasn't some patriarchal, ultra conservative society.
GDR = German Democratic Republic (East Germany), FRG = Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Numbers indicate total fertility rate (TFR).
What do the numbers indicate? Birth rate per capita? And are the arrows expressing ranges, or expressing changes from the beginning to the end of the decades? (Or maybe those are equivalent in this case?)
Also, for those who don't remember the official names:
I found it a bit hard to see what I'm looking at at first glance. Apparently the linked article is the announcement that the sub-articles (together, as a series) have won a Pulitzer price.
Designing cities for families with young children is expensive. I skimmed the articles and did not see any notable coverage of:
* Bedrooms, bedrooms, bedrooms! Families with 2-3 children need 3-4 bedrooms. I estimate over 90% of the housing stock is < 3 bedrooms in my nearby city of over 500,000 people.
* Noise insulation. Babies cry a lot. Being neighbors of a family with a new baby will degrade your sleep quality. Thick walls with noise-cancelling features greatly help.
I'd love to see data on a city that has such housing stock available for families not in the top 10% of income, where crime is not 50% higher than its suburbs.
The problem is not cities, never has been. Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design, the design of cities is maybe the one rare exception.
You can design cities for families all you want, but if you keep lying to people and telling them having children is bad, and it's better to live alone, then they won't do it. Not to mention crime and taking money from families and paying people who are tax leeches.
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design
Are you using “modern society” as a synonym for whichever country you live in? There are countries who directly tell their citizens that having kids is good and offer them financial incentives to do so. For instance:
> PM Lee urges Singaporeans to have more children, and to do so earlier
I mostly agree with the original comment. Most of the western world is anti-family, with rare exceptions (e.g. Finland) with policies that nobody is willing to imitate.
And even with great child-raising policies, Finland has a fertility rate as bad as the rest.
Problem is always money. Why society is going to subsidize 2 year of paternity leaves for everyone? Better and easier to complain about "kids nowadays".
It's not just telling people what having kids is or is not, it's that the MONEY spent on family promotion is laughable. Countries with those policies are just putting a bandaid. People is already NOT having children.
The reason all this is "mostly okay anyway" is that everyone normalized being selfish. So money and time and resources are spent on oneself, and that's okay, who's going to require anything different from the government?
Kids are tomorrow's most valuable infrastructure asset. We're just poisoning the water supply.
Is society anti-family by design when fertility is down in all of the western world except Israel? Many of those countries have pro-family initiatives and the result is the same.
My thinking is that growth-based economics is eating itself.
The fertility rate has relatively plummeted pretty much anywhere with a socialized retirement system.
Why would you go through the trouble of kids when you can just mostly offload the time and cost of that on someone else then tax those kids when they're grown for your own retirement and get about the same size slice as the person that actually raised them?
Most Americans don't have the mathematical rigor to understand a rent vs. buy calculator, but I love the idea that every American without kids understands how to calculate the present value of a deferred annuity against the cost of raising a kid and have made the multi-decade commitment to forgo family life simply as a result of that calculation and knowing that they will come out ahead in the end.
And yet in times century ago every simple farmer understood it. The principle is simple, watching your childless neighbors relatively suffer is not hard to understand.
That calculus totally changes if the childless neighbor can just send armed men to collect the neighbor child's income and redistribute it to themselves.
Doubt this is the explanation. Fertility has declined because easy access to contraception has completely altered the trade-off of having kids. Before you could essentially be celibate and not have kids or you could be sexually active and eventually end up with kids. People want to fuck more than they don't want kids.
Contraception (especially the pill), has eliminated this trade-off. Now people can have their cake and eat it too.
On average I'm not sure it's as 'relatively' deep. Definitely merits further study. Most the places I can think of without a social security system had drops but not the inverted pyramids we're seeing in the west.
Ah yes. In the '90s and early '00s the decline in fertility was laid at the feet of feminism and reproductive choice. And now that Roe v Wade is gone it's because of Social Security. After Social Security is destroyed I wonder what will be blamed next? Income taxes or loss of the gold standard, probably.
IIRC studies on joy of children, there is pretty marginal gains in satisfaction with having children beyond one, except a weird bimodal blip somewhere beyond 3 that trends with a small segment of society that really loves pumping out kids.
