Wildfires burning, oceans rising, glaciers melting, dual incomes can’t buy a home, can’t have a good quality of life without a college degree that’s ever-increasing in cost and decreasing in returns, food prices are rising, global conflict is on the rise, populism is boosting authoritarian regimes worldwide, widespread belief in younger generations that we’ll never be able to retire, cost of healthcare can bankrupt all but the richest of the rich…
“Why aren’t people having children?”
These articles were awful when it was “Millennials are killing X”, and they’re even worse now. The answers are obvious, and I’m tired of entertaining these clickbait narratives that refuse to acknowledge any of the very large elephants in the room.
I'd be interested in per country data for this information. Last I checked, nearly every country was at 0.75-2 tops, save for the world average being skewed heavily by some usual suspects.
This is explicitly the opinion of some of my friends. One is the married couples broke up because only one of them felt really strongly about it. Many discuss this openly. It's weird to see this downvoted like some weird idea.
I mean, your statement says it all plain as day. What used to be the norm - having kids freely and often - is now a discussion. While some people may try to blame that on civil rights, listening to stories from the extended older family as a kid paints a picture that we (as humans) will have as many kids as we feel we’re able to support, and as often as we feel safe doing so, when left to our own devices.
And if that’s the case, then the question answers itself.
Seriously... seeing how people discuss this is so strange. My wife and I literally just did the deed and made a baby. Didn't think a whole lot about it. But as I've said elsewhere in this thread. Part of this problem is that that 'let's-just-have-fun' attitude tends to dissipate by the time people are having kids these days. My wife and I married young for the 'well-educated' crowd (at 22), and I think my family size benefited from our collective on-going brain development. We did not even discuss this before getting pregnant the first time. It was just fun. I think as people age, hormones go down, etc, people start making this a bigger decision.
That's a whole lot of rationalization for a few decades of a species that discovered condoms and the means to spread them cheaply to everyone.
How magnanimous to blame our own selfishness onto the problems of the world. People were having kids with mass killings and rapes and torture and no hospitals or social security or higher degrees or anything for millenia. All that is new is the choice, due to cheap contraceptives.
I think that there's a greater societal problem that's causing ripples everywhere, including issues that came up in the recent election. Women are realizing that stay-at-home wife/motherhood is a really bad job. 24/7, room and board only, and are much like the company jobs of yore where if you leave or the company goes under, you may find yourself with nothing or worse, a pile of debt.
So what's happening for the first time generationally is that women don't really _need_ men. They don't need the money, they don't need the children, they don't want the loss of independence.
Men, particularly young men, are having trouble adjusting to this. They've been raised to believe that having a wife is part of the natural order of things, that being a breadwinner is part of the natural order of things. The whole 'trad wife' meme fed into this dream of coming home to a hot meal, a adoring wife, and obedient children. That's just not something that is going to happen anymore and only men are having a problem with it.
I don't have any idea what to do about it. Sometimes the response to greater women's liberation is for men to take advantage of their greater strength and size and force women back into the homes. I'm hoping that's not inevitable.
I've heard this over and over but don't see it anywhere around me (NYC, likely overeducated, doing fine but not wealthy).
I know a lot of couples that have a kid but face major financial constraints. Up and down the socioeconomic spectrum, it's expensive as hell to have a family, house and educate them, and that's a major part of the calculus for even moderately well-off families.
> The whole 'trad wife' meme fed into this dream of coming home to a hot meal, a adoring wife, and obedient children. That's just not something that is going to happen anymore and only men are having a problem with it.
As opposed to young women, who expect men to earn more than them, adore them, and to do all that while caring for kids? Part of the problem here is that young men's desires are constantly castigated as bad. In particular, coming home to an adoring spouse is something both sexes ought to want, and it should never be castigated as bad for a young man to want a wife who adores him.
Well, either way it doesn't really matter. Yes young men today will be sad, but ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem. The women that do this are not going to be represented in the next generation. Their choice of course. It's a free country.
Great points. And an interesting idea that it might be a self correcting problem on a society wide level, although I’m not sure how heritable relationship preferences might be, versus being culturally transmitted.
> As opposed to young women, who expect men to earn more than them, adore them, and to do all that while caring for kids
Not anymore, that's my point. Women's dreams are changing now that they can make real money. Men's dreams are not catching up.
> Yes young men today will be sad, but ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem
Self correcting in many ways but it is often 'corrected' by oppression and violence. Women did not forbid themselves from going outside or showing their faces.
> Self correcting in many ways but it is often 'corrected' by oppression and violence. Women did not forbid themselves from going outside or showing their faces.
> Not anymore, that's my point. Women's dreams are changing now that they can make real money. Men's dreams are not catching up.
What should men dream?
I honestly think the truth of the matter is that women's dreams change the moment they have a baby. Literally every women I know suddenly has a change of heart on how their future ought to unfold the moment the baby is born. Part of the problem here is that couples are not even crossing that Rubicon, so to speak .
I count myself as a man who probably dreamed what you think men ought to have. My wife and I married young, yes, but we both envisioned working full time. Then we had the baby... and suddenly your wife is obsessed with this little person in a way you never thought possible. My wife in particular never counted herself as a 'kid' person, but it's different when its your own, especially for women. Suddenly, it seemed like the only sane option was the traditional one. But I scorned those who told me that before that happened to us.
