It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Financially the cost?
I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses.
Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant or hell now even the grocery store I always get shafted. Everything is so overstimulated and kids get in the way to strangers trying to ignore reality with their phones. So when one of my kids throws a tantrum everyone's looks and disdain doesn't help. It's a part of growing up that I think most young adults don't realize.
Then for your career it's the most destablizing thing there is. Everyone around me who doesn't have kids the sky is the limit. Midnight PR's and no problem handling oncall. I missed a pagerduty alert when I was careflly bottle feeding my 8 month old who caught pertussis from some idiot who thought they were above that. I had no choice in getting out of pagerduty because 'it's only fair'
Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
Having a family sucks hard sometimes. But I wouldn't change my past for the world. They are my everything. The advantages of having kids are lost on most but I'll let others provide input if they feel like it.
As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share.
First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyone is either actively parenting kids or had raised kids already, so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
Similar for social circle. Because everyone is my town is roughly dealing with the same things it's relatively easy to bond with new people. We've met people talking at the park, at t school drop off, while waiting at the martial arts place etc. Most people are nice if not super interesting but you meet enough people you like.
And living close to family (my wife's family in this case) means you have more network around etc.
Obviously it's not easy to just pick up and move but I am sharing this because the benefits of living in the right, family oriented, place would have been lost on me. Thank G-d my wife was wiser.
To add to my previous comment. There's nothing about "the US" that makes precludes any of this. Lots of people chose to remain (or move back to) close to their families especially when they have kids on their own.
EG when we bought the house because it was closer to the in-laws, the previous owners were moving to SC to be closer to their family. It's just a decision you make or not bother to make.
And then to make an extreme point - before this I used to live in Hell's Kitchen in NYC. When I visit my old hood now, it's basically one continuous giant Grindr date going on. That was totally fine when I lived there as a single person but as a family person it would be a tough situation (e.g. businesses not geared to kids, most neighbors aren't parents - eg there was no kids in my old building). Now I live maybe 30 miles away and it's all parents all around me. The idea of "go where parents are" and "go where other young families are" is relevant to absolutely anyone in the world, so I don't understand why whether I live in the US is even a question?
>so the residents (and businesses) are super accommodating of families with kids. To the point where if I have to take a little one to the bathroom in a restaurant, people often invite my big one (5 year old) to hang out at their table so I don't have to worry about it.
My experience so far with a kid is most people will just tolerate your child. I'm surprised your running into that attitude.
Other new parents I know that are in the suburbs aren't all surrounded by family's either. I think aging people aren't downsizing their houses and moving around. Careers scattered and cheap homes scattered everyone around.
Maybe NYC is just different. I mean I'm 100% sure it's different. I'm grew up in a NYC suburb lol
I mean I think it depends on the suburb. If you moved your family to a place where everyone is a shut-in boomer (vs the grandfatherly types that I somehow meet in my area) then... why would you move there to have kids?
To me that's like going to a badly reviewed restaurant and then complaining about the food. If you knew you were moving to a place hostile to kids, why move there?
I don't think that's right. There's a difference between "I hadn't tried to do that"(which would have been the case for me, if not for my wife's wisdom) and "it's hard"
Like literally a starting point could be -where do your friends and coworkers with kids tend to live? Or ask a realtor which parts of town have turned over with young families.
When you are checking out the house you can literally tell which houses have kids and u can ask about it.
The housing market it what it is but you get a very different outcome if you search in a a family friendly town vs not to begin with. Obviously?
I grew up in a place like that (Port Washington, NY), and it was pretty ideal; I'm raising my own two kids in a suburb of Boston that feels very, very similar along almost every axis.
You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends...unless they also have kids, in which case we play DnD together when the kids go to bed.
Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.
And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.
> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old
I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other side of the country/world. Anecdotally the loneliest older people I know are ones who have put it upon their children to keep themselves from loneliness.
> And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them
As a parent I always find it funny that we need to add this to every statement of frustration of family life (I'm not critiquing you, I also say this every time I mention any frustration about parenting). It is worth recognizing that saying the contrary is fundamentally taboo. I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
<< I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near impossible to miss the "pregnancy will ruin your life" propaganda.
Consequences. They exist. Some are life altering and expected to last a long time.
Some of my friends and family who had kids at a young(er) age - and by that, I mean late twenties or early thirties - seemed totally oblivious to the hardships of parenthood.
You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research. Most people just have kids because it’s just “what your supposed to do” and don’t give much thought beyond that.
I don’t know what they thought to themselves, but outwardly they projected rainbows and unicorns until reality eventually hit them.
> You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research.
I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.
>You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there.
If that's the attitude it renders virtually every discussion about the topic moot and the people in question better stop trying to give life advice to anyone else.
My wife and I don't want kids and we've heard our fair share of (unsolicited) opinions on the topic from people who clearly weren't always happy. I've only ever known one woman I worked with, who was a brilliant scientist, tell me straight up she regrets having children and wished she could have focused on her research.
If that's not something you can honestly say without being berated then clearly the 'propaganda' still works mostly in one direction.
I agree with you but I don't really see what the alternative is. If you openly go around stating that you regret having children, what are people supposed to say? It's better to keep those thoughts to yourself because there, quite frankly, is nothing helpful anyone could say even if they wanted to. Not to mention that it would be unfair to the kids if they got the feeling that you regret having them.
Unfortunately, my soul brought me into that bucket :-(
I can speak about it with other (men) friends without children, and to some women without children. But if you ever say that you didnt want children when others with children are around, they see you as an alien.
Esp it gets hard if you are single (what happenend to me now) and you meet new women and tell them that the only reason for the last breakup was that I couldnt bear the stress with out children.
I knew from the beginning of my life on, that it will totally crush me if this happens - coming from a "not supportive family" makes it really hard to >actually want children<, esp. if the same stories now repeat :-(
Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former)
But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought publicly!
"But don't expect standing ovation is my very subtle point."
that's the exact reasoning why parents who complain about how hard it is to be a parent get no sympathy from you. You blew a load in somebody (or had a load blown into you) and another human popped out. That's a choice you made for yourself, nobody forced you to, and there is a big giant swath of people out there who couldn't care less.
>I find this to be another under-discussed challenging of parenting: you can never even entertain the idea that "maybe this wasn't what I wanted"
Because there's no point in thinking about it. Your wife will ask if you want to leave, your children will hate you, and society will hate you, it will make you feel depressed, and meanwhile it won't accomplish anything. It's a dialogue only for yourself, once you acknowledge that, it becomes far less challenging to deal with and you can move forward with dealing with challenges in solvable ways.
My mothers' friends have to fund vacations for their adult children and grand children in order to spend time with them. They wont let her stay at their home.
My mother was giddy when my father died; so I have strong boundaries in our relationship.
