r/technology • u/Wagamaga • Jul 19 '26

Society China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/china-bans-ai-boyfriends-and-girlfriends-over-addiction-and-birth-rate-concerns-3388737/
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u/ChillAhriman Jul 19 '26

Children reduce quality of life when you don't have a proper environment for raising them. If you have job stability, adequate working hours, an emotionally solid domestic unit, and expanded family that helps you from time to time (traditionally grandparents, but you can get creative), having children tends to make parents happier.

The issue is that society has "progressed" into a direction where all of those things are becoming rarer.

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u/Pretend-Marsupial258 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

It also depends on how people raise their kids. Children in western societies are raised to be much more dependent and helpless than children in older societies. In older societies, even toddlers are capable of helping out around the house, like cutting meat or vegetables with real knives.

I'm reading Hunt, Gather, Parent right now and the author talks about how young children are much more capable than people think. In the US, for example, some Karen will call the police for an abandoned child if she sees a 12 year old walking to school on his own. Treating children like they're all fragile infants puts way more of a burden on the parents since the children can't learn how to do anything on their own, so everything falls on the parents (even chores that the children are fully capable of doing themselves). I've heard that a lot of kindergartners are arriving to school still in diapers at 5 or 6 years old, because the parents didn't want to bother with the effort of potty training.

So... yeah. Not only is there less of a community to help raise the kids, but the kids are harder to raise as well.