I think we should just be honest about the effect of hormones on women's desires. It would be kinder to men and women to do that.
> if you leave or the company goes under, you may find yourself with nothing or worse
Untrue. Alimony, child support.
> Men, particularly young men, are having trouble adjusting to this.
I see just as much anecdotal evidence that men are often (who knows what the percent breakdown is) the ones no longer seeking relationships, and articles authored by women lamenting the availability of highly desirable male partners.
> 24/7, room and board only
This seems like an overly negative view. All the work isn’t done by one partner, income is spent by both, the female partner often spends a higher percent of the income statistically (not implying anything by this, they may just be the one shopping for groceries), they share in what the income buys and the lifestyle of the couple, they also keep half of the asset appreciation, etc.
Not guaranteed in any way. Depends very much on courts, lawyers, and the ability of judgements to be enforced.
Who would take that over a job with a 401k that moves with you?
> I see just as much anecdotal evidence that men are often (who knows what the percent breakdown is) the ones no longer seeking relationships, and articles lamenting the availability of highly desirable male partners
See the 'incel' movement. See the Joe Rogan listeners. See the responses to any post about dating sites and the fury that women get more matches than men.
> Who would take that over a job with a 401k that moves with you?
Just going to say that the perspective of having kids and getting to spend your time not working, or stressing about work, and instead spending it with family and raising your kid, doesn’t seem like a hellish job to me, and besides that it isn’t clear to me the father would be the “employer” in that context, rather both work in the way they agree to within the context of their relationship for the benefit of their child. Many men would like to raise their kids while someone else goes to work.
> instead spending it with family and raising your kid ... while someone else goes to work
Right. 'Spending time' with your family and child is something totally separate from work and stress, presumably because you have an army of nannies and housekeepers.
Another reason women do not want to become stay-at-home wives/mothers, no one respects you or the work you (pretend to) do .
While alimony is not guaranteed, Elizabeth Warren shows in her book 'The Dual Income Trap' that you can be pretty much assured the government will get all that is possible from the husband. This is more true today than ever.
But you're not totally wrong. Part of the problem is that we disincentivize staying home. For example, you don't get to contribute to a 401k if you don't work but are at home with kids. You also don't get to qualify for social security.
In my opinion, if a woman or man stays home (but let's be honest... it's mostly women), then she should qualify for significant tax breaks on retirement accounts (if not a funded government account) and also the quarters she spends caring for kids should count for social security at the working spouse's wage or a government-mandated minimum.
> See the responses to any post about dating sites and the fury that women get more matches than men.
This is hardly a new thing. Literally the entire history of humankind is explained by men being highly desirous of basically any women and women desiring only a certain subset of men. 'Incel's have a long history.
> Elizabeth Warren shows in her book 'The Dual Income Trap' that you can be pretty much assured the government will get all that is possible from the husband.
Is there any evidence of this outside Elizabeth Warren's book? Most reports say that at most 10% of women get alimony.
Warren's book doesn't say all women get alimony, it says that alimony is heavily enforced and that the courts extract as much as possible. If a woman is not getting alimony it's either because she worked (in which case she might still get child support, that's different) or because the husband is simply not earning enough to support two people, which would be a problem even without alimony.
Basically, if a non-working woman divorces, she is highly likely to get about as much as she would have had had she remained married, which stilly might be nothing, if the husband is not earning a whole lot.
I'll stand by my comparison. Absent every other consideration, do you think more people would want a job with retirement benefits and severance pay, or a job where you have a 10% chance of getting part of your employer's income - which may are may not be all that much.
I'm pretty sure I know what Jack Bogle would recommend.
Maybe only 10% of women stop working when they have kids, so few of them need alimony?
And again that’s separate from child support. I’d bet the child support number is 80%+, with the remainder being women that earn huge amounts of money or who decide not to be in their kids’ lives and have zero custody.
I think we should all be skeptical of any 'expert' views given the recent election being so disastrously misunderstood and unpredicted. In particular, I feel when it comes to these social issues, so much time is spent 'researching' that no one thinks to do the obvious and ask people who do have large families what made them do that. In particular, the book 'Hannah's children' comes to very different conclusions than the sorts of things you see here, and better matches my own understandings of those with large families, as well as my own motivations to have a larger family.
> While not all of the women she interviewed cited religious reasons or motivations for their choice to defy the birth dearth, most did. So faith, while not a prerequisite for the choice to have more children, is at least a catalyst. Greater religious liberty, especially with respect to educational choice, would allow for competing narratives of womanhood to re-enter the educational environment and allow women to choose narratives of self that more accurately account for the reciprocal opportunity cost of motherhood and career. I could not agree more.
Every large family I know eschews the public school system FWIW.
Now someone do a chart with data that includes fertility rate, neonatal outcomes/infant mortality, healthcare availability/affordability, social safety net, cost of living, wealth equality/disparity, happiness, etc.
I don't think this is accurate. I am far far far better off than either my grandparents or parents at this age and house ownership percentages in the United States are at the high end of what we had in the 60s and 70s.
I think the real answer is that now people are faced with the choice and many are simply choosing not to.
