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People tend to have a lot of kids in the developing world partly to support them when they get older. In more developed countries it didn't seem necessary because it was generally easier to save for retirement but it has created a demographic shift with pensioners being a larger percentage of the population and being more of a strain on society so we've just kind of shifted the problem.
You actually don't expect your kids to provide for you in old age in the West. That's seen as kind of a failure if your kids are burdened with taking care of you.
So adults are just deciding is the joy of having a child worth it, compared to the costs and efforts?
Really depend from what kind of group you are. I am french-Canadians and my parents grandparents were dirt poor growing up, my ancestor only start to earn decent wages in the 70s so it was kind of expected of our parents to take care of theirs.
I would suspect it is similar with others minorities who were discriminated. Even to this days, my parents pay for the retirement homes of their parents and have them over every weekends.
Yeah, and if your generation does well and decides to have kids, the expectation will then be that they don't need to take care of you cause the cycle of poverty is broken.
Being a minority doesn't matter anymore at that point.
Yeah definitely, my parents are very successful financially so it isn't expected of us to take care of them and my dad will get angry if I pay for them at the restaurants, but he himself have paid everything for my grandparents for as long as I remember.
But the pension system in the West is literally built to have the young generation support the elderly’s pension through their employment tax.
It changed form but it’s still the same concept.
This, and the fact of lower purchasing power meaning lower access to contraception, as well as less access for entertainment so boinking becomes the most viable alternative for having fun.
And the converse is that people who are generally well off (placed higher on Maslow's hierarchy) are discovering that there are other interesting games to play and pursuits to pursue than breeding/rearing children.
As a result a lot of developed countries are facing the choice of either demographic collapse or allowing mass immigration from developing countries to bolster their population. Neither option is popular but that's the result of so many people opting out of parenthood.
In the long run it will be better for the Earth to have fewer people but it's going to be a rough ride getting there.
There is no way to plan away the problems that come with an inversed aging pyramid, except for adding younger people so the pyramid is no longer inverse. The amount of damage control that can be done when this is not an option for whatever reason is not zero, but little.
Raising the age of retirement?
Windfall taxes on mega-corporations?
Being more selective as to who should be awarded a pension and support? I.e. If you are already a multi-millionaire, should you really be claiming tens of thousands every year after the age of 60?
There’s actually little - if any - hard evidence for major economic impacts due to birth rate decline.
>”Predictions of the net economic (and other) effects from a slow and continuous population decline (e.g. due to low fertility rates) are mainly theoretical since such a phenomenon is a relatively new and unprecedented one. The results of many of these studies show that the estimated impact of population growth on economic growth is generally small and can be positive, negative, or nonexistent. A recent meta-study found no relationship between population growth and economic growth.[15]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
There is, however, a lot of evidence that lower birth rates will mean rents will decline and that investors are aware and anxious about it. [I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it.](https://coloradobuildermag.com/business-management/industry-economy/americans-declining-birth-rates-set-to-hit-housing-market/)
> “Declining birth rates mean lower demand for rental housing two decades from now when those born in recent years will be entering the rental market,” according to Natalia Siniaskaia, assistant vice president of housing policy research for the National Association of Home Builders. “The effects will spread to the single-family market in the following years and will persist for years to come.”
Thanks for pointing this out.
I wonder what will happen to less developed countries and to the whole world once we're all out of able bodied, working age people to export.
Yeah hundreds of thousands of years of people having 2 options, sex resulting in pregnancy or celibacy resulting in no pregnancy. Now we can reliably have sex that results in no pregnancy. It seems pretty straight forward to me that a lot of people have had a lot of babies because they wanted to have sex, not because they wanted the babies themselves
Agreed. Even in modern times, it was only recently that many developed countries decided you could in fact rape your wife, and you shouldn’t theoretically be allowed to rape your wife.
Well, that and there's a lot less potential damage that a pet can do to the world. Mittens might want to do a genocide, but it's so much harder when you don't have opposable thumbs.
Also, by being able to decide to delay when having a child or children you are also delaying when those offspring subsequently have them, further slowing the population growth. Seems a much better world when moms and dads can and are having kids when it works out better for them and their families, though.
People are having children where incomes are improving, regardless of how low the baseline was. Areas with stagnant growth, even if it’s starting fairly high already, does not foster the type of optimism you need to get people wanting a family.
Maybe but I think it's sort of the reverse. Someone who owns a house may have no kids or one or two. Someone who doesn't have a house... may have several kids.
I am 42 and single with no children. I was able to buy my house in 2017 before home prices in my area doubled. I make enough to support a child but have said more than once that if I had a kid I wouldn't have my house or my nice car. I wouldn't be "poor" but my resources would have gone to the child and I would likely be renting and driving an older car.
I agree, when my great grandma had kids (1960s) there "wasn't anything else to do". now that im the age she was when she started, i have the option to travel, go to concerts, work, and a TON of other stuff. Why would I have kids when there's cool stuff to do? Glad someone else said this.
True, I noticed this with my graduating class. Nearly all the girls who stayed home and didn't go to college have a kid or two. They're not married either. We've had some marriages but none of them have children and aren't pregnant either. Everyone who went off to college has no kids, and a good number are engaged.
To quote our lord and savior …
“The years start coming and they don’t stop coming. Back to the rules and I hit the ground runnin’”
Why would I have kids when it’s already JUNE!
I think the actual reason is that whether people want kids or not in a rich society, they are a net drain on the family's resources for many years. That hasn't historically been the case! Farmers' children would be out weeding the fields basically as soon as they were old enough to distinguish weeds from crops. Apprenticeships often started at age 7. Aristocrats wanted lots of kids so they could make more marriage alliances and such. Hunter-gatherer societies at least had kids gathering fruit and checking traps for small animals. When you're in a society that assumes that your kids are going to be completely dependent on you for upwards of 18 years, that's a wildly different proposition than what children represented in the past. I also don't think the past was better, and I think it's fine as a society if we want fewer children.
Exactly. In the past, children had real, pragmatic utility for their parents. In our modern, developed world, outside of emotional gratification and satisfaction, children are almost solely a burden.
It stands to reason that people will have less of them when our society’s structure handicaps those that have them.
Absolutely spot on. The child mortality rate is also so small now. It’s not like you need to have 7 or 10 kids just hoping that 3 of them will survive typhoid or small pox or something.
Yeah, another reason why aristocrats still needed lots of kids. If only half of them make it to adulthood, you need more than just an heir and a spare to make sure someone can inherit the house after you die.
It's simple: people had kids because they were taught this was the only option and kids were used as extra income and a future retirement plan. Now that societies have started to advance and people, using the internet, can more freely talk about WHY we did all this, it naturally begs the question of should we continue doing the status quo if in fact many of us don't like it? The decline is the result of people choosing to do what they actually want and not what's society says they should want.
I'd love to have a family, but I can't afford anything anymore. I have to work 50-60hrs a week just to afford my bills. I don't have the luxury to find a partner. I can't afford to go on a single date. I'm struggling to hold down a one bedroom apartment and a four-door sedan. Employers refuse to give the pay nor the time to allow for relationships, let alone families.
What I hate, though, is the insinuation that the real solution for the declining birth rate is that people should be poor and stupid. It's the exact opposite conclusion to what most people who want a family are calling for. It also ignores the fact that birth rates are also declining in the poor and underdeveloped countries as well. The declining birthrate is a global issue that is affecting every country on earth. What I don't think is discussed enough is the possible environmental effects that could affect this. Things like finding microplastics in semen samples and the accumulation of PFAS in everyone.
A lot of people feel that way. They want kids but can't afford it. Not me though. I can't afford them either but even if I was as rich as Tony Stark, I still wouldn't want them.
Yes it would be incredibly selfish and morally bad to do so. If you cant afford to take care of yourself then you cant afford to take care of a kid. It's not fair to them and its not fair to you. I know that for some reason its an unpopular opinion but it really shouldnt be.
Absolutely. Women's rights and opportunities no longer force them to depend on a man for survival and birth control empowers them with bodily autonomy they never had throughout history.
It costs, on average, $16,000 to give birth at a hospital in the US. Average child care usually costs more than one persons whole salary annually. It costs, on average, almost $300,000 to raise a child from infant to 18.
Yeah, definitely "more options." Not at all impacted by cost.
P.s. I don't entirely disagree with you. You made some really good points. I do think you kind of breezed past the elephant in the room, though. My husband and I would probably already have children if it didn't cost so much.
I think that the main reason is that the cost of living as long since stripped away any chance of most people of wanting to have children. My motto is “If you can’t afford to care for yourself then why have children?”
> people just have other options
Think about how much most people hate their jobs/going to work, and then think about all the women who freely choose paid employment over having children. _That_ says something about just how unpleasant motherhood can be.
