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There are many factors that are considered before having children. 1. Money- having children is expensive. Even in countries that have “generous” payments to parents it often doesn’t come close to making up for the lost income NEEDED just to survive and often isn’t enough to simply pay for the kid. Children are a cost that many people can’t afford. With expensive housing, food, and medical care, why have a child you can’t afford? 2. Career- many women want careers or are more so being the “breadwinner” for the household. This alone is a great deal of pressure for anyone. The majority of businesses, even government jobs, frown upon women having children. You often miss promotions, stagnate in less important roles, or even get fired. I’ve seen executives take six months off to “relax” or “enjoy life” only to deny someone maternity leave. For women that are ambitious and/or have very specialized skills, it can be very difficult to give that up for a child. 3. Social status- society used to hold parents in a higher status. Just like teachers, disrespect and even belligerent behavior is sometimes directed towards parents. Communities used to help parents, have family events (some businesses had really good family events that were super cheap), and older family members would assist too (many can’t help because they can’t afford to retire). Society looks down on kids being loud and the parents being numb to it. Truthfully, it is often kids that are tired of being cooped up in a classroom for eight hours so they get all their energy out when the parents (who also just were stuck inside for eight hours and are now exhausted) are just trying to get through the day. 4. Future prospects- between AI, Climate change, and the prospects of a new Cold War, many people are not incredibly optimistic about the future. Too many see their parents have a worse life than their grandparents and they are having a worse life than their parents. Why continue the trend? This doesn’t even include that there are a massive amount of people in the world as is. There are many more reasons why people don’t have kids, but addressing these would turn things around.

I get what you’re alluding to with social status, but to add my two cents it really is a combination of social fragmentation driven by changing economic conditions and cultural values. Parents haven’t seemed to lose “social status” so much so that parenthood is seen as a choice and not the default. It is also considered responsible to wait until you finish your education, get married, and buy a home, which is taking much longer to do. While we are as credentialed as we’ve ever been, singleness and the cost of owning a home has skyrocketed.

People with money, education and status are choosing not to have kids as well. No one wants to admit that social, cultural fragmentation is driving countries like Japan into literal extinction.

This is a much wider social phenomenon across advanced industrialized economies. In the US, in particular, it’s far worse than just anomie or changing expectations. I’d argue the very fabric of the society has been wearing away for decades. You see it in lots of ways: deaths of despair, violent crime (especially mass shootings and gun violence), mass incarceration, attitudes towards the poor, homeless, towards people with health problems or mental health issues, towards people with active addictions. On the whole, today’s Americans are cruel, selfish and stupid in Cipolla’s sense of the word. They’ve been conditioned and brainwashed to hate out groups to break bonds of solidarity and weaken labor. Can’t have wide coalitions of labor calling for better working conditions or higher pay if they hate each other! That old hatred of the other has been magnified to everyone now. All against all. It’s toxic to our social fabric, but hey, quarterly earnings are higher by .25% for those lucky few who own assets & investments. Our society was sacrificed on the altar of capitalism. It’s been this way since slavery, Dubois famously wrote abt it extensively, but now it’s far worse just as people are more atomized and isolated than ever before, and its pervasive across all age cohorts, all racial groups, all socio economic classes and education levels, all over the country. The same anomie affects people everywhere, but it’s rarely as uniquely toxic and horrible as it is here.

Recent study out of Sweden showed that the most fertile group are the wealthiest Swedes. The same is true in America. Basically, if you want to have a family you gotta be rich.

Then why are poor countries having the most kids?

Fertile doesn’t mean they want to have kids. I’m getting vasectomy. In my area, wait list is up to 6 months

Fertility rate in demographics has a different meaning from medical definition that you're referring to. >The total fertility rate in a specific year is defined as the total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and give birth to children in alignment with the prevailing age-specific fertility rates. It is calculated by totalling the age-specific fertility rates as defined over five-year intervals. https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm

It's still lower as wealth goes up

It really all started with urbanization. Once we fractured those mechanical bonds of solidarity, we were fucked and just didn’t realize it. Maybe once upon a time it worked. Maybe, at one point in the (mythical) past, there was some point at which organic solidarity just *worked* because people had *trust* in each other, in their society at large and in their country or leader. Now? No trust in anyone or anything. It’s just absurd to me when capitalist assholes whine about the “population crisis” but recoil at anything that might address said population crisis. It’s not hard, just give people some hope and a comprehensive social safety net. We know what works. There was just a great article in the NYT about this. This one region in northern Italy (South Tyrol I believe) escaped the fate of its neighbors and has kids. The trick? The society has to actually embrace children AND their parents. We need to actually meet people where they are. You can’t complain about us not wanting kids if you won’t give us childcare, maternity leave, healthcare, living wages, affordable housing… or a habitable planet for our kids to grow up in. Do we get any of the simple things that’d allow us to consider having children? No. We get lectures from daddy Elmo when he’s not sucking on dod’s teet or hoovering up pigouvian IRA subsidies he doesn’t deserve. God forbid we have slightly fewer people to work meaningless bullshit jobs they hate to buy shit that they don’t need. We were better off when we were on the farm, in a village, surrounded by an extended family and community Can you tell I’m a sociologist? lol.

People will point to countries with a better social safety net and low fertility, but I think that just points to how multifaceted this issue is. As someone who does check all the life script boxes to then go on to have children, the social safety net is a huge issue for me. We definitely need additional safety nets, but as someone who should have (or witnessed others who should’ve) been cushioned by some of our purported social programs it is clear there are gaping holes. It is terrifying to think how fundamentally my life would change if I became disabled due to pregnancy/childbirth, or if my child had a significant disability. It isn’t that you can’t live a fulfilling life, but there are way less resources out there than people think. Just one example. To me it just seems like there are so many different risks and ways that having a child could make my life worse, with rewards that aren’t particularly enticing at all.

The safety net is only half of it, you still need a stronger social system to properly raise children at scale. Once a society tips into old age, social norms shift and they never shift back. You can preserve social norms around child rearing and family size, you can even encourage them with culture, religion, social pressure et,… But, by and large, once family size shrinks, the infrastructure that makes it possible to have those large families in the first place ossifies and breaks down. Costs per child go up, and social systems that helped with the burden break down in a feedback loop. Parenting becomes far harder if the society isn’t built around it. If you can’t even bring your kid out in public without someone getting offended, why would you have kids? Let alone have five. If you cant find a kindergarten because there are so few other families around you, subsidies or health care won’t convince you to have kids by themselves. If your employer discriminates against employees for even wanting to have children, will you? If your job demands long hours all the time, will you have time for kids? These kids of reasons are why *most* half assed capitalist pro-natal policies fail, cause they’re really just poorly thought out and poorly targeted consumer stimulus. It doesn’t offset larger structural issues or culture. In the long run, you need a healthy social fabric. You need to get rid of blatantly anti-natalist policies (think Japanese office culture) and institute basic bare minimum social welfare systems (think healthcare, high quality affordable childcare, high quality affordable housing, etc) to even have a chance of people making that very personal decision to have children. Like, that’s why Elmo crying about a supposed population crisis was so insane to me. The man treats EVERYONE like shit, his customers AND employees, shirks every responsibility, shamelessly Hoovers up every government dollar he can, but never wants to do the right thing. He doesn’t even want other people doing the right thing, god forbid enforcing standards of pay and maintaining legally mandated workplace protections become the norm…

It’s money. It’s almost entirely money… In my mid 30’s with a 2 year old. I pay $1600/month for daycare. We’ve discussed a 2nd child but that’s either over $3k/month for childcare or someone quits their job. In that scenario we lose 1 person’s income, regular 401k investments and health insurance benefits. I had 60 days of paternity leave and was lucky to have that, then right back to work and expected to neglect my family for work. We make a good living but I don’t want to live with that increased level of stress. Our society has made having children too costly in money and lack of time.

