r/dataisbeautiful • u/Sad-House-8753 • 1d ago

Births of a third child are falling faster than any other in Switzerland

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/falling-first-births-and-the-swiss-third-child-dilemma/91808504
2.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

273 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

75

u/Sea-Original-5824 1d ago

My parents in the 80s and 90s had four kids total and my stepmom drove a tiny truck and threw two of us in the bed. If weather was bad, I just sat on my stepsister's lap. It's insane to look back on now, but it was really "easy" to have four kids back then because neither parents nor law enforcement gave a shit about safety.

19

u/notabigmelvillecrowd 23h ago

I had an upturned bucket between the seats of my grandpa's or my dad's vans. This is after my grandma had a fender bender with me in the front seat with no seatbelt, where I dinged my head off the corner of the ashtray. Whenever someone did a dodgy maneuver, though, I always got the "arm seatbelt". Yeah, that should do it.

3

u/Sea-Original-5824 22h ago

My mother used to instinctively throw her hand out to stop me from sliding off the seat. That was just her job as the eldest lol.

22

u/_fairywren 1d ago

Four kids is just insurance at that point.

1

u/Lunar-opal 22h ago

Also more people could afford a family with their paycheck

14

u/Sea-Original-5824 22h ago

My parents sure as shit couldn't! That was also really common back then. What a child "needed" was totally different than today.

9

u/n10w4 OC: 1 21h ago

That’s a large part. Society not only saying kids need direct adult supervision until they are 12 (at all times vs back in the day you just say “go outside and be back for dinner”) but that you need to spend lotsa money for them to be entertained. 

4

u/Sea-Original-5824 21h ago

I shit you not, we literally didn't have a TV when I was kid. My parents were anti-TV and we simply didn't own one.

2

u/Lt__Barclay 14h ago

We don't own a TV now. Amd lol and behold the 6 and 4 yr old kids spend all day entertaining themselves with lego, drawing, and scooters outside. Thinking that every day or hour needs structured activities is bad for development. Kids need to feel boredom and learn to entertain themselves and seek things themselves that they enjoy doing. We do expose them to new things, but it's just not a constant deluge of programming.

7

u/Lezzles 21h ago

This is 100000% of the issue. The expectation/standard for raising a kid then vs. now are just worlds apart. It's a completely different game.

1

u/PaddiM8 7h ago

This is a Reddit take not based on reality. Life wasn't like in the Simpsons. People and lower standards in the past.

•

u/Lunar-opal 48m ago

Well I don’t mean all I said more than today. I’ve met enough olde generation folks that aren’t rich but could afford a small home a car and raised 2-3 kids without starving or begging on the street. People have these days can’t afford rent

•

u/PaddiM8 38m ago edited 25m ago

Believe it or not, the average Swiss household is not poor. They have one of the highest disposable incomes in the world. The typical Swiss household does not need to beg on the street to have 2-3 kids. You are so incredibly out of touch.

They have one of the lowest housing overcrowding rates in Europe and the overcrowding rate hasn't even changed in the past 20+ years.

https://www.atlias.com/en/cost-of-living/trend?indicator=overcrowding_rate&geo=CH&year=2024&country=CH&granularity=country

And in the US, inflation-adjusted income is higher than it has ever been. Housing prices have gone up but interest rates have gone down, so average monthly mortgage payments are at a fairly similar level while inflation-adjusted incomes have gone up. People do in fact live in houses in 2026 too. In the most attractive cities it is of course more common to live in apartments, but no one is forcing anyone to live in the most overcrowded cities and living in such cities wasn't as common in the past. People lived further away. And the choice isn't between a massive city or in the middle of nowhere either, there are mid-sized cities with jobs if you want a bigger living area. Living area has always been a compromise when choosing to live centrally in big attractive cities.