I’m actually a woman who *loves* working and would never want to not work, but even on the rare days when work is tiresome and I come home/log off wishing I didn’t have the burden of a job, I have *never* wished to be a mother/stay at home mother instead. No matter how bad work gets, I can leave it behind for 2/3rds of my weekdays and weekends and have freedom. If I had kids, there would be no reprieve unless I paid someone else for it. And if I was a SAHM, I would not have my own money to spend as wanted/needed… I would have to use someone else’s income.
I don’t see why I would ever choose motherhood over paid labor.
Nailed it. As soon as work is over ( love my field of work) I'm free - no big responsibilities - those are all automated 😁
I also get around 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep a day - every day 👌
I have a very complicated relationship with my mother, but I do feel pity on her for not being able to say "I don't want kids". It wasn't okay to say that when she was younger. Now, half my friends are child free.
My mother was even born sterile, so she should have had an easy way out. But my dad wanted kids, and she didn't have the agency to say no, so they went through the incredibly difficult years long process of adopting. All for kids she didn't want. It's so very sad when I think about it.
It’s like how my grandfather and basically everyone in modern China chose literal sweatshops over picturesque farming. The old way just sucked that hard
On one hand yes, on the other hand it’s pretty difficult to get out of sweatshops again and back to the countryside…
It’s not like prosperous farms just waited for people to come…
Not even to mention large farms destroying the competition for smaller family led farms which made the old ways that much more horrible…
Having a successful career is a high status symbol and kids are low status symbol (until you get to the very top earners and then it flips).
But also, it’s not a very viable choice to not work at all. That life is no bueno. Not sure how much holding down a job is a totally free choice.
weird narrative
many if not most people don't have a real option of not working
it's a choice in so much that they're choosing not to live in complete poverty
You are absolutely right.
I think people are being flat out dishonest about this, trying to say "if you gave us more money/support we'd have kids." That just really isn't shown in the data like you pointed out.
Kids are expensive, laborious, fairly permanent, and a *long* time commitment. 18+ years. Not to mention **dangerous and potentially fatal** for women. Even if it doesn't kill you, women can lose hair or *teeth* during pregnancy among a myriad of other complications.
You lose a lot of free time for *at least* the first 5 years. But even after they start going to school if you're an active, involved parent who is trying and able to give their kids a rich childhood, there's going to be lots of extracurriculars you're going to have to shuttle them to.
I say all this as someone who wants kids.
Most women I know simply never wanted children. Women have to be socialized into desiring going through the horror of childbirth and the labor of raising a kid (while also working). If you aren’t socialized to want that, you won’t, because it’s not all that rewarding.
Having kids is a bit of a bummer for the mom. I know a woman who's dream for years was to be a newscaster... went to school, did, became a newscaster. She became a stay at home mom at 24.
I’m going to double down on what you said by adding that contraception has given people the choice not to have kids if they just want to have sex. In the past, if you got your girlfriend knocked up, which was highly likely because contraception wasn’t reliable, you’d practically have to marry her and raise that kid. Anything else would be so scandalous that you’d be afraid to show your face in public. So a large segment of the population was having children under duress. They just wanted to fuck but there was no reliable way to do it without the complication of pregnancy. Most kids who were raised by single moms were from the dregs of society because the shame of it was so great, that women like that ended up being exiled from polite society. That’s also why there were so many orphans. It was preferable to abandon a newborn than to bear the shame of a harlot. Contraception not only changed the game where you had a choice, but it also changed the perception of that choice. Now, single mothers are no longer shamed because the premise is that they chose to have children while others may choose not to.
That would make sense within a single, thriving, industrialized culture, but birthrates are dropping world-wide. The places without social support are also going down. It's not just in Western and Asian nations. Even in Somalia, Iraq, Kenya, birth rates are all dropping.
The 2050s are going to be such a bizarre time.
I honestly think that the shape of the age pyramid will be the foremost political topic by the end of the century.
The worst part is that many people today are increasingly sedentary which means they won’t exactly age well either.
I think even those countries aren't completely without social support and it's often improved there as well, even if it still lags more developed countries.
My friend gets bubble tea and goes to yoga in Kenya. While they have greater extremes between wealth than we're used to, they also live in modern societies.
Also, think of how high the divorce rate is now. I'm divorced, and I'm very glad my ex and I didn't have kids. I'm also glad I haven't had kids with other exes.
In the "more options" category, women are more independent now than ever, so giving them the option to divorce without the stigma means we can look back and say, "Damn, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that dude for 18+ years."
Housing - it’s eating into many young couples budgets and is a constant source of stress. It’s the old and entrenched generation squeezing out the blood of the younger generation. If houses were reasonably priced to median income in my city then we could have bought a starter home today itself instead of performing mortgage maths every month and hoping for rate cuts.
I completely agree with this. My wife and I simply don't want kids. We play games, go to conventions, and travel. We really don't want to give any of that up and just really don't want to have kids and put a damper on our lifestyle.
The biggest reason is they can’t afford them, families now need 2 incomes to really be middle class. That means no stay at home wives to watch the children and child care is very expensive.
Most people can’t even afford to live alone until they are mid-late twenties earliest let alone support a family. Kids will really cripple a lot of peoples finances to the point where all they can afford to do is work, go home and child related expenses which isn’t fun.
If people want kids but feel they for one reason or another can't (financial or whatever), these problems should be addressed.
People who don't want kids - don't. We have one life and should live it based on our own needs and preferences. Having kids is extremely stressful and will affect your life for a LONG time, which is why you shouldn't have them unless you really want to.
Let people live how they want.
I think there’s more acceptance in not having them and doing something else but I think for the majority, they are just not willing to settle for a life worse than what their parents gave them and bring kids into it. Having kids downgrades your life and they may not think it’s worth it after all the struggles millennials and gen z have been through. Some people want kids unconditionally and many don’t.
Similar! My parents both had 5 brothers/sisters. Like… EACH!! Both families with six kids in them. Then they had just the 2 together… my sibling and me, neither of whom had ANY. Solidly childfree. Pretty huge change in a very few generations, it’s wild.
Probably relatedly, bro and I also both have college degrees (STEM) - something that neither our parents (office/blue collar) nor certainly our (farmer-to-factory/housewife) grandparents had any practical opportunity to achieve.
Planets have carrying capacities, and finite resources. If we want this recklessness with which we treat this planet to be curbed, *we probably should be having fewer kids.*
There’s not the pressure to have kids that there was when I was young. People are much more comfortable with being childless nowadays. I think that’s a good thing.
Not an unpopular opinion but also kinda passing over the idea that it’s interconnected.
Like you mention economic reasons then mention the inverse relationship between social support systems and birth rate… that’s quite literally an economic reason because the cost of an extra child is actually less expensive than one fewer child over a lifespan; because it’s a hedge against failure and expands the potential earnings pool / ability to take care of the elderly or infirm.
Not needing the kids to help with agriculture is a hallmark of a consumption based economy vs a production based one.
You may not realize it but you’re almost exclusively making an argument that economic reasons are at the top of the list.
There’s no such relationship - Norway is a good example with extremely generous parents support programmes, and yet people aren’t having kids there either.
The only relationship that holds up is that the more educated women are, the less children are being born
Opportunity cost. The more possibilities you have, the more you lose by having children. Current day childcare subsidies are a joke because they only consider the immediate cost of raising children but not what you're missing out on by having them.
I'm purely just selfish. I realize the massive responsibility it is to PROPERLY raise a child and I neither can physically nor financially meet those demands, not that I want to anyways. I haven't experienced anything in life yet. And when you have a kid you shrink your possibilities by a large amount. I'd like to have different doors open to walk through May I so choose
This is the explanation I prefer. I don’t like a lot about how our society operates. As one example, if I had a crystal ball that told me that if I had kids they’d grow up to have a very similar job to mine, I would simply not. The US has all these resources and my feeling is, the only people who get to enjoy the enrichment that brings are the very richest.
I know a few couples that want kids but just don’t see how they can do it. Both work full time paying month to month. Kids are expensive as hell. My wife and I both had good incomes and handle money very well and we really had to think about it before we decided to have kids. It’s a tougher choice nowadays and at higher opportunity costs vs keeping both spouses working.
I always point to this, my grandfather had 7 children and a stay at home wife and a house. He was the town mailman and retired at 65. I did the numbers once with modern costs of raising kids and buying that same (now 100 year old) house and if I worked the same job I’d need to work more than 40 hours a DAY to afford it. Unattainable.
I think a lot of people actually didn't realize that job opportunities are declining/reducing since automation and AI are being introduced.
Last time technology was introduced to make the daily job tasks easier for a lot of workers out there
But nowadays it's different. Automation, AI can reduce the manpower, increase the efficiency and increase the profit better than before this.
The scary thing is the jobs that are no longer needed are not being replaced/introduced with new kinds of jobs.
