Americans Are Having Fewer Babies

People might consciously site economic or other reasons for this, but I think the real reason is that education about birth control has sufficiently permeated the country that people are simply making the choice. I suspect that an overwhelmingly large number of past pregnancies were unplanned, while now more of them are planned. We’re just seeing the natural number that would occur when people actually make the choice as opposed to leaving it up to chance as was done in most of history.

The concept of asking people why they are making the choice presupposes that they have the option of making the choice to begin with.

Our finances are not in great condition. We have little solid support from extended family. I was recently diagnosed with a very serious illness where death is a non-zero possibility.

But you know what? We have three kids and they are our treasures. Life is hard, sacrifice is required, and more days than not I find myself struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed. That is, until my children come and say good morning...then there is joy (not necessarily happiness, but definitely joy).

Our children may not have all of the “necessities” in life, but they will have love and, more importantly, the responsibility to love others: their ailing parents, their struggling siblings, society at large.

I can barely afford to provide for my own long-term survival, let alone a poor little defenseless child.

Maybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everything higher in the USA, then I could afford to properly care for a child. But gone are the days where raising a child meant "another mouth to feed". These days, food is just 1/20th of the overall bill

Americans in general are having less babies. Last year more non-white babies were born than white babies, and due to the opiod crisis the white life expectancy went down while it's rising for other groups. America is in the early stages of a really interesting demographic shift. It will be interesting to look back on how the politics of this era shape out.

Having children has always been a choice, e.g. historical birthrates are closely coupled to harvest success. So people are choosing to have fewer children now, and most of that has to do with opportunity costs.

Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" (https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...) has some data showing that parents are putting more and more time into children. (And his argument is that it is mostly unnecessary, i.e. it doesn't correspond to improved outcomes for children, given a relatively normal stable family.) I wonder how much of this is just changed social expectations (e.g. call Police / Child Services if you see a kid walking home along from school), how much is social signaling, how much is reduced family support.

If I read the list correctly, 6 of the 8 top reasons pertain to money / finances.

3 of the 5 people here with me attributed this to essentially selfishness / unwillingness to sacrifice for others (future generations)

2 of the 5 said that the respondents have strong social consciences and are being responsible for not bringing children into the world that they weren't sure they could support.

It doesn't really matter to me either way [happy father of two teenage daughters who push boundaries but kick ass in academics and sports]. It's just good to realize / understand / remember that rational, intelligent people can form different conclusions from the same information.

My partner and I would like 3, maybe 4. In my culture, you don't have kids until you're married and have secured a house/home (a 2-3 bdrm apt or condo would do). We're spending our fertile years trying to move up the ladder and save as much as we can so that we can secure a home. By the time we get the house, we won't the fertility to have 3-4 we'll be lucky if we can get 2.

Unsurprisingly, when the financial incentive is don't do X people prefer not to do X.

The truth is, we need to socialize the cost of child care and having children. Or we need immigration.

The latter has always been the cheaper (for society) option but given all the resentment that has built up in the US, we are probably better off going with the former.

imo having a kid now is like buying a horse (or maybe 2 horses). By the time a baby born today would have graduated college, there's a good chance we'll have achieved artificial general intelligence. Pretty much impossible to say what exactly would happen at that point, but, in the past kids were a pretty immediate roi, they could work on the farm, more recently arguably the roi is possibly negative but, for instance, one of my uncles takes care of my aging grandparents; but if we are anywhere near to agi a kid wouldn't even be useful for that. I mean I like kids but we're talking easily 250k+ dollars for a single one. In practice for me it would be a lot more than that since the cost of my lifestyle would go up dramatically. (source: am 25 year old american male)