I see this as a contradiction to be honest. On one side, yes, I like to "walk" the city (to go for groceries, to buy some tech stuff, to buy clothes, to go to restaurants, cinemas, etc.). One the other side, I don't want to live (as in "forever") in the city, because that means I end up buying a flat (and prices for flats are higher than what I can pay, even if I'm in the top 90% of earners in my country... I would still need to pay a mortage for decades. That sucks). I would love to buy a house instead (as in, with garden, and something bigger than a flat), but the average city doesn't have houses, so I would buy a house far away from the city and I would need a car anyway (or good transportation system) to go to the places I mentioned above.
For me is a contradiction. House prices are high too, but I definitely don't want to spend the savings of my life buying a tiny apartment with neighbours up and downstairs, even if that means I have all the places mentioned above at a walkable distance.
So, these walkable cities are designed for not necessarily poor families, but for families that cannot afford a bigger places. For young people without families, though, walkable cities are great!
I've seen no explicit mention in any sources that police in Oslo actively avoid policing serious crimes due to fear of accusations of racism.
Going from that to "Non-white crime is under-reported" is a huge leap and contradicts some other well known facts
For instance you might be aware that research has shown that non-white individuals are disproportionately subjected to stop-and-search police stops, which you would think should mechanically lead to higher recorded crime rates among these groups
"How did the authorities respond?
A series of local inquiries have exposed an official response that was unforgivably inadequate."
"What explains these failings?
There are a range of explanations, from lack of understanding and incompetence to snobbery, misogyny and fear of inflaming racial tensions....
"There is evidence that many officials feared being accused of racism. In 2004, a Channel 4 documentary about Asian men grooming girls in Bradford was postponed over fears that it could lead to race riots; Jay found that councillors had fretted that discussion of the issue could harm "community cohesion". Telford's inquiry also identified a "nervousness about race"."
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Was looking for a citation for the claim that the Oslo police avoid investigations of serious crimes in an effort to underreport crimes from non-white immigrants.
Yeah but on the flip side having police show up everytime I leave the house doesn't make me feel comfortable it makes me feel like the police cant do their jobs properly. Or worse I am in some kind of warzone, which is disappointing since my family fled their home country to get away from war.
How about we pay people enough so they don't have to steal and gut the police.
The problem isn’t the police but the judicial system that doesn’t segregate criminals from society and when it does the penal system has no rehabilitation.
Is this /s? I didn't read anything about a crime or kids with criminal intent, just a dad being told that the park was for <5 year olds to play in (which is ridiculous but a different issue).
That's a weird article. It's weird how one-sided the story is: because clearly law enforcement would tell a different narrative if they had been asked for comment. It is strange how the father claims that the issue was the football.
But it is strange that, if the park rules say that only children up to Age Five are allowed, why the father thinks this is so unjust and so horrible. It certainly makes sense to me, that keeping small children safe could involve restricting the age group. So many things are restricted to narrow age-groups for children. Because of different maturity and physique and needs.
If these parents deliberately chose an Age Five park to go play in [and they knew exactly what its name is before they even arrived], then they should've made themselves aware of the Park Rules (which are not too far away to read if you walk up to the sign. Park Rules are usually posted near every entrance and every main walkway!) And they have no right to be angry that the police intervened and had a chat with them, even if the "football toss" was an extreme red herring.
I don't see anything wrong in a community wanting parents to know and abide by those rules. They aren't difficult or obscure or unjust.
No, the children are not criminals. A minor is subject to their parents' responsibility, and the parents are the ones who placed their children into the park, and they are responsible for their children being there. Any liability or criminality is going to fall on the responsible adults.
Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?
Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."
So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
People still complain about falling birth rates and family life in Singapore, one of the lowest crime (and toughest on petty crime!) cities in the world.
It's important, and there's a whole sub-conversation in how to do it, but it's not a totally overriding concern.
Ignore that crime dropped ~50% globally since the 1990s [1], then.
The real issue is that the Right campaigned mostly on security since the 1980s and successfully convinced everyone that hordes of migrant criminals are patrolling the streets to mug you, in spite of the data clearly showing that crime levels are at their lowest.