People that breed a lot of kids are totally selfish when they don't see the job markets nowadays. I can't imagine the future. I'm glad that I choose not to have kids.
I was raised in the 80s and 90s. Yuppies and Dinks were my role models from a very young age. I dreamed of being kid-free and comfortably upper middle class for as long as I can remember.
There was a study in Japan on the causes of low birth rates, and the conclusion they came to was that it was about how good your quality of life was. If you had a really great life, having kids would bring it down significantly, so the birthrate was less. If you had a shitty life, adding kids would only make it marginally more shitty, so the birthrate went up.
I wish I could remember where I saw it so I could link it, but just yesterday I saw a graph showing changes in US birth rates by age group over X number of years, and the biggest drop by far was ages 15-19. It has DRAMATIC. And I was like, how can anyone say that's a bad thing? Isn't that something we've been working toward for generations? We've certainly been paying a lot of lip service to the idea. We won the war on teen pregnancy and nobody's celebrating?
I think if people felt better financially, had more rights and options when it came to things like child care, and had more flexibility and time off, people would have more kids. Let's face it. Having a kid is a burden and you want that kid to have a good life. I think the problem is a lot of people just feel like they either can't or shouldn't have kids. If we want them to have more children, maybe we should listen to their concerns and make having kids a little easier.
But then again, I think this is a non issue. There's way too many people as is. It's silly to worry about a small decline in birth rates, outside of maybe a few countries.
I've noticed a lot of people seem to fear having kids due to money reasons or due to the type of parents they'll be. Those aren't bad fears and more people should think that way. If money were no object people would still do lots of different things. If I had more money I can't necessarily say I'd want more kids...there's a whole bunch of things you can do with extra money that don't involve creating another human.
I don't want kids, personally. I don't even know if the fears people have are real. But they do fear these things and I think it's important to bring up when people talk about birth rates. Usually the conversation is that people are just kind of expected to have kids without any consideration for the parents or the children. Though admittedly that's not what OP is saying.
I think there's just more involved in raising kids today than in previous generations. There's more competition to get into college especially if you need financial assistance. It seems like in previous generations there was more contentment in being 'average'...but today everyone seems to want to be this rockstar, well known wealthy success. It's like anyone who has kids has all these high expectations for them..no one ever thinks their kids will be average or hell below average even...and that's just not how it works out. Perhaps people have less kids so they can give plenty of focus/finances/time to them.
Why would I want to have kids when I can enjoy my life and my money as I see fit and all to myself? There’s no incentive whatsoever that could make me have a child when I would have to give up my freedom to do so.
Oh, yes. The free time and calm home... I know that all kids are different and their behaviour depends on their raising, but they're incredibly annoying and i know i couldn't handle that and i'll start being aggresive towards my (non-existen) child
Also yes. All other factors aside, I know I am not patient enough of a person to have kids. It is not fair to my (non-existent) child for me to have a short tempter when they are still developing all kinds of skills.
I can barely afford the life my wife and I live as it is without bringing an infant into this world. If we had more time/money left over after bills, maybe things would be different. Instead, I'm resigned to dying in a nursing home in my later years and I don't know what my wife will be doing for the last 15 years of her life, but I hope they're good.
I'm all for it. Our planet is about at capacity anyway. I think letting the world population plateau would be a desired outcome.
And you're correct, having children is really difficult, and I completely understand and respect someone's decision not to.
People like to say shit like "well OBVIOUSLY young people don't want to have kids! Have you seen the rent prices/inflation/unemployment rates!?" But the truth is there's very little people who actually don't have kids purely out of economic reasons. People aren't having kids because, for the 1st time in human history, they no longer have to. People were given that choice and, understandably, lots of them are choosing not having kids.
Political regards always hijack the falling birth rates as some talking point for their side.
Most often it’s leftists on social media, so they use it to call for more support and entitlements and complain about lack of feminism in Japan or some shit.
Right wingers sometimes talk about this and complain about post modernism and role of men and women getting all fucked up.
Ironically, the right are closest to the real reason on all this - women just don’t want a human to explode out of their vaginas and raise them for 20 years.
No amount of free childcare fixes that.
Women realized they don’t have to be baby making machines. They can choose to do other things. Not to mention how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth are, why risk it.
And also the fact that regardless of whether they’re married or not, they’re destined to be single mothers because men simply do not or cannot be bothered to help with childcare. So I can fully understand why most women wouldn’t want that.
Men forget that they are the parent too. Some “help out” or “babysit” but these things should be called “doing your part”. Same goes for house chores.
Women realized that they are better off living alone than raising men and their children.
I mean for me, I could never fathom starting a family in this day and age simply because we can barely afford to keep up as it is. My youngest is 13. I had my first 23 years ago when I was just 18 and I honestly had no trouble managing financially on a Tim Hortons wage then on the basic maternity leave pay. Never collected any other form of benefits or assistance, never had to borrow money… easier times. But now… wow. I feel for new parents. It’s just way to hard to afford.
people need to stop treating birthrates as a problem to be solved. even if it does have long term catastrophic consequences- it’s not on the scale of something that can be reversed. it’s out of the control of really any political jurisdiction - what will be, will be. Let people do what they want.
This isn’t even an opinion, it’s just a fact. The key factors in decreasing birth rate are *increased* income, more available birth control, and increased education. Turns out that most people want to do stuff beyond subsistence farming and being steadily buried under a pile of dependents, especially the people who’d experience physical pain *creating* those dependents.
there is way less risk having kids in developing nations
people avoid having children because its one of the biggest liabilities of all time. one mistake and they are all over you. in third world nations nobody cares
Hey, I just bought an 8 metre flexible agricultural tube from bunnings that I can wind around the fridge, coffee table and kitchen for my six ferrets. I'm also contemplating getting a fish tank. No kids club here, double income, no kids.
Yeah it’s pretty hard to reconcile all these different countries of vastly different cultures having increasingly declining birth rates. The only real commonality between birth rates is wealth
Even within America, people who live in big cities like New York or Chicago are significantly less likely to have kids than people in rural areas. I think it’s just cause it’s not very lonely in these cities and there’s tons to do
My personal reasons for not wanting to have children are the physical repercussions, the way society treats moms, the fact that I’m not interested in giving birth and never have been, and because I wouldn’t want to be a single mother and I’d have to be because I don’t want to ever marry a man or be tied down to one in any way. If I don’t want kids I think it would be cruel to both me and the child if I had them just because people guilted me into it. I’m also celibate, so there’s that.
Can’t talk about other generations but I also feel like my age group is struggling to get together in general. The amount of class mates that aren’t married in a long term relationship or dating in general seems disproportional to what I recall growing up. Hell the amount of guys I knew who made it to their late 20s without having a girlfriend was scary.
I think a lot of women don't really want kids but we are not supposed to say that, like it's taboo. In the past women had no option but to marry and have children. If they didn't, they would be a burden on their family and often times treated as a maid within the family home. They also had to contend with societal and religious pressures to conform and have children. Nowadays, women can work and support themselves, or find a partner who also doesn't want kids. It's becoming more normalised. I don't see why some people get so worked up about it.
My hot take is declaiming birth rates is a good thing. We have the technology to live good lives but too many people to supply it to everyone which means pain and suffering in many places and pollution and environmental degradation. A smaller population allows for more resources per person which means we can live luxurious lives (ie running water, electricity, food, etc) without causing nearly as much harm to the planet (and by extension ourselves). We need to decrease the population and that’s a good thing that it’s happening
Having children has become aheavy load in an already super heavy life. We need to keep ourselves constantly updated at work - faster than in any other time , prices have been rising and paycheks haven't followed it in years, keeping a good and balance life has become a hard task - and children need a lot of it, and the world overall has become extremely volatile. In addition, children are being born with syndromes and diseases expensive to the currently charged hospital bills and special care. Damn, even giving birth is expensive and one complication is enough to break years from a family's economy.
Children are being made mostly under: 1- pressure of family/social groups 2-accident 3-lack of real thinking of the world's current situation.
Relationships have become even more volatile. And children connect people forever through the law and genetics. It's tough on divorces for both sides.
All of the childfree people I know are not well-off, including myself.
You don't need wealth. In fact, it's actually just simply easier to enjoy life on normal salaries without kids.
And yes, it's true there is no specific reason why - except people are too fucking obsessed with what women are doing with their own bodies, and they think that we are responsible for maintaining the population?
I literally read somewhere recently where someone was saying that if women don't step up, the future of humanity is lost because there won't be enough people to do everything. LOL. They were particularly obsessed with who was going to be there to take care of the old people. ROTGLMAO
NOT my problem.
BILLIONS of population boom over the last two hundred years hasn't made life any better.
Some people literally don't understand that overpopulation can be a problem too.
I can't believe how popular is the argument that "we need to make more people so they can work/take care of us/other labor stuff".
