The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don't Have Children | Hacker News Reader

The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don't Have Children

pewresearch.org

21 pointssarimkx12 comments

Almost all the reasons apply to me, except that presumably I'm still fertile (for now)

Basically grew up in a small isolated nuclear family. Mom and dad hated each other. Dad only wanted one kid and to sleep with other women. Mom wanted to be unhappy and passed that personality trait on to me. My siblings were all older and tried to escape our parents as fast as possible

So kinda grew up as an only child with a lot of independence inside the house but nowhere to go and no visible examples of what "normal" families look like

Around college one of my siblings had a kid by accident and it was obviously a huge strain on them, financially, mentally, etc. There are some things you simply cannot do once you realize someone is pregnant and keeping it

So after college nothing changed. I never developed that healthy adult friendship people talk about having with their families. My parents made no effort to not be cut off, so... I just quit talking to them little by little. We have nothing in common, as if I picked a stranger off the street and tried to befriend them.

So now it's like, why? When programming pays great, when there's more hobbies and travel experiences I want, when more money is always nice to have, when there's more people I want to love and I barely even feel like a real adult in my 30s... Why have kids?

It would cost me more than I could bear

> It would cost me more than I could bear

That's one way of looking at it. Parenting had changed me profoundly for the better, and even though I made horrible mistakes as a parent (as most people do I guess) I've also managed to significantly improve many shitty aspects of my personality.

I think in parenting most of all you learn to give, without hesitation, without thinking too much, you just give to you kids whatever they demand, out of your unconditional love for them.

Besides, if you wish to become a happier person, kids are such an amazing source of joy and hope! Oftentimes kids can see things much more clearly than adults, they have their own kind of intelligence and reasoning and we adults have much to learn from them.

There are many more "selfish" reasons to have kids. If you do it right and develop affective relationships with them as they grow up, they'll take good care of you when you grow old and frail, and your grand kids will bring you even more joy and entertainment! I don't think it's much fun to be old and alone...

I gotta admit it's tempting. If I 100% knew I didn't want kids I may not come here to argue about it.

> I think in parenting most of all you learn to give, without hesitation, without thinking too much, you just give to you kids whatever they demand, out of your unconditional love for them.

The thing is, I tried to practice that with my ex-partner, and in the end it did not work. After several years of taking care of them I gave up and we had a divorce that was relatively peaceful except they don't want to stay friends with me, which hurts but is outside my control.

I don't know if I want to roll the dice on a kid who never grows up and never stops needing me.

Just between you and me, on this anonymous account, most of my potential romantic partners would need someone to take care of them. I don't want to have a kid-kid and an adult kid both needing my constant care in the same household.

Rational and logical choice to make. Congrats on your freedom and self determination, wishing you a great life.

Is there any way to have a productive conversation about what we, as a theoretical interdependent society, should do (or not) to encourage (or deter) people from having kids?

It’s one of those topics where there’s a lot of data but most people have a position and whatever counter data is provided is typically discarded as irrelevant.

For example plenty would argue about whether having a child so “someone takes care of you when you’re older” or “so you’re not lonely” is a valid reason to have a child at all.

And on and on with no foundational agreement on what the outcomes or impacts of social demands on major individual life decisions should be promoted or even allowed legally.

This is again despite a lot of data about what happens when cultures are either coerced into a fertility management programs (one child program , forced sterilization in the south etc), or let people freely choose and the waxing and waning of populations and societies historically documented since antiquity

This is a deep question, I think.

In the past, children just happened. We no longer have load-bearing conceptual or moral frameworks for thinking about reproduction. Religious leaders have lost their moral authority, if they ever had any. Coercion happens when there are no means of persuasion (except for psychopathic leaders in authoritarian societies, of course: then you get coercion whether or not persuasion is possible).

The two standard reasons you list suffer from free-riding. If other people do it, but you don't, you come out ahead. How should that be addressed? Are, indeed, those even valid reasons at all?

The same applies to techno-utopian reasons. "Have children because more people means more ideas, and more ideas means more progress". Free-riding problem again.

The Ev. Psych. people would say it's a matter of mimesis, or social proof: people have children when they see (respectable) people similar to themselves having children. How far do you go in creating "influencers", then? And to what end?

As to how to have the conversation: step one is persuading feminists that this is not a right-wing reactionary issue, code for undoing all the advances in rights that women have so recently won. That's a tall step.

