Kids living at home aren't saying "I still live in my parent's basement"
"oh, lets have a baby!" this really is the depth of the issue. Confidence isn't going to have you change this answer.
It turns out if you do that the living space required to raise the next generation simply becomes inaccessible.
(Another way to look at it - people on new leases will often spend around 30-40% of net income on rent. In most instances this is a direct transfer to a retiree/near-retiree. Taxes, a lot of which also goes towards transfer payments, and other transfer payments to old people, are 40-50% in many countries. Taken together, younger, working people are effectively transferring 2/3rds or more of their gross income to retirees before spending the first cent on themselves. Why would anyone be surprised people are checking out of that system en-masse?)
Why wouldn’t they, when government policy has made it an asset class that can never fall in value?
The early 20s and 5X+ are the ones that have more time for politics. I would not read some inter-generational class warfare into that.
I wouldn't broadly blame generations for things. It is like that silly Karen meme service workers have. We are part of the problem too.
People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
That's comparing apples to oranges. People living in rich first world countries with stagnating economies like Canada expect a better future and standard of living for their kids than those from impoverished third world countries who rose to be developing countries, no? Then there's also completely different cultural norms and expectations between India and western nations and how multi generational families interact.
I had a similar discussion with someone form Africa who was shocked to hear that in some rich European countries you could have a full time job and still be homeless due to scarce housing and crazy rents. And then he replied "what's the point of a country being rich if the people are poor?". Good question mate. It's because the point of rich countries is to be tax havens and economic zones where worldwide money is funneled to the top 1% and the workers who enable that have to fight for the scraps while those who can't, get left behind for the welfare state to pick up or fall through the holes in the safety net and end up on the street.
>People don't want kids for mysterious reasons that we have yet to discover.
The reasons have been written in this thread. If you don't like them or don't resonate with you, doesn't mean they're mysterious and undiscovered. Just go on the street and ask 100 random people, they'll tell you the same.
Most parents want their children to live a good life, whether they're from poor country or not. Besides, people used to have more sex in the past when life seemed much more hopeless than it is now. Granted, condoms didn't exist but these days, people aren't even dating anyway.
> The reasons have been written in this thread
It's all speculation at this point. If we knew the reasons, we'd solve the problem. Like the meaning of life, there are some things we can't know.
And if the country is not providing a better future for the kids than the parents, why are you surprised they're not breeding? You're also ignoring the differences in standards. For some countries, a good future might be not dying of dysentery, for others is having a single family home.
>If we knew the reasons, we'd solve the problem.
You're talking like a true politician here. "Ah geez, if only we knew why people are getting depressed, poorer and not breeding, we'd totally fix it, but as we have no clue, I guess our hands are tied, oh geez. It's totally not our immigration, zoning and financial policies that have made wages stagnate and housing more expensive and of poorer quality for your kids, no, it's the fault of video games, dating apps, avocado toast and hookup culture."
More money can't solve the problem. People could live in cardboard boxes and still reproduce if they want. The reason is multifaceted.
Why would you bother with the extra effort of dating if your life sucks? Just sit at home or in an internet cafe and watch streamers and play videogames. Much easier.
There's a lot of effort in dating. You gotta groom, you gotta stay fit, and you gotta go out and mingle. But when are you gonna do all that if you finish work at 9pm and need to wake up at 7am as do a lot of japanese?
>More money can't solve the problem.
More money means needling less time spent working and more time for dating/hobbies.
Well, not on HN, but in general.
which has a different culture than the West.
Living with their parents may be a benefit for arranged marriages. Now they are moving out, arranged marriages maybe are dropping, but they don't have the culture to make non-arranged marriages (all the above is of course just assumption)
Now in many Western cultures there is not any sort of arranged marriage etiquette, you live on your own and you invite people over for sex, a person who lives at home is categorized as a loser. I can certainly see why living at home in one of these cultures would end up not providing the necessary ingredients for marriage to be on the roadmap.
Aside from all this I suppose access to birth control takes away the whole got in trouble, need to get married aspect of the past.
Yes, arranged marriages played a big role in getting people to form families. It has many disadvantages in terms of personal freedom, but it seems to be effective for population growth.