Ironically, Republicans are also the one wishing for a "high-trust society" while simultaneously acting paranoid against their neighbors.
If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.
As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.
1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.
Good point and links on architecture. I am so grateful to the architecture student who told me about Jane Jacobs around 1990 and opened my eyes to how much urban architecture design (things like height restrictions as in Philadelphia, unsafe edge effects of big special-purpose areas, sidewalks & porches, and mixed-use zoning) can affect human behavior and "eyes on the street" safety. I also liked the point that new ideas require old buildings (for cheap rents).
This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:
* rules
* norms
* prices
* architecture
All are important -- but they influence people in different ways at different times. If we want to have healthy cities, all are worth considering.
Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
- Underfunds mental health services & makes them nearly inaccessible, for decades.
- Starts wars and treats its soldiers as disposable.
- Rewards the bankers who created the housing crisis.
- Decouples wages from productivity for 50+ years.
- Treats drug use as a character deficiency rather than a societal one.
Newsclues, when the results of these actions (which they were warned about by progressives the entire time) become impossible to ignore: 'Damn progressive activists! Why would they do this?'.
And yet progressive policies are making the situation worse.
Note I’m Canadian and our government and NGOs have been giving safe supply opioids to addicts who sell them for fentanyl and the safe supply goes to kids who get addicted and the cycle of addiction continues thanks to pro drug activists.
I say this as a former drug dealer and current drug user.
Fox News can really warp some people's perception of reality. The truth is Republicans have been hard at work eroding the fabric of society for decades and these guys choose to blame "progressive activists" who have literally never held office.
Well that and the fact that we did the thing everyone suggested and gave lots of welfare money to descendants of freed slaves and that still didn't solve the cultural problem of them being neglected by greater society.
There are a ton of cities where culturally no matter how rich the people are there is a big cultural divide in certain areas and where there is an othering people are less likely to be kind to those families.
I live right next to Boston in a town called Brookline---specifically the region above Rt. 9 called North Brookline. It could be better, but it checks the boxes that make it a wonderful place for families:
* Neighborhood schools over 90% of people walk to. Builds community.
* Lots of parks, both near the schools and elsewhere. Gives kids a place they can go by themselves and have some independence.
* Dense neighborhoods so it's easier to go play with your friends rather than play video games over the internet (they still do the latter sometimes of course)
* Nearby shops. Kids and parents can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bookstore, pharmacy (ie candy store for the kids)
* Wide sidewalks and relatively safe streets for kids to walk to these things.
* Bonus: we've got a trolley that stretches the neighborhood and goes into downtown Boston for the older kids.
You can find pockets like this (sans the train) across the US, but they're just that: pockets. I don't know of any city or town that has all these traits in its entirety (South Brookline for example doesn't cut it, for example). However, as long as they're scarce they'll be expensive. I hope we see a move towards building more neighborhoods like it so that more kids can grow up in them.
Everybody seems to think that sparse suburbs with large yards are ideal for children, but it seems to me that a nearby park filled with other children is far more appealing to a child than an empty back yard.
Suburbs in the 50's used to be filled with children all about the same age, but a modern suburb is filled with a very wide spread of ages. The number of children on each block the same age as your children is likely to be very low.
OTOH, apartment buildings filled with immigrants and poorer people seem to have a much higher density of children than suburban blocks.
The percentage of the population under 18 has dropped from 35% in 1970 to 22% today. Outside heavily immigrant communities, it’s probably even lower (e.g. 19% in Vermont). The suburbs are materially emptier of children than they were when they were built.
Yes, the immigrant communities tend to have lots of kids, but nobody outside those communities wants to move into them. Heck, the people in those communities want to move out. My Bangladeshi immigrant family all noped out of Queens (where there’s a large Bangladeshi enclave with recent immigrants) to Long Island the minute they could afford it.
About half of my children's friends are the children of immigrants. There are pros and cons, but in my opinion it seems to balance.
They aren't poor immigrant families, though. That might make a substantial difference.