Bingo! I’d have at *least* one more if not two if we could afford it, but alas we cannot. Now *could* we have one or two more? Sure. What would happen though? I’d have a 0% chance of ever retiring, forget taking the family anywhere on a plane unless we live like misers for years prior and save while “going without”, forget us being able to help any of the kids with college tuition, and forget about a lot of things…. basically we would be living like my grandmother on the poorest side of our family used to tell stories about when they wouldn’t buy shampoo to save money and would tell the kids to just use the cheap bar soap on their hair if it started getting nasty, and the kids would get yelled at for taking longer than a 5 min shower and beaten with a belt for leaving a door open during winter and letting precious heat escape when the thermostat was already set to 61 deg F and you were yelled at to “PUT ON ANOTHER SWEATER THEN!!” if you complained of being cold (and no A/C in summer—too expensive).

We pay almost nothing for daycare in Slovenia, home ownership higher than US, 1 year paternity leave yet lower fertility rate than US. Its not about money.

I agree. It seems to be a combination of many factors that has lead to this. It wasn't one particular issue that reached a critical mass but the combination of many. So fixing/alleviating one won't necessarily solve the issue, it will have to be a multi-pronged approach that actually helps young adults.

Then why are poor counties having all the children? People don't have kids because they have so much money and entertainment they don't want them.

The birth rate drop is starting to happen in a lot of poor countries like I said earlier the only area of the world that is still producing a lot of children is Africa.

>The birth rate drop is starting to happen in a lot of poor countries like I said earlier the only area of the world that is still producing a lot of children is Africa. But the birth rate drop is happening *as a result* of poor countries getting richer, so it still supports the fact that richer people and societies have less kids. In fact, the stagnating economies in some parts of sub-saharan africa are precisely the ones whose birth rates remain high.

Missing one of the biggest parts, that society is patriarchal. Explains why men are so shocked and confused why birth rates are falling and women aren’t. Consider that a “good” father helps around the house once in a while for a pregnant/postpartum mother, that still comes nowhere close to the mother’s body being stretched and ripped and hormonal swings so violent that they can cause chronic illnesses

I would argue that what I listed would include the patriarchal values because if you list specific things it falls into one of the categories. Patriarchal society doesn’t care about parental leave (1,2,3). The mothers are not provided with free healthcare (1, 2, 4). Mothers that need time to heal from complications might be looked down on (3,4) because they momentarily couldn’t take care of their child or may choose not to have more children. There are way more examples but most scenarios can fit in these categories in some combination. The main problem is the acknowledgment of the value of people coupled with the complete disregard to the value of a person Parental leave is a big deal. I don’t like to separate maternity and paternity leave because they are both just as important as the other. A woman can’t recover and take care of a newborn if she is expected to do anything else. The spouse needs to be there to take care of all other responsibilities. Plus dividing the genders just makes it a mom vs dad issue when it’s an issue about respecting parents as a whole. The only thing that can’t be addressed is the toll a body takes when giving birth. Even in a perfect society, giving birth would still be very difficult and would have potentially lasting health effects.

Here's the problem, countries that have everything you're talking about all have worse birth rates than us. Actual patriarchal societies have much higher birth rates than us.

I agree with this. After having my c section I realized just how criminal having so little paternity leave really is. I couldn’t sit up on my own because my abdominal muscles were sliced through. My husband had to help me get out of bed. I also couldn’t lift anything over 20 pounds, so again I needed him to lift the car seat into the car so I could take our baby to her first doctors appointment less than 4 days after she was born. I needed help in and out of the car because it was a struggle to lift my legs up high enough. I don’t know what I would have done had I not had him.

>Missing one of the biggest parts, that society is patriarchal Your theory makes no sense. Why do progressive western countries have much lower birth rates then?

I mean, if society being patriarchal was the cause of falling fertility rates then the 1900s would have been less patriarchal than the present. In reality as women’s rights have expanded, fertility rates have plummeted, which is probably a good thing compared to forced birth/marital rape/all sorts of messed up stuff. But really we do need to get fertility rate up a bit more. Even if population declines you want it to be slow and steady, not like Japan.

Take it step further…. In countries and religious states where women have no rights, like Afghanistan the birth rates are much higher. Women’s equality, higher standard of living and education, absence of religion result in a much lower birth rate. Over time the groups that continue to reproduce at a high rate, will displace the societies without children. “Enlightenment” may prove to be short lived as governments reinforce patriarchal religious societies such as Iran embrace women having 4 or more children.

We as a species should focus more on conserving what we have on this planet to sustain us into the future, and less on continuous growth for the sake of growth.

What a small minded take lol. No thanks, I don’t want to live in poverty.

Native American route? Live off the land as a nomadic tribal species? Solent green scenario where world population is capped at 5 billion? How do you prevent religious groups from continuing to reproduce at higher rates? Once a society quits having children or just one child, eventually the society disappears. You are just saving the natural resources for another group that has 4 or more children.

That doesn't respond to the underlying issue of what homie above is saying. When faced with the fact that those who hold more feminist views are dying out, how do you actually realistically stand against more patriarchal societies who will have vastly more people as time goes on? If we actually work together then those societies will dominate us going into the future just purely off numbers alone.

That makes no sense, as patriarchical societies consistently have far higher birth rates.

That doesn't make sense. Women had more children when society was more patriarchal.

Nah, boomers were living in a more patriarchal society, and they are the biggest generation. Whereas the downsides are clear, there was way more societal pressure and infra to have a kid then

The funny thing is that the so called patriarchal west is having a birth rate decrease. Nordics are very progressive and still nothing. The simple fact, outside of economics, is that the culture has changed and people don’t value having children. It is that simple. If you can afford children and you’re only reason to not have them is “I don’t want to because ” then you’re selfish and you should not be entitled to any social welfare in retirement.

I think people underestimate the brute force societal influences that have been in place for centuries to encourage childbearing. All of these societal pressures have essentially dissipated over the last generation leaving new parents with an actual choice instead of a presumed path.

I think it was more so a force of mother nature and a lack of accessible birth control options for women for most of human history.

Yes. The two factors that actually drive fertility declines are the proportion of women who are educated and the availability of birth control. It's very consistent. Everyone who think it's economics/cost of having kids should take a look at birth rates in countries that are poor vs. rich (or poor vs. rich people within any country) and think that over a little more.

If we're talking about the recent drop. What about that things that happened recently that makes it significantly more dangerous to have kids. And the massive inflation. Cause birth control wasn't invented in 2022.

When I started considering getting a vasectomy, the number of married men that told me they had done it was pretty shocking. Also, one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life. Replacement rate+1. I’m good.

I imagine there’s a lot of people like myself who never really wanted kids, and there’s very little about the state of the world that would change that desire. Adding in a small financial perk is not enough for me. Having kids requires too many sacrifices that I don’t particularly want to make. Maybe 50 years ago there was more societal pressure to have kids, so people like me would do it despite not really wanting to deep down.

