Why Americans aren't having babies
wsj.com
wsj.com
- Modern helicopter and "attachment" parenting styles are significantly more resource and time-intensive than in other generations.
- Abundance of birth control.
- I would also argue that the breakdown of communities plays a much larger, and likely subconscious psychological role. Whether valid or not, people don't feel like they have a support network, and don't feel like it is safe to have children.
Please bear in mind, I'm not arguing that any of these points are either good or bad, but just suggesting that they contribute to declining birthrates.
Usually these topics emerge with the same three major factors for why people aren't having children:
1. Can't afford to raise a child
2. Concerns about the future state of the world, e.g. climate change
3. A huge loss of freedom
Anecdotally, I personally feel like #3 is by far the biggest reason why people aren't having children. Every time someone in my peer group (mid 30s) announces that they are having a child, there's widespread acknowledgement that we are going to see MUCH less of them from now on.
This is a tradeoff, and those who really want children will still choose to have children. But for those who are deeply engaged in something else -- hobbies, social life, career -- or simply enjoy a low-stress life, having children would upend that. Modern living gives a lot of opportunities to go really deep into a few different facets of life, but most people have to limit that depth once they have children. It doesn't help that modern child raising seems to be endlessly shuffling children from one structured activity to another, with little help from a broader social circle.
Plus, there's less social pressure than ever to have children. If many of your peers aren't having kids, you're not the odd one out anymore.
So I think many people of childbearing age today see a much higher cost in childraising than what people saw in the past. If they aren't especially enthusiastic about raising children in particular, is it a surprise that many are choosing not to?
You'd be surprised how easy it is to have a kid when you can afford daycare, lots of toys to keep Junior busy, and day-to-day life conveniences that make the rest easy to manage.
i.e. freedom isn't an issue because I can send kiddo to summer camp, after school programs, and dance classes. and it's easy to snag a pizza or tacos on the way home from grabbing them from said events. the wee one sleeps really well with white noise generators and temperature controls for the room, and has lots of books to play with (plus a yard + the dogs) when she's not sleeping.
it's the money.
Richest societies are having the fewest babies and poorest people are having the most. So this doesn't ring true.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenaebarnes/2022/07/10/elon-mus...
Countries with the highest TFR are also generally the poor ones.
Specifically, women's rights, financial independence, and general safety if choosing to forego having many children or even entering into a relationship.
The women in the poorest countries are having more kids due to not being able to have fewer kids.
Average American women have fewer kids than top 10% Americans due to wanting more resources per child.
Citation needed for that claim. While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I have also seen other plausible hypothesis that kids are seen as safety nets in the poorer society, or a possible escape hatch out of poverty even if one of them gets lucky in life. So having more kids might be a rational choice for poor people.
I do not have data either way about motivations for women in poor societies to have kids.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
All the countries with high total fertility rates have environments where women would not expect quality healthcare or medical interventions should things go wrong. It stands to reason that women are not making a conscious decision to put their quality of life and life itself at risk over and over again to birth human resources.
Outside of outlier cult-ish groups, I see almost no women choosing to have more than 3 children. And the data seems to agree. Everyone I know that had a 3rd child, they had 2 boys or 2 girls first and only had a 3rd to try for the other gender.
So I am deducing that the painful experience of pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant rearing is a significant limiting factor.
I think the thing with 'freedom' is that they don't want to take on another big responsibility, at the expense of what they already have in their life.
People aren't obligated to justify their own family planning. Even raising the question in the first place is overreach
And no, people aren't obligated to make family planning decisions that contribute to a desirable macroeconomic climate 30 years down the line. Not our problem, it'll sort itself out
Animals stopping breeding means they stop having sex. That is not necessarily the case with humans.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-have-been-...
> The decreases “aren’t trivial,” as the authors wrote in the study, published on November 19 in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women.
The underlying paper has more demographic breakdowns:
> Wellings et al. (2019)—using three waves of data from the UK’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) completed in 1991, 2001, and 2012—found that frequency of sex among 16–44 year olds had declined, more so among married participants and those in the 35–44 age group.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02125-2
Similar article:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/all-about-sex/2021...
Our basic desires and how we deal with them is informed by our society and how it is organized, its culture, etc.