The apartment buildings full of immigrant families with kids are almost exclusively low-SES immigrants. Higher SES immigrants don’t move to those places (and have extremely low birth rates).
You have to remember that high SES immigrants are an extremely small self selected and culturally distinct slice of their home population. Culturally distinct in ways that are hard for Americans to even understand because they don’t have a rigid class system where higher status people culturally diverge from lower status people to the degree, they do in other societies. One major difference is the pre-existing exposure to Western culture.
Extensive exposure to western colonial governments, western non-profits, and western businesses is common among the class of people who emigrate as high-SES immigrants. My family was quite Anglicized even back in Bangladesh. My grandfather’s house was a former British property (my mom comments half a century later about how solidly the British built the tennis courts). At the time I was born my parents weren’t planning on leaving Bangladesh, but my dad adopted the western practice of having a family name (instead of two given names as is our system). My first name is misspelled German, and I never had the nickname Bangladeshis universally use instead of their legal name. I went to a pre-school for British expats (“Catherine’s Playgroup”). After we immigrated, I grew up in a 90% white and asian town in the U.S., spoke English at home, have never set foot in a mosque, etc. My dad was very deliberate in forcing us to assimilate, at least in outward appearances. That’s my particular story, but if you press your high-SES immigrant friends you’ll likely learn about the ways in which they’re very distinct from others in their country—and were long before coming here.
My aunt and uncle, by contrast, live in a Canadian publicly subsidized high-rise that’s entirely low-SES immigrants. Those Bangladeshis are completely different. They’re very religious, socialize primarily within their community, practice arranged marriage and primarily marry within their community, etc. And they were very different from us even when we were all in Bangladesh!
On the northern edge of Jamaica Plain (east of Brookline in Boston proper), there's a pretty stark example of Brookline's accumulated advantages. On the Boston side of the pond that separates the two, there's Jamaica Way. It's a four lane road with few pedestrian crossings, and drivers regularly going way over the 25mph speed limit. The multi family housing on the Boston side is significantly cheaper and denser as well. It too has a trolley (the E branch of the Green Line), but unlike the Brookline side, the trolley on the Boston side isn't grade separated, so it's quite slow. It also typically runs older rolling stock.
I went to school at Northeastern and so spent plenty of time in that neighborhood. We actually looked at buying in Jamaica Plain because of the price difference. Ultimately we didn't because our kids had grown roots in Brookline and the Jamaica Way was too much of a barrier between the neighborhoods.
I think the biggest difference in the price between the two neighborhoods is the schools. Once you cross over the border (either into JP, or the less segmented allston) the prices drop. Brookline's got well-regarded schools (though they've been coasting), whereas Boston is a mixed bag with a lottery system.
Median income for a family in Brookline: $122,000. Median home price: $1.19 million. Judging by the homogenous demographics, almost no refugees or recent immigrants other than perhaps high-skilled Boston tech and education sector workers.
It’s easy to create a city that works for families as long as you use economic redlining to exclude everyone who suffers from the social problems that affect every major U.S. city.
You people want to just build South Africa around here all over again, don’t you? Just a reminder: it works well until it does not.
[delayed]
Family friendly trends pretty hard with homogenous demographics.
Differences breed contempt, or just displays the inability to empathize with a different way of life.
A sad fact of life. People with kids tend to regress back to their familiar mothership when the kids arrive. It's instinctual protection mechanism for their children.
There’s two different issues. In the US, demographics is highly correlated with other factors. Even the most progressive parents will self-segregate to get away from these issues (under the pretext of finding a “good school district”), which in practice means the suburbs.
Apart from that, cultural differences become much more salient when you’re a parent. Because culture is how we transmit our values—what we believe about how to live a good and successful life—to our children. Culture is also highly correlated with demographics and also is a source of conflict. My kids attend a private school with affluent white and black kids (about 2/3 and 1/3). The neighboring supermajority-black county is richer than our supermajority-white county, so there are no socioeconomic divides. But there’s quite a bit of racial conflict nonetheless. A couple of kids in my daughter’s friend group wanted to kick her out of a running group chat because they wanted to make it black-only (she looks fully south asian though she’s half white). My daughter is far more accepted by her white friends who aren’t socialized from an early age to have a sense of racial identity/group solidarity.