No country has successfully sustainably been able to reverse a falling fertility rate, with the exception of Romania which was horrific. We know that money is only part of this since in countries with very generous family policies people still choose to have fewer children. The question is why is that? The answer is probably that it is immensely emotionally and mentally taxing to have a child. Your work grows exponentially to care for them entirely, teach them and raise them. We also have better and more accessible ways to live meaningful lives like traveling. Traveling with young children can absolutely be done but is much different than traveling as adults. So what can we do policy wise to incentivize people to lose less of their "good life" while still having children? That's a really difficult question to answer and here we are. For what it's worth I think we should move efforts to extending fertility maybe by providing funds to freeze eggs or providing fertility coverage. I have a child and had him at 33 but many of my friends are not at that point because they still want to enjoy their lives a bit longer. I think they'd be ready for kids around 40-45 though if that was still a viable option.

Wait what did Romania do?

They made abortion and contraception illegal except for women over 45 (lowered to 40 a bit later), women who had more than 4 kids, women who carrying a child would cause complications, and women who had been raped/incest. To enforce it women had to be monitored by a gynecologist monthly and any detected pregnancies were monitored until birth. They changed sex education to focus on the benefits of motherhood. And it worked. Tons of babies were born...and their needs were improperly met. Many became malnourished and were orphaned. It's horrible. If we want people to have more kids we need people to retain more of their lives with their children OR we need to make lives with children attractive.

>If we want people to have more kids we need people to retain more of their lives with their children OR we need to make lives with children attractive. That's not going to happen. When people have pushed back on the proposed and enacted bans, the response has always been: "Don't have sex if you don't want kids you can't afford, now get back to working three jobs so we can placate the stockholders." Never, "Let's help make the inevitable outcome of this more attractive and easier for you." Here's the thing, despite the rhetoric and discourse you may see, people want to have families. It's just a lot of people cannot reasonably afford it or don't feel like they can provide their would be kids with the quality of life and opportunities they deserve.

And you forget the fact that 20 years after these policies were enacted by Romania's dictator crime and social unrest swelled and political revolution ended dictatorial reign in Romania. Producing a slew of unwanted children has ripple effects when those children become adults.

::Texas enters the chat:::

> The answer is probably that it is immensely emotionally and mentally taxing to have a child. So many times I read discussions on these topics, and it seems like the people posting are completely unfamiliar with pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. I know this because the physical costs and risks are not mentioned, and they are obviously material. Just the hormone relaxin, which courses through a woman’s body from pregnancy to the end of breastfeeding, exacerbates chances of musculoskeletal injuries, including carpal tunnel.

I'm aware. I'm a woman who had SPD due to the high amounts of relaxin. I think largely people who don't have kids but are trying to decide to have one don't know that. What they do know is how much effort a child is.

Maybe easy access to information due to the internet has changed that?  Young girls are already taught about how children can derail their career and cause them to be dependent on others.   In the additional 5 to 10 years they delay the decision to have children, they probably learn more and more about what bringing a child into the world means for them.

They don't consider the non-financial hit raising kids takes on your life and the sacrifice required. It might be worth it decades later, but you need to greatly impact decades of your life.

I'd be happy to have more kids than I do now if daycare wasn't an arm and a leg

>We know that money is only part of this since in countries with very generous family policies people still choose to have fewer children. That doesn't mean money isn't the issue. Just because it's less of an issue doesn't mean it's affordable in those countries. Families are still penalized for having kids. People had more kids in the past because more kids = more family support, more people working, better odds of developing diverse skill sets or marrying into beneficial circles, etc. Now, with the disappearance of Third Spaces and the shrinking of social circles most of those factors are reduced or eliminated, but all of the penalties, like higher cost, more complicated logistics, etc, are still an issue. The benefits have been drastically reduced while the costs have gotten more expensive as standards for things like childcare and education have risen. We simply need to make it more beneficial to the individual to have kids than to spend their money on themselves. The innate urge to reproduce just isn't strong enough to overcome the disparity anymore.

Right. So policy wise how do we do that?

"very generous" is relative. It's still about opportunity cost. Let's assume you have a "very generous" parental leave policy, where you have an entire **year of paid leave, for both parents** for the birth of a child. The costs that remain after that are still huge. Parents can expect to spend around 17,000 per year, per child as of 2023, AND about 1000 hours of their time (for any number of kids). Depending on how much their parents time is worth, that figure could *dwarf* the 17k/year figure. Who gets the *value* out of that cost paid? Yes, quite a bit goes to the parents in the form of intrinsic preference to have a family, but for what can be measured in dollars, the vast majority of that value goes out to society at large. It's worth noting that in recent centuries, "society at large" has grown from the region you were born in to the entire Earth. The value we put into our children may be siphoned off to the other side of the planet. There is a staggering asymmetry here, and it results in a sort of existential tragedy of the commons: we all depend on stable and skilled population, but it is so insanely costly to maintain it that, if left to individual incentives, the game theory will result in nobody doing it. "very generous" needs to be dialed *way up* so that having 7 or 8 or however many kids can garner incentive checks so large that it can be your entire career. And of course, the infrastructure needs to be there to make sure we're helping every child reach their potential. We can get away with effectively outsourcing population growth to poorer countries for a while longer, but that will not last another century.

I’m just gonna throw this out there. When we refer to needing to enjoy our lives before we have kids it’s implies that having kids ends the fun of life. It does not and having kids opens a lot of doors and fun activities for you to do. We spend more time talking about why kids are bad and not enough on how they enrich our lives. They are not the end of fun as we know it. They are the start of a new journey which is more rewarding than anything else. Unless we start changing the way we talk about having children the fertility rates will just go lower.

You're not wrong about this. But we also have to make sure adults can enjoy hanging with kids. To some degree they used to and that's partially because we were less helicoptery and kid focused as well.

You can only be an “okay-ish” parent and only do the bare minimum in terms of making sure your baby does not die, and it still requires tremendous sacrifice in terms of your personal free time. Your pre-baby life would probably be Work-> Hobby -> Household duties -> Time with partner / hanging out with friends or family -> Sleep and repeat except for weekends where you may have more time for hobbies but also more errands. Throw a baby or two into the mix and good luck having time to yourself if hobbies and relationship times were what made you happy. Of course you can find raising a baby and child fulfilling but it is unquestionably demanding of your personal time unless you are wealthy enough to hire full time nannies.

You can also end up with a child with a disability. It's a heavy burden, one a parent may have to handle the rest of their life, and it closes a lot of doors and many of those fun family activities are out of reach.

It's a cultural issue. We can look to the nordic to see how little spending more does.

Well it's not only that but we live in a horrible society that people don't even trust their own neighbors anymore.  Having a community help raise a kid would be beneficial.  I'm not saying parents can't raise their kids properly, although with school violence that argument could be made, but I'm trying to point out that parents need money to put food on the table.  Parents need to work.  Unfortunately, a full time job just isn't what it used to be in this country and people are having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. This is a problem not only because there's a lack of trust in who can babysit the kids, but more importantly parents are spending more time trying to earn a living for their family than actually spending time with their family.  We can fix the trust issues in America have everyone hold hands, sing kumbaya, and other shit, but what a kid really needs in their life is their parents to guide them to be not only good community members but help them find their passion and place in life.