Couples also need to have children in such cultures unless they want to be ostracized from society.
The birth rate issue could very well be cultural instead of a financial one.
If the birthrate is still low when it's four billion, or two billion, I'll start to have concern for the species.
If we don't have war, displacement, and mass starvation, and people still decide just to not have as many kids for a few generations, the species will survive (and from a resource consumption standpoint the planet will probably be better off).
And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.
Incorrect. The politicians are doing what a very small, almost numerically insignificant, portion of the people are telling them to do. Those being the ultra-wealthy. It may be that what we are seeing is that what is best for the ultra-wealthy is not what is best for society as whole.
Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision?
South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul.
This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance.
These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass.
The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...
Learn how to read these plots and what they mean.
There are almost no young people.
There are almost no kids in South Korea.
Unless there is mass immigration, the population of South Korea will implode.
Even if people began breeding like rabbits today, there is nothing that can be done; when the 0-20 year old population is of working age, there will be a massive number of old people, and almost no one of working age.
That page says 11% of the population is under 15.
Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"
You need a tax / working base of some size to produce enough stuff. That simply won't be in place when the current kids are adults, and adults or elderly.
Barring robots and AI -- which admittedly looks like a very real possibility now -- the current adults will not have enough working-age people to support them when they're old.
Indeed, the problem is acute only because they won't be dead. We're all counting on our kids to support us when we're old, only now indirectly, via taxes and mechanisms like social security.
If South Korea simply had 1/4 of its current population, everyone would have more space and resources, and things would probably be okay. Property values and economy would contract in absolute terms, but everyone has more stuff.
Also important to ask people who had children 30-50 years ago why they decided to have children and then to compare to today.
A real interesting data point that made reconsider some of my assumptions on birth rates in developed nations is Israel.
There is a really interesting piece (albeit with a conservative bias) that can articulate this far better than I can. [0]
[0] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-be...
Without data on the relative affordability of living and having children in Israel, and on how parent-friendly (especially mom-friendly) life actually is there - that's 95% useless for comparing to other countries.
(Yes, I get that a very pro-child culture could translate to very pro-child policies.)
On South Korea, you might want to consider this chart instead: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/KOR/sou...
KOR's Fertility rate has been under 1.25 for two decades. It follows then that "stable" population can only be the result of three factors:
1. Pushing the population curve out through longer lives;
2. Immigration;
3. Time-effect offsets of the fertility rate; for instance, if it's the projected fertility rate of females born in a given year, it would take roughly 20-40 years for the fertility rate to have its effect on the population curve.
If the numbers start dropping to the extent that opportunities open up, I believe that people's views might start changing.
We see localized depopulation of e.g. small Italian or Japanese villages as the local economy dries up. But Korea still has a real and growing economy! It's just perhaps not evenly distributed.
This video would beg to differ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&pp=ygUWa3Vyemdlc...
That said, I am inclined to disagree with his take -- when women and men are both expected to work 996, when housing takes up a huge percentage of your income, when the only way you think you can assure a good life for your children is to pay exorbitant amounts for private tutoring, then yeah, 0 or 1 seems like the best option.
This may be a bit of a weird take, but I wonder if it might make sense to just explicitly make "rearing the next generation" a "public good" career choice. Some people are far more cut out, by personality and character, to raise children. Rather than trying to exhort every single family to have 2.1, find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.
> find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.
"Mother of the Soviet Union" or "welfare queen"?
It might work, but a lot of people get really, really mad at taxpayers money subsidizing other people's children.
Do you mean more like surrogacy, or more like teacher/personal tutor?
The former… I'm told is medically inadvisable over 5 births, even if humans used to have 10 in the hope of 2 surviving to adulthood. But that may be confounding variables given 5+ is unusual.
The latter is, I think, a good idea that people will object to actually paying for — "teacher" is not as highly respected a profession as it ought to be.
My theory is that as a society becomes wealthier, the acceptable minimum standard for child rearing grows at an even faster rate, until it becomes unattainable for a growing number of people.
Raising kids is cheap. People who live in mud huts who have never heard of money can afford to raise kids. Avoiding negative social stigma is what people can't afford.