That outcome isn't "more natural" than a hypothetical where they aren't pressured and don't have children
There's no way of distinguishing instinct from social conditioning at scale, this argument is just using naturalness as a moral characterization
I'm not sure what you mean by "even raising the question in the first place is overreach." On an individual and personal level, it may be inappropriate or rude to ask the question. On a government level it is more complicated as I think that while government has no place in interfering with an individual's personal choice, I think there may be utility in understanding changing social trends over time, as a government that is "by the people, for the people" can better represent its constituents and form policies that its constituents want when it understands them, demographically.
But most important to me is that, on a scientific level, it is just data and knowledge. And in my opinion there is never such a thing as "too much knowledge."
There's a difference between government disinterestedly researching social trends and having (particularly right wing) news media shoveling out these alarmist articles that do a lot of stereotyping
The tone of this article, coupled with recent political changes regarding family planning, reeks of overreach into people's private lives
The very mention of "climate change" as being a factor for reducing offspring and second guessing kids is certainly not a right wing idea.
Secondly, anything from mainstream media outlets projects an alarmist tone. They operate on the basic impulse of fear.
While I'd rather not have the state involved in any sort of family planning, the topic is interesting to delve in.
Overall, we rate the Wall Street Journal Right-Center biased due to low-biased news reporting combined with a strong right-biased editorial stance. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to anti-climate, anti-science views, and occasional misleading editorials.
Plenty of (US) right wing media sources accept climate change during the day and rubbish it after dark during peak red in the face angry host times.
I mean, they aren't saying that idea because they agree with it. They could be saying it to paint a negative caricature
Best case scenario: 10% chance you and your spouse are great parents, who stay healthy enough to be good parents, who have a physically and mentally healthy kid, who doesn't end up in a life-changing accident or addicted to substances or down an ideological rabbit hole, and you don't lose your income for 18 ~ 24 years while the kid grows into a self-sufficient adult.
More likely scenario: something (physical, mental, environmental) is way off and there's lots of despair and suffering in your family for years or possibly forever.
I don't like other people's kids, who are seemingly healthy, and I don't want to roll those dice for one of my own, who might not be.
I'd say that the risks aren't worth the benefits to you. But my weighing of the benefits is different. To me, my kids give meaning and purpose. It's honestly hard to imagine not having them.
I think different people are just different. To some, having a purpose in life (to raise your kids) is really meaningful and more important than worries about the risks, all of which seem minor in comparison. But to others, it's a burden instead of a purpose, so it doesn't make any sense to have kids.
the cost of an "ok" daycare can be higher than someone's entire paycheck.
$26,000 per year per kid.
Rates vary wildly across the country. I have friends in the Bay that are paying about the same as us. I have friends in Oregon that are at ~$300/wk. I have friends in Nashville that are at ~$1000/wk. It's a super local thing.
Look, anytime you have a waiting list for something, capitalism has broken. You raise prices until you don't have a waiting list. That's 'Business for 5th Graders' level stuff. But you just cannot do that with daycare.
Our state does a good job with subsidies for the very poor (we have some at out daycare), but it is still really really expensive.
We cannot wait until they get to state subsidized preschool, holy cow man.
Also, Pro-tip: If you are even thinking of getting pregnant, go get on all the local daycare lists you can. Wait times can be >18 months for a lot of places.
Would you consider it a "good" daycare or is it what was available?
There are issues, like all places, but it works for us.
Not entirely true.
A day care has variable costs that jump at the kid count modulo something. Often a government-mandated ratio of adults to kids at various age groups. And adults that have to be paid some government-mandated minimum wage plus some benefits.
Therefore, a day care may be profitable for N kids but not profitable for N+1 kids.
So, the rational choice for a day care may be to optimize for always, always having exactly N kids. Hence, wait lists so when 1 kid departs another kid can immediately replace them.
N might vary if the owner chooses to work as a caretaker. Has some sweet rent deal on a fixed amount of space. Etc.
Notice, this sketch of why wait lists may exist isn't due to capitalism. It's due to a rational response to governmental mandates atop capitalism.
> You raise prices until you don't have a waiting list.
Nah, the parent decides to hire a nanny. Or to host an au pair. Or to move closer to family foregoing some earnings potential. That's the way to buy your way out via substitute goods using just money.
(Notice those substitutes operate in different regulatory regimes. Notice also the day care has to compete against those substitute goods! There's a limit to what parents will pay.)