My brother moved to colorado after the service and never returned.
I'm not convinced having children is the answer alone. (I say as a childless 35yo)
There are many reasons this could be the case. The internet (and Reddit in particular) is abound with AITA type discussions around boundaries within families.
Being a parent is orthogonal to being someone people want to spend time with. Unless I knew for sure I was not in the latter group, I wouldn’t use it as a justification for not having kids.
About your first point, I understand why it happens, but I get frustrated at these debates nowadays. Both sides cannot talk about their experiences without having to add something that invalidates the other side choice. They cannot fathom that the other side may prefer the disadvantages of their choice instead of the disadvantages of yours. Maybe it's the human condition to try to point out how the other side will regret their choices to validate our life decisions
Well said. I appreciate people on both sides that can simply acknowledge having kids is great for some people, and not having them is great for others, and the world is big enough for all of us.
Being able to hook up with random strangers on apps might be fun in your 20s and 30s. When you're old and wrinkly, it's not going to be the same. I hate to say it, but this is especially true for women entering their twilight years. A lot of childless people in our generation are headed to a very sad and lonely future.
COVID was exceptionally hard on these people. A lot of the weirdness of the COVID years was just people going crazy in isolation. Trading random stocks, or ordering crazy nonsense off of Amazon. Being alone is literally psychological abuse and a lot of them were subjected to it for months at a time.
> My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way
I completely believe that’s been your experience, but want to highlight that his is a difficult asymmetry in these friendships. I in no way mean to imply that the below is the experience your friends had with you, just that the challenges are not one-way.
In my own circle, my wife and I have often felt like it was our friends with kids who vanished. We knew they were busy, we kept extending invites or asking for time. Things often didn't work especially as new parents are figuring their lives out, things are changing all the time, etc. We'd meet up here and there, but it was - necessarily - always on their terms. And so of course, our outreach tapered down incrementally but consistently.
But I do wonder: do they feel we detached from them, or do they have any inkling that we feel they detached from us? We've discussed it with one couple who we were always closer to, but it doesn't feel an appropriate topic to resurface uninvited at any given moment.
It's simply hard to plan. Before kids I'd typically meet up with friend around 8 or so maybe 9. Now bedtime rules my evenings. When my kids are asleep I'm exhausted. Most of my friends evenings are just starting at that time! (lol) and I completely understand. The other thing is I can't go out and get drunk or party because being hung over with a 3 year old pissing the bed after they crawl in to sleep/cuddle with you - nothing better/worse.
It's simply hard to relate. I have some very good friends who we've stayed in touch. I'm forever grateful for them. But when you're out and about and you meet a random person and try to strike up a friendship say at a conference. The second I mention I'm a dad I feel I'm relegated to the back of the bus.
Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them.
Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.
And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.
And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.
So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.
The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.
Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
I think it's a fair response, and I can appreciate the truth in one's own life that leads you to write it. But this situation is a complex dynamic, no two situations are precisely the same either factually or subjectively. The same couple with a new child may stay close to one, drift away from another for totally different reasons that may not have one thing to do with intention or effort.
At any rate, I'm never too proud to reach out to old friends even if the time between attempts increases. Relationships may change again!
> You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way.
Similar to what I wrote in the other reply: How far went _your_ initiative to stay in actual contact with them, in a way it's not a boring duty call, but something _actually_ nice?
If I have friends with children, sure I'm also interested in them. But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved - and they mostly expect from me that I constantly want to see the kids and "help in any way", well, where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
> But if it turns out that these friends have no desire to spend time with _me_ anymore - without any kids involved
See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily. My guess would be your friends would love to spend some time with you but can't, because logistics.
> where do I profit from that friendship?? It often gets quite asymmetrical and boring.
Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
> See the problem is the kids. You can't quite make them go away that easily.
You can't, sure. You shouldn't at least. But what does it mean to me? It leads to the fact that the friendship is pointless. So why should I take a lot of initiative, when I don't get anything back anymore? For a reason that they've actively decided for (typically), btw.
> Friendships are not for profit. If you want profit, start a business.
I'm not talking about commercial/monetary/material profits. I'm talking about profits in terms of social lives. If my wording is unfortunate, I hope that it's still clear what I mean. One important (not the only one) currency in that regard is: Timeslots in the calendar.
PS: If the other side shows at least some remote awareness of the situation and indicates a little goodwill, it's already a different thing. In my personal experience, even that isn't common, though.
I understand why they do it, but I cannot ignore that you lose the incentive of visiting your friends and their kids when they always take that visit as a way to treat you like a babysitter. Yes, I accept sometimes looking at your kid while you take a nap, just don't make that the usual experience for years on end, though. I'm lucky, as my friends always understood when I pointed that out to them, but I'm aware that this may not be the common reaction.
It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs.
Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.)
Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-person events - cities are filled with concerts and music festivals, you name it, more Michelin Star restaurants than anyone could visit, etc. etc.)
Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
Not to mention that parents have all kinds of new social stigmas.
Having children used to be: free labor, send them off to do whatever (now you'd be accused of child abuse)
Basically, the problem is single life is too good now. We have smartphones, internet, and the economy revolves around the single experience.
The minute you have kids, you lose access to the exciting single life that the modern society has built itself around and catered itself to.
Society glorifies single life, and the signalling is so strong you know you'll lose it if you have kids. It's not like you have time anyway with the doomscrolling and dopamine addiction.
> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)
This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.
> It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).
Why would it be easier today?
You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.
This. I know me and all my peers roamed the neighborhood and my wife's life was not that different despite being born on different continents. Doing the same now risks a visit from state child neglect referral, which is enough to give most a pause. Parents seem to get all the risk and less benefits, while getting the stink eye when kid is not behaving properly.
In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.
I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion... but to be blunt I've only seen this in black and impoverished neighborhoods. There needs to be enough working single moms releasing their kid out of necessity that the Karens can't snitch on everyone and the police/CPS fatigue of fielding the calls after investigating and not finding anyone they can force into keeping the kids inside.
Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.
Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.
And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:
Housing floor space per person, same trend.
Life expectancy, same trend.
Leisure has increased.
Tourism has increased.
Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.
The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.
As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.
There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.
We can't return to a place where America is the only manufacturing country in the world, where every other country is in ruins and rebuilding and taking loans from America. That was a very weird set of circumstances that gave America unprecedented tailwinds that no other country has ever had.
I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record. But once I had my first child, all of those things seemed so petty and inconsequential. I don’t miss the night life, the hobbies, or the drinking buddies. My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation. I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
> I was young and cool once. I traveled, I did wild things that make good stories, and I did wild things that I will never tell a soul. I think that I had all the adventures that I could handle without having a criminal record.
yes me too
> My life revolves around the little people I brought into this world, and nothing I’ve ever done has made me more fulfilled. .... I know some people resent being parents, but seeing my kids is a rewarding feeling in a way that I never could have understood until I had experienced it. Don’t let the TV tell you what joy is.
yes me too absolutley
> If I had the chance to give up all of my 20s and all those hedonistic pursuits and settle down 10 years earlier, I would do it without hesitation.