White/asian places like Brookline have cultural problems as well. My high school was about 30% asian, the remainder white (all affluent and educated). There was a lot of conflict over cheating and the school being a “pressure cooker” that boiled down to conflict between the asian immigrant proclivity of academically grinding to get ahead and the WASP mentality of raising “well rounded” students with diverse interests. Studies show that white families move out of school districts as asian families move in: https://www.the74million.org/article/fear-of-competition-res.... This is true even though, statistically, asians are more affluent than whites, much less likely to be arrested or imprisoned, etc.
Parenthood is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of any sociological preconceptions people may have. It’s the time when you’re faced with applying those ideas in practice in a situation that will have consequences for what you hold most dear.
It also doesn't help that any perceived error in raising a child results in a phone call to CPS (by literally anyone) and possibly you and your children being terrorized, and much of this perception is cultural. The more cultural diversity, the more chance you come across that single person that doesn't approve of the way you do it.
This has happened over as little as a kid walking home alone or playing at the park while the mom is at an interview.
I've partially chosen to raise my family in a place with people like me because I know the neighbor kids drive trucks, work in construction, explore the backcountry on dirt bikes, etc from a very young age and I don't have to worry about the local nazi mom sending the child snatchers for the sin of a child having some independence.
Yes, that’s yet another dimension! My wife is a free-range Oregonian, and that’s a reason we couldn’t raise our kids in DC where most parents would love to give their kids an ankle monitor.
I always find the comparison between the former West and East Germany super interesting. Great randomized trial where you take the same group of people, expose them to different conditions and can easily measure the results.
East Germany was also interesting in that it wasn't some patriarchal, ultra conservative society.
GDR = German Democratic Republic (East Germany), FRG = Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Numbers indicate total fertility rate (TFR).
1950s–60s | GDR: 2.3 | FRG: 2.4 | Similar postwar boom
1970s | GDR: decline to 1.5 by mid-70s, then rise to 1.85 | FRG: 1.55 | East introduced pro-natalist policies (childcare, housing, maternity leave)
1980s | GDR: 1.85 | FRG: 1.35 | East stabilized; West kept declining
1990s (post-reunification) | GDR: 0.8 | FRG: 1.3 | Economic/social upheaval hit East hard
2000s–present | GDR: gradual recovery | FRG: slight rise | Gap narrows but regional differences linger
What do the numbers indicate? Birth rate per capita? And are the arrows expressing ranges, or expressing changes from the beginning to the end of the decades? (Or maybe those are equivalent in this case?)
Also, for those who don't remember the official names:
GDR = German Democratic Republic = East Germany
FRG = Federal Republic of Germany = West Germany
Ideology:
GDR: Socialist, collective responsibility for families | FRG: Conservative, traditional nuclear family model
Women's Role:
GDR: Encouraged to work and have children | FRG: Expected to choose between work and motherhood
Maternity Leave:
GDR: Up to 26 weeks paid leave + 1-year partially paid "baby year" (from 1976) | FRG: Shorter leave (14 weeks), limited benefits and job protection
Childcare Availability:
GDR: Universal, heavily subsidized childcare from 3 months old | FRG: Scarce childcare, especially for kids under 3; long waiting lists
Financial Support:
GDR: Birth grants, scaled child allowances, housing priority for families | FRG: Modest child benefits (Kindergeld), no housing incentives
Career Impact:
GDR: Mothers retained jobs and career paths with little penalty | FRG: Mothers faced career setbacks; part-time work common
Contraception & Abortion:
GDR: Free contraception; abortion legalized in 1972 | FRG: More restrictive laws; abortion controversial
Cultural Messaging:
GDR: Motherhood seen as patriotic duty; state actively promoted it | FRG: Emphasis on family values, but less direct messaging on fertility
I found it a bit hard to see what I'm looking at at first glance. Apparently the linked article is the announcement that the sub-articles (together, as a series) have won a Pulitzer price.
Designing cities for families with young children is expensive. I skimmed the articles and did not see any notable coverage of:
* Bedrooms, bedrooms, bedrooms! Families with 2-3 children need 3-4 bedrooms. I estimate over 90% of the housing stock is < 3 bedrooms in my nearby city of over 500,000 people.
