Tracking types of non-parents in the United States
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
In our case, there's a pretty clear divide between those that went straight to the workforce after HS, and those that pursued college/university, and typical professional jobs. With the latter being those that become parents late.
Those that I still know very close, and have been in the same situation, have all told the same story:
- Studied for 5 years to get a masters degree
- Worked for some years, until they found their career job
- Wanted to travel and focus on themselves, now being more financially secure and having more spare time to do so.
And suddenly they were 30.
- Spent some time finding a partner they wanted children with. Spent a year or two doing couples stuff, before a kid would take up all their time.
And that's pretty much how you end up as a first-time parent almost in your mid 30s.
Another observation is that around half of the guys have still not had any children, while around 75% of the women have become parents.
One of my classmates didn't go the academic route. She has a 25 year old kid now.
The others, one had a kid late 20s. Most of the class was mid to late 30s. Several had their first kid past 40.
Only two had more than two kids, but they were a couple who met in school.
Nobody has four kids.
There's still only one person who has an adult (18+) kid.
I see this anecdotally in my Gen Z/Millenial friend groups, but the numbers backing the observation up is wild.
But frankly, I understand it. One of our main pain points for not having kids yet is the cost of childcare (US). That’s not getting better anytime soon, either, from what I can tell.
> I know very few parents that would rather work than hang out with their kids.
Work being a proxy for resources, most people want both. The value shift I mentioned earlier affects the extent to which we prioritize one or the other. Given the same economic environment, a society where family is viewed as more important than material comfort would have more families sacrificing income rather than just talking about it.
You need resources to raise kids. So the discussion about values is beside the point in a society where in a couple both people are expected to work to have a normal life. In our society any system that values family is fighting the economy. Best of luck with that.
But they would work to increase the odds of securing a house in a more expensive neighborhood to increase the odds their kid is surrounded by more well heeled children for myriad reasons which then results in higher chances of getting into the best schools to increase the odds they are able to earn a high income due to possessing the right signals and knowledge.
And they would reduce the number of children they have to maximize the odds for the one or two they do have.
In reality, it makes you dependent, very vulnerable and poor. The think is, it is not just value shift, it is women making active decisions so that they life does not become very bad.
Your view is going to change depending if you look at the short or long term.
It has always been trivial to pay a woman to give birth. Incentivizing the creation of productive families with well raised children is the difficult part.
You are of course welcome to disagree.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
It’s always been interesting to me that healthcare for kids is not as popular as healthcare for old people, such that there is no Medicare for kids. There is Medicaid, but it pays healthcare providers less…why?
I think a better policy would be to reduce the tax burden of a couple with 3 children. This makes working quite lucrative whilst at the same time it creates the flexibility for the couple to distribute work how they see fit, whether this is a breadwinner model or more hybrid.
Pinning this to the mother doesn't work. The policy incentive is to work as much as possible whilst at the same time carrying the burden of 3 children. Not an attractive combination.
top 5 ranked
> too old
> don’t want lifestyle changes
> too expensive
> overpopulation
> don’t like children
more recently, but free text answers classified by ML model (which seems to removes some nuance in the categories) - https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51749-why-do-some-brit...
Why Britain needs more migrants - It cannot fix its population-growth slowdown without them - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/01/14/why-brit...
Britain ‘must rely on immigration’ to compensate for falling birth rate - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/26/rise-in-olde...
UK will be reliant on immigration for nearly 80 years due to falling birth rates - https://www.independent.co.uk/world/population-fertility-imm...
Birth rates in the UK are now, according to the ONS, at their lowest levels since records began in 1938, at a rate of 1.44 children per woman. With a rapidly ageing population, migrants will be essential to replace UK-born workers - https://www.tradeandbusiness.uk/news/six-reasons-why-the-uk-...