This is a very important factor. The West has successfully more or less eliminated teenage pregnancy thanks to very heavy stigma plus enabling choice and information. People are simply deferring having children until conditions are perfect - as they were told to do.
The millennial generation has seen repeated waves of economic crises and layoffs and the invention of a gig economy.
Mere stability is lacking. At least the people in mud huts know they can afford their mud hut next year.
Maybe people don’t want to be economically corralled into a large city a thousand miles from home and then to have their children in that city where they moved for career advancement, particularly as the social contract between employees and employers grows increasingly vacuous.
This narrative that "people aren't having children because the future is bleak and they're expensive," is wildly overblown. Yes, it's what people say when you ask them. That's not the same as it being the actual reason.
This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
The opportunity cost—the shadow, if you will, that the cost of children casts on your future retirement savings—is enormous. It’s way larger than the nominal cost. Big ouch.
It ain't like just because the kid 7 you can leave them at home while both parents go to work.
Seems like you may be underestimating how much work kids, even at elementary age, can be.
Six figures? False because poor people have been having children forever and continue too.
Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did. But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.
If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing? It goes up until some cannot afford to pay and demand balances supply.
Without a working age population, your retirement assets will be inflated away into worthlessness.
So far rich world governments and individuals haven't found an optimal incentive/cost share ...
1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.
2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.
Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.
But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.
There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.
I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.
0: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/how-to-have-grandchildren
More than low birth rates, I think that the problem is that people are postponing children until the last possible moment biology allows for it.
The reason is that people need to have their life in order before having children. I imagine it was easier in the past than nowadays.
You have Children and need to work? Daycare is extremely expensive. Want to buy a house? Well, Children weights against you when trying to get a mortgage. And I am not even getting into the actual costs of raising a child.
People say that low birthrates are a problem, but while raising children is a personal endeavor, nobody is willing to make a collective problem (it is fairly unpopular to direct taxpayer money to pay for it).
People in the 1930s did have more kids, quite often out of necessity. Child labour was the norm, birth control access was severely limited cmpared to today, and high infant mortality rates meant larger families were a survival strategy.
As the GP makes clear, most people think about the future, not the past. And many think the future is looking pretty bleak right now.
I do think there’s a tendency to overstate the potential future problems (humans are resourceful and will find ways to solve them), but the psychology of this seems fairly clear cut.
C'mon you have the whole answer right here.
Its a prisoners dilemma. People aren't stupid. For any one individual, it makes sense to wait and defer having kids until they're more economically secure. They know that. So what happens when _everyone_ is under that same incentive structure? Well, some people eventually pull the trigger and just yolo it, if they _really_ wanted kids. They probably aren't as economically secure as they wanted to be, but make the personal sacrifices to do it anyway. But you probably also have a lot of people/couples who are depressed that they didn't reach the position they expected to and depressed people generally don't want to have kids.
This was the late '40s through '60s, not even the '30s. In the US.
Right now, the future has very very few signs of promise. Humanity is behaving attrocious, being a menace and a monster is amazingly popular, science and free thinking are being cancelled and rounded up by government goons. The very rich prey ever more on everyone else.
I would argue that pessimism about the future is the rule, and the American optimism about the future in the 20th century was the exception.
But humanity had so much finding out to do. Average material conditions haven't moved steadily forwards, no, but humanity has been overall rising. Science and technology developing, insights to the natural world happening & spreading, cultural elements forming & flourishing. The powers that be in the world were quite regionalized, had their fingers in only small pies: there was similarities across the world but it was characterized more as many individual experiments rising and falling, a variance among societies where many things were being tried in many ways. The difficulty in survivng (for much of this time) was overall characterized by the difficulty of finding food in the world, which was brutal work but work against nature.
Today, things are so different. We all see (or can see if we want) the whole world. Progress has tapered down. The bold efforts for progress like the New Deal and international order (UN) have been worn down or unrepaired (notably the security council sotuation). But more than all that, we have lost the civilizational diversity that fed change and growth. We don't try new things, our systems don't shift: we are locked on course, path dependence amid the vast global network of international trade. The efforts to try new things are small tweaks, of limited scope: Obamacare (much protested), 4 day work weeks, some small scale UBI. We have seen so few attempts to house and feed the populations of the world, so few attempts to broaden education. The millions of enterprises across the world keep being hoovered up into ever larger companies with ever more high up and far off seats of power, the 0.1%'s ascent over us all and control of the world's money supply and markets extends and extends.