* Noise insulation. Babies cry a lot. Being neighbors of a family with a new baby will degrade your sleep quality. Thick walls with noise-cancelling features greatly help.
I'd love to see data on a city that has such housing stock available for families not in the top 10% of income, where crime is not 50% higher than its suburbs.
The problem is not cities, never has been. Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design, the design of cities is maybe the one rare exception.
You can design cities for families all you want, but if you keep lying to people and telling them having children is bad, and it's better to live alone, then they won't do it. Not to mention crime and taking money from families and paying people who are tax leeches.
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design
Are you using “modern society” as a synonym for whichever country you live in? There are countries who directly tell their citizens that having kids is good and offer them financial incentives to do so. For instance:
> PM Lee urges Singaporeans to have more children, and to do so earlier
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/pm-lee-urges...
> Nearly $7 billion will be spent on marriage and parenthood initiatives in financial year 2026, up from over $4 billion in 2020.
— https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/7b-to-be-spe...
I mostly agree with the original comment. Most of the western world is anti-family, with rare exceptions (e.g. Finland) with policies that nobody is willing to imitate.
And even with great child-raising policies, Finland has a fertility rate as bad as the rest.
Problem is always money. Why society is going to subsidize 2 year of paternity leaves for everyone? Better and easier to complain about "kids nowadays".
It's not just telling people what having kids is or is not, it's that the MONEY spent on family promotion is laughable. Countries with those policies are just putting a bandaid. People is already NOT having children.
The reason all this is "mostly okay anyway" is that everyone normalized being selfish. So money and time and resources are spent on oneself, and that's okay, who's going to require anything different from the government?
Kids are tomorrow's most valuable infrastructure asset. We're just poisoning the water supply.
> I mostly agree with the original comment. Most of the western world is anti-family
The original comment said:
> Almost everything in modern society is anti-family, by design
These are two very different statements.
> Kids are tomorrow's most valuable infrastructure asset. We're just poisoning the water supply.
What tomorrow is there with +4°C in 2100, and what happens in the meantime?
(greenhouse gases emissions are not slowing down, we're closer to 2100 than we are to the invention of the transistor).
> What tomorrow is there with +4°C in 2100, and what happens in the meantime?
The kids will solve it if we give them the right tools. Education, time to learn, confidence.
Is society anti-family by design when fertility is down in all of the western world except Israel? Many of those countries have pro-family initiatives and the result is the same.
My thinking is that growth-based economics is eating itself.
The fertility rate has relatively plummeted pretty much anywhere with a socialized retirement system.
Why would you go through the trouble of kids when you can just mostly offload the time and cost of that on someone else then tax those kids when they're grown for your own retirement and get about the same size slice as the person that actually raised them?
Most Americans don't have the mathematical rigor to understand a rent vs. buy calculator, but I love the idea that every American without kids understands how to calculate the present value of a deferred annuity against the cost of raising a kid and have made the multi-decade commitment to forgo family life simply as a result of that calculation and knowing that they will come out ahead in the end.
And yet in times century ago every simple farmer understood it. The principle is simple, watching your childless neighbors relatively suffer is not hard to understand.
That calculus totally changes if the childless neighbor can just send armed men to collect the neighbor child's income and redistribute it to themselves.
Doubt this is the explanation. Fertility has declined because easy access to contraception has completely altered the trade-off of having kids. Before you could essentially be celibate and not have kids or you could be sexually active and eventually end up with kids. People want to fuck more than they don't want kids.
Contraception (especially the pill), has eliminated this trade-off. Now people can have their cake and eat it too.
Fertility has probably declined due to both. The west and places with socialized systems in Asia though have seen inverted population pyramids.
To be fair, it's also plummeted pretty much anywhere without a socialized retirement system too.
On average I'm not sure it's as 'relatively' deep. Definitely merits further study. Most the places I can think of without a social security system had drops but not the inverted pyramids we're seeing in the west.
