Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children | Hacker News Reader

Declining fertility ideals? Young people more often prefer having no children

phys.org

28 pointsPaulHoule34 comments

It's hard to tell if these studies show that people want fewer children, or if people want fewer children as they age (ie their ideal number declines). It would be also really interesting to see if this is a form of goal post shifting where people who do not have children (for example procrastinate) move the goal post to tell themselves they succeeded at what they _actually_ wanted.

That would take longitudinal studies and to break people into cohorts of how many they wanted at various ages, and how many they infact had. Then see if those who had N children wanted more or less (and was it more or less than their initial predictions, and are they happy with their choices)...

The little bit of googling I've found suggests mostly want as many or more children than they have, meaning having 0 children is a dominated strategy compared to at least having some, if not more than you currently already do -- up to a point.

University of Michigan did a recent study that shows intentional childfree cohort at at least around 20% in Michigan [1]. Would be super interesting to expand these studies out across wider populations.

Somewhat related, about 40-50% annually of both US [2] and global [3] pregnancies are unintended. How many are unintended and unwanted would also be an interesting datapoint. This would provide signal as to folks who perhaps wanted to remain childfree but didn't because of circumstances.

[1] https://www.michiganradio.org/health/2022-07-27/1-in-5-adult...

[2] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[3] https://www.unfpa.org/press/nearly-half-all-pregnancies-are-...

You put it like it's not normal to not wanting kids.

I'm pretty sure a lot like and love their kids but I'm quite fine with not having to shift my life around kids.

We area much fuller planet than before. Everything is full.

We also have plenty of other things to occupy our time than kids and we can have sex without kids and stigma.

afaik Its not normal in the statistics sense of the word, most people are falling in a tightly centered distribution. But I'm not going to debate here that it's a moral choice, or that you're somehow wrong by being one or more SDs out of center. (It might be, but this isnt the forum for it). Anyone who does not want to have children of their own are well within their rights. I'd encourage anyone who doesnt have kids to still find someway to contribute their time/interactions to the next generations though, I've found it really changes the mindset of people to invest in someone else with no expectation of return.

Im a nihilist and also see value in anti-natialism.

Almost no one can buy a house, of course they want no children.

Why is buying a house a prerequisite? Renting is perfectly reasonable. Billions of people happily have kids never being able to afford to buy a house.

That was a round about way of saying people can’t afford kids so they don’t consider it a life choice

Expecting to bring up your children in better (or at least same) conditions as you experienced as a child seems reasonable.

Bought a house a couple of years ago, don't want children.

I would have loved to have kids. I'm 33 and will never have children. I consider it morally irresponsible to bring children into a world where they will have to deal with the worst of the changing climate. That's it, that's the only reason.

It's heartbreaking, and yes, cynical -- but it's not a risk I'm willing to take ("the world will turn itself around and band together to mitigate climate change" is not a gamble I'm willing to put on my child's life).

If you’re in a developed nation, and unless you expect the earth to go through an irreversible Venus syndrome in the next century, I don’t see how this argument is anything more than a fig leaf for more fundamental social ailments. What would you say to someone in 700 AD, for whom the next 1000 years were more likely to be objectively worse in terms of quality of life than the next 1000, even accounting for what climate change is expected, intervention notwithstanding.

The costs of childcare, housing and education have exploded, and even establishing the relationship needed to do the deed in the first place is arguably harder than it s been. That sucks and there’s little any individual can do about it, despite the rhetoric blaming it on the generations most likely to be impacted by it. Climate is a convenient scapegoat to deflect blame, but we were never to blame in the first place.

> What would you say to someone in 700 AD, for whom the next 1000 years were more likely to be objectively worse in terms of quality of life than the next 1000

Not OP, but I would probably say something like "don't have kids, it's morally irresponsible to bring children into a world where they will have to deal with conditions likely worse and far more barbaric than climate change which causes immense suffering in the future".

Then I'd quickly duck out before they reported me for being a witch.

They didn’t burn that many witches back in those days, it was more of a renaissance* and reformation thing.

*Romans really liked executing/punishing people for witchcraft too compared with medieval Christians

Respectfully, and this is a very personal decision, I see it the opposite way that you do.

Our ability to counteract, or reverse, climate change will be directly related to the vitality and economic power of future civilization. So if you have lots of children, in a thriving society, then humanity will be more able to reverse climate change than it is today.

As data, consider that US emissions have already peaked. And "The proposed wind, solar and battery projects seeking interconnection to U.S. transmission grids today are enough to bring the country to 80 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030."[1]

Certainly we are a long, long way from making total global emissions negative. But we can give our children the tools they need to completely reverse climate change. And if there're in a healthy and thriving society they're likely to solve the problem that we have caused.