The stagnancy and unflinching singular trajectory we are all locked into is pitiful. Humanity feels so a long for the ride of a couple absolutely insane pathological freaks. That loss of diversity, the consolidation of many things into fewer and fewer, is an evolutionary stagnancy which even if unconsciously experienced weighs enormously heavy on the human souls of today. It feels terrible, feeling like as the wheel turns, it's not the rise and fall of civilizations, but now the plight of us all, enmeshed, and knowing that we do so very little have so few levels to pull, so few positions of any real power to steer this.
Maybe you can argue that it's slower now than it was in the late 20th century. But it's still far faster than it was at any other point in history.
You may think we're locked on course, but we're far less locked on course than we were in medieval times or pretty much any other time in history. Changes in medieval times happened, but took centuries, and those advocating for change got burned at the stake.
Of course, it matters less what actually was than the way people thought. It's an almost universal constant throughout history that people thought the future was doomed.
People don’t measure happiness in aggregate. Just because I can fly anywhere in the world in a few hours, doesn’t make up for something like loneliness.
There’s categories of “happiness with life”, and some of them are much, much worse than a century ago.
It could very well be that those carry a lot more weight than tech.
The trend is global so the main reason is most likely something global. In this case couldn't it be simply that motherhood is no longer attractive to women and they want to do other things instead of raising kids?
If you frame this from an economical standpoint, there simply isn’t a single country in the world that adequately compensates parents (especially mothers) for the costs of raising children. These costs are numerous and not just financial — there’s also massive opportunity costs, and that’s to say nothing about the tradeoffs a parent is forced to make (“do I spend more time with my kid or spend more time working to help ensure they have a stable childhood and bright future?)
Simply put, if we want people to raise families it needs to make economical sense to do so. What exactly that looks like can be debated, but it’s likely something along the lines of one of the parents receiving a midrange part time or full time paycheck (depending on if they decide to stay at home or not) on top of the other parent being able to work an hour or two less each day without taking a hit to their paycheck.
Otherwise, it makes more sense to either accumulate wealth until the last biological second and then only have 1-2 children or simply have none at all. That’s what the current system incentivizes.
Second is universal education which rapidly advances, means that women are no longer content with being a nanny plus housemaid forever, and often want to have something more meaningful, leading to no or much less time for kids.
Basically kids require at minimum one adult taking care of them during most of the awake time. And due to various reasons gaps in that coverage can be a deal breaker. For example kids going to day care until 15:00, but parents busy until 19:00. 4 hours gap is not a lot but at early age can be a deal breaker. Etc.
In my opinion we won't reverse this trend until next world war (after such event humanity will partially reverse development and due to loss of life and work, many people would have time for kids). So in the mean time countries need to attract skilled educated immigrants while suppressing housing prices, and the most successful countries in that would win in the long run.
Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund.
Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.
I'm sure this has been a fairly commonly perceived trope amongst late-X and millenials for several years now.
Presumably accelerated during 2016-2020, and once again ramping up quickly, for our stateside friends - but I haven't heard of any part of the planet being burdened by an over-abundance of optimism about the (affordability of the) future.
In the past few decades, we have globally seen a massive shift towards living in a city. Even in times of war and pestilence, people needed extra hands on the farm. But when living in a city, children are just an extra burden on your time and budget. I feel articles like this are over-analyzing the issue.
Why does this read like we have to have kids?
I'm completly fine not having kids surprise \o/
Nothing to see here.
If you look at birth rates in eastern europe after the fall of the soviet union and the establishment of neoliberal economics everwhere and the development of eastern europe economies as workbenches for western corporations with low wages the birth rates fell and are only slowly recovering now.
Before that - while circumstances where surely not better in a lot of ways - essentials like housing, childcare (kindergarden and so on) where provided and you could be assured to be fine no matter what is going on in your job.
Now you are only fine if you either on welfare and have nothing to loose anyway or earn so much that you can afford everything and risk having children. If you are in between (like most of the population around 20-40 here) it's perceived as a risky gamble.
