Under the hashtag #China now has lowest birth rate in the world, a blogger writes, “It’s not that dual-income families don’t want to have kids. They don’t have anyone to help with childcare. Schools let out so early these days, and there’s always something coming up that requires the parents to take time off of work to go help out, and most companies don’t let you take your kid to work. If you don’t solve all these problems, how are young people supposed to have kids?”
This blogger shows a compilation of other bloggers’ takes on this issue too:
“I’m just curious, like, ignoring money, just how many people do you need to take care of a kid these days? Just a couple of days ago, an internet commenter said, “If your kid has a cold, don’t send them to daycare and get everyone else sick.” I’m sure they had good intentions and all…but scientific data says that a kid gets a cold 6-10 times a year and stay sick for a week. If every time they get a cough or a runny nose, you take them out of school, who’s supposed to take care of them at home? When Beijing has a snow day and school is out, adults still have to go to work, so who’s supposed to watch their kids? For people who don’t have their parents around, or can’t afford to hire a nanny, and are a normal dual-income family, what are they supposed to do? Sterilise themselves?”
“Back then, I was still pregnant, and I saw a mom on my way to work with a kiddo with her, probably on her way to the children’s hospital. She was stopped by the side of the road, fighting with the kid’s dad on the phone, accusing him, “Every time the kid gets sick, I’m the one who takes care of him and brings him to the hospital. You’ve got work? I’ve got work too! Why do I have to take time off every time!? It’s not like you’re the only one who has a career!” Ahhh, she sounded so helpless, and most families have this problem.”
“You really can’t afford to have kids if you don’t have a full-time parent. It’s hard enough dealing with what to do with the kid between when school lets out and when you get off of work. When I was little, my parents both worked too, and when school let out, I’d just go over to a classmate’s house to do homework, but now that’s not a thing anymore.”
“Last week, I went to pick up my kid from school, and a dad was talking to the teacher by the gates. The teacher was like, “Your daughter got a fever again today. You need to wait until she’s completely better before you bring her back to school.” And the dad said really helplessly, “Both her mom and I work and we can’t take that many days off.” And the teacher was like, “Just bring her to work with you.” It made me really upset to even hear it, because I’m in the same situation. If my kid doesn’t feel well, I have to take him to the office with me. At least my company’s pretty forgiving. The school and parents are both in such a difficult situation here.”
“Right? Back in our parents’ time, even if they were dual-income, companies had much looser regulations. If you need to pick your kid up from work or there’s a family emergency, you can just give your workplace a call and go about your day, and everyone understood. Now, society’s so strict, there’s no wiggle room even if you have tenure.”
“Dual-income families have it so hard. Forget sicknesses, who the hell works at a place that let’s out at 4pm?”
“Get a notice there’s no school next day in the middle of the night, like I can summon a babysitter with the push of a button.”
“If you have a daughter at home, you need to teach her to forget about friendship. Especially after she gets into primary school. Friendship is just as dangerous for young girls as dating.
Some kids will gift away their favourite toy just to make their friend happy. Even if they’re upset in their heart, they have to put on a smile. They’re not the same carefree, happy-go-lucky kid at home at all.
Don’t say stuff like, “Don’t be such a loser.” to your kids to put her down. You need to give your kids a lesson about friendship.
You need to put yourself first.
We’re not teaching kids to be selfish. We’re teaching her to learn how to love and protect herself, and not compromise on her feelings and emotions. She can refuse anything that makes her uncomfortable.
2. Don’t overvalue any friendship.
When you get into primary school, there’s gonna be 40-50 kids in your class. You don’t have to be friends with all of them. There’s six years to primary school, plenty of time to get to know all your classmates, and find out which one of them makes you feel comfortable and happy and can improve together with you. Not every friend can stay with you until the end, and that’s okay. Nobody absolutely needs someone else to live.
3. Don’t force any relationships.
A long, healthy friendship doesn’t last by one party kissing up, but through mutual interest and attraction. Sometimes, when you compromise for your friend, people just think they can take advantage of you. Compromising without any sense of boundaries or a bottom line just makes them value you even less. Friendship is built on mutual respect. If you feel the other person is being disrespectful, you need to have the courage to tell them off and leave. At the same time, you need to widen your social engagements, and get more friends that make you happy.
4. Maintain your independent thinking.
When your friend makes a suggestion, don’t hurry to agree. Stay calm and think about what you need. Agreeing blindly will just make them not care about your feelings in the fture.
5. Learn how to protect your privacy and not overshare.
Don’t talk with other people about your parents’ private matters, because you don’t know if they’ll keep your secret or not. And if they blab about it, you’ll be the one that ends up embarrassed.
6. Learn how to enjoy yourself while alone.
Friends are absolutely essential in life, and only by improving yourself can you attract more friends. You’ll meet the best friends while you’re working hard on improving yourself.”
Comments say, “I had to get screwed over a lot before I learned these.”