Sure, a waitlist of a few months is fine here. But waitlists of > 1 year are the norm (at least for all the parents I've talked with). I can't see how any mod() math is going to square up with those long of waits.
Look, the US is the only country that has this issue. And it's a huge issue. Talk to any parent of young kids, they will all complain about the daycare system we have. It needs fixing and raw capitalism isn't the method to fix it with.
It takes 1 year for a batch of similarly aged kids to age into the next classroom. >1 year sounds like math to me, especially under the selection bias of adults only talking about this hassle when commiserating.
> Look, the US is the only country that has this issue.
The US stinks at domestically developing young talent vs its relative ability to attract skilled adults from across the world, raised to adulthood on the dime of other other countries' infrastructure. The US demographics pyramid relies on and will increasingly rely on immigration. Right or wrong, it's a feature not a bug.
I didn't realize how hostile some locales were to children until I left NYC (which stinks for kids in many ways) to NJ (which excels for them, a complement to NYC, attracting families in the process). Ever seen an entire city glow at your dog but glower at your kids?
We all know it takes a much greater amount of effort to raise a kid today because our standards are so much higher, which is particularly true of fathers. You could be a "good dad" in the 80s if you only beat your children in response to them doing something bad versus randomly beating them when you got black out drunk. I would definitely say that dogs today receive a higher standards of care (nutrition, toys, doctor visits, training) than children did in the 50s.
Most of what children need, healthcare, food, shelter, supervision. Is directly tied to employment of the adults.
If an adult loses employment you lose all pillars to support your child.
The social safety net in the US is not sufficient for people to feel safe in having children.
Further, the argument of why people should have children so the economy is supported is very shallow. I am not raising children so the economy can have more consumers.
As a society we should have larger goals then the next quarter results of publicly traded companies.
Fertility is absolutely abysmal, though, and even worse among the natives (less so among recent arrivals from Afghanistan, Africa etc.)
Meanwhile the winner in the global birth rates is Niger, a country near the bottom of the world economic ladder.
It can't be primarily about social security.
as a westerner most you, if you lose your job, will have no way to feed yourself. how many of you have the skills, infrastructure, and available bodies on hand to set up a subsistence farm? where is the land to be able to do that?
the guys in Niger are a lot closer to the land, to traditional food-ways like herding animals, and don't have much by way of creature comforts, which means they don't have much to lose, may have things to gain, by having kids.
in many ways it keeps them poor, but poor with a lot of kids is a society that continues, while rich but depress and to anxious to go outside and meet people and breed is a society that doesn't have a future.
Earth Overshoot Day is just weeks away this year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day)
Population decline is bad for our unsustainable economy, but it's a good thing for the environment and our increasingly diminishing resources.
Even frankly unexpected places like Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh are dropping towards 2.0 or less.
* not enough daycare even if you do have money;
* not enough space at home;
* cities that are not made for parents and small kids;
* atomized communities with very little help;
Feels like most people are raising their kids by themselves.
I can only wonder what it will be like in another 20 years, when my children are grown up.
I don't need to have kids for them to be my labor, that's not how this works anymore.
- They had latchkey children - no daycare required!
- "Free range" children was a thing and nobody got arrested for it!
- There were such things as "Block Parents", people in the neighborhood who looked out for all the kids. Obviously this was before "stranger danger."
- Everybody looked after everybody else's kids, even in tenement buildings.
- People lived close to where the grew up and generally had relatives nearby to help out when all of the above failed.
Nowadays, most of this is gone. In short, in just a mere 40 to 50 years, the cost of having children has skyrocketed. Add in the cost-of-living expenses have skyrocketed for younger people and you get the result that fewer people are having children and those who are having children are having them much later.
The short answer is cultural fragmentation and soft paternalism.
I would be miles away from home doing whatever and nobody would know. Now parents freak out if their kids leave their sight for more than a few seconds.
One thing that is really interesting is that many of the "free range" children don't follow that same parenting technique even though things are as safe or safer than when I was a child. I think this is mostly from the media putting fear into them that their children are going to be abducted.
I really feel for kids now in the US. How they grow up I would not really consider a childhood. It's just preparation to sit in an office all day until they die of old age.
My sister has kids, and she's a total helicopter parent. I've asked her why, considering how we were raised. She simply said, "That's just how it is now. That's how everyone parents." So yeah, there is certainly a cultural element to this. But I wonder if that cultural change has been created or amplified by cost. In other words, the dumb-ass kid that jumped off a bridge into a shallow creek (it was on a bet, naturally), would his parents have to file for bankruptcy these days because of the high medical costs?