It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma, but one prisoner refuses to defect or learn anything, despite the other constantly defecting.
i get the irony you’re trying to point out. but global overpopulation is not the same as national overpopulation.
at some point we’re gonna run out of fucking food as a species. *
the sooner we can get our heads out of our arses and past the primitive tribalism of “we need to have more than the other lot” as a species, the better.
i squarely fall into the “migration is the solution, not the problem” camp too [0]. exactly because of that global perspective.
plenty of people in the world. maybe it’s time we learned to share as a species? although fuck all chance of that happening any time soon in the current political climate.
* someone usually attempts a retort about “technology will magically save all of us” to this point. which is just kicking the can down the road.
[0]: edit to note that the problem i’m referring to here is national underpopulation specifically
Always remember that the world was fine with 2bn people just 100 years ago.
we’ve gone from ~2 billion to ~8 billion in 100 years.
compared to the (highly estimated) figures from before 100 years ago — that’s a massive increase.
the graph is basically a line going straight up compared to the rest of (highly estimated) population data for the last 10k years. and growth is continuing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
> Maybe the world in 2050 will be so different that the issue has resolved itself
“maybe a miracle might happen” — is just kicking the can down the road in my book.
we are out of balance with our surrounding environment. there will be a readjustment — whether we choose to make that readjustment ourselves (take responsibility for the problem), or let the readjustment happen (the problem really becomes a problem), is up to us as a species.
> Some problems need tackling at the right time.
some problems take a really long time and a lot of effort to work on so maybe starting to work on them early and proactively might be a good idea. like climate change.
> We don't need to get too crazy about declining populations when we are facing more urgent issues.
speaking of climate change, global overpopulation kinda has an impact on it! more people -> use more resources -> screwing up the planet faster
If this turns out to be an issue we can act. At the moment it looks like it to me that the climate crisis is more relevant than the demographic change, because as you said: Less people are actually better for the planet.
With AI becoming more capable each year we might find that many of the issues of large elderly populations can be alleviated.
Let's check back in 5 or 10 years if the demographics is really shaping up to be a problem.
You are right, of course; but just to put some perspective to it:
If Thanos-style the population and the CO2 emissions would be cut in half, this would not be enough at all -- we need to get back to 350 ppm (or similar).
I'm writing this to counter the meme that "climate change is Africa's fault, because of their population count".
But then leaders started promising the old people (majority of voters) wealth transfers from the young people.
And that will cause friction, because these wealth transfers only made sense with growing proportions of young people.
Elder abuse is widespread in Confucian societies like Japan and China, it's the dark side of a culture that professes filial piety but actually breeds resentment in the young.
There exists an arbitrage opportunity where one can avoid the costs and compromises of coupling/parenting, and still retain some of the benefits.
> Social security takes a burden off young people as much as it gives to old people.
I don’t see it this way. If I were given the choice, I would not pay the government at all, and I would not expect anything from the government in the future. I already don’t, by way of knowing that my future benefits will be decreased in purchasing power via devaluation of currency and increased retirement age and changes in the benefit formula.
And it wouldn’t change my burden at all, because I didn’t ask to be born, hence I don’t owe anyone in their old age (nor does anyone owe me in my old age).
During the increase in population kids are helpless for ~8 years before they're actually able to contribute to farms and whatnot, so the large number of extra children doesn't show. During demographic collapse, since it happens generally as life expectancies go up, elderly adults generally (with exceptions) spend decades getting less and less able to contribute before they die. We don't have answers for how to take care of them during that window.
Eventually this would be a self-correcting problem, but in the most gruesome way one can imagine. And creating and maintaining Tesla Bots would require lots of young people, too... unless/until one finds a way to make them create and maintain themselves, which seems rather far off; I live in a world where computer servers don't really even maintain themselves.
It's not that different that the deserved skepticism for new "climate friendly" technologies. "The totally unsustainable behavior you had was bad. Here, have a slightly better option that allows you to keep doing the totally unsustainable thing with a slightly smaller footprint."
Electric cars. Organic meat. Carbon offsets for flights. LEED certified McMansions. Every time we tell people the change isn't going to hurt, we lie to them. What we need are car-free communities, plant based diets, less travel, and smaller homes.