Ah yes. In the '90s and early '00s the decline in fertility was laid at the feet of feminism and reproductive choice. And now that Roe v Wade is gone it's because of Social Security. After Social Security is destroyed I wonder what will be blamed next? Income taxes or loss of the gold standard, probably.
They'll come for women's right to vote next. You know, in the name of the West.
> Why would you...
Joy!
IIRC studies on joy of children, there is pretty marginal gains in satisfaction with having children beyond one, except a weird bimodal blip somewhere beyond 3 that trends with a small segment of society that really loves pumping out kids.
I see this as a contradiction to be honest. On one side, yes, I like to "walk" the city (to go for groceries, to buy some tech stuff, to buy clothes, to go to restaurants, cinemas, etc.). One the other side, I don't want to live (as in "forever") in the city, because that means I end up buying a flat (and prices for flats are higher than what I can pay, even if I'm in the top 90% of earners in my country... I would still need to pay a mortage for decades. That sucks). I would love to buy a house instead (as in, with garden, and something bigger than a flat), but the average city doesn't have houses, so I would buy a house far away from the city and I would need a car anyway (or good transportation system) to go to the places I mentioned above.
For me is a contradiction. House prices are high too, but I definitely don't want to spend the savings of my life buying a tiny apartment with neighbours up and downstairs, even if that means I have all the places mentioned above at a walkable distance.
So, these walkable cities are designed for not necessarily poor families, but for families that cannot afford a bigger places. For young people without families, though, walkable cities are great!
That’s not a contradiction, you just don’t want to live in a city with kids. Lots of people do.
Skate Parks are Growing Up reminds me that skate parks are common in small Utah cities.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-skate-park-gardens/
https://archive.today/ywqGt
Maybe control the crime. If you can't fundamentally live in peace, there's no point in continuing the conversation.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves".
Crime in cities is seriously over reported. Any concentration of population will have higher total crime, particularly if there's poverty.
Relieve the poverty, improve the education, crime drops.
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I've seen no explicit mention in any sources that police in Oslo actively avoid policing serious crimes due to fear of accusations of racism.
Going from that to "Non-white crime is under-reported" is a huge leap and contradicts some other well known facts
For instance you might be aware that research has shown that non-white individuals are disproportionately subjected to stop-and-search police stops, which you would think should mechanically lead to higher recorded crime rates among these groups
This sort of social media commentary about immigrant rape was salacious in 2016 but no longer has the same bite
https://youtu.be/r9qiCN7CcB8?si=7-3uMLKsB00hHep8
[citation needed]
"How did the authorities respond? A series of local inquiries have exposed an official response that was unforgivably inadequate."
"What explains these failings? There are a range of explanations, from lack of understanding and incompetence to snobbery, misogyny and fear of inflaming racial tensions....
"There is evidence that many officials feared being accused of racism. In 2004, a Channel 4 documentary about Asian men grooming girls in Bradford was postponed over fears that it could lead to race riots; Jay found that councillors had fretted that discussion of the issue could harm "community cohesion". Telford's inquiry also identified a "nervousness about race"."
https://theweek.com/crime/the-grooming-gangs-scandal-explain...
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Was looking for a citation for the claim that the Oslo police avoid investigations of serious crimes in an effort to underreport crimes from non-white immigrants.
A flat out racist lie in service of the fascist wave. What is this even doing here?
Yeah but on the flip side having police show up everytime I leave the house doesn't make me feel comfortable it makes me feel like the police cant do their jobs properly. Or worse I am in some kind of warzone, which is disappointing since my family fled their home country to get away from war.
How about we pay people enough so they don't have to steal and gut the police.
The problem isn’t the police but the judicial system that doesn’t segregate criminals from society and when it does the penal system has no rehabilitation.
Stop crimes and prevent them
Put criminals behind bars
Rehabilitation for those who can rejoin society
Gotta do all three or it’s not going to work
Are you suggesting we shouldn’t build playgrounds for kids until we’ve locked up all the criminals?
The children playing at the park are the criminals.
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2025/03/19/tot-lot-ardmore-lo...
Is this /s? I didn't read anything about a crime or kids with criminal intent, just a dad being told that the park was for <5 year olds to play in (which is ridiculous but a different issue).