Today you need to be "the perfect mother". Just "being a parent" isn't good enough anymore for the middleclass.
Today's grandparents spend their time and money on themselves instead of helping out.
So not only do you need to be perfect as a parent, there is also less support from the people who have done this once before.
If does not help much to consult the internet as you will mostly get told the world is about to fall apart if your kid gets as much as a skin rash.
Its the hyperinflation of "as standard" seen things one needs to be ready to have a family. Just in this thread many say its housing. Well guess what my grandma had 5 kids living with her parents. Its our culture that infected us with the idea we need a 100 sqm apartment and two cars etc. Put on top of that the need for our kids to be special, it should get at least get a masters degree , a high paying job etc. I dont think this idea was so cemented in generations before, because mobility was lower and therefore it was e.g. ok for a child to become a mechanic.
And in the words of my wife, “It seems like a bad idea to bring a kid into this world”
That portraits a child as someone that you need to protect from suffering at all costs. If your parents were to make the same argument towards you, as an adult, you would argue that it is perhaps condescending and removes somewhat your own agency.
There is a _chance_ that any children that you bring into this world become not only an adult but an agent for (positive) change.
"Hey, it was unfair of us to bring you into this situation, so we were thinking maybe we should kill you."
This does not follow. A person's resistance to having their shitty life terminated doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin it.
My personal favorite reason is just that this is the outcome of birth control. At no other point in history could people decide how many kids they want, and when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.
Cultural shifts, in this case due to the availability of birth control, take time to materialize.
Your initial claim was that it was the availability of birth control. That is, that birth control was the cause. But this new claim is that it is the choice to use birth control. That is, choosing to use birth control is now an effect, which must have some other cause.
when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very many.The Pill was first used in 1960.
Yes, condoms existed. But they were stigmatized, sometimes criminalized, and substantially less effective than hormonal birth control methods developed and popularized during the 60s and 70s.
For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility.
What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war for an additional drop).
Eritrea and Ethiopia are right next door to each other, they have high birth rates dropping completely in lock-step, despite Eritrea being essentially shut off from the outside world in terms of disruptive tech - no Internet for most, no social media or whatever other bogey man you can come up with and blame for "disrupting the culture".
Countries that are essentially ignoring climate change have falling birth rates too, as do countries where people aren't into Western-style contemplative existential dread.
I haven't come up with an alternative answer, mind you. So far, I've just been noting how easy it is to poke holes in all available single-cause explanations.
We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population is more than 10% below its peak level by natural decline. It's visible in some areas and cities, but not the whole country level.
It's possible we're nearing a moment when we have to re-evaluate what it means to be human. Do we live just to procreate? Just to work to support 'the system'? I don't know the answer, but I can't stop thinking about that line from Star Trek First Contact: "... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves..."
Women choose to no longer have children or to have a very limited amount of children because they don't see the point in it anymore.
Women who have kids lose the best years of their life and then on top of that have trouble getting back into the workforce once they are done raising the kids.
From their point of view, it means an overall loss of income and some may have to restart their careers from scratch because no employer wants to hire someone with a 5/10 year gap on their resume.
According to this study https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-..., only 18% of stay at home parents are dads, which means that in 80% of the cases, it's the woman who has to sacrifice their career to raise the kids.
If I put myself in the shoes of young ambitious woman today, would I give up my dreams of climbing the corporate ladder/opening my own business/traveling the world in order to have kids or would I delay/ opt out of motherhood?
As a guy I don't even have to ask myself this question, but a woman will and as we can see from all these studies, they have decided that it is not worth it.
Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking.
Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel that they need to be more established in life first - the larger the city, the stronger this sentiment.
I have children myself so I had plenty of conversations about people's decisions in this regard and the majority of those I spoke with who don't have children see it as some kind of grand undertaking that either requires more preparation (indefinitely) or is just too much to bear.
Meanwhile my parents' generation would essentially yolo people into this world, sometimes by accident.
We've become too cautious for our own good.
It is good to be cautious when thinking about having kids.
Having a child is not like picking up a new hobby that you can give up the next month because you got bored of it, it's taking on the responsibility for another human being for the next 20 years.