Total opposite for me, no way. Whilst i dont want to do them now, I am so SO glad i had those experiences. I know I would be deep in a mid life crisis today wondering "what if" if i had missed the fun and gone straight to having kids in my 20s. Like, id probably be blowing up my life over it now, doing something stupid, out of FOMO for never having tried living other lives. Different people are different, but it would have been a TERRIBLE choice for me. (im also not the only one - witness the commonality of the old mid-life-crises sportscar and mistress trope that was born out of a period having kids young)
Yep this is 100% it -- my partner and I who stayed single and lived out our 20s and early 30s "experiencing life" only wish we could have met and settled down 10 years earlier. Its way more important and rewarding than all the shallow stuff that people talk about. Of course sometimes you miss the freedom, but sometimes I missed high school when I was in college -- didn't mean it was a step down. Sometimes I missed college and my old job when I got a "real job", of course, it was still a strict upgrade, but you can always look back and appreciate what was good about the old days.
$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.
> Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?
In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.
Also, a nanny is not the same ecosystem as child-care. It's not nescessarily a substitute. If what's desired is a private-private child-care, I suspect you'll be paying a lot more than the price of a nanny.
One challenge with hiring a nanny is if they need to take a sick day (or if they quit!) you can end up in a tough spot. In contrast a day care center usually has backups built in so you don’t end up scrambling.
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
The trick is that au pairs are nowhere close to that expensive. (Though the US becoming radically less attractive of a place for foreigners to live and work may be changing the availability of that option.)
I agree, it's the public attitudes that are most disheartening and probably some of the reason young people are less inclined to have children. All over society people are seeing kids as a kind of personal indulgence that shouldn't be allowed to impact other people - whether its a lack of sympathy that parents have higher priorities at work, or looking down on kids who act like kids in public. At the same time parents who let their kids look at screens in public are demonizes, as apparently only kids who are perfectly behaved without distractions should be allowed out.
Meanwhile when dogs bite people there's an outpouring of 'well why did you bother that dog?'.
Your experience sounds exactly like mine. My son is very autistic as well. I've had to cut off friends with families because either their didn't understand meltdown and were incredibly judgy because they were blaming my parenting for his ASD meltdowns, or others because my autistic son was a "bad influence". God forbid their (later diagnosed) kid have some exposure to a child with different neurodiversities.
That's not even going into my traumatic health care experience to getting my son help when he needed it.
So now I have all the hardships of raising a family, and I'm restricted friendship within the small ND accepting community of my area. So my support network is incredibly small and I barely get any support. It sucks.
Reading the responses to your story that are nitpicking it over your daycare experience is a perfect representation of the problems that families face.
When I read things like this I find it confusing in so many ways. I've been out of the US for a while now so perhaps there's some contemporary issues I'm just not considering? For $6k a month, why not hire a private nanny? You could also work with other parents in your area to setup something for a bit more socializing depending on their age.
Similarly, I find it practically impossible not to meet people literally every single time we go to e.g. the park. The kids want to play with other kids, we meet their parents, and it's basically an endless source of friendships - even better because it's other parents who probably live relatively close to you enabling you to start setting up aforementioned ideas.
My childcare cost is $52k/year for two kids. To hire a private nanny for TWO kids, it'll be at least $35/hour with benefits (insurance, paid time off etc) in my area. That'll be around $80k/year for a private nanny. And once the kids are older, the value of a nanny isn't as good IMO since they don't provide the variety of social challenges that a daycare can provide (group working, relationship building, conflict resolution etc...). We have friends with kids of the same age that don't go to day care and have nannies instead, and the differences in social interaction are significant - maybe we just get lucky but I think our kids build a lot of skills being in a bigger group.
Say you hire a nanny for $6k/mo... What problem have you solved? You're still paying the six grand, and you had better hope the nanny is good, because that is your kids' whole world now for a chunk of their existence.
It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month. If desired you can also generally arrange something with other parents in your area to do a cost share with the side benefit of also getting a bit more socialization for your kids. There's endless differences with nanny vs daycare. A big one is that most studies show children do best when raised by a small handful of consistent figures. In daycares they're going to have rotating workers with relatively unfavorable ratios.
It's also done at your house so there is no transport, you can create play areas and the like to your own imagining, set the standards for what is expected, have easier access to the exact foods/etc you want your children consuming, and so on. You also have a lot more freedom for your children to experience things you want them to. For instance if you want your kids to go to the park on Wednesdays, you can set that up.
There's also small things like the fact that most kids are going to get endlessly and repeatedly sick in daycare due to close contact with a large number of other children and relatively premature immune systems - when anybody gets sick, most of everybody gets sick. Some of those will be one-time-only sicknesses that everybody will get, sooner or later, but a lot are just colds and other things that kids will catch endlessly. And so on. There's plenty I'm leaving out but basically you get better, more personalized, care over which you have much more control, and pay less.
---
One thing I'd also add on. I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required. They obviously need to know how to care for a child and so having one who has had at least one child on her own is good, and bordering on a requirement, and they should know basic first aid and emergency treatment (like what to do if a baby is choking), but beyond that - I think the most important thing for a child is simply the personal connection. If somebody gets into nannying they presumably already love children and, at least for me, that's mostly what I'm looking for.
> It depends on the area, but a nanny is typically nowhere near $6k/month.
Agreed that it depends on the area. In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less. In my experience having lived in different areas the price ranges for infant/toddler daycares and (legal) nannies are closely correlated.
> I'm not even entirely sure a "good" nanny is required.
Having employed a couple of bad nannies, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Real median personal income in the US is $45k which is $3750 gross per month. [1] Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans. What was your experience with bad nannies?
> Nannies are obviously not making more than the vast majority of Americans.
Experienced nannies in high-cost-of-living areas do. Many charge $35 to $55 per hour [1][2][3] and at 45 hours a week, that is $82k to $129k a year or $6,825 to $10,725 a month.
> What was your experience with bad nannies?
Not wanting to pay the aforementioned prices and dealing with strong cigarette smoke smell on clothing, strong perfumes, buying them age-inappropriate toys, issues with timeliness, general messiness in our home, questionable unemployment claims, even a DUI. All the problems of an employee and roommate rolled into one.
All of them had prior experience, first aid training, and loved children so in retrospect I may have been overly harsh to refer to them as "bad nannies". But I still think it was absolutely worth the time and effort it took to find a good nanny.