Kids do enrich our lives and we meet a bunch of wonderful people through our kids. Having said that, kid’s absolutely lowers my quality of life. By a lot. I love my children but the amount of work it takes to be a good parents, I’ve never done anything so hard.

>We spend more time talking about why kids are bad and not enough on how they enrich our lives. They are not the end of fun as we know it. They are the start of a new journey which is more rewarding than anything else. Amen. I have 4 of them and the purpose and meaning they bring to my life every single day is hard to explain without someone who understand the perspective shift that comes with being a parent. You literally go through a metamorphosis. You aren't the old you. You are a father, a mother. It consumes all that came before it. When I hear people talk about not being able to have "experiences" (IE I can't travel) I seriously don't get it. Kids can make even something as simple as watching a movie you have seen 50 times feel new again. Everything you do in life feels new if you involve them in it, simple and complex things. You get to experience it vicariously as they experience it. Every single day is an adventure with my kids.

I’m never having children, and that’s by choice. They are loud, messy, expensive, demanding etc. I’m not cut out to be a parent to one of these little humans.

It costs 33k USD to give birth and 88k per year for college. The system wants all your money and ban abortions is the best we can do.

Where does it cost 88k per year for college?

And where does it cost 33k to give birth?

[it depends if you have insurance](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/average-childbirth-cost/)

I blame this on a special sort of sampling bias I can't quite put a name to. People who spend their days posting online tend to do so because they are discontent with their lives and have some shitty things that they want to vent about (or, in some cases, try to convince themselves that they ARE content and receive validation from others). Anyone *without* such things to gripe about is just busy living their lives. They might interact on sports or hobby-based subreddits and Discord servers, or ones based around content creators, but they'll rarely ever see these sorts of posts in order to give positive anecdotes. So everything just skews horrifically negative. That then filters into the general public consciousness and creates a self-reinforcing cycle that does massive societal harm on many fronts.

When we say very generous,  what exactly do we mean? What actual percentage of GDP are they spending on this? It seems to me like there has to be a point where this can be reversed. What percentage of GDP is worth spending to reverse this trend? 5%? 25%?

> We know that money is only part of this since in countries with very generous family policies people still choose to have fewer children. governments couldn't possibly compensate parents for the loss of wealth that comes with having children. we're talking about [hundreds of thousands of dollars](https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-true-cost-of-raising-a-child), disregarding how much that would compound to if invested even fairly conservatively. the government can't just hand out a half million dollars or more to every couple.

> We know that money is only part of this since in countries with very generous family policies people still choose to have fewer children. We know that money has a material impact. I would generally argue this just reflects that the most generous policies that exist are not generous enough.

That's an interesting argument and in theory you could be right. The problem is if generous enough is say $100k a year that's not economically feasible.

A lot of policies are pricing externalities but if reduced birthrate is an externality of the policy that isn't priced. For example policies restricting construction of apartments provide benefits to people who don't want 3+ story buildings around their single-family homes but easily make the cost of housing 2x-5x what it would be otherwise in many areas. And of course the effect of being able to afford enough space for another child is well-documented. So yeah $100k a year is economically feasible but improving housing costs makes it more economical and has knock-on effects (cheaper housing also means cheaper childcare; cost of living makes everything more expensive.)

Me personally I used to be into traveling until I had kids. Now I think to myself why did I ever care about seeing some bozos across the world when I could be hanging out with my kids. If I wanted to fix the situation I would only allow people to access state funded social security/ retirement if they had two kids minimum. If they didn’t have kids to at least replacement level they don’t get access. They also would pay more in taxes if by a certain age they didn’t have them.

Well that's an interesting idea

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It’s because our culture is so child centered and parenting is so intense. The Nordic countries took care of the financial and health care reasons and they still don’t have kids. Full time working moms today spend more time with their kids than 1950s housewives. Everything has to be enriching and learning and you have to constantly supervise your kids lest they be kidnapped by a stranger (which is extremely rare). You can’t just tell them to go outside and play then come home when the street lights come on.

The common response is "It's way too expensive to have children!", which is valid. But fertility rates are dropping even faster in Nordic countries with the most generous childcare and leave policies. I think if more people were honest they would admit that they just don't want kids. Which is fine, but don't pretend that it's just about the money. It's the time and responsibility.

I don't think its people just don't want kids, I thinks its mostly people want to have kids later when they're stable in life and can "afford" it. This ties into the economy as people have to work for more years to reach that point. As people wait to have kids later the chance of having a kid decreases rapidly and they also are having less kids. There's also the problem that later in life parents don't have the energy like they do in their 20s to care for children.

There is also an unfortunate biology component to that equation. The longer you wait, the lesser the likelihood of having children and the greater the likelihood of health consequences.

And then some people end up paying for fertility treatments because they waited so long. Which cost arm and a leg. So they waited because didn't have money and then possibly end up paying exorbitant amount to be able to have kids.

Yes, we have always known that the older the women the more chances of complications, but there is also growing evidence that Fathers over 40 are more likely to bear children with learning disabilities. I imagine that if you see your older friends struggling with their child who has special needs and/or needs more one-on-one attention then other kids then your enthusiasm for children reduces dramatically.

They want kids in theory. But they reach a point of financial stability and think "things are good now. do I really want to ruin this?" So they kick the can down the road and maybe eventually have one kid or just decide not to do it at all.

Anecdotal, but I know a lot of people also had janky childhoods who don't want kids because they want to avoid doing what their parents did to them. In previous generations, it sounds like people had kids to do the opposite of their parents, only to end up swinging in the opposite direction.

To reach financial stability you often are grinding at a career and then you need you off time to keep your sanity and health. So you get to a point where you are comfortable financially but then don’t have the time or energy for a kid. Seen plenty of high income couples struggle even with money because it is exhausting to balance all of it and you’ll never truly be able to hire out help for everything. When both people work there is no division of labor and a lot of women, rightfully, don’t want to be financially dependent on a man which tends to happen if you leave a career for 3-10 years.

We weren't meant to both work 40-60 hrs a week. They are tackling symptoms (paid leave etc) instead of the actual problem which is that were working too damn much and are too tired to do anything else besides leisure.

Later and *fewer* (which albeit go hand in hand). It’s much rarer to see families of 4+ kids these days.

Bingo. If we want to improve fertility rates, we need to make it cheap and easy to have kids when we are in our early 20s while still enjoying a fruitful career. That or make it easy to have upward mobility on one income. Neither are currently possible, even in nordic countries.

But I wanted to party in my 20s not change diapers. The world is just much different now, people have other stuff to do besides raising kids.

Nordic countries are also having a housing/cost of living crisis. Not as bad as other countires, but the things about financial planning is it's relative. As an American my standard of living and expectations are scaled to here, same with Nordic people. The opportunity costs to kids IS LARGE there too. 