Last week, I let my 7 year old go by herself to a Dollar Tree store by herself while I was with her siblings at another store in the same shopping center. A bit later, I went in to the Dollar Tree after her, and got a real talking to from the cashier about how unsafe it was for me to let her go to the store by herself. She said the world isn't safe any more and I'm putting her at risk. The cashier was an elderly woman! I would think she was raised in a time where kids were allowed to leave the house on their own.
I try to teach my kiddos independence. I send them out on their in ways that I think are safe. But the amount of judgment I get is just crazy. And I fear that one day I'll have child protective services knocking on my door.
Again, I think almost everything can be reduced to "it just is too expensive".
* Don't care - children are not a priority (often "I am the priority")
* Get wealthy - children oppose money gaining
* Get famous - children correlate poorly with rapid fame rise
* Get sex - children correlate poorly with being a player
* Work less - children take work (if not already wealthy)
* America - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/americans-fe...
* Sinking ship - enshitification everywhere, murder stats on all news, why have kids in a latrine?
* Success correlation - wealth and success correlated with starting wealth. why have kids?
* Negative wage slave experiences - hey kids, here's your collar, just like mine.
* Abortion access - americans would fight to the death other over abortion access. wait, they already do. "a gift to Jesus on his birthday."
* Health care (not specifically kids) - 10x all other locations.
* Food - pointlessly expensive. so much land it's nonsense humans starve. they fight to squander it all.
Don't forget climate change! The latrine is also on fire.
Yet only about half of the increase is due to rising prices for the same quality and quantity of care. (Child care prices are up 180% overall since the mid-90s, according to BLS data.)
The remaining half is coming from parents choosing more personalized or accredited care for a given 3- to 5-year-old, or paying for more hours, Winship says."
It's gotten more expensive. We're also parenting harder, though it's unclear to what degree there is a selection effect in play.
Dual-income households were less prevalent in 2017 (54.4%) than 1998 (56.5%) [1]. Looking at just families, it went up from 2022 to 2023, but I don't see data for 1995 [2].
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/comparing-characte...
> The remaining half is coming from parents choosing more personalized or accredited care for a given 3- to 5-year-old, or paying for more hours, Winship says.
Basically parents are unwilling to have kids unless they can give them an ideal and heavily invested in life as well as in many cases buy their way out of many of the hassles.
Not wanting to be poor, or more likely, trading the yearly trip to $insertPlaceHere, eating out on the weekends, or the daily Starbucks, for a new kid, isn't a bad, but 'too expensive' doesn't really describe that situation accurately.
If someone was trying to get me to buy a boat I'd tell them I can't afford it. It's a shortcut to, Why would I spend money on something for "the economy"
I won't have kids if I cannot pay for their post-secondary education. That is clearly not a requirement in poorer countries.
Does having children impact their earning potential? The US offers a relatively high earning potential, and having children really directly interferes with that. If you don't have high earning potential, having kids may not have an appreciable impact.
Childcare alone can easily cost over $1k/mo. Daily Starbucks and eating out is nothing compared to having kids.
it certainly did in my case. Holding a newborn and realizing an actual life depends on you is good motivation to do what it takes to get better as a whole, earn more, and climb the ladder. It wasn't easy but i'm in a much better financial position with kids than i would be without. I know myself pretty well and i'm sure i'd be in the same apartment doing the same thing day after day year after year like my childless friends. No knock on them but i've grown my income way more than they have and I credit family obligations for forcing my hand.
Actually, worldwide population trends suggest that childbirth rates are dropping across the board. Poverty does have a direct correlation with how many kids you have because access to healthcare, education and financial stability all contribute to you having fewer kids. But as globally those things change for the better, child birth rates will continue to drop.
If the cost of having and raising a kid was equal to one Starbucks drink a day we wouldn't have this problem. What we have right now in the US is record amounts of household debt (hint: it's not because people have been going on "yearly trip to $insertPlaceHere" and charging it to their VISA), record number of utility shutoffs due to non-pay, record numbers of people who can't afford rent, and skyrocketing child poverty rates.
'too expensive' seems to sum up the situation pretty damn well
You need space for kids, meaning your 1 bed apartment isn’t gonna cut it. Look at the cost of housing these days.