You originally said: "In high cost-of-living areas, both nanny and childcare can be (significantly) higher than $6k/mo, and in lower cost-of-living areas they're typically a bit less."
You're now limiting your price to high cost of living areas with extremely experienced nannies (even that 'hire for your yacht here' page you dug up only gets into these $72k+ prices at 8+ years of experience and specialized skills), and working overtime every week. And in those conditions - sure, but that is quite atypical. A normal search for 'us average nanny salary' turns up about a million hits in the $19-$23 hourly range. I imagine off the books is rather lower yet still on average.
And yeah it sounds like you had some remarkably bad luck with nannies. I take most of those, like showing up on time, completely for granted, and would certainly never hire a nanny who smokes. And it's not just the stink. I mean I don't even understand how that's supposed to work - how do you even nanny while also taking smoke breaks? Yeah, just ridiculous.
A good nanny for four kids is definitely more than $6k / month in lots of parts of America, you're ignoring the downsides of nannies (like when they get sick, or need time off, etc), you're ignoring a lot of the upsides of daycare (like socialization), and the research does not support your claim that kids do better being raised by a nanny than daycare.
It's totally fine that you've chosen a nanny over daycare. I did for my first, and I think we'll go with a nanny for my second, but you're presenting a wildly misleading perspective here.
"people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled"
I have two disabled siblings out of the four kids my parents had - I didn't really appreciate what that meant for my parents until I had kids - I can only guess at the stress they must have gone through.
So yes, having kids sucks sometimes, but its also the most important thing that most of us do. And yes, as a dog-owning empty nester, I can confirm its not the same, not even close.
I completely sympathize with the challenges, though I don't understand (and might completely misunderstand) the word "now". Do you meant 'in the current world'? What is different that makes it harder? And what defines now - the social media age? Post-WWII?
Now to me I think is a point in time earlier than now. I'm thinking somewhere when people didn't need to get out and do stuff with another. I think when I was a kid it was normal to have grandparents, and church settings, and just after school programs at the Y or kids in general would find each other in the neighborhood and play. I don't see much of that the same in the 'now'
If you're with your spouse, what I do is pull them out of the store until they calm down. Sometimes I wait in the car and my wife comes to the car because she is done shopping. I then remind them that they put themselves into that situation.
I feel a big part of what you experience is based on where you live. Having a family seems incongruous to the fast paced corpo world, sadly.
I moved to a small, uninteresting town years ago, mainly to escape the hustle and crowds. Honestly, I don't like it much, it's a bit too small and dull for my tastes. But more on point, the people here have all been so mind bendingly kind and patient with the kids that it makes it really hard to leave.
I wish every place were so patient, but there's probably a pretty direct negative correlation between that and 'getting ahead', whatever that means.
> Don't get me start on dog/cat people who equate their struggles to mine... or people who have no idea how hard life is already for a kid who is disabled.
I’d never have believed this until it happened to me.
Yep, but people can only understand the stresses and challenges they have faced, its very hard to understand something you haven't experienced. Even if you try to imagine it, you really can't understand it until you're living it. But yeah, after kids I think any rational parent would instantly without question abandon or sacrifice a pet for a child. A pet is literally 0 out of 10 compared to a child -- no comparison whatsoever. But I appreciate the "I have a cat" people are at least trying to relate. But its a bit like when my plumber came over and tried to tell me how he's really into programming because he's dabbled in a bit of HTML on his drag and drop website. I was friendly and appreciated relating to it, but he's only grazed the surface. I'm sure in his circles he's the "computer wiz".
Not sure how old they are, but we found that this loneliness phase got better once they were in school (and better as they got into middle, then high school.)
"don't get me started on dog/cat people who..." listen dude, you chose to have kids. You and your partner made the conscious decision to produce life, maybe instead of complaining about it, just live it and stop vilifying people who made different choices than you did.
You talk about your children as if they're a burden and that's sad.
Perhaps they don't like the fact that someone is equating pet struggles to human struggles.
Doesn't sound like they are talking about them being a burden, just how their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
> their life has changed and how they can't do all the things that those without kids do.
This is true of people with pets, too.
Everyone's struggles are equally their struggles. I too get a little miffed when someone invokes the struggle Olympics, especially when their struggles are the consequence of their choices.
I have plenty of friends with young kids that are super social. They invite people over, take their kids to restaurants and invite people to come, go to picniqs, festivals, and other things. We love their kids (or at least all the people that show up do).
You and your love for and acceptance of their kids and willingness to show up to family-friendly activities are very likely the key to their ability to do this.
> It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic.
Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointless contact.
There's often the expectation that you're super interested and excited about their children. But even if you'd try. You'll never get something back. Not because they turned into bad persons. But because there are just no spare resources for it (e.g. in terms of calendar slots) on their side anymore.
Do I have to be infinitely sympathetic with them? Or is there some limit at which I am allowed to say: This friendship just doesn't give me anything anymore.
since i had kids my friends come more often to my place since i can go less often to theirs. and we have a great time, because we are friends...
really depends on what you call friends. i am not very social and have very few friends (i don't have a "contact list"), but these are strong friendships.
When I was young in the 80ies, my mum worked part-time 4h as basic clerk, mainly for fun and having people around her so that she doesnt have to take care of us for the whole day.
My dad worked fulltime as an engineer, the bought a house.
Today, you need 2 top tier salaries to make childcaycare and rent even possible
My sister did this too until it got to be nearly as much as her entire salary so then she stopped working again and became the daycare. And that is super hard when your children have special needs. I think the worst may be that in-between area, where working and paying for daycare still seems to make sense financially because you take home more than you spend on not being at home but the net practical result is working for a very low effective salary to also spend less time with the children, which is its own kind of utterly draining.
The tipping point isn’t just take home pay. Peak daycare expense is generally only for a few years. Quit the workforce for a decade and you see long term effects.
Further if either parent loses their job you can quit daycare until they get a new one. Single income families are far less resilient.
I feel kids need that sense of community and social setting. I know it's hard to get a handle on when there's nothing I went through that with my other two during covid. The difference is night and day with dealing with anxiety in social settings.
Midnight PRs sounds really sad. Pager duty; I mean you’re not saving people in the ER. Everything you’ve written comes off as profoundly selfish and self-centered. God forbid your 8 month old needs to be a priority over pager duty.
Raising kids is hard, I have 3 but it’s not sad. Blowing off some steam is something every parent needs. But it sounds like you are in desperate need of some perspective on life.
I think an underrated aspect is how much a couple is expected to willingly sacrifice to have kids. Financial mobility, career prospects/growth, hobbies, leisure, and retirement preparation are just a few of the things that have to take a back seat for both the mother and the father on top of all the things that impact both individually (especially the mother). At minimum, kids are like a boat anchor on all of those things. Naturally, for many people this can make starting a family look a lot putting an end to their personal lives until retirement.
Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
And that’s without even touching the financial security angle. It’s unpleasant to have to struggle and scrape by as an adult, but absolutely terrifying when there’s children involved, and for most couples the likelihood that they’ll need to struggle at some point is much higher if they have children. It’s understandable that people don’t want to risk that if they don’t absolutely have to.
> Some might say this is selfish, but on the other hand it’s kind of weird to expect anybody to commit to that for the sake of some other party, whether that be society, the government, peers, or parents, particularly when none of them are doing anything of substance to help mitigate those impacts in exchange.
Nah, I think that it is just selfish, and that it’s the least weird thing in the world to expect people to commit to sacrificing some things for the sake of their children.
You must have been led to these conclusions by ideas (perhaps labeled “individualism” or similar). Like all ideas, someone had to invent them, and these particular ideas surely have not been widespread for even 100 years.
I would agree if it weren’t almost everything that must be sacrificed in some capacity. Sacrifice of some things are unavoidable, but when no aspect of life remains untouched it’s too much.
It’s worth noting that such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children. It used to be much more hands-off and less financially burdensome — responsibilities were split between grandparents, other relatives, and the town/neighborhood, and after the youngest years kids could (and were expected to) spend their time outside unsupervised doing kid things. This gave parents much needed breathing room that no longer exists, thanks to the ongoing stranger danger panic that was kicked off in the 90s, people needing to move around to have a shot at getting a decent job, systematic destruction of safe third places for kids and teens, and pressure to control and structure every moment of each child’s life.
So I don’t agree that it’s individualism, but rather a natural response to financial and societal forces pushing ever more of the burden onto the parents’ shoulders. We’ve created a world that is actively hostile to children and asking parents to just eat the resulting vastly increased costs.
Talking to my parents, and listening to recordings made with my grandparents and great-grandparents, this is silly. All of them worried about finances and the cost of kids. They survived the Depression, and that informed their view. And they always worried about their kids success and safety.
Worry is going to present, no matter what. Parents with hundreds of thousands in the bank worry, too. That can't be optimized for.
Smart people see when doing something will require swimming against the current for extended periods, however, and opt to not put themselves in that situation. The problem isn't that people can see this and act accordingly, but the direction of the current. The direction of the current is what needs to change.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
> such a degree of sacrifice wasn’t always associated with raising children
To a certain extent I agree with you that lower standards in parenting made the whole project more doable.
However, when my great-great-grandmother's brother's wife died, my great-great-grandmother had to quit school (about 14 or 15 years old?) in order to stay home to help take care of his baby. Shaped the whole rest of her life.
Responsibilities being split often meant others had to sacrifice in addition to parents, and those expectations of sacrifice often fell hard on women (whether young unmarried or past their own reproductive years).
I think there's a very important distinction to be made here. Having kids and taking care of kids you already have are too very different things.
If you're calling not having kids selfish, that's just completely weird. You are going to have to prove first that your opinion isn't also one of these invented ideas.
If we're talking about taking care of them, I kind of agree. Excluding extreme circumstances like rape in a country without abortion, you kind of know what you're willingly signing up for when you have kids. You forced them into the world, they are your responsibility.
In our culture, we're socialized to minimize our "self." Your life is defined by the roles you play in the extended family at various stages of life: child, father, etc. You spend a life laboring to provide for your kids, and the reward at the end is raising your grandkids and sharing their joy as they experience everything in the world for the first time through fresh eyes. It completes the cycle of life. If you don't have grandkids, you're stripped of purpose and robbed of your reward.
I can understand at an intellectual level that other people are raised differently and probably have a different emotional reaction, and, at an intellectual level, I understand that viewpoint is valid. But I genuinely cannot put myself in that mindset. The idea that you could live a fulfilling life without grandkids is predicated on being something I don't know how to be.
For whatever it's worth, it's my perception that even within the US there are many who come from a culture where it's expected for adults to settle down and raise a family at some point in their lives. That describes my background, and I would like to have kids myself.
I believe for many, the desire is there, but it's not so strong as to overcome the forces against it. It's a major life decision and can make the difference between relative financial stability and a decent retirement or struggling their whole lives and standing in a grocery store all day bagging groceries to keep a roof over their head in their 70s.
Keep living in your bubble my friend. It is not selfish to see the sacrifices required to raise children (and I will not enumerate them here, this thread is full of them if you want to educate yourself), see that all you get from society is "thoughts and prayers" (at least in WA state where I live) and take a hard pass on having children.
This is literally the definition of selfish? You see what you must give up for the sake of someone else (children), see the lack of support you will receive, and decide that you don't want to make that exchange.
That's literally a selfish decision, because you are deciding you want to keep that energy and those resources for yourself.
It's not inherently bad to make that decision, but it absolutely is selfish.
I don't think it matters? A decision to keep resources for yourself is selfish on the basis of it being a decision to keep resources for yourself, regardless of where they might otherwise be going?
I guess, but that kinda makes the word selfish meaningless. By that logic we’re all selfish all the time since we’re keeping our resources instead of throwing them in the garbage.
You're saying it's de facto selfish to not have kids? What if someone can't have kids?
In reality everyone who's thinking about having kids exists on a spectrum of what's possible: either it's going to be really easy for you (because you're Elon Musk and you don't give a fuck) or it's going to be borderline impossible (because you're infertile, or you're broke, or whatever).
Just because someone looked at the odds and said "you know what, maybe this isn't a great idea" doesn't make them selfish. Meanwhile you're the one imposing your worldview on them...
Not to put words in their mouth, but I think part of the poster's point is that inability is is a more complex equation than simple biological capacity. A couple who judges it economically risky or otherwise irresponsible to start a family (which represents a wide swath of the population) could for example consider themselves unable.
No, this is a pretty typical conversation on the Internet these days: someone takes a relatively well-defined stance on an issue, and then someone else wildly misinterprets or misrepresents it, just to get in a dig at the original person for... Unclear reasons.
It's either terrible reading comprehension, an inability to understand nuance, or just plain trolling. None of these lead to productive conversations.
My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids. It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
Then, for most, it was, at 20-ish, find a partner ASAP and have a family. That was "the culture".
Today it's "have a great career, travel, party, netflix, game, ... and maybe someday think about kids"
There's other stats like in the USA in the 50s, being single was seen as just a transition until you met someone. 78% of adults were married, 22% single. Today, being single is way more common, > 50% and while many of those might want a parter, tons don't see it as a priority.
> My take is that modern culture just doesn't want kids.
This is true for many people. I know a few childfree couples that you could offer them a hefty salary to raise kids and they would decline.
However I know even more people who ended up having fewer kids than they would have liked, especially when I lived in a big city. Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids, found raising their current child(ren) challenging enough that they didn't think they could handle another, or reevaluated their preferences after watching friends and neighbors struggling.