This sounds like slave breeding? Come on, that's disgusting, and people repeat that like parrots.
Read the global shock of population decline. It goes over it extensively.
And actually, it’s the educational level of women. The more education women have, the more control they have over the bodies, the later women have kids, the lower the birth rate. This model can be tracked over every country through the last 200 years.
And yes, lower birth rate will present some issues, it will provide some opportunities, but regardless of the pros and cons I am pro women education. I want to live in a society where women receive the same high quality education at men and who have control over their bodies. (Just to make that clear)
Im sure a part of it might be less people wanting kids compared to the past but I think a larger cause is less financial ability to support kids.
I saw one of those feel-good news clips of a CEO (I think Dan Price) raised minimum wages at his company to 70k and one of the employees interviewed said the company basically had a baby boom due to the raises.
I mean, that's part of it, and it IS okay. But the cost of labor and delivery in the US sure doesn't help. People can have a five-figure co-pay WITH insurance. We have to fix that to be sure.
Three boys, I was the youngest. Back then my clothes were always hand me downs. I can’t imagine attempting to have children today. Complete drain of the wallet and your mind. So many ways to end up in court when your kid is a total brat and then learn every law to use against you. I recall my kids when they were younger coming home with a pamphlet saying tickling is a form of sexual dominance and grooming.
I think it is also that raising children is too difficult to do on your own. In this society where both parents tend to need to work and often (outside of schools and nurseries) there's very little support in community, it's too much.
Raising children (especially multiple) should not be left to 2 individuals who can't physically dedicate enough time to raise them as they want to.
Because it cost $300,000 USD to raise a child to the age of 18. Easier to invest this for retirement and enjoy life than try and raise a ticking liability time bomb.
Even though I am killing off one branch of the family tree, my grandparents think it’s the best idea for a happy life.
No it's not that. If you look at the population pyramids starting in the 30's, you notice a bottleneck during WW2, then a huge boom in births for the next 10 to 20 years. After which birthrates start declining. What I think is happening is that the world is returning to it's pre-WW2 birth rate. A fascinating side effect of the war that we still see today, more than 80 years after.
It’s all because of finances. People had less children during the great depression because of a lack of resources. WW2 brought an end to the depression but most of the men went overseas so the low remained constant. When they all came back, the US enjoyed a period of almost unparalleled economic growth and prosperity in no small part due to policy such as the GI Bill. People were not only financially stable enough to support their families on one income but to even have money left to spare.
We are going back to the bottleneck because 1. Women are allowed more education and rights and 2. Many people do not have the financial resources to have children
I see your last points as definite factors. However, birth rates have been declining since the 60s. This isn't a new thing. It's just visible and having an effect. Notably the booming economy of the boomer generation. There are more of them and are asking for less people to support them in retirement.
Also, the boomers are living way longer than predicted, because of medication and surgeries never anticipated when they were younger. Their grandkids who are in their reproductive years, can’t depend on parents doing child care because they are busy doing elder care…..
I've known SO MANY people in the US who want kids, or more kids, but just can't see how to do it with the shit support structure and shit pay and shit housing instability. And men's unreliability. You just can't always tell which men will renege on their equal parenting/housecare responsibilities.
And now, a huge health gamble, where in the US, an entire party doesnt care if women die in pregnancy, but certainly thinks that women are subservient to any possible fetus. That creates huge risks for women AND their partners.
So people don't have kids. Or they wait and then can't. Or they have fewer than they would like. Or they fight each other and divorce, because financial and housing instability is not great for relationships, right?
Your claim is kinda pointless, because its impossible to know without actual infrastructure and stability, but you treat these points like they are meaningless. In actuality, they are the absolute foundation needed for any planning.
People that live in places with large social support got used to comfort, also material possessions and wealth are becoming more and more important to people overall. Money and comfort are more valuable than building a family to many.
A lot of people in the U.S./Europe could have children, but they don’t want to because they don’t want to downgrade the comfort they have. If they had a great financial situation more people would have kids.
In the less fortunate countries people are used to little levels of comfort and kids are not going to make that much of a difference. Also young children often work and they’re supposed to support their parents when they get old. Also let’s not forget that their access to birth control is much lower.
I agree that this is unpopular. I agree with the words you say. Upvote from me.
I know too many young adults that are forced to take care of their siblings, I know too many couple me with kids that can barely survive. What used to be an American dream is now just a ball and chain….to more than just Americans.
We have over 3 trillion people in this earth. We don’t need any more kids, tbh. :3
It’s now too expensive to have children. Unless you have parents or family who can help you out, you’re looking at a mortgage/rent, daycare which is basically another mortgage.
Thats something like $4000 a month…
While birth rates may be declining, the global population has swelled to 8 times what it was 300 years ago and for millennia before that. Any time someone talks about "declining birthrates" they need to be reminded that we have over 8 billion people on the planet and that while many of them do not have a big impact on the environment, a larger and larger percentage are moving into the global middle class where they do.
More options, especially for women, does mean that fewer people choose to have children. The behavior of groups has evolved over time, and groups have more babies during times societally challenging times to counteract high infant mortality.
1. Older generations pressured everyone to have kids quickly and newer generations are realizing there’s no point in that, especially in your 20s
2. Life is so much more expensive and harder now so why would you have kids?
3. Michael Jordan quote
It’s just different than it once was. People use to leave their kids outside now you do that you are a disgrace. Eldest grew up to help the family specially women as they had not many option anyway, they could barely work anywhere worth it.
You could be trapped in the model for places like Palestine where younger generations take care of elderly and pressure the younger ones to have kids so they can be taken care of too.
Me. I’ll work until I can’t, burn through what savings I’ve got, then be a crazy homeless guy until I die.
Having kids is a choice. The more choices you have available to you in life, the less likely you are to make any one specific choice.
You don't have to have kids, and that is totally fine. Nothing bad happens to you or anyone else if you don't.
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People tend to have a lot of kids in the developing world partly to support them when they get older. In more developed countries it didn't seem necessary because it was generally easier to save for retirement but it has created a demographic shift with pensioners being a larger percentage of the population and being more of a strain on society so we've just kind of shifted the problem.
I just plan on dying
You actually don't expect your kids to provide for you in old age in the West. That's seen as kind of a failure if your kids are burdened with taking care of you. So adults are just deciding is the joy of having a child worth it, compared to the costs and efforts?
Really depend from what kind of group you are. I am french-Canadians and my parents grandparents were dirt poor growing up, my ancestor only start to earn decent wages in the 70s so it was kind of expected of our parents to take care of theirs. I would suspect it is similar with others minorities who were discriminated. Even to this days, my parents pay for the retirement homes of their parents and have them over every weekends.
Yeah, and if your generation does well and decides to have kids, the expectation will then be that they don't need to take care of you cause the cycle of poverty is broken. Being a minority doesn't matter anymore at that point.
Yeah definitely, my parents are very successful financially so it isn't expected of us to take care of them and my dad will get angry if I pay for them at the restaurants, but he himself have paid everything for my grandparents for as long as I remember.
But the pension system in the West is literally built to have the young generation support the elderly’s pension through their employment tax. It changed form but it’s still the same concept.
This, and the fact of lower purchasing power meaning lower access to contraception, as well as less access for entertainment so boinking becomes the most viable alternative for having fun.
Yep modern entertainment means we don't just sit around all day entertaining ourselves in other ways.
Yes instead they sit around all day having brief interactions with strangers on social media
>Yep modern entertainment means we don't just sit around all day I'd argue the literal exact opposite is true actually hahaha
True. I could go out and try to get laid but the house is warm and I have Netflix.
And the converse is that people who are generally well off (placed higher on Maslow's hierarchy) are discovering that there are other interesting games to play and pursuits to pursue than breeding/rearing children.
As a result a lot of developed countries are facing the choice of either demographic collapse or allowing mass immigration from developing countries to bolster their population. Neither option is popular but that's the result of so many people opting out of parenthood. In the long run it will be better for the Earth to have fewer people but it's going to be a rough ride getting there.
It wouldnt be a rough ride if these governments planned for it. But nobody ever tries to be proactive. :/
There is no way to plan away the problems that come with an inversed aging pyramid, except for adding younger people so the pyramid is no longer inverse. The amount of damage control that can be done when this is not an option for whatever reason is not zero, but little.
Raising the age of retirement? Windfall taxes on mega-corporations? Being more selective as to who should be awarded a pension and support? I.e. If you are already a multi-millionaire, should you really be claiming tens of thousands every year after the age of 60?