You will need to pay for childcare. This could easily be $1000 per month for the first 5 years.
Transportation. You may need to get a larger vehicle. Plus food, clothing, healthcare.
Oh and then there’s tuition costs.
To summarize, this country has done approximately nothing to make childcare more accessible lately and is wondering why kids don’t magically appear.
> There are plenty of poor countries having children
You’ve hit the nail on the head. In an advanced economy, making a worker costs more. We have offloaded this cost onto parents, and wonder why parents aren’t doing it as much.
Like having kids and making sure they are able to survive adulthood come with two separate sticker prices. And if you’re not going to do the second, might as well not do the first.
Agreed, a lot of Nordic countries provide more support to families with children yet they have very similar numbers to countries with worse support. The monetary aspect obviously plays a factor but it cannot explain everything. If you want to change the trend you will have to look at other additional factors as well. Not all factors have the same weight but they all feed into the same trend.
The different narratives around "why would you bring children into this horrible world?" also have an effect. It does not matter that they live better lives than people did in the 13th century. Their reality tunnel will latch onto anything negative to justify why they cannot have kids until things get better. And because they always focus on the negative they will never notice if things improved at all. Things will always look too bleak for them.
It sadly also remains a reality that if a woman gets kids her career will take a hit. This pushes women who care about their careers to delay having children sometimes too long.
The economical factor has easier answers I guess than the other more intangible aspects.
What is kind of baffling to me is a lot of people are still not having kids, but anthropomortising their pets, paying 10s of thousands a year in health insurance and bills for their pets, taking them to day care, and not traveling when they can't find sitters, etc.
Eh, for people in my area at least, childcare for one new baby could is easily $20k-$45k/year, whereas I don't know of anyone personally who spends anywhere near that much a year on non-necessity material possessions. Plus all the other costs of a baby. Just another 1 room in an apartment could also be another $500-$1000 a month. Plus all the other baby-related costs. You could easily be talking about an order of magnitude difference in child-cost vs. typical spending on non-necessity material possessions per year.
people are over spending on a lot of things that quickly add up, since we aren't talking about a 'specific person' its hard to say what. For example, people buy phones every year (1,000$ a pop), eating out can cost many thousands, etc.
Its also not uncommon for people to buy 20,000$ watches or hand bags.
> Because people have no problem spending tons of money on other things
It's like saying I'm spending my money on Starbucks, and that's why I can't afford kids. The reality is that childcare is astronomically expensive. Me and my wife both work in tech, and we've had the conversation where it made more financial sense if one of us quit our jobs to raise the kids. Unfortunately we can't do that because covering mortgage would become a problem. The solution: don't have more kids.
I work in tech too, and I'm probably about median TC in tech. With my income alone I could support children and a wife, so if you are both working and can't afford it: you bought way to much house.
Let me guess, you bought a house before 2021 and are locked in on 3% or less mortgage.
> you bought a house you couldn't afford
I bought a 3 bed not so big house. Are you going to tell me that’s too big for a family with 2 kids? Or are you going to tell me I should’ve been born earlier to buy the same house for cheaper and lock in those rates?
yes, and I want to buy a new home but these prices are unreasonable, so I am not. unfortunately, I also rent because I had to move for work; however,
who said you need to buy? I am not saying you are wrong for doing so, that's what you wanted to do and good on you for that.
but you made a conscious choice to choose buying a home over having kids. you could have rented, or like me you could just wait.
my friend and her husband both work with a combined income of 250,000. They live in Brooklyn, NYC and have THREE kids, and still travel, etc. I'm guessing you and your wife is making more then that. if you can't support 3 kids at your combined income: You are over spending.
> Or are you going to tell me I should’ve been born earlier to buy the same house for cheaper and lock in those rates?
now you are just being rediculous / toxic, so will ignore that.
That being said, our cat is still family and I would do anything in my power to ensure her well-being and would be absolutely devastated and grieving when she passes.
Your example was spending ~$10k/yr on vet bills. Press (X) to doubt, but if you really think babies cost less than this, you are wildly misinformed.
We have record numbers of Americans who can't afford their rent, record numbers of utility disconnections for non-pay, household debt is at all time highs and people are struggling with the rising costs of food.
In whatever bubble you live your life in, people might seem like people "have no problems spending tons of money" but looking at the state of things in general it's very clear that Americans are struggling.