> It doesn't matter how cheap you make having a family, for many it's just not remotely the same culture as it was 50-70 years ago.
For many, sure. But for other people addressing the root causes (of which cost is one) can move the needle.
> Typically because they couldn't find a suitable partner, got divorced and remarried too late to have kids
You then brought up cost as the reason. Cost can basically be removed as a reason. There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
To be clear, I said cost is one root cause, I did not say it was the root cause.
> Cost can basically be removed as a reason.
How have you come to this conclusion? From an empirical standpoint, Pew Research finds that financial concerns rank among the top reasons adults say they are unlikely to have more children, the US Census reports that a substantial share of women who expect to have fewer children than desired cite economic constraints, and OECD fertility analyses find that financial insecurity and housing costs are closely associated with lower realized fertility in OECD countries.
> There are plenty of studies that it was far more costly in the past than now.
Can you provide more detail about these studies? At least when it comes to paid childcare in the US this seems to run counter to the data. Before the 1940s paid/institutional childcare was less common in the US, with most childcare provided by mothers, extended families, neighbors, religious institutions, and charities. From 1990 to 2025, the Day Care and Preschool CPI index increased ~280%, outpacing the ~150% increase in overall CPI during that same period.
Not to mention that double-income households are much more common, especially in high cost-of-living areas, and this raises the opportunity cost of having a child compared to a couple with only one income.
And not to mention housing costs outpacing inflation, and for many people stable housing is often a prerequisite for considering starting a family.
Again, I'm not saying spiraling costs is the only reason, and I would not even claim that fertility is highly elastic, but the worsening economics of child rearing do seem to be shifting behavior at the margins.
Yes some countries like India are still like that. Parents from the smaller villages literally pick a partner for their kids if they don't find one.
I think that's really unfair, people deserve to enjoy their lives. If they actually enjoy it that's fine but nobody should be pressured into having kids.
No need to wait: they've already fried themselves out of the evolution game with STDs. Any child they have will likely be retarded or diseased in some way.
Don't forget to include alcohol as a drug - "fetal alcohol spectrum disorders", FASDs, are a real thing.
Choosing to not have children appears to "swim against the current" of the dominant biological process/context by which one came to be and in which one exists.
Certainly not having children allows one more time to pursue other matters. Mankind in general might gain (or lose) from such behavior, depending on whether one is an Einstein or a Stalin for example. Most anyone who participates in society has some set of interests and pursuit of those interests is nonetheless very real and the results may dominate our perspective.
I see no clear way to judge whether a person contributes more through his/her work or through his/her children. Nor do I think "contributing" (whatever that means) is a known evaluation anyway. And what one man considers useful another might judge detrimental. All the more b/c history is "unfinished business". IMO in summary we simply cannot know.
Aside: there's a T-shirt that shows the sinking bow of a shipwreck through a telescope lens. It's labeled thusly:
"MISTAKES - It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." Yet another viewpoint.
I agree with this take. A lot of old boomers tell me how there was a lot of pressure to get married and have kids because it was the thing to do. Nowadays, there is less pressure for people to do that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest.
I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.
Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).
> I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic about the future, and what you think rich countries should be learning from them!
Why not ask Israelis?
Even ignoring Haredim and Arab Israelis (both whose fertility rate has fallen dramatically), secular Israelis tend to have 2 kids on average [0]. Israelis also work much longer hours than Americans (South Korea is the only developed OECD country tied with Israel in hours spent working) [1], live primarily in 2-3 bedrooms low rise brutalist apartment blocks built in the 1960s-90s, earn less than Americans, pay San Francisco level prices for everything, and have almost nonexistent government benefits.
But society as a whole is very children friendly. If you have a baby crying in the background of a zoom call, it's not a faux pas to care for them. If your kids are running around in a mall no one gives you stink eye. Setting up a playdate in the office while parents are working is viewed as completely normal.
Western Europeans and North Americans are much less friendly and more individualistic veering on self-centered.
It really is cultural.
The economics don't help at all, but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc.
I barely know my coworkers kids names half the time. I certainly don't see photos of them or see them popping into zoom backgrounds. Growing up my dads company had picnics and his coworkers had parties and I'd meet his coworkers & their kids.
And while theres obvious things children limit.. like 4am clubbing on a Tuesday... a lot of public spaces are less child-friendly than in the past.
Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
There's very little overlap in 20-30 something singles & family public spaces anymore. It's like the entire world has self segregated.
I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
> but in the US kids are largely seen as some sort of annoyance, burden, interruption, etc
Pretty much!
> Parenting has become increasingly a home-bound activity over time, with a reduced social life for both parents and children. Or the outside-home activities involving kids are specifically kids focussed and a time commitment, like spending all your weekend mornings at children's sports leagues.
This isn't bad if there are other parents doing the same thing too. Increasingly there are not (or at least not among the demographic who uses HN).
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
I don't think so. I'm from around that generation, and that didn't stop Asian, Eastern European, and Israeli American parents from having multiple kids here in the Bay Area when growing up in the 2000s.
> I also wonder about the extra burden of some of the over the top car seat rules in US (up to 12 years old!?) also causing challenges for parents. Both parents probably need a bigger car, especially if you have 2-3 kids. If you have grandparents that help out, they need the same.
If nothing else, it's yet another area of increased expense.
In the early 90s when I was a child, it was pretty normal to shuttle 3 kids + parents around in a cheap little late 80s used sedan or station wagon. These days 3 kids + parents looks more like a big expensive 4Runner or Highlander.
The car thing is also limiting on who can perform extra childcare, and how/where.
As a kid, I used to hang out with my 10+ years older cousins who could drive - taking me to mall/movies/arcade/sports games with them in their little 2 door coupe.
Sure they were babysitting me, it wasn't some tremendous chore of being stuck in some kids-only space. They were doing stuff that they might have done without me, and probably got $20 from my parents.
We'd go see a Jim Carrey PG-13 film, not some Disney movie with they boyfriend/girlfriend/buddy, and they'd cover my eyes when their were tits on the screen. Or I'd sit in an older cousins lap at a ballgame while they drank beer (and smoked) and shouted at the players.
Can't imagine this is acceptable or normal now, lol. But it meant different generations commingled in ways that they just don't now.
I hadn't even thought about this angle, but you're right. Furthermore, not only is it not acceptable or normal today, it's largely not even possible.
Cheap econobox starter cars have disappeared from the market, used car prices are through the roof for anything that's reasonably safe and not basically dead already, and there's nowhere for young people to go anymore even if cheap cars did exist.
Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
You seem to be supposing a model where most people naturally want kids, but are just discouraged from having kids because...other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids
Yes.