This is a very important decision that will change your life and should not be taken it lightly. The fact that the previous generation were "yoloing" is not a great argument. The previous generations used to drink a drive a lot more too, should we go back to that as well?
But it never occur to me that e.g. being a homeowner should be a prerequisite. My parents weren't and neither most everyone else's in my generation. I was still renting when my first child was born.
Also to me people give undue importance to things like climbing the corporate ladder. Most don't get far enough for the pay to finally match the responsibility, as there's simply too few positions to take and competition is fierce.
I don't think I can name a single person in my extended social circle who either is or reports directly to a C-level who got there without already being promoted once or twice in their twenties. If it didn't happen by the time a person is around 30, there's going to be someone younger and snappier vying for the same role.
Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
We (the West, generally) have successfully put the fear of god (including metaphorically, for atheists) into people that they MUST NOT HAVE CHILDREN THEY CANNOT SUPPORT. We have provided them with means for not having children. Now everyone is surprised?
The birthrate for educated folks has been below replacement for a long time. Teenage moms probably aren’t in their mind cause they were raised among other UMC folks and it just doesn’t happen there. The US has been below replacement overall for even longer. We’ve relied on immigration for 50+ years.
Most of these discussions talk about cost of living and so forth - which are good metrics but the biggest influence of whether people have kids is if they’re getting into relationships. As any country has more women getting online, the birth rate plummets. It’s another factor we don’t talk about in these discussions. Social media has a huge effect on getting into relationships - and therefore having children.
Kids incur exceptional opportunity and real costs, and are unnecessary for a fulfilling life, so this outcome should not be surprising.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2014/09/what-behind-declines-...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr104.pdf
Teen marriage rates (15-17) are alread exceptionally low. One would expect as laws are enacted at the state level to raise the minimum marriage age to 18, these declines should continue.
https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(21)00341-4/full...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar...
Depends on what you expect for the future. A lot of those children have a hard time thinking of what kind of job they'll be able to do. Most of them seem to land on "influencer" or something.
I know it is contentious, but there is a very real chance that a large part of humanity will cease to be able to add significant (economic) value in the somewhat near future. You may not believe that, but if it is true then adding to that number of people is not a good thing.
More humans != more better.
Which, of course, is our "special purpose" in life.
Why would people even exist if they weren't going to contribute to shareholder value?
I completely agree that more people is not good, but for completely different reasons: there are WAY too many already.
Our primate species has so overpopulated the planet that every single "environmental service" (to put this in the money = purpose in life perspective) is massively over burdened.
My personal opinion is that there is no such thing as "purpose in life", we just grew from the mud here. But I think there is a general awareness among people with some exposure to the state of the planet that we're trashing the place, and that's mostly due to there being way too many humans.
Even if a person can't put their finger on it, there is a general feeling that the future holds a dubious opportunity to flourish.
Therefore less kids.
I also believe that raising a child takes a lot of time and effort, and modern first world youth just aren't interested in spending that much time away from their phones.
The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.
Oddly, a lot of what they cite, particularly climate-related, is directly related to humans shitting out too many humans.
This was particularly experienced in India, where the birthrate went down when literacy went up.
Maybe more educated people do worry about the future?
If so, then much of this idea fails on the same arguments it uses against other possible explanations.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-...
So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age)
I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I already only have ~15 minutes at the end of the day for myself, another one would make me go negative (somehow). Part of this is our situation: my folks need some intensive memory care and my In-Laws aren't really interested in any childcare duties. We spend about an hour a day in the car shuttling about the ones we have, so more destinations isn't too bad, but would be tougher. Monetarily, we're more than fine compared to our neighbors, education should be well and paid for through college (very lucky here, we know). We can and do afford weekend activities. Our religious group is alright, they care, but there is just too many old people that need help and really suck all the charity-time out of the group as is (read: mostly useless for child-care/assistance). So, we're probably going to stick at what we have right now.
I'm free to be questioned about my choices, so don't feel bad asking, though I'll try to keep some anonymity if that is alright.
> So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age)
> I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time.
I think you've largely answered your own question, by reflecting on your own circumstances. I suspect there are plenty of people who would not mind having more kids per se, but simply cannot afford to (in terms of time, or in terms of money, etc).