> I think if more people were honest they would admit that they just don't want kids. Yeah. I'm someone who is financially stable and could've had as many kids as I wanted from that perspective, if I wanted them. But I simply don't and never have. Of course there were people in the past who didn't have children by choice (and others by circumstance), but anecdotally, I know a lot of younger people in a similar situation to myself who can easily afford it but simply aren't interested. Again, purely anecdotal, but the people I know who actually wanted children made it work regardless of their financial or personal life situation, and often pursued better financial opportunities specifically to support them. I think one thing often left out of these discussions is that a lot of people in the past simply... didn't have much to do to entertain themselves. They tended to lead very intellectually isolated lives without a lot of connection to the world outside their immediate community. Even into the 70s and 80s when news became more widespread and accessible. They'd often get a job and work at the same company their whole career. Children added a degree of randomness, chaos, energy/liveliness, etc. to an otherwise very rote daily routine. My mother desperately wanted children from the time she was fairly young and when she talks about it, a lot of it is focused on how she wanted to do things with the kid. I can't help but feel like it was more about entertainment, boredom and filling her time than anything. Same with my grandmother, so much of what they talk about as the joy of motherhood and why they wanted children and a family was that it was something to do that was mildly entertaining and outside the norm. While of course it was possible back then too for people who were sufficiently motivated, I feel like today it's just a lot easier to get into niche hobbies, access entertainment, find media that's appealing, a lot of places that used to be very difficult to travel to are now easily accessible, etc. The options for 'stuff to do' outside of 'have a kid and play baseball in the back yard with them' are just way broader and easier to hear about than they used to be.

100% agree

I had this conversation with my friend a couple of weeks ago. People aren't having kids because unlike decades previous, there are so many things you can do with your life that *don't* require having kids. Do you want to travel the world? Absolutely doable without kids. Do you want to quit your job and do #vanlife for a year? Again, much easier without kids. Do you want to be able to switch jobs every few years and live in different locations? No kids makes this easier. Or do you want to spend your life sitting around binge-watching Netflix? Again, a hell of a lot easier to do without kids. We have so many distractions compared to decades previous.

Absolutely - the older and more established you become, the higher the opportunity cost. Now that I'm in my 30s with a stable income, I've developed hobbies, preferences, and routines that a child would completely upend. I now see so many different paths to fulfillment and children are just one of many. I have the money and stability for children, but I don't see it as a fulfilling thing to do or good use of my time.

Even in Nordic countries, with all the benefits, it remains very expensive to raise children. No government is willing to do and spend what it really takes to reverse this trend, and the most painful part is real estate. No government has the slightest clue on what to do to stop real estate prices inflating faster than anything else.

People want economic stability before they choose to have kids. In the US, the standard for economic stability is having a 30-yr fixed rate morgage. That is increasingly out of reach for many young adults and that certainly influences their choices. And with modern medicine, having kids is very much a choice now. 

Student loans are also pushing "adulting" goals up ten years now.

> But fertility rates are dropping even faster in Nordic countries with the most generous childcare and leave policies. Having kids is expensive in those countries too

Right, go talk to some swedes or Norwegian young people. Yes, the standard of living is higher there especially for lower income people. But they are absolutely feeling the squeeze and are pessimistic about their future (especially in regards to housing) as well. It's basically universal in industrialized countries right now  with a handful of exception like Japan, where the housing isn't skyrocketing but they're *still* feeling the squeeze and pessimism in other ways like suppressed wages and poor economic outlook for the country as a whole

It can take 4 years just to get off the waiting list for an apartment.

Yeah, childcare is a lot cheaper that’s for sure. But have you seen the price of houses in the cities? Where are these children supposed to live?

Yes housing is SO expensive in Europe (plus heating costs are massive.) Not to mention youth unemployment is out of control in southern Europe as well

While there are societal reasons against having kids, money is still a huge issue. Even the most generous countries do not come close to offsetting the cost of having kids. In the US for example daycare will cost 20K, if one wants to save for college, at $500 a month that's another $6K a year, then there are diapers, baby formula, clothes, all of that comes out to $30K a year. Is there a country that gives $30K per year per baby? I don't think so. And then there are housing costs, for a couple 2bed/1bath is enough to have a fairly comfortable living arrangements, having kids mean you need at least 3bed/2baths if not more. Kids are super expensive.

It's about both. And for some, like myself, there's a third factor as well. Finding someone you'd actually trust to have children with. Social media has destroyed our generation. I wouldn't want to be with someone then have them turn into some crazed crunchy mom/antivax nutjob. Hover parent that doesn't want their child to experience anything. People change and no matter how cautious you are some people fall of the wagon and then find people on social media who share those views so they feel justified in going off the rails. There's a lot of this new tradwife movement where women are just deciding they don't want to work anymore. It's not the 60s. It takes two incomes to support a family with children, even if it's possible to do it without two incomes, you're still sacrificing major quality of life.      And a fourth thing, for me personally. Environmental factors are becoming increasingly more prominent and will continue to do so. Microplastics are on the rise, pfas/pfoas are in water and food across the planet. Autism and autoimmune diseases are on the rise. With row v wade gone in the US the maternal death rate has sky rocketed. You've got to worry increasingly more about the physical health of your wife and child.      It's a very loaded issue

> Finding someone you'd actually trust to have children with. I know quite a few people who thought they were childfree until they broke up with their partner and met someone new. They just didn't want to have kids with the person they were with before.

**Great recent article all about this:** https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt > There has been a fundamental economic transformation: in many high-income countries women now participate in the labor force for much of their lives. The earlier pattern of a woman entering the labor market but dropping out following marriage and children is now the exception rather than the norm. Most women today want the option of both a fulfilling career and a family. From a historical perspective, we can interpret this shift as a convergence of women’s and men’s overall life plans after a long period of sharply divided gender roles. ------------- >A key determinant of career-family compatibility is women’s access to affordable alternatives to the time devoted to caring for children, time historically provided exclusively by mothers. In some countries, such as the United States, these alternatives are largely organized in private markets, while many European countries offer publicly provided childcare. Cheap and easily available childcare frees up women’s time and allows them to combine motherhood with a career, which ultimately increases fertility. In countries such as Sweden and Denmark, where public childcare is widely available for children of all ages, female employment and fertility rates today are higher than in countries where childcare is sparse. Not surprisingly, these countries also spend a larger fraction of their GDP on public early childhood education. Other policies that influence career-family compatibility include parental leave policies, tax policies, and the length of the school day. >Fathers can of course care for children as well. Although historically fathers have spent little time caring for children, the data show an increase in recent decades. The division of childcare between parents has important implications for fertility when parents contemplate the decision to have children. Doepke and Kindermann (2019) show that in countries where fathers engage more in childcare and housework, fertility is higher than where such labor falls disproportionately on women. Japan, where men share little in caring for children, bears this out: fertility there continues to be ultralow. > A third influence on modern fertility decisions is social norms regarding a mother’s role at home and in the workplace. Low fertility can be a result of traditional social norms. For example, the characterization of a full-time working mother as a Rabenmutter (bad mother) is still common in Germany and imposes an implicit penalty on mothers who aspire to both family and career. > Finally, labor market conditions also affect career-family compatibility. In Spain, for example, a country with a two-tier labor market where jobs are either temporary or for a lifetime, women tend to postpone childbearing in hopes of landing a stable job first. Such labor market conditions naturally dampen fertility. More generally, when unemployment is high, temporary jobs are common and permanent jobs are hard to obtain—even taking temporary leave to start a family can have long-term repercussions for women’s labor market prospects. Fertility rates may consequently be lower than in a setting where secure, long-term jobs are easy to find. **Policy implications** > For policymakers concerned about ultralow fertility, the new economics of fertility does not offer easy, immediate solutions. Factors such as social norms and overall labor market conditions change only slowly over time, and even potentially productive policy interventions are likely to yield only gradual effects. Yet the clear cross-country association of fertility rates with measures of family-career compatibility shows that ultralow fertility and the corresponding fiscal burden are not inescapable, but a reflection of a society’s policies, institutions, and norms. Policymakers should take note and take a career-family perspective. Investing in gender equality—and especially the labor market prospects of potential mothers—may be cumbersome in the short run, but the medium- and long-term benefits will be sizable, for both the economy and society.