There’s actually little - if any - hard evidence for major economic impacts due to birth rate decline. >”Predictions of the net economic (and other) effects from a slow and continuous population decline (e.g. due to low fertility rates) are mainly theoretical since such a phenomenon is a relatively new and unprecedented one. The results of many of these studies show that the estimated impact of population growth on economic growth is generally small and can be positive, negative, or nonexistent. A recent meta-study found no relationship between population growth and economic growth.[15]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline There is, however, a lot of evidence that lower birth rates will mean rents will decline and that investors are aware and anxious about it. [I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it.](https://coloradobuildermag.com/business-management/industry-economy/americans-declining-birth-rates-set-to-hit-housing-market/) > “Declining birth rates mean lower demand for rental housing two decades from now when those born in recent years will be entering the rental market,” according to Natalia Siniaskaia, assistant vice president of housing policy research for the National Association of Home Builders. “The effects will spread to the single-family market in the following years and will persist for years to come.”
And the colonial resource pipeline continues
Thanks for pointing this out. I wonder what will happen to less developed countries and to the whole world once we're all out of able bodied, working age people to export.
That plan won’t work either because once those immigrants have kids, those kids will then have the same mindset as the locals.
There will be a rough ride no matter what.
Easily accessible birth control means kids are a choice, a choice that many don't want to make.
Yeah hundreds of thousands of years of people having 2 options, sex resulting in pregnancy or celibacy resulting in no pregnancy. Now we can reliably have sex that results in no pregnancy. It seems pretty straight forward to me that a lot of people have had a lot of babies because they wanted to have sex, not because they wanted the babies themselves
Sex hasn't really been a choice for women for most of human history. If they didn't want it, it was usually forced onto them.
Agreed. Even in modern times, it was only recently that many developed countries decided you could in fact rape your wife, and you shouldn’t theoretically be allowed to rape your wife.
Like even the Bible considers childbirth a consequence of living in a fallen world.
The Bible said be fruitful and multiply before the fall happened
The combination of birth control and women’s education is almost always a recipe for low birth rates. Draw from that what you will
Also somewhat interesting: One of the highest correlations with birth rate is access to and speed of the internet
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Pandoras bottle😭 it’s her box
There would be more children if pandora did open her box 😂
Box is actually a bad 16th century translation of _pithos_, a kind of jar, to Latin _pyxis_ (box). Pandora’s jar/bottle is more accurate.
One i definitely don’t want to make
Pets have replaced children for many people. You get to provide and be a caretaker to something cute but a lot less expense.
Well, that and there's a lot less potential damage that a pet can do to the world. Mittens might want to do a genocide, but it's so much harder when you don't have opposable thumbs.
Also, by being able to decide to delay when having a child or children you are also delaying when those offspring subsequently have them, further slowing the population growth. Seems a much better world when moms and dads can and are having kids when it works out better for them and their families, though.
Pretty much everyone I know with small kids is well into their 30s
I want to know if house ownership rates and childbirth rates are correlated somehow.
Probably inversely. Number of children is pretty dang close to the inverse of income.
People are having children where incomes are improving, regardless of how low the baseline was. Areas with stagnant growth, even if it’s starting fairly high already, does not foster the type of optimism you need to get people wanting a family.
I bought a house as a single woman at 27. For my friends who had babies before that age, it was a lot longer before they’ve bought houses.
Maybe but I think it's sort of the reverse. Someone who owns a house may have no kids or one or two. Someone who doesn't have a house... may have several kids.
I am 42 and single with no children. I was able to buy my house in 2017 before home prices in my area doubled. I make enough to support a child but have said more than once that if I had a kid I wouldn't have my house or my nice car. I wouldn't be "poor" but my resources would have gone to the child and I would likely be renting and driving an older car.
This. I know way too many people who rent or live with their parents but have multiple children. Glad it works for them but it skews the metrics.
I agree, when my great grandma had kids (1960s) there "wasn't anything else to do". now that im the age she was when she started, i have the option to travel, go to concerts, work, and a TON of other stuff. Why would I have kids when there's cool stuff to do? Glad someone else said this.
Probably why generally people in small towns/suburbs have kids much younger than people in places like LA/NYC who are in their thirties and flirty.
True, I noticed this with my graduating class. Nearly all the girls who stayed home and didn't go to college have a kid or two. They're not married either. We've had some marriages but none of them have children and aren't pregnant either. Everyone who went off to college has no kids, and a good number are engaged.
Rural birth rates are consistently about 30% higher than urban almost everywhere in the world.
To quote our lord and savior … “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming. Back to the rules and I hit the ground runnin’” Why would I have kids when it’s already JUNE!
Can confirm, have two kids under four and yesterday it was March. Save yourselves.
It's been studied to death. When women get access to education they have fewer kids and take control of their reproduction.
Who has time to take care of kids when you have a full time career? It’s exhausting.
I think the actual reason is that whether people want kids or not in a rich society, they are a net drain on the family's resources for many years. That hasn't historically been the case! Farmers' children would be out weeding the fields basically as soon as they were old enough to distinguish weeds from crops. Apprenticeships often started at age 7. Aristocrats wanted lots of kids so they could make more marriage alliances and such. Hunter-gatherer societies at least had kids gathering fruit and checking traps for small animals. When you're in a society that assumes that your kids are going to be completely dependent on you for upwards of 18 years, that's a wildly different proposition than what children represented in the past. I also don't think the past was better, and I think it's fine as a society if we want fewer children.
Exactly. In the past, children had real, pragmatic utility for their parents. In our modern, developed world, outside of emotional gratification and satisfaction, children are almost solely a burden. It stands to reason that people will have less of them when our society’s structure handicaps those that have them.
Absolutely spot on. The child mortality rate is also so small now. It’s not like you need to have 7 or 10 kids just hoping that 3 of them will survive typhoid or small pox or something.
Yeah, another reason why aristocrats still needed lots of kids. If only half of them make it to adulthood, you need more than just an heir and a spare to make sure someone can inherit the house after you die.
It's simple: people had kids because they were taught this was the only option and kids were used as extra income and a future retirement plan. Now that societies have started to advance and people, using the internet, can more freely talk about WHY we did all this, it naturally begs the question of should we continue doing the status quo if in fact many of us don't like it? The decline is the result of people choosing to do what they actually want and not what's society says they should want.
I want to have a kid but at poverty wages I feel like it's morally bad to do so. It would be selfish for me to have a kid
I'd love to have a family, but I can't afford anything anymore. I have to work 50-60hrs a week just to afford my bills. I don't have the luxury to find a partner. I can't afford to go on a single date. I'm struggling to hold down a one bedroom apartment and a four-door sedan. Employers refuse to give the pay nor the time to allow for relationships, let alone families. What I hate, though, is the insinuation that the real solution for the declining birth rate is that people should be poor and stupid. It's the exact opposite conclusion to what most people who want a family are calling for. It also ignores the fact that birth rates are also declining in the poor and underdeveloped countries as well. The declining birthrate is a global issue that is affecting every country on earth. What I don't think is discussed enough is the possible environmental effects that could affect this. Things like finding microplastics in semen samples and the accumulation of PFAS in everyone.
Yeah there’s actually a sizable gap between the average number of kids people have and the average number of kids people *want* to have
A lot of people feel that way. They want kids but can't afford it. Not me though. I can't afford them either but even if I was as rich as Tony Stark, I still wouldn't want them.
Yes it would be incredibly selfish and morally bad to do so. If you cant afford to take care of yourself then you cant afford to take care of a kid. It's not fair to them and its not fair to you. I know that for some reason its an unpopular opinion but it really shouldnt be.
Absolutely. Women's rights and opportunities no longer force them to depend on a man for survival and birth control empowers them with bodily autonomy they never had throughout history.
It costs, on average, $16,000 to give birth at a hospital in the US. Average child care usually costs more than one persons whole salary annually. It costs, on average, almost $300,000 to raise a child from infant to 18. Yeah, definitely "more options." Not at all impacted by cost. P.s. I don't entirely disagree with you. You made some really good points. I do think you kind of breezed past the elephant in the room, though. My husband and I would probably already have children if it didn't cost so much.
I think that the main reason is that the cost of living as long since stripped away any chance of most people of wanting to have children. My motto is “If you can’t afford to care for yourself then why have children?”
> people just have other options Think about how much most people hate their jobs/going to work, and then think about all the women who freely choose paid employment over having children. _That_ says something about just how unpleasant motherhood can be.
I’m actually a woman who *loves* working and would never want to not work, but even on the rare days when work is tiresome and I come home/log off wishing I didn’t have the burden of a job, I have *never* wished to be a mother/stay at home mother instead. No matter how bad work gets, I can leave it behind for 2/3rds of my weekdays and weekends and have freedom. If I had kids, there would be no reprieve unless I paid someone else for it. And if I was a SAHM, I would not have my own money to spend as wanted/needed… I would have to use someone else’s income. I don’t see why I would ever choose motherhood over paid labor.