>I think the real answer is that now people are faced with the choice and many are simply choosing not to.
It's not like they're choosing no in a vacuum. The price of housing bleeds into everything else being expensive too, especially in HCOL areas. Childcare is incredibly expensive, and in many cases it makes more sense for one of the parents to not work than to pay for it. That of course makes the calculus of having a child more complicated, let alone more than one.
Some 30-40 years ago there use to be stores here in the netherlands ran by old people who owned the building and the inventory. They live on the first floor. Almost no bills to pay. On a slow day they would sell 1 puzzle and 2 postcards. This was enough to buy food.
I remember one that had motion detection lamps. If no one was in the store for 3 minutes the lights went off.
In 2024 the new owner pays some 7-9000 per month and atleast 1000 worth of other bills. They also "own" a modest home that costs [say] 1500+600 and have some employees who also live in expensive houses.
Shopping there is unsurprisingly expensive.
Politics is artifically limiting construction and we all became the slaves of the owner class.
Among my extended family, cousins, etc yes. Everyone has more square footage. Even double or triple. Even those that don't make six figures or live in Europe have much larger living spaces.
> I think the real answer is that now people are faced with the choice and many are simply choosing not to.
Moreover... many people are living very interesting engaging lives without kids that would have been impossible before due to the previous centrality of children to the social scene. In the past, not having kids was met with suspicion. Having children opened doors, economically, socially, and professionally, for better or worse.
Today, you are probably going to have more opportunities without kids. Indeed having kids limits you, versus someone who does not.
Literally no one cares. This is not a major concern when deciding to have a child. Why don't we just ask the people that do have lots of kids. Not a single one, regardless of income (not everyone is rich), seems to really care. Truly we live in a rich country. No one who is not mentally challenged is going houseless. I recommend the book 'Hannah's children'.
What a surprise, given today's headline of women being asked to pre-pay the cost of births before delivery [1].
People can't afford housing decently sized for children, people can't afford birth itself (or medical complications), people have to work too much to care for children.
This is a self-correcting problem. There are several subgroups in the United states with significantly above replacement rate. The basic statistics of stochastic processes and heritability of cultural practices regarding fertility and such dictate that those who have been able to resist the memetic pressure to have fewer children, will simply dominate. From an economic perspective, it doesn't really matter... A taxpayer is a taxpayer. From a political perspective, my guess is many people here won't like the simple results of natural selection.
This ignores the reality of systems. Certainly, some folks may have more kids than above replacement rate. But the number of childfree people is soaring (per Pew Research), and as there are less need for maternity services, daycares, and schools, the volume needed to keep these open is above the actual need. See Japan and China how schools and daycares are closing (or converting to retirement homes) due to their structural demographics.
You're not going to "outbreed" the childless unless perhaps you're extremely wealthy, and those folks are going to be exceptions, not a material movement of the demographic needle.
I'm not sure how many children you have. While certainly true that having healthcare is life-saving, it's not a requirement to have children. Pregnancy is not a disease, and results in a natural birth the vast majority of the time. Left on its own, this will naturally happen enough to replace the population.
By all means, I am absolutely pro-hospitals and healthcare funding, but it's not an important consideration when considering the overall birthrate.
Childcare is similarly not an issue. The sorts of people having a lot of kids are just not going to be using childcare a whole lot. One spouse will stay home.
As for the wealthy comments. I go to a fairly traditional parish in a HCOL West Coast city, and I don't think family income has a very large impact on # of children. We have families making anywhere from $60k to $200k+ and if anything, more money results in less children. At the end of the day America is very rich and well-off. You don't actually need a whole lot of money to raise a child as long as you can resist the memetic pressure to be like everyone else.
I mean, from what I've seen, income dictates whether or not a family decides to have seven kids versus six kids, but not 2-3. That's just a given.
> While certainly true that having healthcare is life-saving, it's not a requirement to have children. Pregnancy is not a disease, and results in a natural birth the vast majority of the time. Left on its own, this will naturally happen enough to replace the population.
Where healthcare access is limited, maternal mortality increases, impacting the total fertility rate (which accounts for infant mortality). I do expect people who want to have children to migrate to where they can obtain maternal and reproductive healthcare whenever possible, but if they don't, the evidence shows higher death rates of both mothers and infants. Citations below.
While I agree with you that maybe people will move, and I agree that lack of hospitals increases maternal mortality, the entire history of humanity suggests that we're incredibly good at reproducing without all of that. I don't really need a study. Your existence is proof enough.
Your argument against a rapidly falling fertility rate is that I exist? Yes, I exist, but the evidence is strong that year over year, more people are choosing not to have children and the systems that people who do have children rely on are not being supported adequately (as I've enumerated with my citations). Would you not agree with those observations?
(South Korea's TFR is ~0.7, China is ~1, Japan is ~1.2, the US is not far behind at ~1.6, all 2024 figures presented)
No... your existence is proof that hospitals and medical care are not necessary to have a growing population. It's not proof against a rapidly falling fertility rate. How many times must I say I agree with you on some points before you'll actually engage?
I think their argument is valid because in the whole history of the world we were able to replace the population and had zero hospitals, right up to recently. So their argument stands, medical care is neither here nor there when discussing population replacement. Whoever wants kids just would do what they always did, have a few more because half will die before they hit 12.
