It's not some weird self-pity or a first-world problem, it's a very real thing.
You don't want to talk about it because there is absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, but it feels a bit like this:
The Lad moved into student halls of residence at the weekend. (Rather ironically, his uni is within half an hour of our home, but he dug his heels in and insisted he was moving out, whole 'nother story.)
Mrs W had offered to drive him and his stuff down there. I assumed that kids would want to appear cool and independent, and ask their parents to park discreetly round the corner so that they could rock up with a rucksack and a couple of heavy bags, so I was going to leave them to it, but Mrs W said I should at least offer to accompany them. So I did and to my surprise, The Lad accepted and The Lass tagged along as well for good measure.
It appears he called it correctly - the car park was full of shiny 4x4s and SUVs, most students had turned up with both parents and even younger siblings.
Trolleys were provided to get stuff from the car park to the halls, and many of them had managed to fill them to the brim. One lass had six large matching suitcases and a brand new flat screen TV on hers. And I don't mean shopping trolleys, I mean the big industrial 'roll cages' that supermarkets shelf stackers use, as depicted here.
Mrs W was channelling her inner Beverley Goldberg and brought some cleaning wipes and started wiping his shelves. I did my best to be Murray Goldberg, but funnily enough it was a bit of a wrench. Even bombing round in the Toyota MR2 for forty minutes couldn't cheer me up.
From The Daily Mail:
Parenthood makes people happier - but only after their offspring have moved out.
That's according to research from Germany's Heidelberg University which examined data from a recent European survey.
It asked 55,000 people about their emotional well-being and found happiness is more common among those aged 50 or above who have independent children.
Specifically, they were less likely to be depressed and have more financial stability than their childless peers.
In two years, I will be able to confirm to confirm the veracity of this or otherwise.
Last time I posted something along these lines, A K Haart commented that the joy is short lived - after a few years, your children dump their children on you.
From Sky News:
People in the UK are drinking less alcohol, despite an increase in worldwide consumption.
Using World Health Organisation data researchers found UK consumption fell from 12.6 litres of pure alcohol a year per adult in 1990 to 11.4 litres in 2017.
The study, published in the Lancet, predicted the downward trend would continue, falling to 11 litres by 2030.
From the BBC:
British people are having less sex now than in recent years, according to a large national survey.
The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggest nearly a third of men and women have not had sex in the past month. That's up from around a quarter in 2001, according to the data from 34,000 people.
Less than half of men and women aged 16 to 44 have sex at least once a week, responses show. Over-25s and couples who are married or living together account for the biggest falls in sexual activity across the 21-year period.
From the ONS:
Main points
* There were 696,271 live births in England and Wales in 2016, a decrease of 0.2% from 2015.
* In 2016, the total fertility rate (TFR) decreased to 1.81 children per woman, from 1.82 in 2015.
* The average age of mothers in 2016 increased to 30.4 years, compared with 30.3 years in 2015.
* Women aged 40 and over had a higher fertility rate than women aged under 20 for the second time since 1947.
* Over a quarter (28.2%) of live births in 2016 were to mothers born outside the UK, the highest level on record.
(My mother was born abroad, as was my wife, and we have two children, so that last figure does not particularly bother me, here for the record only)
From The Guardian:
Nearly a million more young adults are living with their parents than was the case two decades ago, a study has found.
The figures, in a report by the right-leaning thinktank Civitas, will fuel concerns that too little is being done to protect young people from Britain’s housing crisis.
The proportion of people aged 20 to 34 who live with their parents has risen from 19.48% in 1997, equating to 2.4 million people, to 25.91% in 2017, equating to 3.4 million.
From Public Health England:
The adult smoking rate in England is continuing to decline year on year and is now at a record low. In 2017, 14.9% of people in England aged 18 years and above smoked, accounting for 6.1 million people.
If this trend continues it will reduce to between 8.5% and 11.7% by 2023. PHE is calling for the NHS long-term plan to commit to achieving a smokefree society by 2030 with an adult prevalence of 5% or less.
I'm sure that shifting taxes from production/consumption in the real economy to taxes on land values will help reverse these worrying trends, quite by how much remains to be seen...
From the BBC:
If you've ever wondered why your mind is a hotspot for new ideas in your 20s, it could be that you're experiencing the first of two creative peaks.
New research from Ohio State University found that our mid-20s is when our brains first become fertile ground for innovation.