They didnt need to buy that house, rent is very cheap compared to the cost of homes right now.
That's heavily skewed by the wealthy. Most Americans can't afford to take a vacation at all. (https://www.newsweek.com/americans-ca-no-longer-afford-vacat...), online purchases are at record highs every year (since 2009) and the overall trend is that online purchases have increased since the early/mid 2000s and that's not expected to change any time soon.
> People are buying homes that have gone up by over 2x in the last 4 years
Very rich people and investors (including foreign investors) have been buying homes. Foreign investment is slowing down because of the high prices. Current transactions are at "recessionary lows" and "The average home is still unaffordable for most potential buyers" (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/25/home-price-growth-slows-what...).
Mostly people just aren't buying houses. In 2023 homes sales were at their lowest since the mid 90s (https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/home-sales-likely-fell-t... or here (no paywall issues) : https://www.housingwire.com/articles/just-4-09-million-exist...)
A prime example is housing. People seem to think if they have a kid, they NEED a 4 bedroom 2 bathroom house with a yard, or you simply can't have a kid at all, game over if you don't own that.
Meanwhile my 1920s home was more than enough for families back then, it was a 2 bedroom 1 bath.
As far as pet care, people are spending 40,000$ on operations on their pets, and thousands a month on pet health insurance. People are spending 20/hour for dog walkers, the average Seattle dog owner spends up to 9,000$ / year on their dog (source wagwalking.com).
No one says you have to pay nannys and private schooling. thats on you.
that's about on par with a child, and someone pointed out a dog only lives 20 years, that just means your 'investment' is less well spent and support my claim pets are expensive. Also noting: you dont owe your kid anything after 18, they should be grown adults capable of making their own money and decisions after that point.
Reminds me of England in the Middle Ages. Someone told me most people in England (and maybe W Europe) has a ancestor that was a King or Queen.
If true, seems we may be heading in this direction with our "Aristocracy". Seems only the very wealthy can afford more than 1 child.
I do remember Musk is trying to get rich people to have many Children. He had a WEB site about it but I cannot find it. The site has a picture of Blond Blue-eyed parents and their children. But a search did come up with this:
https://people.com/elon-musk-wants-smart-people-to-have-kids...
If a couple has 20k+ to spend a year on child care, that means they have enough free money that they can do a lot of other enjoyable things instead.
Airplane fares keep decreasing, destination vacations are becoming more and more affordable, and "everyday luxuries" keep being pushed down into becoming more affordable.
Or to put it another way, having a kid means a serious drop in QoL compared to being a DINK.
60 years ago this didn't matter, even the upper middle class wasn't jetting off around on a regular basis. Also it wasn't as socially acceptable, all your friends were having kids and if you didn't have kids you were missing out. Compared to now when there are basically two parallel societies, families with kids and families without kids, and one can choose which group to be a part of.
Every wealthy nation sees a declining birthrate that falls below the replacement rate. The economy of every wealthy nation depends on immigration. This is a fact.
If the nationalist right want people to have more babies to combat depopulation, they should be proposing and funding social support programs, not reproductive rights like abortion, IVF, contraception, etc.
France's fertility rate is basically the same as the US. (1.9 vs 1.84 according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...). Other countries with expansive welfare states like Finland and Sweden are even lower.
Japan has free healthcare for anyone under 18 as well as free daycare if your income is low, etc. Their population is also on decline.
Without this, both parents cannot work AND reproduce. Daycares are a scam. I would rather not work than offload my kids to randos.
heh it's very hard on parents. You can always spot the new parents at daycare because they're the ones crying in the parking lot after drop off.
Plus, as a parent, my #1 goal is to raise them with my full attention, teach them all the values, etc. Otherwise there is no point.
Parenting is full-time job. Daycare is lazy parenting.
That's fine too. Couples without children will always have much more money than couples who do. It's not a problem when couples who do have children can still afford to live a good life.
It won't destroy the housing market either. Not every person without kids is interested in becoming a real estate mogul. What's made housing unaffordable today wasn't that families used to be able to support themselves on a single income, it's corporations and foreign buyers who purchase homes without any intention to occupy them. They'd rather hold onto them as an investment leaving them empty or rent them out at higher and higher rates. Stopping this practice, and ensuring that anyone buying a residential property is a resident of the city/state/nation, and that the buyer must occupy the property at least some of the time would do a lot more good for the housing problem in the US than suppressing wages so that no parent can afford to stay home to raise their own children.