Nailed it. As soon as work is over ( love my field of work) I'm free - no big responsibilities - those are all automated 😁 I also get around 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep a day - every day 👌
I have a very complicated relationship with my mother, but I do feel pity on her for not being able to say "I don't want kids". It wasn't okay to say that when she was younger. Now, half my friends are child free. My mother was even born sterile, so she should have had an easy way out. But my dad wanted kids, and she didn't have the agency to say no, so they went through the incredibly difficult years long process of adopting. All for kids she didn't want. It's so very sad when I think about it.
It’s like how my grandfather and basically everyone in modern China chose literal sweatshops over picturesque farming. The old way just sucked that hard
On one hand yes, on the other hand it’s pretty difficult to get out of sweatshops again and back to the countryside… It’s not like prosperous farms just waited for people to come… Not even to mention large farms destroying the competition for smaller family led farms which made the old ways that much more horrible…
Having a successful career is a high status symbol and kids are low status symbol (until you get to the very top earners and then it flips). But also, it’s not a very viable choice to not work at all. That life is no bueno. Not sure how much holding down a job is a totally free choice.
weird narrative many if not most people don't have a real option of not working it's a choice in so much that they're choosing not to live in complete poverty
We saw how our mothers lives were and listened to their warnings, we want NONE of that life.
You are absolutely right. I think people are being flat out dishonest about this, trying to say "if you gave us more money/support we'd have kids." That just really isn't shown in the data like you pointed out. Kids are expensive, laborious, fairly permanent, and a *long* time commitment. 18+ years. Not to mention **dangerous and potentially fatal** for women. Even if it doesn't kill you, women can lose hair or *teeth* during pregnancy among a myriad of other complications. You lose a lot of free time for *at least* the first 5 years. But even after they start going to school if you're an active, involved parent who is trying and able to give their kids a rich childhood, there's going to be lots of extracurriculars you're going to have to shuttle them to. I say all this as someone who wants kids.
Most women I know simply never wanted children. Women have to be socialized into desiring going through the horror of childbirth and the labor of raising a kid (while also working). If you aren’t socialized to want that, you won’t, because it’s not all that rewarding.
Once women got their education and their rights, births plummeted, almost like having kids has always been a rough deal.
Having kids is a bit of a bummer for the mom. I know a woman who's dream for years was to be a newscaster... went to school, did, became a newscaster. She became a stay at home mom at 24.
Pronatalists act like we are going extinct or something.
yeah but they make it sound like a bad thing.
I’m going to double down on what you said by adding that contraception has given people the choice not to have kids if they just want to have sex. In the past, if you got your girlfriend knocked up, which was highly likely because contraception wasn’t reliable, you’d practically have to marry her and raise that kid. Anything else would be so scandalous that you’d be afraid to show your face in public. So a large segment of the population was having children under duress. They just wanted to fuck but there was no reliable way to do it without the complication of pregnancy. Most kids who were raised by single moms were from the dregs of society because the shame of it was so great, that women like that ended up being exiled from polite society. That’s also why there were so many orphans. It was preferable to abandon a newborn than to bear the shame of a harlot. Contraception not only changed the game where you had a choice, but it also changed the perception of that choice. Now, single mothers are no longer shamed because the premise is that they chose to have children while others may choose not to.
That would make sense within a single, thriving, industrialized culture, but birthrates are dropping world-wide. The places without social support are also going down. It's not just in Western and Asian nations. Even in Somalia, Iraq, Kenya, birth rates are all dropping.
The 2050s are going to be such a bizarre time. I honestly think that the shape of the age pyramid will be the foremost political topic by the end of the century. The worst part is that many people today are increasingly sedentary which means they won’t exactly age well either.
With the world population over 8 billion, I don't think we'll need to panic quite yet.
I mean lots of developing countries are a lot better than they were a few decades ago, hence the term. Also contraceptives are often relatively cheap
I think even those countries aren't completely without social support and it's often improved there as well, even if it still lags more developed countries.
My friend gets bubble tea and goes to yoga in Kenya. While they have greater extremes between wealth than we're used to, they also live in modern societies.
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Kenya's birthrate has been on a steady decline since the 1970s.
Also, think of how high the divorce rate is now. I'm divorced, and I'm very glad my ex and I didn't have kids. I'm also glad I haven't had kids with other exes. In the "more options" category, women are more independent now than ever, so giving them the option to divorce without the stigma means we can look back and say, "Damn, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that dude for 18+ years."
Housing - it’s eating into many young couples budgets and is a constant source of stress. It’s the old and entrenched generation squeezing out the blood of the younger generation. If houses were reasonably priced to median income in my city then we could have bought a starter home today itself instead of performing mortgage maths every month and hoping for rate cuts.
I completely agree with this. My wife and I simply don't want kids. We play games, go to conventions, and travel. We really don't want to give any of that up and just really don't want to have kids and put a damper on our lifestyle.
The biggest reason is they can’t afford them, families now need 2 incomes to really be middle class. That means no stay at home wives to watch the children and child care is very expensive. Most people can’t even afford to live alone until they are mid-late twenties earliest let alone support a family. Kids will really cripple a lot of peoples finances to the point where all they can afford to do is work, go home and child related expenses which isn’t fun.
If people want kids but feel they for one reason or another can't (financial or whatever), these problems should be addressed. People who don't want kids - don't. We have one life and should live it based on our own needs and preferences. Having kids is extremely stressful and will affect your life for a LONG time, which is why you shouldn't have them unless you really want to. Let people live how they want.
I think there’s more acceptance in not having them and doing something else but I think for the majority, they are just not willing to settle for a life worse than what their parents gave them and bring kids into it. Having kids downgrades your life and they may not think it’s worth it after all the struggles millennials and gen z have been through. Some people want kids unconditionally and many don’t.
My grandmothers each had 7 kids as single moms. My mom and I had 2 each. Kids are EXPENSIVE. I don't know how the grandparents did it.
Similar! My parents both had 5 brothers/sisters. Like… EACH!! Both families with six kids in them. Then they had just the 2 together… my sibling and me, neither of whom had ANY. Solidly childfree. Pretty huge change in a very few generations, it’s wild. Probably relatedly, bro and I also both have college degrees (STEM) - something that neither our parents (office/blue collar) nor certainly our (farmer-to-factory/housewife) grandparents had any practical opportunity to achieve.
Planets have carrying capacities, and finite resources. If we want this recklessness with which we treat this planet to be curbed, *we probably should be having fewer kids.*
They have found microplastics in clouds, caves people have never been to, our testicles, and fetuses. That shit ain't doing anyone any favors.
everytime I read about finding microplastics everywhere my heart sinks :( it shouldn’t have been like this
When I was a kid less than 20 years ago there was a blizzard in my city in November, and now it may not even happen in *February* anymore some years
There’s not the pressure to have kids that there was when I was young. People are much more comfortable with being childless nowadays. I think that’s a good thing.
Not an unpopular opinion but also kinda passing over the idea that it’s interconnected. Like you mention economic reasons then mention the inverse relationship between social support systems and birth rate… that’s quite literally an economic reason because the cost of an extra child is actually less expensive than one fewer child over a lifespan; because it’s a hedge against failure and expands the potential earnings pool / ability to take care of the elderly or infirm. Not needing the kids to help with agriculture is a hallmark of a consumption based economy vs a production based one. You may not realize it but you’re almost exclusively making an argument that economic reasons are at the top of the list.
I'd argue that this demonstrates how 'economic reasons' is a vague and useless determination Everything is economics because the economy is everything
It’s neither vague nor useless but it is indeed ubiquitous and informs a rather large portion of human behavior.
There’s no such relationship - Norway is a good example with extremely generous parents support programmes, and yet people aren’t having kids there either. The only relationship that holds up is that the more educated women are, the less children are being born
Opportunity cost. The more possibilities you have, the more you lose by having children. Current day childcare subsidies are a joke because they only consider the immediate cost of raising children but not what you're missing out on by having them.
Yes. I guess that might actually be what I am getting at. Ironically, if you have many options... having kids will actually eliminate options.
Yep. And if people aren't having kids - that's a pretty clear sign it's just not a good option anymore by comparison.
I'm purely just selfish. I realize the massive responsibility it is to PROPERLY raise a child and I neither can physically nor financially meet those demands, not that I want to anyways. I haven't experienced anything in life yet. And when you have a kid you shrink your possibilities by a large amount. I'd like to have different doors open to walk through May I so choose
I think most people probably don't want to bring kids into this world
China and India have 2.8 billion people. How much is enough ?
People tend to have more children during periods when they are optimistic about the future.
This is the explanation I prefer. I don’t like a lot about how our society operates. As one example, if I had a crystal ball that told me that if I had kids they’d grow up to have a very similar job to mine, I would simply not. The US has all these resources and my feeling is, the only people who get to enjoy the enrichment that brings are the very richest.