“Agreed! My daughter has a friend, and I’ve caught her pinching my daughter’s face super hard when she thinks no one’s watching three times now! I was furious! But since her parents were around too, I could only tell my daughter to stop playing with her in the future! She doesn’t see my daughter as a true friend at all! But my daughter was all like, “But she said sorry afterwards though.” I really need to educate her when I get home. It was super scary. The kid was pinching her really violently.”
“I feel like this works for boys too, especially the thoughtful, soft, honourable kind of kid.”
“After watching clinic videos from fertility doctors, I just feel like…man, women have it so hard.
This patient was 44 years old, and had failed at IVF 8 times already. She’d been encouraging egg release a dozen times, did hysteroscopy like 5 times, spent hundreds of thousands of RMB on this. Even this time, coming to this doctor for surgery, she had to save up money for months. She even got depression over not being able to have a kid, had severe insomnia. Her psychiatrist prescribed her meds, and told her to stop taking them immediately if she gets pregnant.
Her fertility doctor took a look at her medicine and was like, “I need some of this shit too. I get depressed every time I meet a new patient. You’ve got it so hard!”
Like, on the one hand, I understand that some women really want to be mothers. But on the other hand, is it really worth it to blow all your savings and wear down your physical and mental health just for a kid?”
Comments say, “Once you have a kid, you’ll understand that no. It’s not worth it at all.”
“Infertility is nature’s way of telling you you’re not suitable for reproduction. Stop trying to go against God.”
“My auntie did IVF 4 times and never succeeded, and now she’s given up. She hasn’t tried adoption or anything, just living childfree with her husband, and they’re very happy.”
A tiktok video of a small horde of medical students checking out a patient with an impacted bowel, taking turns pressing on her stomach to feel her accumulated poop:
Comments say, “I freak out if my kiddo hasn’t pooped for 3 days. I get annoyed if I don’t poop every day! How the hell has she waited six months??”
“Don’t you know how to use lube?”
“I can’t even imagine how much weight she’ll lose from this.”
“A lot of female bloggers these days make it sound too easy to be childfree, or to be a single mom. It’s to the point that a lot of girls think it’s easy to do in real life. But in reality, both of these are very difficult to pull off.
If a girl is childfree, it means she has to spend her life by herself. To be more realistic, if you don’t get married, then the burden of buying a house, working, and taking care of your parents will fall exclusively on your shoulders. The chances of finding a good, childfree man is just too low. Marrying up is unlikely anyways. Marrying up while staying childfree is like winning the lottery.
And being a single mom is even harder than being childfree, because at least if you’re childfree, you just have to take care of yourself and your parents. If you’re a single mom, you have to raise a child too. Not only do you have to work and buy a house, you have to invest in the kid. Can you imagine how hard it would be? As for finding a rich person to marry and then divorcing him and keeping the kid, what, do you think rich people are retarded? If they’re an entrepreneur, which one of them aren’t the sharpest tool in the box? If you can trick them, you’ve got to be one of the most badass people in the world. We’re all normal people. If we can get through this life safely and peacefully, that’s already super lucky.”
Comments say, “Is it so hard to just live by yourself? Do you have to get married? You can’t live without a man?”
“Leaving childfree aside, I don’t see what stake someone has in how hard it is to be a single mom when you don’t even have a uterus yourself.”
“I’ve never seen any woman include “childfree” in her dating profile. It’s just an excuse to haggle for a better price.”
“Criminal Lao Rongzhi has been executed! She used her good looks to seduce men, while her boyfriend, Fa Ziying, robbed, extorted, and murdered them. Together, they killed seven people! Fa Ziying was executed 24 years ago, and Lao Rongzhi got to live another 20 years! That’s a pretty good deal for her! Everyone, learn from this and don’t get seduced so easily!”
There’s a video of Fa Ziying’s arrest in 1999:
Comments say, “He’s not scared at all.”
“God, it’s so scary. Why would they kill seven people so cruelly? Why couldn’t they just talk it out? They’re really demons.”
“She has to get executed! Nothing else would be justice!”
A blogger reposts a very controversial post lately, “This thing has 4 bedrooms in her house, but wants to put her daughter in the bathroom.”
“Guys, I got screwed trying to convert my spare bathroom into a child room! When I got the remodelling company to put together a design, they gave me to options. Since I felt the first option made the master bedroom too big and didn’t want to enclose my balcony, I went with hte second option.
Then, when they finally got around to remodelling, I discovered all kinds of problems turning a bathroom into a child room. First, there’s no sound insulation for all the pipes. The remodelling company said that there’s gonna be some unavoidable noise. And I was like, why didn’t you mention that to begin with?”
The blogger includes a screenshot of the comment section, where more context is given:
“Another emphasise: She wanted another tea room. She’s already got a tea room, and wants to turn one of the bedrooms into a second tea room.”
“Looked at the blueprint of your house, and now I understand why you have to put your daughter in the bathroom. Because your sons are twins. To make it fair for them, and easy to talk out their “twin issues” or whatever, and to make it convenient for them to go to the bathroom, they have to take the two bedrooms to the North. That creates a problem—not only does your daughter get to live in the bedroom to the South, but her bedroom is even going to be bigger than one of your son’s bedrooms, and you don’t think she deserves that treatment, so you’d rather turn it into a tea room.”
