"So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support".
"So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support".
https://twitter.com/juutsid/status/1720518455458214044
tl;dr: millennials are afraid of failure.
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I have a theory that millennials are the first generation to realize how their own parents fucked them up. Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do. Now they do the opposite.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.Phillip Larkin wrote this in 1971, so the sentiment isn't quite new. The amount of despair in the air, and the "luxury" of being able to express it and you know... Disengage is newer though
I'm sure individual people had the idea for a long time but I don't think it was ever a popular idea among an entire generation.
In part this might be because millennials are the most educated generation in history - that has consequences.
You might be right, the fact that your folks screwed you up is much more common nowadays, or at least more mature. I think it also has to do with the system being literally unable to keep it's barest promises. Even when there was hardship before, people who did "everything right" to live comfortably and happily, and have nothing to show for it but misery and despair, haven't been the majority in the history of capitalism I think.
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Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do.
Oh come on. There's a stack of classic literature a mile high disputing this claim. If anything, the 70s/80s/90s was a renaissance in exploration of the ideas of Good Parenting. But like so much else in our neoliberal hellscape, the idea of a quality childhood was commodified on one end and problematized on the other. The 80s-era parents were constantly bombarded by paranoid "They're sticking razor blades in your kids' candy and stealing children off the streets for satanic rituals!" headlines. They were solid a thousand different panaceas for Genius Children. They were told to hate their own parents, to hate where the parents lived, to hate teachers, to hate "bad influence" of other kids...
Like, on the one hand, its cool that we got a bunch of focus on nutrition and discouraged people from straight up beating your kids to win obedience. But on the other, holy fuck was the discourse toxic.
This generation is just getting a repeat of the shit fed to the last generation. The "don't trust anyone over 30" line is being recycled by the Millennial media hustlers and to the same effect. If you aren't learning anything from your parents this time around, you're falling into the same trap laid by the Boomer era media hacks.