Birth rates are falling. Demographic collapse is imminent. The world is ageing. We are living in a gigantic demographic bottleneck.
It's so big and so slow that it's hard for us to see it, we can't even really feel it yet.
Submarine parents don’t do anything their kids can’t do for themselves. Submarine parents step back and give their kids some breathing room.
Large parts of the population are being culled. Entire socio-cultural blocks are being taken out of the game. The future will look nothing like the present. A severe cull is happening. But it doesn't feel like it because it's all based on choice. Everyone is free to have children or not.
Bear Care
In an age of declining population, who will choose to have children? Who will decide to inherit the future? There are many different people with many different backgrounds, but there is one pitfall that affects us all.
It's that simple. If you make a conscious decision to have children in an antinatalist era, you're probably Really I want to have kids. I don't think I just ended up having a few kids by chance. It was a very intentional choice.
For many of you, that means going against the flow. You care a lot. Probably more than your parents, and certainly more than your grandparents before them, who probably didn't critically examine their parenting style on a daily basis; parenting was a verb that didn't even exist in the public consciousness when they were raising their children.
If you choose to have children now, you may be obsessed with your children, and this obsession is exacerbated by the fact that there are fewer and fewer children around. The fact that you are in the minority just fuels all of this. It just fuels your passion even more.
You're committed to raising your kids right, determined to give them the best opportunities possible. It's almost your identity. The temptation is to become obsessively focused on your kids and turn into an overly protective parent. We've all felt it. We all love our kids too much to help it.
This is the struggle.
Brat Factory
Having children in a time of declining population means there is a tendency towards over-care and over-parenting. Like many things in life, the positives contain the seeds of the negative, even if they're not always obvious on the surface.
We all know that only children have certain issues that kids who grow up with siblings don't have, and while having a lot of one-on-one time has certain benefits, it also has negative effects.
Simply put, when you are a child and you are constantly the center of attention with the perception that the world revolves around you, you often become a spoiled child. This is what causes runny noses. This is true. Every parent knows it.
As parents in these strange times, how can we protect our children from this fate? How can we avoid creating baby factories?
We need to restrain ourselves and take a step back, we need to realize that it is our natural tendency to care too much, that our strong desire to have a family can at some point become a strange weakness.
It may sound provocative, but it's true: we live in times of extremes, and everyone who has children needs to recognize and temper some extreme feelings within themselves that have resulted in them having children.
Submarine Parenting
We need to somehow raise our two kids as if we had five. Or our four kids as if we had eight. We need to be aware that we don't run the risk of trying to do too much. We run the risk of trying to do too much. We can't be helicopter parents. We need to be submarine parents.
Helicopter parents are constantly hovering over their kids, making sure everything is going well. They always want the best for their kids. They want to give their kids every opportunity. They are at the mercy of their kids and obsess over the latest and greatest horror that Instagram has to offer.
Helicopter parents take on all of their children's stress in a desire to make their children's lives as easy as possible. Helicopter parents love their children, but don't realize how much harm that love causes them and themselves. We're already stressed out over everything. We've already begun the challenge of maintaining civilization in a declining population. We just can't take any more of this.
Submarine parents aren't visibly standing by to immediately correct whatever their child is struggling with. Submarine parents don't do anything for their child that the child can do for themselves. Submarine parents step back to give their child some breathing room.
diving!
Submarine parents know that there is virtually no chance of them running the risk of being absentee parents, they know that they have spent countless hours researching the best ways to handle sleep, feeding, making conscious choices about discipline and technology, and every other consideration known to man.
There is zero chance that they are not involved. There is zero chance that they have lost interest. They are the most involved and conscious generation of parents that has ever walked God's green earth. With this in mind, they must relax and embrace the subs.
Of course, sub parents are always there. But they're not on the lookout. They're not making everything easy. They're not the entertainment committee. They're not always solving every inconvenience or every little problem.
We love our children so much that we have to recognize that sometimes that love gets in the way. It can manifest in unhelpful ways.
Our natural urges and desires, the things that led us to have children in the first place, are in danger of driving ourselves and our children crazy. We need to rein them in and recognize ourselves for who we are. It's okay. We need to relax a little. If we don't want to run a baby factory, we need to reject helicopters and embrace submarines.