I assume GP is implying some type of cultural messaging around kids being undesirable. I don't think this is true, and even if it is, the primary reason is the decline in living conditions (inflation-adjusted wages) for the average person in western countries for the past 50 years. Especially housing. Without stable and cheap housing it is hard to raise kids well.
Your hypothesis is completely unmoored from reality. The only durable correlation between birth rates and living standards is negative - wealthier people consistently have fewer kids.
I gave my anecdote elsewhere, but I will recount it again. I felt embarrassed at age 23 to purchase a pregnancy test with my wife. This is simply due to cultural messaging saying babies are bad. Despite having been married for a year, making well above median wage and having enough for a down payment, etc, I was worried what others would think of me! And I come from a family that is very pro-child and pro-natalist for lack of better word. I can only imagine what my peers would have been feeling. I think in many people, it takes into their 30s for this feeling to go away, but if they wait that long to have children, they're having 1 or 2 max on average.
EDIT: I think many on here don't believe that there's anti-child cultural messaging, because they're in their 30s-40s where this pressure starts to go the other way. But if you start having kids at that age, on average, you will never have enough to hit replacement. To hit replacement TFR, the pro-child messaging must start at 18 or younger.
People still want to have children, above replacement rate even.
Problem is that we gate children behind careers and getting married which is atrocious because you will run out of years to start families if you wait too long.
Until the cavalry for extending lifespan and fertility arrive, we need to fix our economic and cultural system right now.
It's simple memetic pressure. We've made out getting pregnant to be a bad thing. My wife and I married somewhat young, but hardly extraordinarily young -- age 22. When we conceived the first time, I remember going to the drug store with her to buy a pregnancy test and feeling ashamed at 23 to buy a pregnancy test -- ashamed that I got my wife pregnant! But it's simply due to the social conditioning that we're subjected to as teenagers. There's a weird American puritanism about sex, and it doesn't come solely from the religious right.
This 'it's only a meme' bit ignores the part where being pregnant has the potential to breathtakingly suck. It doesn't seem so strange that people would want to avoid that if given the option.
Pregnancy isn't the reason why people are not having kids. It's the eighteen years after, IMO. That is what is memetically discouraged. Although, I won't pretend to know what the messaging is towards young girls
memetic pressure = desire to be like everyone else.
Having lots of kids is counter-cultural. I have three children, which is not that much. However, being in a well-off neighborhood full of cultural 'elite's in Portland, OR means that I am a pariah. I am especially a pariah because I enthusiastically say we want more. THis means we don't do what the other people are doing. Hence, we're resisting the memetic pressure.
Another way of saying this, on an economic front, would be 'keeping up with the Joneses'. If you ever read the millionaire next door stuff, you'll notice the main thing these people have is the ability to resist the pressure to spend. That, in addition to the magic of compound interest, which also applies to fertility rates, means that they end up with disproportionately more capital.
I know people with three or four kids in the middle of Silicon Valley and I've never seen anyone talking ill of them because of that. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that if you're a social pariah in Portland, OR then it's not because you have three kids.
I never said I'm spoken ill of, just that the cultural pressure to not have more kids is omnipresent. I'd label it a 'microagression' of sorts.
For example, after my third, I've been asked multiple times if I'm getting a vasectomy.
No one speaks ill of it, but I'm definitely one of the only ones with this many kids in the area. I can count on my hand the number of 3+ kid families in the neighborhood. Whereas for my parents generation... 3 is a typical family.
As for the pariah bit... having kids means that we're probably not going to be doing a bunch of the adult-only activities that people invite us to. With a baby always at home, it's unlikely we would do that kind of thing until our kids are grown and my wife well past menopause.
Parents today expect to not only have children but also to have an adult social life of a sort that my parents and grandparents never expected. Rather, adults socialized with their families mostly. That was considered typical.
Looking at your post history here, I don't think you're a pariah because of the amount of children you want to have. It's because you have a lot of noxious viewpoints that involve saying people straight up should not exist.
No not really. While they have high fertility, they also have cultural practices that limit the spread of their viewpoints (requirements to live in particular geographies, etc).
I would more be talking about groups like traditional Catholics which have no such prohibitions, and frequently find themselves in very high-ranking fields. For example, I'd point to many Supreme Court Justices, several entrepreneurs, several media figures, etc. It's not just traditional Catholics [1], there are many groups with persistently high fertility rates.
It's not just Catholics. Conservative protestants also have much higher fertility. In particular, red states have higher fertility than blue states, and if you drill down deeper, it's simply due to these states having more of these groups than blue states, not any particular policy. The data are pretty unequivocal that government policy has basically no influence on people's decisions to have children.
Anyway, the higher fertility combined with the ability of full civic / economic participation means these groups will eventually come to dominate. There is simply no other way. We can talk about immigration until the cows come home, but overall, the global birth rate is sub replacement, so while any one country can migrate more people to solve its problem, this just punts the political football to another country which will invariably become more conservative.
To conclude, I can name several examples of 'conservative' groups with significantly higher birth rates, but I can't name a single liberal one. This is simply a cultural thing, but it doesn't matter for the economy. Regardless of who has kids, the kids pay the taxes necessary to sustain the welfare state. However, as I pointed out, it'll likely lead to political differences that many here won't like. As an example, I'd point to everyone's surprise that Gen Z is more conservative. I've been saying this for years now, because I first noticed the differential in fertility rates as a child in the 90s. People thought I was a chicken little, but we're seeing the results.