Overpopulation isn't that different. Population reduction will hurt, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary. I fully expect to get a lesser quality of care in my old age than my parents got. That sucks, but, that's reality. We're now in the consequences stage. We should be focusing on mitigating harm, not clinging to populating the planet in the way we used to.
Extremely painful likely means working 7-10 more years. Today's retirement at 65-67 will be considered an aberration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse
how can you expect them to sacrifice a single penny to address problems like climate change that will affect future generations? Granted, fewer people in itself reduces our environmental impact, but some combination of young people and older people who feel invested in their offspring is necessary for us to face the future.
If population declines that much, retirement will become structurally impossible for anyone but the relatively wealthy. Other types of social safety nets will also collapse, because at some point young working people will just balk at the tax burden they'll have to pay to support them with a shrinking cohort of workers.
AI and automation could cushion the blow to some extent.
[1] Emigration is negligible compared to population growth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6tSqGCfoCI
i wasn’t clear on that do i can see why you’re now arguing this point.
on global overpopulation — i disagree. the only way to solve it is to co-ordinate globally. and that involves helping everyone else who doesn’t hsve stuff getting to a place of yeah we’ve kind of all got enough stuff now.
or, alternatively, somehow everyone getting to a place where we realise “stuff” is abjectly meaningless and pointless as a measure for our individual/group success.
basically, materialism needs to fuck off as our dominant incentivising thing.
Here we agree. I should clarify there are multiple types of coordination - the kind you propose is the easier one. It can be global, but it really only needs two countries - one offering aid [1], and one receiving it. If someone defects, no big deal - someone else might step in, and in any case, the situation should be better than if there had never been aid in the first place.
But getting every population on Earth to agree to and follow through with reducing their own fertility is the much harder kind of coordination. There will always be defectors, and these defections will (literally) add up and multiply. Unlike with aid, where the giver is only sacrificing as you say materialism, now their worry will be "will my group continue to exist?"
[1] Whatever form that aid takes. There are arguments that simple material aid does more harm than good and hinders development, but surely there are forms of aid that help development, so this is not an excuse to stop aid entirely.
It's long term average successful fertility over time.
The film Idiocracy is a good exhibition of this.
If fitness were based on counting offspring, there would only ever be bacteria. There would be no complex organisms and no intelligence. Bacteria leave the largest number of offspring. From that perspective they have the highest fitness.
Here's a scenario to get started:
Let's say you have someone who has zero children but is a foster parent and contributes to the successful upbringing of dozens of children. Those children then go on, as a result of the actions of that individual, to have far more successful offspring than they would have otherwise.
What is this sterile foster parent's genetic fitness?
Consider that humans are actually a fairly genetically un-diverse species. We have less genetic diversity than most mammals, owing most likely to a survival bottleneck our species endured at some point in its recent evolutionary past. (There is evidence of this: see "mitochondrial Eve.") As a result, we all have most of our genes in common with other humans. If I have zero children but contribute to the survival of loads and loads of other humans then I am in fact perpetuating the survival of most of my genetic material. The percentage that dies with me is a tiny, tiny percentage.
From there research topics like group selection effects, the emergence of cooperation, the evolution of evolvability, etc. This is a gigantic rabbit hole.
Ultimately you'll hit the limits of our understanding. We really don't understand yet why there is anything other than boring mats of bubbling goo. Indeed, the first billion years or so of life on Earth appeared to be nothing but that. Then things got interesting, and we're not 100% sure why.
It is not as simple as "more kids equals higher fitness." Not at all. If it was we would not exist.
"Survival of the fittest," as popularly understood, is such a massive oversimplification that it's basically wrong. "Survival of a subset of the fittest genes over time" is a little better.
Racism is rooted in a very pop-science surface level understanding of evolution, which is just as bad as the pop science understanding of quantum physics.
I would have been worried about energy before we cracked cheap solar power and cheap batteries. At this point we have the technology to power ourselves off the sun even if we lack the political will to migrate to it quickly.