Absolutely no.
If your job lays you off or you get fired, then you just lost your childcare and all that community for your kid. I don't see a lot of parents taking that huge of a risk.
That happens regardless. Or is regular daycare free?
Generally though, if you lose your job, you can go get another job and still stay at the same daycare. I think we've all survived through credit cards for a while in between work. But that doesn't work if the daycare is through the job.
Co-location is, i think the key to solving this.
If co-location of daycare and work was something that people valued highly, then you'd see it happening already. The daycare nightmare has been going on for quite some time.
> I would rather not work than offload my kids to randos.
I am in agreement. Mama needs time off. Dad needs time off, too, and that helps avoid discrimination against the women.
1) Peter Pan syndrome
2) Pressure to pursue career and higher education. See 3)
3) Cost of life
So is cost of living -- these two tend to be correlated.
I do not desire to feed the capitalistic beast with more wage slaves: if I have children - it must be because I can give them a better life than I've had. That will not be the case for the foreseeable future...
There is no ethical consumption (period). If I am to raise consumption in society by bringing another human into it... that cost must be offset. An economically lush environment makes that feasible, the lack of funds makes that less feasible (to the point of impossibility).
Cry some more about how 'the poor' aren't filling the factories with their children anymore (since they've wised up) ... /s
Ethics, philosophy, you can argue along those vectors all you want. It will be useless and moot.
The answer isn't 'let me change my mind about my opinions about sending a child into wage slavery' the answer is to 'convince me (with money) my child won't have to be a wage slave and having one won't make my family homeless due to financial strains; convince me that my child will have a good life'.
You want more children - pay up: 3C7tm5a1UMgsnwGF5GtYQazLxnG9y23v2B - btc address.
The answer really is as simple as: more money is needed.
Is being childless immoral in your eyes? If so, why do you thank those that would bear (what you consider to be) an immoral agent into this world... I am seriously confused by this confusing remark.
My grandparents had money to raise a family. I don't. Is them having more resources what makes them have better morals?
Really: can you spell out explicitly what you are trying to say? The message is confusing, and unclear.
People have always been always making babies , even when the risk of starvation, death from the elements and murder were extreme.
Even the wealthier eras were challenging, with families having 3-5 kids in cramped 1-bedroom apartments containing multiple generations even.
I'm the first to admit that prosperity has declined over the past 50 years, but the circumstances for making babies are still among the best compared to history and to 95% of the current circumstances on earth.
The actual reasoning will make people uncomfortable, hence the economics cope.
If you fall into a river, it's a huge expense to send a helicopter . The decision to save your life is not economical, it's ethical.
Or is it an ethical issue of what you do actually do, regardless of your wants?
You have every variant of wealth and poverty leading to both increasing and decreasing birthrates so another culprit must be the factor.
it just isn't true that people are primarily motivated by money.
I personally think affordability plays a role, but I think the driving factor, that applies to all developed countries and why we don't see people's pet ideas being common threads (socialized medicine will solve it! except in every developed nation with socialized medicine) comes down to hedonism, decadence and consumerism. People are living for comfort, entertainment, short term enjoyment, they're chasing shiny new things and they don't want to give that up to do something selfless like create good people. They don't want sticky hands ruining their new leather couch.
Prices going up aren't the cause, they're interlocked intimately as a symptom in a feedback loop. People aren't having kids so they can eat Korean barbecue for lunch every Tuesday, and so they have all this money that they're not spending. Or were, because everybody figures they can squeeze a few extra bucks out of them, and that adds up. Prices are going up because people are childless and so are more flippant with their money. Prices and fertility rate are interlocked tightly and one does not simply cause the other.
The only way out of course is that people accept a lower comfort level and buy only long lasting things that they actually need. But that's not going to happen, and that has a systemic cause too. I'd love it if you replied with your thoughts on what I've said, your 6+ factors, no matter how hard to swallow. I know for a fact most people reading this aren't going to like my premise that they are not having kids because they'd rather encase themselves in a constantly 73°F expensive memory foam ball, complete with genital stimulation and endless scrolling goggles. Scare some people off with me?