[1] Note, I'm calling out traditional Catholics here. The overall fertility rate for Catholics is on par with an average American. However, simply by breeding, there's already a huge faction within the Catholic church writ large. The progressives, with fewer kids, are dying out to be replaced by younger, more zealous figures. I think this will probably be the next step for the country as a whole as well
[2] EDIT: someone mentioned mormons... that's another good point. A small group of a few dozens of families moving west and now dominate one state and are important minorities in several others.
Irrelevant though because California's population as a whole is declining. Religion / politics is highly heritable. That doesn't mean that 100% of kids feel that way. But enough to change the demographics.
I would hardly call people like Amy Barrett, Kavanaugh, Alito, etc as uneducated, but believe what you want. It's true that the lower your income, the more kids you'll have. However, again, there are several subgroups where that's not really true.
You could definitely convince people to have more children by offering significant tax/money incentives.(2k/month per child would certainly be a policy that had a very significant effect on fertility.)
Me and my wife live in Canada, with universal healthcare, and pay around 250k in taxes annually.
We also have fertility problem. Our treatment costed over 100k so far and (yes, $100,000), all out of pocket. Worse that that, for some treatment (egg donation) we had to go abroad because laws in Canada prevent it! Somewhere I read 10% of families struggle with similar problem, and I'm sure many are not as lucky as me to have the means to spend this much.
After spending so much, we finally could have our first child. But it's really hard to continue for the second one. The main problem is cost and traveling abroad.
At the same time, I see govt spend so much effort for LGBTQ gender change and similar treatments.
With such upside down policies, news like this is no surprise at all.
Im liberal in most policies, but this in and of itself is enough to vote against liberals/dems.
rationally, budgets are constrained. any process that increases the number of potential tax payers is good. reassignment surgeries are elective, those receiving them do not pay more taxes, so priority should be given to fertility treatments.
Gender affirming care, including surgeries, increases the quality of life of transgender individuals, which can help make them more productive and even patriotic members of society and which can encourage other transgender individuals and those that believe in transgender rights into the country, potentially overall improving overall throughput and profit and taxes to pay for it all.
Are you saying you think the Canadian government should pay more toward fertility and less toward LGBTQ procedures such as gender reassignment? I wonder how much money the latter costs. Seems like it wouldn't be as big a cost vs fertility treatments being covered.
While I sympathize with your struggles to get pregnant, buying into blatant lies about me and my friends (LGBTQ+) effectively undermines the entirety of what you said. Your entire post can be summed up as, “It’s incredibly expensive and difficult for us to have children, and I think it’s better that the government hurt others instead of helping us.”
And at that point, you lost my sympathy, because the attitudes of the parents are far too easily transferred down to their children. I really hope you rethink your argument in favor of improving treatment for everyone as opposed to reducing treatment for others, medical or otherwise.
Blame your provincial government, it is their decision what gets covered or not. I doubt you're living in the Maritimes, so maybe check first before blaming the Liberals for this. FYI in Quebec, IVF is covered so it's not an impossible feat either.
It's weird how wildly different this statistic is, compared to real life observation.
At least in the midwest, we have had a record-high number of kids for the last 10 years or so (so many more kids that new schools keep being built to try to keep up with it because each new year the number of enrolled kindergarteners is higher than prior, daycare facilities have a minimum 1 year waiting list and many are closer to 2 years, summer camps sell out entirely in minutes, etc)
I think people hear "low fertility rate" and just assume this means "adults aren't becoming parents" or "not enough kids being born".
But if you spend 5 minutes on the ground, it becomes immediately apparent that we have the opposite problem -- there's so many more kids being born and raised than before, and most of our municipal/regional support systems for parents and children have not yet expanded to accommodate the slow-surge in births.
The US hit peak school age children a few years ago. Projections have it on a decline. While painted as midwest, I imagine these may be hyper-local issues. If you look at recent historical changes, there has not been some magic growth spurt and most states have been in a peak decline.
Since the statistic applies to the whole US, it's biased towards urban population centers.
E.g. the lack of K-12 kids in SF almost caused the shutdown of 11 schools due to the lack of funding that comes primarily from the number of enrolled students, they halted the closures in lieu of other cost saving approaches due to the political pressures of shutting down schools, but the truth remains that there are fewer kids in population centers.
Same here in Seattle, both in the city proper and in the surrounding suburbs. Many public schools closing down due to lower enrollment. Partly because many parents are opting for private school, but also because there are fewer kids in the area. Many possible explanations: It's expensive to afford a big enough house for a family, people are having fewer or no kids, many people unable to find a partner, etc.
“Why aren’t people having children?”
These articles were awful when it was “Millennials are killing X”, and they’re even worse now. The answers are obvious, and I’m tired of entertaining these clickbait narratives that refuse to acknowledge any of the very large elephants in the room.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...
Everything is expensive as hell these days.
And if that’s the case, then the question answers itself.