We are planning on a second kiddo, and I can barely fathom how we'll make it work with what little time we have left. At least in the US, we simply don't have a society that makes it easy or feasible to have kids - financially or otherwise.
I was looking for the perspectives of others, not to conclusively answer the question. I thought it would be polite to offer my own first.
My wife wanted more than our 2 children, but medical reasons prevented us from having more.
Most of my children's friends are in 2 child families. IMO middle class people tend to stop at 2 for financial reasons. OTOH, we know several couples who are both surgeons or in similar occupations. They tend to have either 0 or 4+ children.
There is a profound amount of entertainment and education at our fingertips, much of it available literally at all times. This includes adult entertainment, so it's easy to alleviate, uh, "needs". A lot of kids in the past came about from boredom.
Also, because of the access to information, a lot of people realize that raising a kid is, for most people, kind of a sucky job. I love my son and would do it all over again, but the actual job of parenting has a lot of boring stuff that pushes me back into social spheres with people I gladly left years ago. There are some people that love the job through and through, but I just don't think most adults are like that. And we can easily understand that as an adult now. Plus the pressure to execute perfectly is intense. My parents had me, my mom carried me around until I was school age, and then basically my life was my own after that - they cared about me and were good parents, but they only vaguely were paying attention to me (I was a 3rd child and generally good kid, so it was easy). GenX experience through and through. These days? My son is in high school and the insane rat race for college is something my son and wife and I are just saying "no thanks" to. He'll go somewhere and figure something out, but kids are literally spending 60-80 hrs a week on school and "extracurriculars". Too much pressure!
Really, there are just all kinds of factors now present that all push down the birthrate.
1995: Have > 3.8 GPA, take the SAT, get a good enough score, write some decent sounding bullshit on an application essay, and bam: you have a shot at a top school.
2025: Start taking AP courses in middle school. Take and excel at advanced science and math classes for 4 years. Take 3 years of a foreign language and become fluent. Have a 5.0+ GPA. Have at least a 1580/1600 SAT. Have at least a 35/36 ACT. (Realistically you want perfect test scores). Be thoroughly involved in (preferably in a leadership role) multiple extracurriculars or sports teams. Have at least 3 letters of recommendation from prominent people in the community. Write an elaborate essay that checks multiple boxes, and a personal statement. After all this, you have maybe a 3% shot at a top school.
I work with a lot of high-end CS graduates, and some are great, but few of them blow my socks off.
Our education is just messed up right now.
(By the way, it is possible for a high school student to graduate with an entire year's college credits via AP classes)
Compare that to what seems to now be the normal pattern of waiting until you're financially secure before having children. It seems to work out OK for the guys, but seems far from optimal for many women. Children later in life is really hard on their bodies, and so many of them seem to blow a giant hole in their career that they never recover from.
There were down sides, of course. Most grad students are terribly poor. But they make it work.
I really think that's something we should lean into and encourage as a society.
hectorchu•5h ago
robertlagrant•5h ago
odyssey7•5h ago
Skilled professions were likely to remain useful after the war. AI makes their future value seem uncertain.
Jedd•5h ago
tw04•5h ago
The results would also likely be skewed by Germany quasi-forcing people to have children in support of the party.
baxtr•4h ago
cjfd•5h ago
_dark_matter_•5h ago
anilakar•5h ago
bee_rider•4h ago
raymondgh•4h ago
spacemadness•1h ago
pjc50•5h ago
bell-cot•5h ago
I might note the role of 24x7 News and the attention economy in temporal inflation - "We Are Doomed, Because _______" stories are great for audience- and profit-building, but they keep dialing up peoples' expectations of temporal inflation.
And "temporal inflation" is easily dumbed down to "their future looks sh*tty, to them" - which feels like it could get through, to at least a few of those who are skillfully and willfully oblivious to the causes of the problem. Hopefully. Maybe.
baxtr•5h ago
My mom used to say exactly the same, but she still got 3 kids with very little money because her social groups expected her to have children.
ggandv•5h ago
Catholic?
kaibee•4h ago
This is what you're missing. They are not.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink.
In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on...
Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value.
And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.
chuankl•29m ago
I think this is the key insight, on this specific topic and many others.
freehorse•3h ago
I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.