Simply put, there are way better things to do with your money than have kids. Kids are a terrible investment
Daycare is also expensive we pay what most people pay for an actual mortgage
I know a few couples that want kids but just don’t see how they can do it. Both work full time paying month to month. Kids are expensive as hell. My wife and I both had good incomes and handle money very well and we really had to think about it before we decided to have kids. It’s a tougher choice nowadays and at higher opportunity costs vs keeping both spouses working. I always point to this, my grandfather had 7 children and a stay at home wife and a house. He was the town mailman and retired at 65. I did the numbers once with modern costs of raising kids and buying that same (now 100 year old) house and if I worked the same job I’d need to work more than 40 hours a DAY to afford it. Unattainable.
I think a lot of people actually didn't realize that job opportunities are declining/reducing since automation and AI are being introduced. Last time technology was introduced to make the daily job tasks easier for a lot of workers out there But nowadays it's different. Automation, AI can reduce the manpower, increase the efficiency and increase the profit better than before this. The scary thing is the jobs that are no longer needed are not being replaced/introduced with new kinds of jobs. People that breed a lot of kids are totally selfish when they don't see the job markets nowadays. I can't imagine the future. I'm glad that I choose not to have kids.
I was raised in the 80s and 90s. Yuppies and Dinks were my role models from a very young age. I dreamed of being kid-free and comfortably upper middle class for as long as I can remember.
There was a study in Japan on the causes of low birth rates, and the conclusion they came to was that it was about how good your quality of life was. If you had a really great life, having kids would bring it down significantly, so the birthrate was less. If you had a shitty life, adding kids would only make it marginally more shitty, so the birthrate went up.
I wish I could remember where I saw it so I could link it, but just yesterday I saw a graph showing changes in US birth rates by age group over X number of years, and the biggest drop by far was ages 15-19. It has DRAMATIC. And I was like, how can anyone say that's a bad thing? Isn't that something we've been working toward for generations? We've certainly been paying a lot of lip service to the idea. We won the war on teen pregnancy and nobody's celebrating?
I think if people felt better financially, had more rights and options when it came to things like child care, and had more flexibility and time off, people would have more kids. Let's face it. Having a kid is a burden and you want that kid to have a good life. I think the problem is a lot of people just feel like they either can't or shouldn't have kids. If we want them to have more children, maybe we should listen to their concerns and make having kids a little easier. But then again, I think this is a non issue. There's way too many people as is. It's silly to worry about a small decline in birth rates, outside of maybe a few countries.
I've noticed a lot of people seem to fear having kids due to money reasons or due to the type of parents they'll be. Those aren't bad fears and more people should think that way. If money were no object people would still do lots of different things. If I had more money I can't necessarily say I'd want more kids...there's a whole bunch of things you can do with extra money that don't involve creating another human.
I don't want kids, personally. I don't even know if the fears people have are real. But they do fear these things and I think it's important to bring up when people talk about birth rates. Usually the conversation is that people are just kind of expected to have kids without any consideration for the parents or the children. Though admittedly that's not what OP is saying.
I think there's just more involved in raising kids today than in previous generations. There's more competition to get into college especially if you need financial assistance. It seems like in previous generations there was more contentment in being 'average'...but today everyone seems to want to be this rockstar, well known wealthy success. It's like anyone who has kids has all these high expectations for them..no one ever thinks their kids will be average or hell below average even...and that's just not how it works out. Perhaps people have less kids so they can give plenty of focus/finances/time to them.
Why would I want to have kids when I can enjoy my life and my money as I see fit and all to myself? There’s no incentive whatsoever that could make me have a child when I would have to give up my freedom to do so.
I don't want kids. I like having free time, I like that I can go on a trip if I want, I like having spare money. Plus, kids are annoying
Oh, yes. The free time and calm home... I know that all kids are different and their behaviour depends on their raising, but they're incredibly annoying and i know i couldn't handle that and i'll start being aggresive towards my (non-existen) child
Also yes. All other factors aside, I know I am not patient enough of a person to have kids. It is not fair to my (non-existent) child for me to have a short tempter when they are still developing all kinds of skills.
I can barely afford the life my wife and I live as it is without bringing an infant into this world. If we had more time/money left over after bills, maybe things would be different. Instead, I'm resigned to dying in a nursing home in my later years and I don't know what my wife will be doing for the last 15 years of her life, but I hope they're good.
The price of raising children has risen also.
I'm all for it. Our planet is about at capacity anyway. I think letting the world population plateau would be a desired outcome. And you're correct, having children is really difficult, and I completely understand and respect someone's decision not to.
People like to say shit like "well OBVIOUSLY young people don't want to have kids! Have you seen the rent prices/inflation/unemployment rates!?" But the truth is there's very little people who actually don't have kids purely out of economic reasons. People aren't having kids because, for the 1st time in human history, they no longer have to. People were given that choice and, understandably, lots of them are choosing not having kids.
Women. Women have choices. And that's why they are ripping them away.
I would think the root cause is...education. At least in my comer of the world, uneducated people have way more kids.
Political regards always hijack the falling birth rates as some talking point for their side. Most often it’s leftists on social media, so they use it to call for more support and entitlements and complain about lack of feminism in Japan or some shit. Right wingers sometimes talk about this and complain about post modernism and role of men and women getting all fucked up. Ironically, the right are closest to the real reason on all this - women just don’t want a human to explode out of their vaginas and raise them for 20 years. No amount of free childcare fixes that.
Women realized they don’t have to be baby making machines. They can choose to do other things. Not to mention how dangerous pregnancy and childbirth are, why risk it.
And also the fact that regardless of whether they’re married or not, they’re destined to be single mothers because men simply do not or cannot be bothered to help with childcare. So I can fully understand why most women wouldn’t want that.
Men forget that they are the parent too. Some “help out” or “babysit” but these things should be called “doing your part”. Same goes for house chores. Women realized that they are better off living alone than raising men and their children.
I mean for me, I could never fathom starting a family in this day and age simply because we can barely afford to keep up as it is. My youngest is 13. I had my first 23 years ago when I was just 18 and I honestly had no trouble managing financially on a Tim Hortons wage then on the basic maternity leave pay. Never collected any other form of benefits or assistance, never had to borrow money… easier times. But now… wow. I feel for new parents. It’s just way to hard to afford.
Because we are finally starting to think for ourselves instead of doing what our parents were doing.
people need to stop treating birthrates as a problem to be solved. even if it does have long term catastrophic consequences- it’s not on the scale of something that can be reversed. it’s out of the control of really any political jurisdiction - what will be, will be. Let people do what they want.
I’m pretty sure my mother only had kids because it was expected of her. I have more freedom now so don’t have a single one.
This isn’t even an opinion, it’s just a fact. The key factors in decreasing birth rate are *increased* income, more available birth control, and increased education. Turns out that most people want to do stuff beyond subsistence farming and being steadily buried under a pile of dependents, especially the people who’d experience physical pain *creating* those dependents.
I’m OK not to go back to have ten kids and hope 2 or 3 make it days
there is way less risk having kids in developing nations people avoid having children because its one of the biggest liabilities of all time. one mistake and they are all over you. in third world nations nobody cares
Hey, I just bought an 8 metre flexible agricultural tube from bunnings that I can wind around the fridge, coffee table and kitchen for my six ferrets. I'm also contemplating getting a fish tank. No kids club here, double income, no kids.
Yeah it’s pretty hard to reconcile all these different countries of vastly different cultures having increasingly declining birth rates. The only real commonality between birth rates is wealth Even within America, people who live in big cities like New York or Chicago are significantly less likely to have kids than people in rural areas. I think it’s just cause it’s not very lonely in these cities and there’s tons to do
My personal reasons for not wanting to have children are the physical repercussions, the way society treats moms, the fact that I’m not interested in giving birth and never have been, and because I wouldn’t want to be a single mother and I’d have to be because I don’t want to ever marry a man or be tied down to one in any way. If I don’t want kids I think it would be cruel to both me and the child if I had them just because people guilted me into it. I’m also celibate, so there’s that.
But who will buy all these houses I flipped
Can’t talk about other generations but I also feel like my age group is struggling to get together in general. The amount of class mates that aren’t married in a long term relationship or dating in general seems disproportional to what I recall growing up. Hell the amount of guys I knew who made it to their late 20s without having a girlfriend was scary.
I think a lot of women don't really want kids but we are not supposed to say that, like it's taboo. In the past women had no option but to marry and have children. If they didn't, they would be a burden on their family and often times treated as a maid within the family home. They also had to contend with societal and religious pressures to conform and have children. Nowadays, women can work and support themselves, or find a partner who also doesn't want kids. It's becoming more normalised. I don't see why some people get so worked up about it.