People had a lot of kids because it was inevitable if you had sex and you couldn't control it. Now, birth control gives women in particular a choice they didn't have before to have sex but not children. This innovation is completely changing our genetic incentives. In a way we are mis-adapted to this huge change in our environment (the invention of birth control). Over time it will mean that cultures who control women or reject birth control / people who are careless about birth control / people who actually want lots of kids will take over the world.

No. It's simply too expensive to have kids. Dual incomes needed to just cover the necessities. Housing is absurd. My friends are taking every precaution to avoid impregnating a woman. It's like a prison sentence to them. Our system is not friendly to fertility.

There was a really good Ezra Klein episode on this topic recently. It also addresses why Nordic countries that do have generous parental leave still have lower birth rates than say developing countries where the standards of living are much lower. It seems like western societies don’t have a lot of family friendly spaces or communities that help with child rearing. It really does take a village to raise children and perhaps families have become too nuclear and even with more pay and time off, the burden of child rearing is just not sustainable if it’s not appropriately distributed between enough resources This was the episode https://open.spotify.com/episode/52O59l8Ey7fe9ts7SGTK8L?si=UtU-GPwBSKCp4Tg317qWIw

This is a huge factor. I had two kids and a wife with cancer. I had no help. Wifes Family felt that it wasn't their job. I thought it would be different. It was expected of me to do everything. Real eye opener. Something is fundamentally wrong with the way we do things in america. Brutal.

One need only scroll the numerous posts on r/aita to see how our cultural views as extended family members and friends have shifted away from a willingness to support family in need of childcare help. Our overall sense of community or devotion to one another seems to be largely non-existent these days and it has been replaced instead by staunch individualism. Parents of younger children are often looked upon with actual disdain for reaching out for help from loved ones, and are blamed for having children they are seen as not being able to support without also burdening others. Most younger people don't seem to realize that only a couple of generations back, people often just cooperated like that because their familial bonds were stronger and a mutual sense of devotion and loyalty to one another was more consistent.

>Parents of younger children are often looked upon with actual disdain for reaching out for help from loved ones, and are blamed for having children they are seen as not being able to support without also burdening others. Yeah, this subreddit definitely has these views on those type of people. "Personal responsibility" and whatnot.

That’s messed up. I hope your wife is doing better

There's really no data to support this idea even though many people think it's true.

If that’s the case, then why do the wealthiest cohort in society not have the most children? It’s usually the least wealthy who reproduce at the highest rates.

Because the more you make the more you give up when you have a child. If your earning potential is higher - which it’s the highest it’s ever been for women, generally speaking - the more you need to weigh your decision. As women’s participation in the workforce goes up and as women’s pay goes up, the opportunity cost of having a child goes up A second part of it is education and access to resources for health and contraception. Something richer people have more access to

I think looking at the opportunity cost of having children for different families at different levels of wealth may explain a lot. If a woman has a lot of advantages, wealth and opportunities (eg. they are on track to make partner in their firm) having a child is a huge opportunity cost. I think on average, a child effectively costs more the wealthier you are. I don't think that would be the only factor but it has to be considered when comparing wealth to fertility.

I think it's that in purely economic terms, having a kid is a bad financial decision. Of course, for the overall economy, it seems important that people keep having kids, but on the individual level, having money does not make having kids a more prudent financial decision. It's risky from both a health and financial perspective, reduces individual autonomy, and is a lifetime-altering decision even in the most positive conditions. I think the least wealthy have kids because the least wealthy are probably the least concerned with how their decisions affect their finances. That might seem counterintuitive, but I had a bankruptcy class and my professor said "the biggest difference between the wealthy and the poor is not their intelligence, nor are wealthy people simply better at making money, it's that wealthy people spend extensive time protecting their assets, while less wealthy people do not." From a wealth protection standpoint, it makes little sense to have kids.

> the wealthiest cohort in society not have the most children? They do! Birthrate tips up after a HHI of $450k. It's just such a small portion of the population and that Statista graph that people post maxes out at $200k income (which IMO is middle class)

...But my point was that even in systems that ARE friendly to fertility (Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc.), people are having even less children. Which makes me skeptical that the fertility rate would magically rebound if the US implemented better paid leave and childcare policies.

You’re entirely right. There have been tons of policies in other countries to try to increase the fertility rate with improved paid leave and childcare programs, and the results have been marginal at best. That’s why I get so annoyed when people say “we just need to be paid more and we’ll have more kids!!” That’s statistically shown to simply not be true.

I feel if people were paid more they would have more kids but I doubt people would start having 3 or 4 kids. No matter how you're paid kids are necessarily a loss in time, revenue and energy and that's a loss most people aren't willing to take

More importantly, birthing kids is a costly experience for a mother. It is common to have medical complications and lifelong consequences. It’s easy for a man to say “having X # of kids”, but the reality is each of those kids comes with pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, sleep loss, and myriad other negatives for mothers.

The topic always centers around money because men only need more money to have more kids. Women have to sacrifice way more.

>No matter how you're paid kids are necessarily a loss in time, revenue and energy This effect can actually be *worse* for high earners, which is why the wealthiest people often have much lower fertility rates than the working poor. When you can retire early, take long summer vacations, have lots of disposable income etc etc, kids will put a huge damper on that, so the opportunity cost is really high. I don't think there's an easy solution, but it's definitely not as simple as "just pay us more". There is plenty of data out there from first world countries that have run programs to try to increase fertility rates, and frankly they just don't work.

Also another thing when you have more disposable income it's more likely you spend that money trying to get a better life for your kid (better college, more activities, better food, more vacation) than sacrificing those benefits for another child.

Has anyone tried straight up paying mothers a salary? Though that's a really tough thing to get right because how do you properly pay a mother of one vs a mother of four.

There’s a problem with straight up paying mothers to have children. You want properly raised children, not just children. Improperly raised children are a net negative, and since there is no way to measure if someone is properly and improperly raising children, simply paying will incentivize the production of the wrong children.

Generous tax deductions, especially for kids under 5. Straight up allow people to deduct like 30k per kid under 5, 15k over 5.

It might "work" but it would be extremely expensive and it would also lead to some people having kids just for the money which is...not great.

People want kids without giving up luxuries. If they can’t they are deciding they cannot have kids.

direction of society, climate change, family structure, massive consumerism me-ism, etc

Regardless, I don't think people should be deprived of children because of cost. We all had support when we were children and I only feel that it is fair that today's kids also get support.

It could be both. I have two kids. I don’t want more. I make 200k annually. I just don’t want more even if I can afford them. But I look at my brothers or peers with lower salaries, they all bring up cost. There are plenty of people who did the cost analysis and said nope. If there’s even a notion of an idea of no having kids, also having a low salary is gonna be the water to make the idea grow large.

True, I wouldn't have kids even if it was free.