If you read the codes of the city those park rules are binding as law, thus the child is a criminal.
That's a weird article. It's weird how one-sided the story is: because clearly law enforcement would tell a different narrative if they had been asked for comment. It is strange how the father claims that the issue was the football.
But it is strange that, if the park rules say that only children up to Age Five are allowed, why the father thinks this is so unjust and so horrible. It certainly makes sense to me, that keeping small children safe could involve restricting the age group. So many things are restricted to narrow age-groups for children. Because of different maturity and physique and needs.
If these parents deliberately chose an Age Five park to go play in [and they knew exactly what its name is before they even arrived], then they should've made themselves aware of the Park Rules (which are not too far away to read if you walk up to the sign. Park Rules are usually posted near every entrance and every main walkway!) And they have no right to be angry that the police intervened and had a chat with them, even if the "football toss" was an extreme red herring.
I don't see anything wrong in a community wanting parents to know and abide by those rules. They aren't difficult or obscure or unjust.
No, the children are not criminals. A minor is subject to their parents' responsibility, and the parents are the ones who placed their children into the park, and they are responsible for their children being there. Any liability or criminality is going to fall on the responsible adults.
It's a matter of proportionality.
Calling on the cops because one person in an undercrowded park, toss a ball? The cops actually acting on that report?
Maybe if the police had different narrative, they would have answered; from the article mentioned: "I reached out to the township and the superintendent of the Lower Merion Police Department on Monday and heard back from neither."
So it was likely a ludicrous report, and a ludicrous reaction for the local police department, that doesn't stand the light of a local newspaper.
A dysfunctional/uneven society has an endless supply of criminals.
People still complain about falling birth rates and family life in Singapore, one of the lowest crime (and toughest on petty crime!) cities in the world.
It's important, and there's a whole sub-conversation in how to do it, but it's not a totally overriding concern.
Ignore that crime dropped ~50% globally since the 1990s [1], then.
The real issue is that the Right campaigned mostly on security since the 1980s and successfully convinced everyone that hordes of migrant criminals are patrolling the streets to mug you, in spite of the data clearly showing that crime levels are at their lowest.
Ironically, Republicans are also the one wishing for a "high-trust society" while simultaneously acting paranoid against their neighbors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop?wprov=sfla1
Control yes, but even more so, prevent it.
If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.
As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.
1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.
Good point and links on architecture. I am so grateful to the architecture student who told me about Jane Jacobs around 1990 and opened my eyes to how much urban architecture design (things like height restrictions as in Philadelphia, unsafe edge effects of big special-purpose areas, sidewalks & porches, and mixed-use zoning) can affect human behavior and "eyes on the street" safety. I also liked the point that new ideas require old buildings (for cheap rents).
This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:
All are important -- but they influence people in different ways at different times. If we want to have healthy cities, all are worth considering.Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
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The homeless population is the elephant in the room here.
And the progressive activists who are destroying society trying to make it a kinder place, who enable the homeless/mental health and drug crisis
America:
- Underfunds mental health services & makes them nearly inaccessible, for decades.
- Starts wars and treats its soldiers as disposable.
- Rewards the bankers who created the housing crisis.
- Decouples wages from productivity for 50+ years.
- Treats drug use as a character deficiency rather than a societal one.
Newsclues, when the results of these actions (which they were warned about by progressives the entire time) become impossible to ignore: 'Damn progressive activists! Why would they do this?'.
And yet progressive policies are making the situation worse.
Note I’m Canadian and our government and NGOs have been giving safe supply opioids to addicts who sell them for fentanyl and the safe supply goes to kids who get addicted and the cycle of addiction continues thanks to pro drug activists.
I say this as a former drug dealer and current drug user.
Fox News can really warp some people's perception of reality. The truth is Republicans have been hard at work eroding the fabric of society for decades and these guys choose to blame "progressive activists" who have literally never held office.
Well that and the fact that we did the thing everyone suggested and gave lots of welfare money to descendants of freed slaves and that still didn't solve the cultural problem of them being neglected by greater society.
There are a ton of cities where culturally no matter how rich the people are there is a big cultural divide in certain areas and where there is an othering people are less likely to be kind to those families.