They are much more tolerant about having kids and making sure to give space to people planning to have kids.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
The more likely you and your peers are to have kids, the more likely you are to live in a society which will accommodate you.
---
Heck, Germany gives significantly more monetary and subsidized childcare benefits than Israel (which gives almost nothing), and Israel remains significantly more expensive than much of Germany, yet secular Israelis continues to sustain a much higher fertility rate than similar Germans.
It is hard to describe how kid unfriendly Western society has become.
I think it is more than just tolerance and stink eyes.
Some cultures actively celebrate children and families. They center them in social life in an inclusive way. This covers inclusion in social events, institutions, and civic design.
Kids are not only FUN, but interesting, challenging, and rewarding.
I would be very interested in a breakdown of how the American perception changed over time and what the drivers were.
Since total fertility rates have the same trend all around the world, why restrict the breakdown to Americans?
Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children, which necessarily includes foregoing many or all of the adult things due to lack of funds and time.
> Seems kind of obvious that doing adult things with freedom during one’s 20s and 30s is deemed more fun than raising children
This is exactly what I am talking about. Is the obviousness of this statement constant across time? Would someone in the 1960 or 1980 have found it equally obvious?
Alternatively, is it the emphasis on prioritizing fun that changed?
Alternatively, has both the perception and reality of fun given up changed?
Im mostly interested in breakdown in America because I am an American. Some countries match, some dont. If the underlying drivers are common, I would still find them the most relatable and interesting in the American context.
> Are you saying that Israelis are more likely to have kids mainly because Israeli society is more tolerant of kids?
Yes, absolutely.
I used to work in a big city where friends, neighbors, and coworkers with young kids had to sacrifice their career trajectory, friends, hobbies, savings, personal space, and more. Most couples we knew had no kids, some had one, a few exceptional folks had two. A few couples we knew even commented that they ended up having fewer children than they were planning to because of the difficulty with the one(s) they had.
Then my partner and I moved near relatives to a small, family-friendly town. Most of our neighbors have two kids, some have three, and a few exceptional folks have four or more. Almost everything here revolves around families -- even my company has family events and taking time to take care of kids is normalized.
True, living here did not change our decision to have kids, but it actually did change how many kids we ended up having.
> In my model, people choose to have kids because it's an important life goal for them, and this decision is not very much affected by whether other people might give them a stink eye if their kids run around in a mall.
That's a plausible model, but my model is that people alter their goals based on what they observe happening to other people who pursue those same goals. If young people see their friends, coworkers, and neighbors struggling due to their decision to have children, it seems reasonable that they would reevaluate how important it is to them.
I think in atomic families in the US, more and more people are brought up without really interacting with children much once they are a teen and stop being a child themselves.
What used to be normal teen rights of passage like hanging out with your younger extended family, holding a baby, babysitting the neighbors kids, being a summer camp counselor, helping with youth sports, etc.. are less common.
Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college.
> Teens are busy cramming SATs, doing homework, and polishing up their resume for college
So are Israelis. Getting into the best IDF units is much more difficult and stressful than getting into an Ivy - it's both academic and physical. But if you get into those units, you will be set for life financially.
Otherwise, your just an infantry grunt who wasted a couple years with no discernible skills and facing a future of (best case) working a dead end job that pays $40k a year in a country with a CoL similar to the Bay Area.
This is why immigrating abroad is still somewhat popular amongst non-techie Israelis (Zohran's electronics store [0] still hits somewhat close to home).
Agreed with your take. The lifestyle choices lead to the costs, and it's sort of a circular problem in the end. My dad's (European immigrant) family lived in one of those multi-generational homes you mentioned, and so there was just far less of this self enforced age segregation you see in atomic families.
From when I was young, I'd see my extended family at least every 2-3 weeks or more, every other holiday was hanging out with people from newborn to 90 years old. Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
By comparison my mom's side which had been here a few generations, I never really saw kids other than when I was a kid myself. I don't think my wife ever held a baby until she was an aunt in her 30s.
Yeah, and it forces kids to need to do "activities" to even see other kids. Makes proper development for kids much more expensive than the essentially free "existing alongside other kids" that happens in the multi-generational home.
In many cities in india, there is somewhat of a revival of this setup. What happened was that people weren't able to get homes with their aspirational square footage in the location they want. So what they end up doing these days is taking their family, the wifes family and the kids and buying 2-3 apartments in the same building. It's the closest you get to a multi-gen home. Will be interesting to see if this trend affects TFR.
Note that the recent +10% increase in TFR in rich indian states (you would expect a decline) is mostly due to better IVF availability/affordability, not due to any of the reasons I mentioned.
> Babies and elderly were pretty regular fixtures of my regular life.
Yeah, this exposure also blunts some of the fear&uncertainty that puts people off of having kids.
Their life are pretty stable - consistently bad, you can say. They know what their kid have is more or less same as what they did - not improving, but not getting worse either
Can you say the the same in a city where housing is getting less and less affordable,?
It's simply a matter of the social position of mothers, or, what defines the social status of women in a given society. In much of the world it's educational attainment and professional status, so it surprises me very little that most women in these countries don't want children, or can easily find an excuse to not to.
Are you truly so confident that people in those countries don’t feel optimistic that their children will have better opportunities than their parents did?
I’d be shocked if they didn’t feel that, and even more shocked if it didn’t end up being the case.
Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids.
In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest.
But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
> But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"
Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.
That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.
Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.
The dimension of this issue that never gets air time is that we've made having kids almost completely intentional. The richer a country becomes, the more intentional having kids becomes. The dynamic we see with rich countries is that as having kids becomes more intentional, there's also the increase in reasons why people would choose to delay or forego having kids.
I think you're spot on. And all of the various theories and analysis are pretty laughable if one has any sort of historical context.
- "People don't have kids because they're afraid of climate change" - Wildly overestimates the number of people who figure climate change into their life plans, and it discounts the numerous catastrophes people have feared and experience in the past while continuing to have high birth rates.
- "People don't have kids because everything is too expensive" - My father-in-law has 11 siblings and they grew up in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom home. His story is not unique.
"having kids is almost completely intentional"....in countries where this is the case due to birth control, abortion, feminism (and other cultural shifts), the birth rate plummets.
Delving into the reasons why people opt to have fewer or no children when given the choice consistently across races, religions, cultural background, etc would be a book-length endeavor, but to me it really is that simple. There are numerous reasons someone wouldn't want to have more children, and they tend to find one of them when given the choice.
Yes, this absolutely appears to be the main reason. Both in practical terms through birth control, but also through cultural terms in that it's now seen as a choice rather than as an obvious thing you do. To change this course, we probably need to change the culture first so that a birth control ban will be supported. That's currently not looking likely, so population collapse it is
However, he specifically said "will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones."
