Your points about how we must do better to make having kids less financially risky are excellent however. Better parental leave and tax incentives would help.
Remember this [1] picture? Related: the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to explode further. Average age there is, according to the google infobox [2], 18.8.
In other words: US-internal policies are not going to move the needle on world population much.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Valeriep...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+age+sub+saharan+afri...
Housing can actually be fairly affordable in Europe. Berlin until about 5 years ago had incredibly affordable housing for such a nice city…then it simply got more popular until that wasn’t the case anymore. Tokyo would have similar problems if its population wasn’t actually shrinking now (as are Nagoya and Osaka), since it’s a nice place to live, and housing isn’t very restricted beyond having to rebuild everything every 30 (SFH) to 50 (apartments) years.
San Francisco should look like Hong Kong or Tokyo. If you want a quaint small town move to a quaint small town. World cities are not small towns and trying to contain them to preserve their “character” just leads to affordability crises and homelessness among other problems.
If Detroit suddenly became a hot place to live and it wasn’t upzoned the same problems would start happening there.
My point is that, with few exceptions, housing is always expensive in places that are popular. If you want affordable housing, turn your city into Cleveland, don’t turn it into Hong Kong.
What if one of the most powerful politicians alive doesn't get to make this particular decision? She'll be so disenfranchised!
You mean to rent?
What about people who want to buy a home, have space, and have generational wealth?
You are unlikely to find that in Berlin or any major western city.
The only places to buy withing reach of the middle class are tens to hundreds of KMs out of these cities.
Berlin, and may I add Vienna, are anomalies. Vienna's population peaked in 1910. Berlin's population peaked in 1943. They were both capitals of an empire at their peak time. Then they became less important, and their population decreased. Now they have been in a very unique situation with their new population growth, because they already were designed for a larger population.
You can't generalize from Berlin and Vienna to other, more normal, cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Vienna.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin#/media/File:Berlin_popu...
It's been getting a bit more expensive due to Chinese students and also people moving north from England but it's still very affordable compared to most places.
If you’re looking for an excuse to not have a kid, you’ll find one. There’s a cultural element too.
I'm not sure I want to give up my landhouse for a six-story building in which I share a place with hundreds... just because of "having children".
debatable if that has changed
Having no kids is simple very easy life without any bigger problems.
Procreating is our only purpose, as a life form.
Therefore, even if procreating is our only purpose, we can still ponder what the point of doing so actually is. Since we are intellectual beings, we can decide whether it's a logical decision or not, so that we don't end up no-ops either. I've seen friends and family members where kids are born to teen parents, who then have kids as teens, who then have kids as teens, and so on. Those are the equivalent of the moths, those teens have not had the chance to grow and achieve more, they were simply procreating to procreate, and they could not get out of poverty as their entire life was only dedicated to sustenance. Personally, their lives were very sad to me.
Finally, do not fall for the fallacy of appealing to nature, as just because something is natural does not mean it is moral. Many animals will forcefully mate with one another or eat their prey alive, that does not mean that humans must do the same. So too for procreation.
I agree that there are plenty of reasons to not have kids. and also that plenty of people probably shouldn't have kids from a moral calculus; though importantly it's not our calculus to dictate.
In any case i still say that having kids for the sake of humanity is a Just reason to have kids. Problems and all. Humanity is basically a huge injection of problems and chaos. What else are we going to do.
the lack of people who openly talk about regretting having kids as that's not socially acceptable
I used to feel like that... until I had children. It is an experience that can't be understood until you live through it. We can use words to try and describe it, but to a non-parent it will sound like a "nebulous sense of pride and accomplishment" because of how far removed it is from their past experiences. It's like trying to use words to explain music to a person who has never felt it.
You won't find answers to this by trying to rationalize it, because you can't know what it's like until you experience it, if you ever do.
You do you, my friend. I could no possibly have less at stake here, one way or another.
Have a nice day.
In contrast, you cannot put the baby back inside if you don't like it, so to speak, and your earthly concerns are much more affected than some nebulous concept of hell that may not even come to pass should you choose a good god.
It’s like buying a 1M dollar without seeing it and having someone tell you “you’ll love it when you cross the threshold because I did with my house!”
Not saying it didn’t happen to you or your experience is invalid. But extrapolating your experience to everyone else feels dismissive about the doubts they are expressing.
The child's soul, whole, grows... whilst your damaged soul whithers. Evidence of this can be seen by the zombie like appearance new parents have, still coping with this horrible loss.
As time passes, you become more accustomed to this loss, and it becomes like Stockholm syndrome. You eventually like it, embrace it, concoct wild fantasies about how great the experience is. It is your own mind defending you from the horror, and more importantly, you wish this same fate upon others.
Don't believe them. Don't trust them! Keep, cherish, protect your soul.
I am not extrapolating my experience to everyone. I'm pointing out that the vast majority of people who have children find it a positive experience.