The study looked at previous winners of the Nobel Prize in economics. It found that those who did their most groundbreaking work in their 20s tended to be "conceptual" innovators. So basically they had a light bulb moment and acted upon it.
But don't panic if you've gone past your mid-20s without a flicker of an idea - some of us won't hit our inspirational stride until our mid-50s.
The headline might as well say: "having kids at home stifles your creativity", which I suspect explains most of it. As lovely as kids are, you have to always go for the safe and steady options while they are in your care. Give me two more years and I will once again be the creative powerhouse I once was (if I ever was, which is debatable).
From the BBC:
Children's safety could be put at risk if the UK leaves the EU without proper plans for child protection, the UK's four children's commissioners warn.
Child abuse, exploitation, abduction and how family law matters are dealt with if a child has one parent from the EU, are all "immediate issues".
In a letter to Stephen Barclay, the minister for exiting the EU, the commissioners ask for reassurance...
The commissioners highlight their fears over co-operation on child protection and law enforcement after Brexit, saying that prevention of child abuse and exploitation often involves international collaboration.
From The Daily Mail:
A seven-year-old boy from China has survived after intimating [sic] a cartoon character and leaping out from a 10th-storey window with an umbrella...
Luckily his fall was partially intervened [sic] by an [sic] utility pole which the boy hit before landing on the cement ground next to a hair salon. This has apparently saved his life.
Bloody hell...
A similar incident happened last month in China's Urumqi city in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
A five-year-old girl reportedly jumped out of a window on the 11th floor after watching a popular Chinese cartoon named 'Boonie Bears'.
She jumped from the window wearing a backpack and carrying an umbrella. The little girl suffered severe injuries after landing on a cement platform on the fourth floor.
Are Chinese children made of rubber?
The Daily Mail publishes a summary of some research by the EBRD:
Young couples are putting off starting a family as a result of rising house prices, research shows.
They want a home of their own before they have a baby but face a longer wait before they can afford to buy. A European Bank for Reconstruction and Development study found that for every 10 per cent increase in house prices, the overall birth rate falls by 1.3 per cent.
All of which we knew anyway, it's nice to see somebody putting some numbers on it. This is exactly what the Boomers and Homeys want of course, they need today's adults to be slaving away paying off mortgages and rent, not wasting time bringing up children who will only be of benefit to society after the Boomers are all dead.
... an increase in house prices on that scale could reduce the birth rate by more than 7,000, the figures suggest.
The pattern is the opposite when looking only at those who own their home, with a 10 per cent house price rise causing a rise in the number of births among this group by 2.8 per cent.
Among renters, however, the same increase causes a birth rate decline of 4.9 per cent, bringing the overall national birth rate down.
And why does house price inflation make owner-occupiers have more kids..?
... rising house prices usually mean that those who already own a home have a larger proportion of equity in their home. This may make them feel wealthier and more inclined to have more children, he said.
Newsflash: Rising house prices do not pay off your mortgage for you. You might feel wealthier but you are not.
I accept that having children is a "choice" for the parents, but it is an absolute necessity for a healthy and cohesive society. The only other way to keep things going is to have continual mass immigration, which brings its own problems - more perceived than actual, but problems nonetheless.
Being the Daily Mail, they love the last bit:
The researchers call for the Government to scrap the maximum purchase cap of £250,000 – £450,000 in London – on its Help-to-Buy ISA as the amount may be too low to allow couples to buy a home big enough for a young family.
Aaargh! That is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing! Shifting taxes away from earnings and output to Land Value Tax will sort all this out - it will level the playing field, encourage Poor Widows to sell their Mansion to young couples, increase owner-occupation rates among people of prime child-bearing age (25 to 35), enable people to pay off their mortgages faster etc etc.
[Sadly, the report offers no conclusions as to the correlation between house prices have and the gruesomeness of domestic murders.]
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UPDATE: The actual study (pdf here: www.ebrd.com/documents/oce/shortterm-effects-of-house-prices-on-birth-rates.pdf) does not say who funded it, maybe it was just the EBRD acting instinctively on behalf of banks generally, despite all the evidence pointing the other way.
It kicks off with:
I would like to thank Dan Anderberg, Arnaud Chevalier, Christian Hilber, Melanie Lührmann, Berkay Ozcan and seminar participants at the University of London, Royal Holloway, Royal Economic Society PhD Meetings, 29th ESPE Conference (Izmir, 2015), 30th ESPE Conference (Berlin, 2016) for their helpful comments.