How magnanimous to blame our own selfishness onto the problems of the world. People were having kids with mass killings and rapes and torture and no hospitals or social security or higher degrees or anything for millenia. All that is new is the choice, due to cheap contraceptives.
So what's happening for the first time generationally is that women don't really _need_ men. They don't need the money, they don't need the children, they don't want the loss of independence.
Men, particularly young men, are having trouble adjusting to this. They've been raised to believe that having a wife is part of the natural order of things, that being a breadwinner is part of the natural order of things. The whole 'trad wife' meme fed into this dream of coming home to a hot meal, a adoring wife, and obedient children. That's just not something that is going to happen anymore and only men are having a problem with it.
I don't have any idea what to do about it. Sometimes the response to greater women's liberation is for men to take advantage of their greater strength and size and force women back into the homes. I'm hoping that's not inevitable.
I know a lot of couples that have a kid but face major financial constraints. Up and down the socioeconomic spectrum, it's expensive as hell to have a family, house and educate them, and that's a major part of the calculus for even moderately well-off families.
As opposed to young women, who expect men to earn more than them, adore them, and to do all that while caring for kids? Part of the problem here is that young men's desires are constantly castigated as bad. In particular, coming home to an adoring spouse is something both sexes ought to want, and it should never be castigated as bad for a young man to want a wife who adores him.
Well, either way it doesn't really matter. Yes young men today will be sad, but ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem. The women that do this are not going to be represented in the next generation. Their choice of course. It's a free country.
Not anymore, that's my point. Women's dreams are changing now that they can make real money. Men's dreams are not catching up.
> Yes young men today will be sad, but ultimately, this is a self-correcting problem
Self correcting in many ways but it is often 'corrected' by oppression and violence. Women did not forbid themselves from going outside or showing their faces.
Where in the western world is this happening?
Saying something is 'self-correcting' is not the same as saying that the correction is something that you are going to like.
What should men dream?
I honestly think the truth of the matter is that women's dreams change the moment they have a baby. Literally every women I know suddenly has a change of heart on how their future ought to unfold the moment the baby is born. Part of the problem here is that couples are not even crossing that Rubicon, so to speak .
I count myself as a man who probably dreamed what you think men ought to have. My wife and I married young, yes, but we both envisioned working full time. Then we had the baby... and suddenly your wife is obsessed with this little person in a way you never thought possible. My wife in particular never counted herself as a 'kid' person, but it's different when its your own, especially for women. Suddenly, it seemed like the only sane option was the traditional one. But I scorned those who told me that before that happened to us.
I think we should just be honest about the effect of hormones on women's desires. It would be kinder to men and women to do that.
Anyone can dream anything but they shouldn't respond with outrage and fury if their dreams don't come true.
> I honestly think the truth of the matter is that women's dreams change the moment they have a baby.
Not in my experience but that is immaterial in the context of the current discussion.
Women are not having babies. Not in the US, not in east Asia. In their opinions they've got better things to do.
Who is responding with fury? I see no widespread male fury? On the internet, you'll always find someone furious enough.
> Not in the US, not in east Asia. In their opinions they've got better things to do.
Fine with me. Their ideals and cultural preferences won't be present in the next generation. A self-fixing problem.
The governments of Japan and South Korea disagree.
Untrue. Alimony, child support.
> Men, particularly young men, are having trouble adjusting to this.
I see just as much anecdotal evidence that men are often (who knows what the percent breakdown is) the ones no longer seeking relationships, and articles authored by women lamenting the availability of highly desirable male partners.
> 24/7, room and board only
This seems like an overly negative view. All the work isn’t done by one partner, income is spent by both, the female partner often spends a higher percent of the income statistically (not implying anything by this, they may just be the one shopping for groceries), they share in what the income buys and the lifestyle of the couple, they also keep half of the asset appreciation, etc.
Not guaranteed in any way. Depends very much on courts, lawyers, and the ability of judgements to be enforced.
Who would take that over a job with a 401k that moves with you?
> I see just as much anecdotal evidence that men are often (who knows what the percent breakdown is) the ones no longer seeking relationships, and articles lamenting the availability of highly desirable male partners
See the 'incel' movement. See the Joe Rogan listeners. See the responses to any post about dating sites and the fury that women get more matches than men.
Young men are angry.
Just going to say that the perspective of having kids and getting to spend your time not working, or stressing about work, and instead spending it with family and raising your kid, doesn’t seem like a hellish job to me, and besides that it isn’t clear to me the father would be the “employer” in that context, rather both work in the way they agree to within the context of their relationship for the benefit of their child. Many men would like to raise their kids while someone else goes to work.
> (not) stressing about work
> instead spending it with family and raising your kid ... while someone else goes to work
Right. 'Spending time' with your family and child is something totally separate from work and stress, presumably because you have an army of nannies and housekeepers.
Another reason women do not want to become stay-at-home wives/mothers, no one respects you or the work you (pretend to) do .
But you're not totally wrong. Part of the problem is that we disincentivize staying home. For example, you don't get to contribute to a 401k if you don't work but are at home with kids. You also don't get to qualify for social security.
In my opinion, if a woman or man stays home (but let's be honest... it's mostly women), then she should qualify for significant tax breaks on retirement accounts (if not a funded government account) and also the quarters she spends caring for kids should count for social security at the working spouse's wage or a government-mandated minimum.