The slope of US emissions is already in the right direction - I can't wait for the total amount to go negative!

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/transmission/the-us-has...

We are not in a position were we have not enough people to solve any specific problem.

I don't get your logic.

How can emissions be indirectly correlated with the population size on earth?

I don't understand this space of what I can only term ecological or economic antinatalism. Can you share your thoughts on the following?

Do you think unbeing is preferable to a potentially miserable life that would still likely result in them having their own children that didn't experience their own level of suffering? How many generations of potential suffering is required before having children is off the table? How many n+ future generations of having potentially joyful and regenerating lives would offset the former generations of suffering?

What level or type of disaster would trigger it? Would you have had kids if you knew that the Black Death was coming or, being a Roman citizen, that the Roman Empire was going to fall? If you were a European in 1920, fully knowing the outcome of WWII, would you intentionally have kids? What if you only had models that these things were coming in a fuzzy way?

My father-in-law told me don't have kids. My brother-in-law sees climate change as catastrophic to any progeny, and my best friend views human life itself as an involuntary evil inflicted on children, but I have difficulties understanding their positions on an intuitive level. I get the reasoning on a rational level, but I don't have the gut-sense of it and it hurts my relationship with my family and friends.

Like, my position is that I'd like to think that I'd undergo torture for my kids, and that my kids would do so likewise for theirs recursively until the number of generations outnumbered the stars. From what I can see, living-on is the only thing that actually lasts--everything else will fall away, improve, and fall away again, including what we mean by being human itself, but procreation is forever.

How can I understand your perspective? Can I understand it? It would help me build stronger bridges if you (or anyone else) could help me intuitively picture it.

There was a significant dip in birthrates during the 1920s.

Twenty years later something terrible happened to a lot of sons.

It is plausible to me, some people lose the will to have kids, when it is most disadvantageous to have children. Something is off, we can all sense it.

That sense is just prior experience, from conversation, news story, etc building memory over time.

“Inequality is growing” headlines have been in the news since the 90s.

What you prescribe to ethereal magic is years of shared prior experience and exposure.

The sense experience is half of the two frames of reference. I was hoping to explore the other half as to why that might be.

Millions of men are not 'pulling through' like they used to, something is definitely off and it feels very impolite to say anything more serious about it.

There was a significant drop in birthrates in the 1920s because millions of the men who would have fathered those children were dead.

Not so much in the US or in Finland (which effectively didn’t take part in WW1 at all)

Priced out of having children

Normalize stay-at-home moms. This will raise the birthrate and drive up wages. For now us faithful Catholics, as well as Mormons and Muslims, will keep civilization going.

This seems to be a big issue. e.g. it seems Israel has permanently shifted to the right because of the excessive growth of the (societally/economically) useless ultra-orthodox population.

While other people have to spend their lives working they can spend their reading their boom and having dozens of children because of government subsidies.

Yes of course religious people only have kids because they just want those government subsidies, not because God told us to "be fruitful and multiply"

I never said that’s the reason why they do that. It’s possibly one of the reasons why they can, though.

Also I was almost exclusively talking about a specific group in Israel:

50% or so of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work (instead they spend their days studying religious texts or something…). They have massive amounts of children and are supported by the state and/or their wives (78% of whom do have jobs).

For reference, there's 16% Ultra-Orthhodox follower in Israel (which itself has a popultion of 9millopn).

We should just normalize stay at home spouses, no need for it to specifically be moms. Also we need to bump wages enough for that to make sense for most people.

No moms specifically. It's better for the family as their nature is specifically ordered toward raising children. Men on the other hand are ordered towards protecting and providing for the family. The feminist movement to get women working is the great hoax. It makes women miserable and it is the single great cause of the wage stagnation by doubling the workforce. Corporation love this.

Do you think that the Catholic Church has historically or presently embraced wage labor outside the home? Is modern society something that fathers can protect their kids from by being absent? I say as this as one of five kids of a Traditionalist Catholic father who rolled around with Marcel Lefebvre. None of his kids are Catholic. And it wasn't for a lack of a decent catechesis.

Dont have kids, cant afford kids, I didnt like growing up poor to uneducated parents and uneducated people around me.

UK is way too crowded anyway, so I'll let the immigrants crossing the channel take the place of my kids.

Hopefully they'll be able to destroy that anglo-saxon rape and pillage philosophy out of the native population, of which I'm one.

Companies are very toxic, houses very expensive, schools are useless but yeah people are to blame.

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