The top comment is a screenshot that shows people spamming her comment section with, “If your daughter lives in a bathroom, she’ll bring fatal misfortune to her dad and brothers.”
As well as more screenshots of comments, “Even Cinderella didn’t live in the bathroom. Even Harry Potter didn’t live in the bathroom!”
“The only reason you thought this was a bad idea is because problems came up with the remodelling process, not because you think there’s anything wrong with making your children sleep in a bathroom.”
“Why don’t you convert the bathroom into a tea room? Then you can drink tea to the sound of your neighbours’ flushing their toilet. I’m sure it’ll bring mental images of lovely mountain streams to mind.”
“If parents complain about being poor to their daughter, when it’s time for them to date, they won’t try to date up, or find someone who has great potential. At most, they’ll marry someone their own class, or even much lower. This is the habit they’ve formed from childhood, of what they deserve.
Finding someone who’s too well off will make them feel a strong sense of insecurity. They won’t be able to get along.
And the only reason for parents to complain about being poor to their kids is to control them better, to make the kid behave and be more like what they want.
But they’ve never considered how that’ll affect the kid. That it’ll make their kid feel like they’re lower than other people, they don’t deserve good lives.
The karma these parents have sewn with their words will come to fruition in their children in this way.
And a lot of parents complain, that so-and-so’s kid got a great date, and yet their kid’s bringing home all kinds of trash.
In reality, it’s just how they were brought up by their parents. If her parents have sucked her energy dry growing up, how is she supposed to reach up?”
Comments say, “I feel insecure even being friends with rich classmates, much less finding a rich date.”
“Not only do my parents love to complain about being poor, they also love introducing terrible dates to me. Even if I find someone in my own class, they yell at me for aiming too high.”
“The hell did these kids do wrong to be reincarnated into such families? They’re bringing karma on themselves by abusing their kids, and yet their kids have to pay for it? To be abused by their parents in the first half of their life, and pay for their terrible parent’s karma in the second half of their life?”
Under the hastag #after man passes away, friends take care of his family for his for six years, a blogger writes, “Reading that hashtag, I thought it was the husband’s friends. And when I click open, I find out they’re all the wife’s friends. And of course, in the comment section, everyone’s making up sexual rumours about them…”
Comments say, “Well, you know how men’s friendships are like :P”
“The fact that I’m not surprised by this at all is what’s really scary.”
“Shouldn’t that hashtag read #woman loses husband and friends support her for six years?”
“Being single and childfree isn’t something accessible to normal people. That’s exclusively for rich people, and it has to be elites among rich people. This is a luxury, not something simple.
I’ve seen a ton of people who don’t have the resources and yet insist on being childfree and single, and put themselves into a worse and worse state. They regret it once they’re in their 30s, and want to get married now, but there’s no one good left on the market. Then they just rot in their shitty lives, making the best they can out of a pile of shitty choices.
I’ve got a female coworker, born in 1991, parents from rural villages, not a lot of money, with a brother too. Her family went completely bankrupt helping her brother get married, but her parents still told her that she can decide how much bride price she wants, and she can take all of it with her. That’s the last help they can offer her. There’s no way they can help her with a house. They don’t need her to take care of them either, they’ll live with her brother.
She’s from a technical college, with no talent at all, and works as a independent contractor for the government. She’s paid less than the temp workers, because at least the temp workers have a proper contract with the workplace. She just has a contract with a third party.
Ordinary looks, 160cm, around 50kg. When she’s young and puts on make up, she doesn’t look too bad, but now, she’s too old and it’s obvious.
She makes less than 60K a year, with no house. And her biggest dream is to own her own house in the big city. But she has no abilities of her own. She can’t take the hardship of working sales. So she’s just staying stable in her current job. When she was young, she wanted to stay single, because her parents fought all the time, and she doesn’t want to be stuck in the same situation. So she never tried to date. Now, she can’t put it off any longer. She’s anxious too, but there’s no use. She’s born in 1991 with hardly no savings, no house, no proper work, and her parents are from the countryside. It’s harder than hell to find someone who has a house in a big city and makes decent money and isn’t a total asshole.
Now she feels super lost and torn. Like, every day, she knows it’s harder for her to find a man, but there’s nothing she can do about it.”
Comments say, “Having kids isn’t really accessible to normal people either. That’s exclusively for rich people, and the elites among rich people at that.”
“Not wanting marriage when she’s young and being desperate for it now is just a sign of a weak will. She wants to have her cake and eat it too. She’s assuming that marriage means a happy life.”
“Stop trying to scare people into marriage. The most basic quality of a human is being able to proactively and eagerly use yourself as a tool. Anyone who doesn’t have these qualities are meant for extinction. That way, the best genes can pass on.”
I don't think you get thanked enough for what you do and the time you put into this, but I really appreciate the window that you provide to Online China.