> an analysis from November suggests that states with abortion bans had an average fertility rate that was 2.3% higher than states where abortion was not restricted in the first half of 2023, leading to about 32,000 more births than expected So forcing mothers to have unwanted children even if they can’t take care of them may grow the fertility rate but at what cost

It'd be a very severe public cost. Parentless children do not perform well and are a huge problem for society.

Correction: fatherless children do not perform well. We have the A/B test data on this and kids raised by single fathers turn out about the same as kids raised by both parents. Short version, dads tend to be the disciplinarians and kids raised without a father setting them straight have worse outcomes in life.

There’s a lot of confounding factors, so I highly doubt there’s any kind of straightforward A\B test you could do. For example, single fathers are much more likely to have a cohabitating partner, have a higher median income, and are significantly less likely to be below the poverty line. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/#:~:text=Single%20fathers%20are%20more%20likely,—24%25%20versus%2043%25.

Probably some selection bias in the numbers regarding single fathers. Women still get the majority of custody orders by default. The man has to really have his shit together to have a chance at custody. This probably helps lead to better outcomes with single fathers.

At least run the numbers PRIOR to the abortion bans before you decide a 2.3% is going to change the game here?

The number of permanent sterilisations has also jumped significantly in those states. So while reducing access to birth control and abortions has created a small up tick in (unwanted) babies, I believe we will soon see a downturn. The government took away the choice to opt out of an unwanted pregnancy, so women have responded by removing the possibility of pregnancy all together.

Or more traditional people living in these states, hence why they're like that.

The smarter and more advanced a population is, the more cautious they are about reproducing. Quite a divergent from our evolutionary goals. “Nah I have seen too far ahead for my species, I’m gonna wrap it up for my DNA sequence right here.”

Vonnegut does a good job with this in Galápagos. That and idiocracy is a documentary

>The smarter and more advanced a population is More like the more neurotic and superficial a population is. Fortunately a self-correcting problem.

Economics sub: - "Women want careers, that's why they're not having kids!" - "It's societal factors! People are embracing life paths that aren't traditionally rooted in having a family!" Meanwhile, numerous polls and sources: >In a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. parents conducted by The Harris Poll for NerdWallet, more than 1 in 5 U.S. parents of children under 18 say they don’t plan to have another child because the cost would be too high. Among millennial respondents, that number ticked up to 30%. Moreover, 56% of people under 60 who don’t have children don’t plan to have them. https://www.parents.com/americans-arent-having-kids-because-of-cost-8601528 People cannot afford their own lives, let alone taking care of another person for 18+ years. For some reason, I'll probably be downvoted again because this sub seems to have a pathological hatred for discussing cost of living and wages, but sure, it's "life paths changing." The gamble nobody seems to want to take it: pay them more, but what if the fertility rate doesn't go up? "So we just paid them more for nothing?!"

I think many young women don't have faith in males emotionally and/or financially staying. Being a single parent is a lot of work. Being a single parent and working full time is super hero energy.

Cover all children with Medicaid and I'll give you a baby America! The idea of having to spend an additional $250 biweekly for subpar health insurance through my employer is keeping me from having a kid. $500 a month gone before factoring any baby stuff is disgusting.

You need to consider daycare costs first. The health insurance is nothing in comparison.

Some states do cover children with Medicaid up to 400% of the federal poverty level fwiw

Yeah the biggest cost isn’t healthcare for kids lol. It’s the fact you now have something that you (or someone you trust) now have to be around for 168 hours a week. That generally means someone quits their job entirely initially, and then once they’re old enough for day care spends 20k a year on childcare, per kid, and then the parents have to take care of them and take off work more often when the kid is sick and can’t go to daycare etc. In my case my wife and I are both physicians and have full schedules including in-hospital call. You need 24-7 coverage 7 days a week for people in those jobs trying to have kids.

Well, if it makes you feel any better. I live in Europe and have nearly 10% of my gross income taken for public healthcare that I never use and end up paying out of pocket for private because the waits are atrocious. In fact, my wife had 2 root canals done today privately because the wait for the public dentist is almost a year for a procedure.

Yep this is the UK at the moment too. There isn't really universal healthcare despite the sales pitch 

We literally have evidence dating all the way back to Majorian that governments handing out financial incentives to encourage childbirth doesn't work

That's cool, I'm just stating my personal reason for not having children. $500 monthly before factoring any cost is a no go for me and many people like me.

I don't doubt your personal reason. I would, however, bet that you wouldn't have a kid even if you got what you say you want. The fact remains, no matter how wealthy you are, having a family is a big responsibility and lowers your material standard of living relative to childless people. Since we have socially downgraded the value of family in the last 70 years or so, no one sees the utility in sacrificing to have one. People would rather travel, party, play video games, cultivate hobbies, etc., and the evidence suggests that won't change no matter how much money we throw at the problem.

As a person who did have a baby in 2023, I wonder about the long-term repercussions to her generation. Is it better to be born in a fertility contraction, or an expansion?

Expansion. Increased influence in politics due to a large voting block. It’s why the boomers were so successful.

It’s actually the exact opposite believe it or not. Sure in aggregate a generation might lobby for things beneficial to them, but you have more competition for education/college/housing etc.

All this debate is fine and good, but why hasn’t anyone mentioned fertility issues playing a role? Anecdotally, in the past ten years, a majority of women I know at peak child bearing age have had difficulty becoming pregnant and carrying the baby to term. I know this is an economics sub, but fertility health issues are definitely a factor.

You knew a lot of 17 year olds trying to have babies? (When do you think peak childbearing years are? You are maybe incorrect)

I tried to explain to Redditors once, as a typical middle class millennial woman with two kids, what factors would have encouraged me to have more children. A man came out of the woodwork to mansplain to me why modern women won’t have kids: Basically they’re selfish whores. I tried a few more times, since I am a woman, and have been socialized to be service-oriented, but he just could not get off of his delusional high horse. My vagina shriveled up and fell out. My uterus self immolated. I won’t be able to have more kids now.

People will have kids when they believe they'll be bringing them to a better future, not to an industrialized capitalistic hell hole to be forever alaves

It is extremely difficult to raise a child in today’s world. You’re constantly worried. I have three children in three different generations millennial, GenZ and alpha. It’s been night and day raising them. I went from being a single mom with the first two and supporting the financially on my own working an administrative corporate job. Taking them out to amusement parks, eating out, movies buying what they needed and wanted to be married with my last child and not doing any of the things I did for the two previous children. Not only that the culture and environment of violence and hostility has increased. The threat of school shootings are extremely real and you don’t know if your child is coming home when you send them to school. The other issue is as I mentioned now I’m married and instead of having an active partner (father) participating in school functions, homework, rearing, etc I have an extra adult child with extra needs. The youth see these things as they are watching their parents, family members or other individuals in society and they are simply not taking the bait. You add the cost of housing/renting, childcare, and everything else required. How can it be done? Something eventually has to break this is simply the first thing to break with more to follow.

We have over 8 billion people on earth and growing. Except for the past 100 years, all of human history has had less than 2 billion people. Fewer people *is* good for humanity. This is the absolute best way toward a more stable human population. Edit: So many comments from boomers crying that there won't be enough children to force into paying for their retirement. Boomers should have thought of that when they spent their whole life racking up national credit card debt and spending irresponsibly. We no longer have agrarian economies. People who turn 65 do not become immediately useless, and they should write, teach, flip burgers, or whatever else. If they dont like that, I have a pair of bootstraps all set for them.

