A 4-income economy impacts dating when we 6 adults are living together. And paring off is tough when 2-typical incomes only make 60% of the most basic bills.
I spent 20x the time parenting that my parents did. My mom spent 0-few hours a week on me. I'd be home for dinner and homework and otherwise I roamed, with and w/o my peers. On my own is when I learned critical life stuff.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting. Their life was spent moving from one adult populated box to the next. Occasionally they had some exhaustingly curated experience. But even then they were never on their own.
Young and old, my experience reflects my peers. They roamed when they were young. Their kids were tightly corralled at all times.
Until LDS Church leaders acknowledge the above realities - directly, meaningfully, comprehensively - they can't properly consider the problem, nevertheless address it.
Trasmatta•3mo ago
WarOnPrivacy•3mo ago
When is money is simply tight then it's a wash. Funds go to tithing. Funds come from having enough work because of the unique network.
ThrowawayR2•3mo ago
Trasmatta•3mo ago
tredre3•3mo ago
Trasmatta•3mo ago
WarOnPrivacy•3mo ago
In actuality it doesn't because there are a lot of mitigating factors. There's some Church aid that shores things up. There's a lot of major support and resources from other members, in about every area you can think of. Long term benefits like careers and housing are more usual than not.
If society was full of comparable networks like that and they were free, I might grant your point. But there really isn't. And if you move to an insular region of the country, it can be brutal to get established w/o some kind of introduction.
BeetleB•3mo ago
If tithing had such a big effect, you would expect non-tithing folks to not have a corresponding decline.
The amount being tithed hasn't changed over the decades. Other things have. If one were to point at the cause, tithing would be low on the list.
Trasmatta•3mo ago
You can't just compare it to declining birthrates for the population at large though: you have to compare to cultures with the same emphasis on large families that exists within Mormonism.
> Other things have
One of those things being cost of living.
I'm sure it's not the only factor, but it has to be one of them.
BeetleB•3mo ago
This is the main factor, which is my point. Tithing as a percentage of your income has not gone up, but general cost of living has. So if one wants to do an analysis on what's causing the declining birth rate, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the factor that has increased and not on the one that hasn't.
WarOnPrivacy•3mo ago
The spirit was unhelpfully somewhere between dismissive and disdainful. Putting that aside, the content is worth discussing.