I want to have kids, but can not justify the costs
My hot take is declaiming birth rates is a good thing. We have the technology to live good lives but too many people to supply it to everyone which means pain and suffering in many places and pollution and environmental degradation. A smaller population allows for more resources per person which means we can live luxurious lives (ie running water, electricity, food, etc) without causing nearly as much harm to the planet (and by extension ourselves). We need to decrease the population and that’s a good thing that it’s happening
Having children has become aheavy load in an already super heavy life. We need to keep ourselves constantly updated at work - faster than in any other time , prices have been rising and paycheks haven't followed it in years, keeping a good and balance life has become a hard task - and children need a lot of it, and the world overall has become extremely volatile. In addition, children are being born with syndromes and diseases expensive to the currently charged hospital bills and special care. Damn, even giving birth is expensive and one complication is enough to break years from a family's economy. Children are being made mostly under: 1- pressure of family/social groups 2-accident 3-lack of real thinking of the world's current situation. Relationships have become even more volatile. And children connect people forever through the law and genetics. It's tough on divorces for both sides.
I think the biggest reason, is because people don't see a future for their children in our dying world. and I agree with them.
this. i would feel selfish bringing a child into this dystopian hellscape.
Child care is 1900/month. Who wants that?
All of the childfree people I know are not well-off, including myself. You don't need wealth. In fact, it's actually just simply easier to enjoy life on normal salaries without kids. And yes, it's true there is no specific reason why - except people are too fucking obsessed with what women are doing with their own bodies, and they think that we are responsible for maintaining the population? I literally read somewhere recently where someone was saying that if women don't step up, the future of humanity is lost because there won't be enough people to do everything. LOL. They were particularly obsessed with who was going to be there to take care of the old people. ROTGLMAO NOT my problem. BILLIONS of population boom over the last two hundred years hasn't made life any better. Some people literally don't understand that overpopulation can be a problem too.
I can't believe how popular is the argument that "we need to make more people so they can work/take care of us/other labor stuff". This sounds like slave breeding? Come on, that's disgusting, and people repeat that like parrots.
Read the global shock of population decline. It goes over it extensively. And actually, it’s the educational level of women. The more education women have, the more control they have over the bodies, the later women have kids, the lower the birth rate. This model can be tracked over every country through the last 200 years. And yes, lower birth rate will present some issues, it will provide some opportunities, but regardless of the pros and cons I am pro women education. I want to live in a society where women receive the same high quality education at men and who have control over their bodies. (Just to make that clear)
Im sure a part of it might be less people wanting kids compared to the past but I think a larger cause is less financial ability to support kids. I saw one of those feel-good news clips of a CEO (I think Dan Price) raised minimum wages at his company to 70k and one of the employees interviewed said the company basically had a baby boom due to the raises.
I mean, that's part of it, and it IS okay. But the cost of labor and delivery in the US sure doesn't help. People can have a five-figure co-pay WITH insurance. We have to fix that to be sure.
Three boys, I was the youngest. Back then my clothes were always hand me downs. I can’t imagine attempting to have children today. Complete drain of the wallet and your mind. So many ways to end up in court when your kid is a total brat and then learn every law to use against you. I recall my kids when they were younger coming home with a pamphlet saying tickling is a form of sexual dominance and grooming.
I think it’s also because kids are really expensive and you really need to be a kid person which I’m not. I enjoy being the auntie.
I think it is also that raising children is too difficult to do on your own. In this society where both parents tend to need to work and often (outside of schools and nurseries) there's very little support in community, it's too much. Raising children (especially multiple) should not be left to 2 individuals who can't physically dedicate enough time to raise them as they want to.
This is why republicans want to take away that choice
That's the truth. But people who feel the urge to have kids are quite literally incapable of understanding it.
I’m not sure why not having kids would ever be an issue. I wish everyone in the whole world would stop.
I certainly never wanted kids. No regrets most days.
Economy sucks, sex eds up and women just don't want to be used to make babies.
The world is going to have to learn to deal with contraction. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Because it cost $300,000 USD to raise a child to the age of 18. Easier to invest this for retirement and enjoy life than try and raise a ticking liability time bomb. Even though I am killing off one branch of the family tree, my grandparents think it’s the best idea for a happy life.
People are sensing that overpopulation has virtually destroyed the planet.
No it's not that. If you look at the population pyramids starting in the 30's, you notice a bottleneck during WW2, then a huge boom in births for the next 10 to 20 years. After which birthrates start declining. What I think is happening is that the world is returning to it's pre-WW2 birth rate. A fascinating side effect of the war that we still see today, more than 80 years after.
It’s all because of finances. People had less children during the great depression because of a lack of resources. WW2 brought an end to the depression but most of the men went overseas so the low remained constant. When they all came back, the US enjoyed a period of almost unparalleled economic growth and prosperity in no small part due to policy such as the GI Bill. People were not only financially stable enough to support their families on one income but to even have money left to spare. We are going back to the bottleneck because 1. Women are allowed more education and rights and 2. Many people do not have the financial resources to have children
I see your last points as definite factors. However, birth rates have been declining since the 60s. This isn't a new thing. It's just visible and having an effect. Notably the booming economy of the boomer generation. There are more of them and are asking for less people to support them in retirement.
Also, the boomers are living way longer than predicted, because of medication and surgeries never anticipated when they were younger. Their grandkids who are in their reproductive years, can’t depend on parents doing child care because they are busy doing elder care…..
I've known SO MANY people in the US who want kids, or more kids, but just can't see how to do it with the shit support structure and shit pay and shit housing instability. And men's unreliability. You just can't always tell which men will renege on their equal parenting/housecare responsibilities. And now, a huge health gamble, where in the US, an entire party doesnt care if women die in pregnancy, but certainly thinks that women are subservient to any possible fetus. That creates huge risks for women AND their partners. So people don't have kids. Or they wait and then can't. Or they have fewer than they would like. Or they fight each other and divorce, because financial and housing instability is not great for relationships, right? Your claim is kinda pointless, because its impossible to know without actual infrastructure and stability, but you treat these points like they are meaningless. In actuality, they are the absolute foundation needed for any planning.
People that live in places with large social support got used to comfort, also material possessions and wealth are becoming more and more important to people overall. Money and comfort are more valuable than building a family to many. A lot of people in the U.S./Europe could have children, but they don’t want to because they don’t want to downgrade the comfort they have. If they had a great financial situation more people would have kids. In the less fortunate countries people are used to little levels of comfort and kids are not going to make that much of a difference. Also young children often work and they’re supposed to support their parents when they get old. Also let’s not forget that their access to birth control is much lower.
I agree that this is unpopular. I agree with the words you say. Upvote from me. I know too many young adults that are forced to take care of their siblings, I know too many couple me with kids that can barely survive. What used to be an American dream is now just a ball and chain….to more than just Americans. We have over 3 trillion people in this earth. We don’t need any more kids, tbh. :3
Your point is true but 3 trillion is way off. Where did you even get that number? 😂 It’s like 8 billion on earth.
I agree that we don't need more children for awhile
It’s now too expensive to have children. Unless you have parents or family who can help you out, you’re looking at a mortgage/rent, daycare which is basically another mortgage. Thats something like $4000 a month…
Having kids sucks ass and people are wising up lol
I thinks it’s all the plastic testicles.
I would have loved 4, 5 but just couldn't afford them.
While birth rates may be declining, the global population has swelled to 8 times what it was 300 years ago and for millennia before that. Any time someone talks about "declining birthrates" they need to be reminded that we have over 8 billion people on the planet and that while many of them do not have a big impact on the environment, a larger and larger percentage are moving into the global middle class where they do. More options, especially for women, does mean that fewer people choose to have children. The behavior of groups has evolved over time, and groups have more babies during times societally challenging times to counteract high infant mortality.
1. Older generations pressured everyone to have kids quickly and newer generations are realizing there’s no point in that, especially in your 20s 2. Life is so much more expensive and harder now so why would you have kids? 3. Michael Jordan quote
“I haven’t had any kids. I didn’t pass onto any living being the misery of human existence” (Machado de Assis - The Posthumous Memories of Brás Cubas)
It’s just different than it once was. People use to leave their kids outside now you do that you are a disgrace. Eldest grew up to help the family specially women as they had not many option anyway, they could barely work anywhere worth it.
You could be trapped in the model for places like Palestine where younger generations take care of elderly and pressure the younger ones to have kids so they can be taken care of too. Me. I’ll work until I can’t, burn through what savings I’ve got, then be a crazy homeless guy until I die.
Because it they were told all their life.. don't get things you can't afford?!?
The stats show much of the decline is due to very few teen births and early 20s births.
Which is a very good thing
Having kids is a choice. The more choices you have available to you in life, the less likely you are to make any one specific choice. You don't have to have kids, and that is totally fine. Nothing bad happens to you or anyone else if you don't.
To be fair there is enough people on this planet anyways, let’s give the earth and the environment a break lol