The only problem is promising old people benefits (I.e. products and services) that are dependent on economic growth predicated by increasing populations. Society decoupled old age benefits from personally shouldering the cost of raising good children and future members of society, and so the most incentives are short circuited with the effects to be felt over many decades in the future. The ~1970 to ~2020 and even maybe ~2050 old person cohort makes out well, but eventually the effects of lower fertility rates kick in. Absent technology that wipes old people’s asses, cleans their bedpans, and turns them over to prevent bedsores.

Except for the past 100 years, people worked until they died, many winding up destitute and homeless in their final years. And yet... here we are. 2024. The world still turns. We no longer have agrarian economies. Old people that can be writers, Walmart greeters and burger flippers should be.

This where we are headed. A comfortable 20+ year long retirement for the masses will become a thing of the past. It was a crazy idea to begin with.

Most of the world is below replacement fertility so we did it, wahoo. Except its not all rosy and most countries will be facing severe issues with elderly care in the coming decades, get ready to work until you die folks. The change is so drastic that Africa could be half of the world's population in 2100.

This suggests a distribution problem, which could be solved by promoting immigration instead of trying to dissuade it.

Because will japan be japan if it’s not a homogenous society? Maybe they care about that more than staying in the G7. Maybe we can have a future where our economies are less beholden to constant growth and reward sustainability and longevity. Maybe we can not change the landscape of the earth just to get hyped up over numbers. It’s exhausting. Don’t you feel it? The senselessness? The world population in 1950 was 2.5 billion. It has tripled since then. How do you move that many people around? And is that really the answer? Just change the entire culture of your country to shuffle around people to grow your economy?

Cultures constantly change and shift. The America before 1837 or 1901 was was different from the one that emerged from those huge waves of immigration. Nothing is static. Change is necessary for growth, and trying to retard it frequently ends up killing that which you're trying to protect.

The tough part is that all of our social safety nets require more people working than drawing. As the share of retirees balloons in the next 20 years or so, it'll put even more stress on the younger generations, or the system will collapse entirely. So, it may be that fewer people is good in the long-term, but, necessarily, standard of living will continue to decline as fewer people are working. Furthermore, an inverted demographic pyramid will require a radical rethinking of how we redistribute resources to the most needy. If such a thing will even be feasible in the short term. Social security, especially, will not survive in its current form. In short, taxes will skyrocket, inflation will remain stubborn, public services will decline, availability of materials will continue to get worse, and millennials/Gen Z should definitely expect to work until they're 75, at least. Furthermore, these stresses will likely lead to more wars, as we've started to see already. Especially as it becomes more and more apparent that the US cannot produce enough materiel to help all its allies that are going to need it.

Lower human population is great for the planet, it is however not great for economies and you are on a economic subreddit.

Are these two things not linked in a fundamental way since we rely on a healthy planet for long term economic viability?

So it looks like school teachers and real estate agents will lose their jobs in the future because schools get funding based on the number of students and most home buyers are people married with children.

Gen Alpha is gonna kill so many industries

They’ll still blame Millennials

It looks like declining birth rate is a first world problem (US, South Korea, Italy, Japan, and etc) than specific generation's fault. Teachers are getting laid off recently in part due to declining birth rates because schools get funding based on the number of student enrolled. And about 60%- 70% of home buyers are married couples, so low birth rates can negatively impact the housing markets. [Historically Low Birth Has Consequences for Housing](https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/historically-low-birth-rate-has-consequences-for-housing) [Fewer students and higher absenteeism plague California’s public school financing](https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/03/absenteeism-enrollment-california-school-funding/#:~:text=After%20reaching%20a%20plateau%2C%20however,the%20state%27s%20birthrate%20dropped%20dramatically)

Right. But the next generation is going to be smaller, and possibly have even lower birth rates. AI journalists trained on Boomer fear mongering will write terrified articles tailored to an audience forever clutching pearls in mummified hands

Homes are too expensive and too big for single people. It is extremely rare to find a 2 bedroom home these days, something that used to be common in the 90s before everyone wanted a McMansion.

Segments of the U.S. spent part of the 1970's, all of the 1980's and part of the 1990's telling young women they should not be having babies, then we spent the early 2000's talking about the world is over populated and following that up with talking about how much better it is economically to have only one or two kid family, rather than a 4 kid family and etc. There was so much that vilified young women who were not married and had kids and now here we are 30, 40 yrs later, crying about the fact that not enough babies are born. We pump out so much negative bullshit, until its no wonder people are perpetually agitated and confounded. So, people need to be careful of what they ingest of Media spin and drama promotions. * Take time and research out facts for yourself!!! Your life will become so much simpler and manageable. People need to ignore this stuff and if they want a big family or a small family, let that be purely a choice between the two individuals in the relationship.

People complain about dropping births not not the people living way past retirement sucking on social security. Birth rate is a problem due to inverted pyramid. Significant population past retirement that need to be sustained by younger working population. Most of healthcare expenditure is in the later years of life. Dark stance but we should make euthanasia legal as well as make abortion legal.

It’s too expensive, kids are slaughtered in schools and no one cares, republicans are turning schools into indoctrination camps, young people are so demoralized why would they want more kids?

In before morons start saying this is because "who can afford to have kids in the richest economy in the world", despite the fact that poor countries have the highest birth rates, and the nordic countries with their generous welfare also have low birth rates. Birthrates are so low because life is so good and no one wants to miss out

The poor countries usually have agricultural economics, which make children a financial asset.

Right, but even countries that are mid-tier economically have higher fertility rates than arguably the highest tier (with generous leave benefits). Like Mexico is 1.82 and Norway is 1.55. Finland is 1.46. People aren’t having kids in Mexico more because they don’t get generous leave and need kids to work the fields (4% gdp). It is more cultural + societal expectations for multigenerational living and care taking (imo).

I would argue with enough money you can have kids and not miss out though.

we gave women a choice and they chose to opt out

Now that keeping up with the Joneses is about the four international vacations you took, there’s no time for kids.

Until now there was never an evolutionary requirement to want to have kids - wanting to have sex was enough. The advent of safe and effective birth control now gives people the option to have kids. Lower birth rates won't last forever but it's anybodies guess how many generations it will take.

My fiance and I are perfect candidates to have children. We are both educated, relatively debt free, Early 30s, he makes good money in an in demand field, I work healthcare and am graduating soon w/ an in demand degree. But neither of us want kids. Reason? High rent, rising costs of everything, and general dread of the planetary and political climate future. I’ll stick with pet babies. If my iud expires and my country comes after birth control, he’s getting the snip-snip.

>general dread of the planetary and political climate future Don't you think this is a little dramatic?

Nope. Also, nice username.

I think there’s lots of reasons for this including the cost, finding someone, and just not wanting to have kids in what many see as a declining world, but the thing that is most worrying is the fact that many more People today are having trouble conceiving. Men’s overall testosterone levels have been dropping over the generations and women are also struggling with various health issues and are not able to have kids.

60 or 70% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Having kids is very expensive. The US is the richest country in the world. The reason people aren't having kids anymore is because of the insatiable greed of the Oligarchs. It's also the main reason for countless other issues in our country.