I've never heard of the others, but "Professor" Hilber is the Home-Owner-Ist from Hell, so he might be the one who pushed the author towards the completely 100% wrong final recommendation.
Perhaps we ought to email the author and point out his mistake via aksoyc@ebrd.com
At last!
From the BBC:
Women in the UK returning to work after having a baby fall even further behind men in earning power, a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said. The gap between hourly earnings of the two sexes becomes steadily wider after women become mothers, the IFS says. Over the subsequent 12 years, women's hourly pay rate falls 33% behind men's.
The IFS says this is partly because women who return to work often do so in a part-time capacity and miss out on opportunities for promotion.
Robert Joyce, one of the IFS report's authors, said women who chose to cut their hours on returning to work were not penalised with an immediate cut in their hourly wages. However, he said: "Rather, women who work half-time lose out on subsequent wage progression, meaning that the hourly wages of men (and of women in full-time work) pull further and further ahead."
Which is what I have been saying for years - there is no real gender pay gap, it is a mothers vs everybody else pay gap. You do not need to be an economist, social scientist or statistician to suss this out, most people will have noticed this themselves first hand (my wife and I certainly have).
Ben Southwood of the ASI takes the more cheerfully libertarian view in City AM explaining why this is no biggie and the real reasons for the apparent residual ten per cent pay gap which cannot be explained by motherhood alone, worth a read in full.
Nonetheless, to the extent that we "should" do something about the gender pay gap*, this is the place to start. IMHO, a Citizen's Income and more generous Child Benefit** instead of the Child Tax Credit crap would more or less eliminate the pay gap in net terms.
* My view is 'big deal'; the total wage pot is what it is, if mothers were paid more, then everybody else would be paid less, so for most couples it evens out. Her Indoors earns barely a third as much as I do (she is underpaid and I am overpaid, by definition) but - like most women - she somehow gets to spend considerably more of our total net/discretionary income than I do.
** The IFS say that the pay gap increases steadily after a woman has had her first child. Other sources correlate this with the number of children - the more children, the bigger the gap (probably a bit of both). So a more generous Child Benefit per child, paid to the mother would fix this nicely, and scrapping means-tested Child Tax Credits increases the incentive to work, so that looks like a win-win to me.
It is well know that there is no real gender pay gap (except at the very top).
It is - indisputably - a "mothers vs everyone else" pay gap, women take an average pay cut of about 10% for each child/year missed to maternity leave for each of the first three children (it flattens off after that). I mentioned some research a few years ago that said that fathers tended to earn more than childless men, so as long as couples with children pool income and expenses, it all comes out in the wash.
More evidence of this from the BBC today:
Full-time working fathers out-earn their childless counterparts by more than a fifth, research suggests.
On average, fathers working full time get a 21% "wage bonus", the study based on 17,000 workers aged 42, concluded. Fathers living in Britain with two children earned 9% more than those with just one, says the research by centre-left think tank IPPR for the TUC. Full-time working mothers of the same age saw a "wage penalty", earning 11% less than their childless colleagues.
The report said the reasons for the "fatherhood bonus" were not clear, though they were likely to relate to hours worked, increased effort and positive discrimination.
The last bit is the interesting bit:
- Do men pull their socks up when they have kids and try to earn a bit more,
- Are the qualities which make men likely to get married and have kids the same sort of qualities which employers look for (boring, reliable etc), or
- Do women simply prefer getting married to and having children with men who earn more (self-selection)?
We don't know, but facts is facts, and the fact is that overall, working couples with children probably earn the same as couples without children or single/childless people.
I once tried explaining all this to a feminist (in a couple and expecting their first baby) and she went mental and refused to accept the logic or even the principle.
From the Daily Mail,
Gary Lineker and his wife Danielle have split after six years of marriage amid claims that they disagreed over starting a family together.The problem is here that older men like sex with young women, but often don't want kids, especially if they've already got some. But young women want kids, especially if like his wife, she's only got 1.
The pair confirmed their divorce today, just over six years after the former footballer and actress were married in Italy in 2009, but they insist they remain on good terms.
It is believed that Danielle, 36, wanted to start a family but former footballer Lineker, 55, who already has four children, feels he is too old to father another.