Climate change is a danger but I do not believe it's existential unless we really do continue to burn carbon all through the 21st century without migrating to other energy sources and just DGAF. Climate change will cause regional disasters and migrations and political instability but I don't think it's going to cause any more death or suffering than large scale wars. (It may cause large scale wars.)
If we did in fact have 1950s levels of global population growth ongoing, we would eventually hit major problems, but that is just not happening. The only place left with high birth rates is Africa and their birth rates are falling like everyone else's as they develop and urbanize.
No we're not. IIRC, birthrates are declining everywhere, and the global population will start to decline within my lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
we have finite resources on this planet and we are out of balance with our surrounding environment. one way or another, it’s gonna catch up to us.
to quote one of my favourite NOFX tracks [2]: There's no more points of view when your only thought is food
[0]: https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/only-100-harvests-left-in-uk-farm...
[1]: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/the-hidden-cost-...
no
comments mentioning immigrant birthrates below misunderstood what is being talked about here.
> they will continue to have high birthrates
'they' here is not immigrants , they here is ppl in the places where immigrants came from.
The "we need more people" stuff is coming from the capital class and their sycophants. They want more people so they can have more laborers to drive down the cost of labor, and more consumers to buy more product, and more renters to drive up the price of rent. They want population number to go up because they are invested and committed to the numbers go up game. As long as more people means more numbers go up, that's what they'll keep demanding. The UK has more people than ever before, it's steadily climbing but they always want even more. Unbounded growth.
The "I don't want kids because this place is crowded" and "kids are too expensive" messages are coming from members of the general public who are dealing with the ramifications of the policies of the first group. Their rent is high, their towns and cities growing, traffic is getting worse, city buses are packed, there's lots of things they want to buy but the value of their labor isn't keeping pace. Birth rate falls in response to these pressures, so the capital class tries to import new labor from poor parts of the world, knowing those new laborers will feel relatively happy to live 10 people to an apartment working for piss poor pay, because those conditions are still an improvement over where they are coming from.
Here's a good pod on the subject:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Lk2wsYafTyoPA2hrNVN8e?si=L...
For some strange reason this line of thinking had tremendous influence on the left, at least in the West, despite the fact that there has always been a huge undercurrent of racism in overpopulation discourse. This pod does a decent job calling that out. I remember watching an overpopulation alarmist documentary as a teenager and thinking -- without any prompting -- that the whole thing came off as super racist. Any time they wanted to show the looming population catastrophe they always showed hordes of people with dark skin.
Ehrlich continues to be treated like an economist -- meaning, given intellectual credibility despite a track record of having been consistently wrong.
This doesn't mean I buy into underpopulation hysteria either. I see them making the same mistake: assuming that current trends will continue indefinitely.
It's entirely possible that things like the childfree movement will cause a population rebound. How? By selecting out of the gene pool whatever traits make people more reluctant to reproduce. Until recently reproduction was pretty automatic, allowing those traits to persist, but after a few more generations of reproduction being solidly optional we could end up with a population composed of almost 100% people with intense "biological clocks" and a strong urge to have babies. The present decline in fertility could be like a "bear trap" on a bull market stock graph.
in the west answer is that there are more forms of entertainment and fulfillment available now and there is actually a flowchart with diamond in it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ind/ind...
https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/increasing...
thank god!! its suffocating over here.
curious why do you think women have gained economic and social freedom in india?
Not all, obviously a few hundred million are still probably not close to economic freedom, but more are than before.
anyways i wasn't contradicting that there are more women working now ( which is not actually true ) . I was asking how you correlated that to birth rates .
these two graphs aren't exactly telling the same story
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locat...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ind/ind...
In short, Mao Zedong thought that having a big population would lead to a stronger state. Keep in mind this is the same guy who declared war on sparrows as being "capitalist birds".
Anecdotally, in my friend group, once the first two people had kids and started hanging out with each other, it was like the flood gates opened.
I'm afraid I don't have the link but the gist was that most couples do ultimately want and have children. Slightly too less for population replacement but still. However, the far more alarming issue is the lack of couples. Couple forming is falling off a cliff.