Lastly, I'm not dismissing their feelings, I am reassuring them that they are very common indeed.
How do you know this?
But that is not what I'm saying, is it? I'm saying that having doubts before having kids is very common, and that they dissipate once you actually become a parent.
Having children is an adventure for which you can never be prepared. Every parent takes a leap of faith and does the best they can, regardless of how much or how little confidence they had. That's it.
I would be more concerned about the ability of somebody to raise a child if they didn't feel apprehensive, because that would suggest they underestimate how much effort it is going to take.
I completely get where you are coming from. I was the partner who didn't want children at all. I didn't want the responsibility, the loss of freedom and the financial burden.
We then had a child and any doubts I could have had dissipated: I now knew with absolute certainty that I did NOT want to raise children. No room for doubt whatsoever. I struggled with anger, depression and grief of my previous lifestyle.
A few years later I'm perfectly satisfied with not one but two kids. We would have a third if we were young enough.
All of this is to say: it is a life-changing experience and no amount of doubt or certainty before the fact can prepare anybody for the reality of it. Thus, people overthink it in my opinion.
Do or do not have kids, but let's not pretend that any of us knows what they are getting into until they are in the middle of it. Your priorities in life and your very own identity changes.
That's fine for you but what about society?
A few western societies are below the child replacement rate.
How do these places keep their society and social programs going without growing the tax base with new births?
Are immigrants expected to move in and have their own children to insure the tax base stays stable?
Yes that one. The same one with pyramid scheme social programs.
My main concern is who will pay for pensions and health care when my working generation is old?
Most social programs are insolvent or virtual ponzi schemes where CURRENT workers pay for TODAY'S beneficiaries.
Thus we need immigrants AND native babies at greater the replacement rate to insure the scheme does not stop.
* This does not mean "exactly one full time income", aka "woman, get in the kitchen". There are many desirable options between "one traditional full time male earner" and "two people working a combined 90 hours of paid employment". Also doesn't necessarily mean all the trappings of an affluent Western lifestyle, big suburban home with two new cars on the drive, foreign vacations every year etc.
Remote sounded good back in 2021, but with the return to office push, it is a struggle to have quality of life today.
Our priorities have changed but some want to be able to have everything without compromise.
It's getting better - especially since the pandemic - but most jobs are not remotely flexible enough to deal with school hours or sick children. Nursery is insanely expensive in most countries. I really think a mortgage style option would make a lot of sense here because it's a ton of money for a short time. Or, just make it free like some countries do (and the Tories pretended to do in the UK).
Life still assumes only one parent will work. Our school regularly schedules meetings and events in the middle of the day at short notice and expects that will be fine.
Does this impact parent's earning potential? Absolutely. I cannot find a single day on my calendar where my wife and I had an solid block of 8 hours to focus on work. It just doesn't happen. Thankfully I have flexible work hours otherwise it would be literally impossible. As it stands, it's merely exhausting and unsustainable.
Almost. They want the same lifestyles that their parents had growing up. I do blame the housing market for this. If you rent for the rest of your life, nothing will stop your rent from increasing and your wages from stagnating, and those two lines will cross at some point. With kids it's sooner. The only security you can have is to own a home to guard against any future price gouging.
I know an older couple, same age as my parents, they take their entire family on vacations and have a very nice house. They talk about how when they started out they made their own furniture out of paper mache.
My parents had a similar lifestyle, things were not easy then either.
There is a mountain of good enough cheap products now due to global supply chains, but you have to stuff them into a tiny flat/apartment.
Sitting on a papier-mâché chair in a well sized home is by far the better situation.
But what about women who want families or want both?
What can western societies do to encourage these women to have at least 2 children?
We need taxpayers or these social benefits will be gone in a century or sooner.
Main reason seems to be that young people in advanced societies simply don't want children because the alternate childless lifestyle seems very appealing in 20s and 30s, costs of raising kids are privatized while benefits are socialized (welfare programs funded by taxes on the working generation).
This will not work for as long as we keep building neighborhoods that require the use of cars or make biking/walking unsafe. America also lacks a comprehensive public transportation system.
You will not stop the artificially high cost of housing without addressing that root cause.
But yeah, the problem is that some people want to live in their houses with a backyard, those evil villains that don't see the advantage of living in a pigeon home for further capitalistic enhancement of the lives of fat-cat developers.
Everything that exists deserves to perish. The capitalistic leviathan can never be stopped, neither questioned. What do those small folks in the path of progress think they are?
Tax incentives help, but where Americans need federal assistance is in paid time off, college tuition assistance (self and children) , and retirement. I'm not talking about social security when I say retirement. What I mean is there needs to be incentives for companies to do better than just 401ks. Public sectors are still enjoying pensions, perhaps a tax incentive would help, but I do not necessarily have a solution there. Only a very subjective view of the problems from my perspective.