Point is parenting is hard and life today makes it harder. I don’t believe wedlock is a deciding reason for people having children.
If I'm paying for childcare the expenses often increase linearly with the number of children, with my wife caring for our children we were able to double the number of children while substantially reducing costs.
We are no longer jetting to Alps for skiing, and we've not had a night out without the kids in 9 years but we've different priorities now.
On a serious side note. I think many (including us) highly underestimate how much time children require.
Why? Is it possible our busy schedules, ability to relocate, and less dependency on each other are reasons why this may not be as important as it was at one time?
Also you may not have experienced the adversity necessary to forment the desire for a fuller sibling relationship.
Everyone gets there own new underwear.
Also after the collapse of civilization, the labor of the children will be especially helpful. :)
Kids were previously an asset a century ago, now they’re a luxury good.
There's an opportunity cost for most life decisions. Sometimes they're obscured. It's often not presented this way but for a cohort of women university and work, displaces marriage and children.
It feels like a lot of users there, instead of replacing all that time/effort/money spending (that comes with having kids) with a bunch of fun/useful/exciting things to do in life, they end up replacing it with "not having kids is my personality and the ultimate activity".
I agree with the core premise of both (not religious, don't want to ever have kids), but i ended up completely filtering out both subreddits. Even opening a random post from those subs on r/all is like stepping into some children- and parent-hating alternate reality cesspool, where their choice is the only "obvious" choice, and everyone else is "brainwashed" or an idiot.
That's an important point. I'm in the "people that just happen to be not religious" group, some people around me are religious and we have no issues getting along. These subreddits are based on a total rejection of "live and let live".
https://theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-gap-...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-gender-gap-in-marriages-betwe...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/01/business/college-gend...
(“College educated gender gap” are the search keywords for more info on the topic)
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
Even in the Guardian piece you're linking there:
> To me, looking at the demographic data, it doesn’t seem that there is a widespread aversion to forming serious relationships [across educational lines] – there are more and more relationships in which women have more education than their male partners.”
> She doesn’t see large numbers of educated women holding out for an educated partner, and remaining unhappily single, in other words.
In the Pew piece linked from there,
> The primary reason for the decline in the share of married couples with similar education levels is that marriages between spouses with high school or less than high school education are much less common these days — the share is down from 74% of all marriages in 1960 to 24% in 2012. In addition, adults with high school or less education are much less likely to marry. The marriage rate among this group plummeted —from 72% in 1960 to 46% in 2012.
> Just the opposite has occurred among college graduates. The share of couples in which both spouses have a college degree has risen steadily in recent decades. In 1960, only 3% of couples were in this group, the share rose to 22% in 2012.
Framing a decrease in marriage as "for a cohort of women university and work, displaces marriage and children", what I was responding to, is simply not supported by the data. The decrease in overall marriage is disproportionately due to the non-college-educated. Getting a university degree increases a woman's likelihood of marriage.
You seem a bit too into being childfull, I probably wouldn't like your shitty kids anyway.
But if couples want to, it's doesn't have to be the financial catastrophe that many make it out to be.
The pressure of living up to the "mom/dad" in the bio on your social media coupled with the cripplng fear of buying the wrong pram or not enough toys and fucking your child up for life has spawned an industry that is happy to facilitate the drive toward that financial catastrophe.
This might apply to individuals but not to nations or society as a whole.
Pensions, healthcare, capitalism, etc are so dependent on new people being born. I would assume that's why the ticking demographic bomb is so worrying for governments with declining birthrates.
Only if you care about what the influencer of the day is saying. Things are much easier now as we have childcare, kindergartens, disposable diapers, milk formulas, better healthcare.