From the TES
Education secretary Nicky Morgan is to ask publishers to cut the prices of classic English novels for secondary schools, in a bid to ensure more teenagers have access to the books.
Ms Morgan is expected to make the request as part of a “rallying cry” to improve literacy, in a speech at Charles Dickens Primary School in Southwark, South London, today.
She will say that all children should have access to “our nation’s vast literary heritage” and that cheaper access to novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë would encourage schools to buy in more of the texts.
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte are already available for a low cost. If you've got an e-reader or computer, you can get them for nothing. Their works entered the public domain long ago, and you can get them from places like Project Gutenberg, or sometimes Amazon, for £0.
If you want a paperback, it's about £2 a book, which is basically production and a little profit. And it's "little profit" because anyone can print and sell these books. There's no monopoly publisher. So, competition drives down the price. I doubt that this government scheme will be much cheaper.
This does then raise the thorny question of whether kids would want to read Dickens rather than The Hunger Games or Discworld books.
By Graeme Leach in City AM:
Ten reasons why gender pay differences don’t prove discrimination by employers
From The Daily Telegraph:
Britons are so ill at ease with levels of immigration in their towns that their children do not play football with their neighbours in the streets, Nigel Farage has said.
Had he said that there are some small parts of the country where women get hassled for wearing western clothing, fair play, that is true, but this is just being silly.
Via The Boiling Frog.
From The Daily Mail:
They are the traditional childhood pastimes which often see children spending hours safely in front of a screen instead of coming home drenched and muddy after jumping in puddles, injured from falling out of a tree or picking up nasty infections from mud pies.
The dubious pleasures of playing outside are disappearing - as children choose to stay indoors playing video games rather than go out to make sandcastles and daisy chains. Dozens of indoor pursuits that now define childhood are activities that yesterday's children never had the chance to try...
David Hardy, spokesman for the Electro Attractions Group which carried out the survey, said:
"Nowadays, children have much more to keep them amused - computers, a host of TV channels and smart phones - something older generations didn't have. As a result, youngsters don't have to get dirty in the mud and puddles, be bored stupid by fresh air or get beaten up by bigger boys in the park.
"Forcing your children to suffer these traditional activities occasionally can be a great way of reminding them just how great it is simply sitting in front of a computer or TV screen.
"But that's about it, really. You've made one daisy chain, you've made 'em all, frankly."
Weird.
There was a throwaway sentence in yesterday's Metro suggesting that this was happening, but I assumed it was a typo. Turns out it's true.
From My Northwest
Among the balloons and flowers tied to the chain link fence outside Marysville-Pilchuck High School are these: a white wrestling shoe; a youth football team photo, with one player encased in a red-marker heart; and a candle covered with a plastic cup bearing the name "Jaylen."
They are all tributes to Jaylen Fryberg, the popular 15-year-old freshman who texted five friends to invite them to lunch Friday and then gunned them down at a table in the school's cafeteria…
From The Manchester Evening News:
A schoolgirl has not yet received an apology from her mother after she went to the newspaper to report that she had discovered sexually explicit text messages on a mobile phone borrowed from a shop.
Thirteen-year-old Marina Keefe burst into tears after seeing her name and photograph on page 13 of yesterday's edition, holding up the pay-as-you-go phone provided by an EE mobile phone shop. Marina, from Higher Broughton, was even more distraught after she was teased mercilessly all day at school.
Unlike her mother, Lisa Johns, 38, mobile phone network Orange, whose parent company is EE, has apologised for the distress caused to Marina, a pupil at Abraham Moss Community School in Crumpsall.
Ms Johns said: "Everybody gets their fifteen seconds of fame. But it’s quite shocking that I went to the newspaper with a story about these messages. It's even more shocking that they published it.
An Orange spokeswoman said: "Her schoolfriends shouldn’t be reading things like this at their age. They're only 13. Marina is upset by the whole thing and is too embarrassed to talk to us about what happened.”
Marina has since contacted Google and ask that the story be 'forgotten'.
Ah, fuck it.
The BBC proudly announces that our elected representatives yesterday succumbed to group think by a margin of 376 votes to 107.
Meanwhile, 143 of those they claim to represent voted as follows:
Should smoking in a vehicle with a child present be a criminal offence?
Yes - 7%
No - 93%
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If anybody has a bright idea for this week's Fun Online Poll, please leave a comment/send me an email etc. I'm starting to get a bit despondent about all this.