When I was seven years old, I realized that there was no god, and that when I died, I'd simply be gone forever; my consciousness extinguished as though it had never existed, and that nothing mattered. I'd learn much later that this could be called experiencing the death of god and becoming a nihilist; pretty rough stuff for a kid in grade school. And it meant life was just a long slog of work, and if you're lucky maybe a bit of vacation once in awhile. But that was basically the plan they wanted for you - grow up, work, have kids to repeat the cycle, and die. I never could get much enthusiasm for any of it, and I could never imagine having to explain this existence to a child; I don't have any of the happy stories regarding loving gods and an afterlife that seem to get most people through.
You'll find that religion correlates fairly highly with fertility, though I don't think there's any easy, slam-dunk causal factor that explains why people don't want to have children. Still, it makes sense to me that they have declined together.
I think two of the more uncomfortable reasons that don't get discussed might be:
1. The allure/requirements of the modern lifestyle (both people working then limited leisure time) reduce the 'space' for childrearing
2. Depression, a negative outlook about the future, and awareness of the environmental impacts of more people mean adults consciously abstain from having children.
People are depressed on a social scale. Few people have a real passion for life and reason to live. Even our "leaders" are milquetoast technocratic caretakers -- not very inspiring.
People generally follow the crowd, and the crowd is busy with hedonistic pursuits.
3. Religion and Culture - atheism has grown rapidly among western cultures over the past few decades. It is possible that western atheists have made a personal choice in service of their individual lives here on this earth, while someone who is guided more by religion or ideology is making a decision for what they view as a higher calling or purpose. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that first generation immigrants to the west tend to have higher birthdates vs those who were born in the west, as well by how common it is see modern religious and social conservatives in the west push for "tradlife."
I just like to think and make stuff while I listen to music, I don't want to be responsible for picking a child up or dropping it off or feeding it. And, I'm not particularly concerned with how long we perpetuate our human nonsense.
I don't hate life, but I don't know that I'd have picked it for myself and I don't feel strongly about forcing it on anybody else.
There was an instagram comment feed (of all places) where the OP asked people to post what their reservation for kids were, and many parents responded to those positively
The next post asked parents to post what they were surprised most about being a parent. Some common themes were “I was afraid I wouldn’t like/feel attached to my child” and “I was afraid I would resent my child for the time commitment.” For the latter, dozens of responses say that something within them switched, and they wanted to bear the responsibility. It was fulfilling like a hobby may be, but deeper.
Personally I don’t like the rhetoric that describe (others, not you) kids as leeches that take time and money, i think thats toxic to our society.
If you know yourself and know you don’t want kids, then it’s best for everyone involved not to have them.
The world sucks at the best of times. The last thing someone should do is putting an unwanted child in the world.
I have a daughter, who I love and means the world to me. But I wanted her, so all the work and cost is meaningful and rewarding. I wouldn't feel the same if I didn't want a child.
Gee I can't imagine why
Without an extended family and support network, raising a child becomes an overwhelming burden, and the parents end up feeling they were lied to about the supposed joys of parenting.
I'm so glad we didn't move away from home and family.
Back then they were less so, fine, but still expensive and not somehow magically more fun. So that can't be the whole story.
Was it the lack of contraception? Surely not just that, in 1970s or whatnot a typical family had maybe 1-4 children, but not like 10.
I suspect it was a combination of status, expectation and ease. Having children was simply a milestone on the roadmap of life that was hard to skip. Grandparents were younger then, and thus more able to help, and more likely to live nearby in the first place.
As the societal expectation to have children waned, people stopped.
>Perhaps the worthwhile question is, why did people (Americans included) have babies in the first place.
Rural/farmer pov it's slave labour. Go feed the chickens!
Urban/city pov it's slave labour. Go put out the trash!
>and not somehow magically more fun.
Extreme high quality toys. You would have to be a king to have this much choice and quality. You get to play with the toys of your childhood.
So much more fun to be a parent today.
>Was it the lack of contraception? Surely not just that, in 1970s or whatnot a typical family had maybe 1-4 children, but not like 10.
People point to the 1950s as when it seemed to be easier. When yes, you had 10.
Planned parenthood developed the pill in the 1950s but only widespread use in the 1960s.
Contraceptives impacted the 1970s numbers.
1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_v._Baird
Abortions are about that time as well. This isn't even the whole story.
https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/most-estrogen-in-drinki...
You might expect pills accidentally being flushed down the toilet for example to start showing up in water supply, but it's not statistically significant because our drinking water has so much estrogen in it already.