I think it is simple though. Empower people who don't want to have children to not have them, that is their right. Society can reconfigure itself accordingly based on the outcomes of agency and free will.

While completely fair to do so, one consequence is that it might dissolve any intergenerational social contract, and it is entirely reasonable for the younger generation to vote to defund pension programs, not provide elder care (or make it extremely expensive), etc. Essentially, looking at things from a high level, if the previous generation's decision to not have children means that the current generation has to spend an overly burdensome fraction of their economic output to support the previous generation, then it's their prerogative to simply not take care of them. Particularly for people who have no ties to the current generation.

Full disclosure, I help folks get permanent birth control who want it [1] to empower and provide agency in a system that is attempting to not provide it to humans.

Why? Because the intergenerational social contract already doesn't exist. Outside of a handful of countries with pro natalist policies, there is no material support. In the US, the expectation is that people should have kids so line goes up, broadly speaking (productivity = capital market gains and pay as you go social program funding), while making working arrangements as tenuous as possible, no daycare subsidies, no guaranteed paid time off, requiring to go into debt to procure an education credential employers can mandate but not need for a role, etc. Per the Brookings Institute, it costs ~$310k to raise a child 0-18 (not including daycare and college). ~40% of annual pregnancies are unintended, per the Guttmacher Institute. It is a pyramid scheme that is upset the latest entrants have wised up to the scam and do not want to be juiced for their working life.

Therefore, society must make potential parents a better offer, or live with the consequences at scale (rapidly falling fertility rates) of rational actors making rational decisions to protect themselves from an adversarial system they are forced to exist in. Is it young cohorts' fault society ran up this enormous liability [2] [3] [4] they must now pay? It is not. They do not exist to pay off someone else's credit card tab, nor should they be encouraged to have children as a means to fund these liabilities.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034976

[2] https://www.pgpf.org/infographic/the-national-debt-is-now-mo... ($35T US national debt, does not include unaccounted for liabilities around future societal obligations, pollution remediation, carbon emission sequestration, etc)

[3] https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2024... ("The cost of climate change to a baby born in 2024 in America could be around $500,000 over their lifetime. When more uncertain factors are included, the costs could reach about $1 million.")

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-change-... ("Climate change damage could cost $38 trillion per year by 2050, study finds")

We seem to be saying the same thing. It is not the younger cohort's fault that they've been given an enormous liability. A great deal of that liability is to the older cohort, paying for things like their ability to retire, health care, social security, etc. It would be entirely fair for the younger generation to cut pension programs, tax retirement savings away, and cut funding for e.g. medicare so that more of their economic output can go to providing goods and services they and their children need and fixing the planet for their children instead of working to provide services for the previous generation who caused the issues and to whom they have no connection anyway.

Of course when that younger cohort becomes older themselves, the same applies to them. If they did not put in the work to prepare a future generation and set that generation up for success, then they should be prepared to have no support from the children of people who did. If people plan to DINK it up, save a bunch of money, and buy their way into a comfortable life in old age, they should at least be prepared for a scenario where their money is no good when the next generation decides to tax them heavily or hit them with extortionate prices for services they need while removing social safety nets. e.g. take all of their money for a couple years in long-term care, and when it runs out, leave them homeless.

People are and should be free to live they lives the want, but they should consider that it is risky to count on an overburdened future generation with no familial ties to take care of them, and they shouldn't be upset if that generation decides to cast off that burden so that they and further future generations can succeed.

I mean, I just wanna sit here and appreciate that this chain of comments (which I upvoted all of them) demonstrated in the affirmative that it is possible to have a productive conversation on this topic

In fact, to such an extent that it has opened my eyes to considerations I hadn’t thought of, and this concept of intergenerational debt and expected life outcomes have so changed and diverged over the last couple of generations, that we are not even operating under the same basic set of assumptive principles

I don’t think it can overstated enough, the impact that birth control being generally available and trivial to use effectively has had on this issue.

In effect, it has upended the entire biological history with respect to assumptions about the way you live, and what you should expect comes from simply living

As a father of three who had my children simply because we weren’t trying not to, while most of my peers did not go about it like this, shows me the functional and cultural difference in mindset that you can’t really bridge

Resulting in economic constructs like colonizing pensionfunds seeking to enslave the young by economic means. Resulting in intergenerational civil war.

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