> See the responses to any post about dating sites and the fury that women get more matches than men.
This is hardly a new thing. Literally the entire history of humankind is explained by men being highly desirous of basically any women and women desiring only a certain subset of men. 'Incel's have a long history.
Is there any evidence of this outside Elizabeth Warren's book? Most reports say that at most 10% of women get alimony.
> This is hardly a new thing.
Not new, but I believe that it's getting worse.
Basically, if a non-working woman divorces, she is highly likely to get about as much as she would have had had she remained married, which stilly might be nothing, if the husband is not earning a whole lot.
I'm pretty sure I know what Jack Bogle would recommend.
Do you have a source for this claim? (anon291 provided at least one source...)
From 2015, but I don't think there's any reason to think they've gotten higher
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-women-divorce-alimony/how...
And again that’s separate from child support. I’d bet the child support number is 80%+, with the remainder being women that earn huge amounts of money or who decide not to be in their kids’ lives and have zero custody.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164920 - April 2024 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40157435 - April 2024 (1 comment)
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40163251 - April 2024 (79 comments)
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?537667-16/hannahs-children
To summarize:
> While not all of the women she interviewed cited religious reasons or motivations for their choice to defy the birth dearth, most did. So faith, while not a prerequisite for the choice to have more children, is at least a catalyst. Greater religious liberty, especially with respect to educational choice, would allow for competing narratives of womanhood to re-enter the educational environment and allow women to choose narratives of self that more accurately account for the reciprocal opportunity cost of motherhood and career. I could not agree more.
Every large family I know eschews the public school system FWIW.
I think the real answer is that now people are faced with the choice and many are simply choosing not to.
It's not like they're choosing no in a vacuum. The price of housing bleeds into everything else being expensive too, especially in HCOL areas. Childcare is incredibly expensive, and in many cases it makes more sense for one of the parents to not work than to pay for it. That of course makes the calculus of having a child more complicated, let alone more than one.
I remember one that had motion detection lamps. If no one was in the store for 3 minutes the lights went off.
In 2024 the new owner pays some 7-9000 per month and atleast 1000 worth of other bills. They also "own" a modest home that costs [say] 1500+600 and have some employees who also live in expensive houses.
Shopping there is unsurprisingly expensive.
Politics is artifically limiting construction and we all became the slaves of the owner class.
The majority of people I know don't own a house. They rent and they're in their 30s.
Perhaps you have more disposable income and savings because you don't have the expense of supporting a stay-at-home wife and two kids?
Moreover... many people are living very interesting engaging lives without kids that would have been impossible before due to the previous centrality of children to the social scene. In the past, not having kids was met with suspicion. Having children opened doors, economically, socially, and professionally, for better or worse.
Today, you are probably going to have more opportunities without kids. Indeed having kids limits you, versus someone who does not.
People can't afford housing decently sized for children, people can't afford birth itself (or medical complications), people have to work too much to care for children.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baby-birth-costs-women-asked-to...
You're not going to "outbreed" the childless unless perhaps you're extremely wealthy, and those folks are going to be exceptions, not a material movement of the demographic needle.
Fertility intent forward looking:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
Rural hospitals at risk:
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Hospitals_a...
https://ruralhospitals.chqpr.org/downloads/Rural_Maternity_C...
Rural childcare:
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/rural-child-care-shor...
Childcare funding:
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/20/child-care-cliff
School closures due to demographic pyramid:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/rural-schools-are-fighting...
(Urban folks have less kids than rural folks; as rural systems parents rely on inch closer to collapse, it is a forcing function on fertility)
By all means, I am absolutely pro-hospitals and healthcare funding, but it's not an important consideration when considering the overall birthrate.
Childcare is similarly not an issue. The sorts of people having a lot of kids are just not going to be using childcare a whole lot. One spouse will stay home.
As for the wealthy comments. I go to a fairly traditional parish in a HCOL West Coast city, and I don't think family income has a very large impact on # of children. We have families making anywhere from $60k to $200k+ and if anything, more money results in less children. At the end of the day America is very rich and well-off. You don't actually need a whole lot of money to raise a child as long as you can resist the memetic pressure to be like everyone else.
I mean, from what I've seen, income dictates whether or not a family decides to have seven kids versus six kids, but not 2-3. That's just a given.
Where healthcare access is limited, maternal mortality increases, impacting the total fertility rate (which accounts for infant mortality). I do expect people who want to have children to migrate to where they can obtain maternal and reproductive healthcare whenever possible, but if they don't, the evidence shows higher death rates of both mothers and infants. Citations below.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1128335563/maternity-care-des...
https://www.marchofdimes.org/research/maternity-care-deserts...
(South Korea's TFR is ~0.7, China is ~1, Japan is ~1.2, the US is not far behind at ~1.6, all 2024 figures presented)
What does this mean?
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
EDIT: I think many on here don't believe that there's anti-child cultural messaging, because they're in their 30s-40s where this pressure starts to go the other way. But if you start having kids at that age, on average, you will never have enough to hit replacement. To hit replacement TFR, the pro-child messaging must start at 18 or younger.
Problem is that we gate children behind careers and getting married which is atrocious because you will run out of years to start families if you wait too long.
Until the cavalry for extending lifespan and fertility arrive, we need to fix our economic and cultural system right now.
> Stunning stat: 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.
Having lots of kids is counter-cultural. I have three children, which is not that much. However, being in a well-off neighborhood full of cultural 'elite's in Portland, OR means that I am a pariah. I am especially a pariah because I enthusiastically say we want more. THis means we don't do what the other people are doing. Hence, we're resisting the memetic pressure.
Another way of saying this, on an economic front, would be 'keeping up with the Joneses'. If you ever read the millionaire next door stuff, you'll notice the main thing these people have is the ability to resist the pressure to spend. That, in addition to the magic of compound interest, which also applies to fertility rates, means that they end up with disproportionately more capital.
For example, after my third, I've been asked multiple times if I'm getting a vasectomy.
No one speaks ill of it, but I'm definitely one of the only ones with this many kids in the area. I can count on my hand the number of 3+ kid families in the neighborhood. Whereas for my parents generation... 3 is a typical family.
As for the pariah bit... having kids means that we're probably not going to be doing a bunch of the adult-only activities that people invite us to. With a baby always at home, it's unlikely we would do that kind of thing until our kids are grown and my wife well past menopause.
Parents today expect to not only have children but also to have an adult social life of a sort that my parents and grandparents never expected. Rather, adults socialized with their families mostly. That was considered typical.
I would more be talking about groups like traditional Catholics which have no such prohibitions, and frequently find themselves in very high-ranking fields. For example, I'd point to many Supreme Court Justices, several entrepreneurs, several media figures, etc. It's not just traditional Catholics [1], there are many groups with persistently high fertility rates.
It's not just Catholics. Conservative protestants also have much higher fertility. In particular, red states have higher fertility than blue states, and if you drill down deeper, it's simply due to these states having more of these groups than blue states, not any particular policy. The data are pretty unequivocal that government policy has basically no influence on people's decisions to have children.
Anyway, the higher fertility combined with the ability of full civic / economic participation means these groups will eventually come to dominate. There is simply no other way. We can talk about immigration until the cows come home, but overall, the global birth rate is sub replacement, so while any one country can migrate more people to solve its problem, this just punts the political football to another country which will invariably become more conservative.
To conclude, I can name several examples of 'conservative' groups with significantly higher birth rates, but I can't name a single liberal one. This is simply a cultural thing, but it doesn't matter for the economy. Regardless of who has kids, the kids pay the taxes necessary to sustain the welfare state. However, as I pointed out, it'll likely lead to political differences that many here won't like. As an example, I'd point to everyone's surprise that Gen Z is more conservative. I've been saying this for years now, because I first noticed the differential in fertility rates as a child in the 90s. People thought I was a chicken little, but we're seeing the results.
[1] Note, I'm calling out traditional Catholics here. The overall fertility rate for Catholics is on par with an average American. However, simply by breeding, there's already a huge faction within the Catholic church writ large. The progressives, with fewer kids, are dying out to be replaced by younger, more zealous figures. I think this will probably be the next step for the country as a whole as well
[2] EDIT: someone mentioned mormons... that's another good point. A small group of a few dozens of families moving west and now dominate one state and are important minorities in several others.
You and The Onion both:
https://theonion.com/study-uneducated-outbreeding-intelligen...
Me and my wife live in Canada, with universal healthcare, and pay around 250k in taxes annually.
We also have fertility problem. Our treatment costed over 100k so far and (yes, $100,000), all out of pocket. Worse that that, for some treatment (egg donation) we had to go abroad because laws in Canada prevent it! Somewhere I read 10% of families struggle with similar problem, and I'm sure many are not as lucky as me to have the means to spend this much.
After spending so much, we finally could have our first child. But it's really hard to continue for the second one. The main problem is cost and traveling abroad.
At the same time, I see govt spend so much effort for LGBTQ gender change and similar treatments.
With such upside down policies, news like this is no surprise at all.
Im liberal in most policies, but this in and of itself is enough to vote against liberals/dems.
Wouldn’t it be better to vote *for* additional rights rather than *against* someone being helped?
Rising tide vs bucket of crabs, after all.
And at that point, you lost my sympathy, because the attitudes of the parents are far too easily transferred down to their children. I really hope you rethink your argument in favor of improving treatment for everyone as opposed to reducing treatment for others, medical or otherwise.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40163251
At least in the midwest, we have had a record-high number of kids for the last 10 years or so (so many more kids that new schools keep being built to try to keep up with it because each new year the number of enrolled kindergarteners is higher than prior, daycare facilities have a minimum 1 year waiting list and many are closer to 2 years, summer camps sell out entirely in minutes, etc)
I think people hear "low fertility rate" and just assume this means "adults aren't becoming parents" or "not enough kids being born".
But if you spend 5 minutes on the ground, it becomes immediately apparent that we have the opposite problem -- there's so many more kids being born and raised than before, and most of our municipal/regional support systems for parents and children have not yet expanded to accommodate the slow-surge in births.
E.g. the lack of K-12 kids in SF almost caused the shutdown of 11 schools due to the lack of funding that comes primarily from the number of enrolled students, they halted the closures in lieu of other cost saving approaches due to the political pressures of shutting down schools, but the truth remains that there are fewer kids in population centers.