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
I think this is exactly right. It's not just environmental disasters either. There are more existential risks looming than ever before. The relative peace of the post-WW2 order kept things relatively calm and quite prosperous for decades, but everyone can see that coming to an end right now.
Maybe things will work out fine or even great in the medium term, but I think a lot of childbearing age people are looking around and thinking the next 30 years might be a lot worse than the previous 30.
There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?
If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.
Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
> How do you square those facts with your view here?
"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?
Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.
Because it's not just money. It's time and money. You can have lots of money and nice things, but if you don't have time to raise your kids, you can't do it. And if you had the time, you wouldn't have the money.
First, that’s a LOT of money. Very few people can afford that at all and those that can are definitely counting down the days until their last child goes to school.
Second, it’s hard to find a good nanny. Parents live in fear of not getting a good one, having something go wrong and need to scramble for a replacement without missing too much work, etc.
It’s possible but it’s not going to move the mainstream averages because only like 5% of the population does that. If we want to materially change national averages, we should be talking about government daycare filling in the gap before public schooling starts around the country.
The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory.
Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare.
You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demographics with the most children universally are those with "old world" style family and community situations. More or less communal child care without the weirdo expectations that the "richer" parts of society has on parents. Parents are allowed to actually be adult human beings with real lives that are not hyper-scheduled to death. Kids tend to be more independent and "roam" between family and friends without official activities being scheduled every day for them. Ironically this typically results in more engaged parenting overall.
That's my theory at least - it's not much better than anyone else's though.
I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.
The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".
I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.
When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.
Generally, the more developed a country is, the more capitalistic it is. Capitalism inherently assigns monetary value to everything, even children, and as capitalist societies currently function children have deeply negative value. So deeply negative that it completely nullifies the higher “default” standard of quality of life that comes with life in a developed country.
Who knows? Maybe they are. I’m not from Chad myself (and sounds like you aren’t either), so we’re really not in a position to speculate on that. I do know that it’s quite common for one culture to have values or think in ways that are unintuitive to another culture.
Yeah, I grew up poor in the 3rd world (not quite Chad level though) and even the upper class culture of my own country was almost alien for us and vice versa... Imagine the 1st world.
Pretty sure the poor women in Chad with no access to healthcare and quality nutrition have quite a bit to lose, and they don't have a choice not to risk it.
Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?
(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly
There is another way to go about this. Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Personally, as someone with capital, having people who also work hard for less salary is beneficial. Most native born Americans are much poorer than I am so I understand their fear of the competition. Nonetheless, for me immigration is a great way to increase the population.
The US isn't that attractive for white collar Latin Americans either. For example, the kind of Mexican who can get a job at Google MTV or ATX would also be able to work at Reddit CDMX for around $80k-$100k TC or McKinsey CDMX for $130k-160k TC.
Even for blue collar immigrants working undocumented in the US, a large portion were formerly lower middle class before the states they lived in either failed (eg. Venezuela) or quasi-failed (eg. El Salvador, Honduras).
I remember seeing a similar trend as a kid - we used to see plenty of college educated Mexicans and Argentinians Engineers working blue collar jobs in California because of both their economic crises. When the worst of their economic crises ended, those that didn't naturalize chose to move back to the old country.
CMDX is where we did a LOT of offshoring pre-COVID. Ditto for folks in Baja to cover timezones.
Definitely a paycut compared to the US but still pretty great for MX. Timezones and cultural overlap were pretty good, and there was a vibe that the folks coming out of Universities in CDMX were genuinely good, compared to iffy paper tigers in the Indian call centers.
The TN visa was also attractive, since we could just bring them north for a rotation or two. The Mexican workers love it since there was a big pay bump, but also the expectation they could continue their job back in MX later; bring em up to the RDU or Austin, put em in a few leadership roles, and then have them run a unit in MX, or help coordinate other LATAM efforts.
I find it a much more conscious choice for high paid immigrants. They can either live closely with their family, with the added bonus they basically live like a 'king' or they can move countries to live relatively wealthy lives in a new country.
Living in the US has many advantages but I feel like a lot of them matter more for offspring. More safety besides wealthy pockets in their home country and a more 'average' life experience compared to the rest of your country are things some people care about. Difference in air quality, traffic congestion and easier access to nature are things that make the US a more attractive choice.
But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain. Lots more things to think about as a (potential) immigrant.
> But with changing politics I imagine even many of these advantages are less certain
That plays some part but in most conversations I've had with Indian and Chinese nationals, the bigger issue for them was that it would take them decades to naturalize in the US. It's not worth spending your entire career and starting a family at the mercy of an employer.
I'm traveling South America now. It is so nice! Brazil and Peru are both today unexpectedly awesome. From the point of view of someone born in those countries, I can understand having ~70% of a US salary but living there being very attractive.
Things are a lot more stable than when I first visited South America 21 years ago. In every city on every block there is new construction in Bogota, Lima, Curitiba.
Moreover, the economic impact of having skilled trained labor returning from years of training how to lay brick, roofing, construction, welding, farm management, cooking in 2 star Michelin restaurants, and other industries is going to continue to fuel the growth. (I could understand building a wall to keep the skilled labor form leaving.)
> Statistically immigrants from Latin America have lower crime rates than the average American. It is possible to increase population AND decrease the crime rate by allowing immigrants into the country.
Except that Latin America also has a fertility rate below population replacement and taking working-aged people from countries that are already in that position is likely to be extremely destabilizing, not to mention unsustainable because it implies those countries would be undergoing long-term depopulation.
We need to figure out why people aren't having more kids everywhere and there's not really anything else for it.
The “average crime rate” argument is disingenuous for an analogous reason to Waymo reporting that their cars are safer than the average driver is disingenuous: it lumps me in with Doris who last passed her vision test a decade ago but now has two cataracts. It also ignores that crimes in immigrant communities are less likely to be reported in the first place.
I lived in South Florida for 12 years working on mega yachts. We were all aware of the criminals raping children then. We were aware of the 14 and 15 year old child prostitutes from Russia trafficked into St Martin. The girls were in the hot tub on the third deck on the yacht in the next slip over and nobody said anything. We were all aware of the hard working immigrants from South America too busy providing for their families and sending money home to be committing crimes.
The main issue is that you don't need children anymore. Previously, your children were:
- your workforce
- your retirement plan
- your elderly care plan
- your security
- your private army
Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children. They are just an unnecessary cost. You can live a happier and better life without that with children.
Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Just want to chime in, for anyone else reading this: I can say I used to think this way. Having kids is 100% the best thing, would never trade them for anything, including all of the above and a 5x raise and early retirement. Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child. Of course this is "anecdata" but so is "the single life is so awesome" given most of the stats about mental health and lonliness.
Just letting that one person out there who like me who's wondering "is this all there is?". once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
> once you get bored of mindless work/consumption cycle, go ahead and get to the good part!
The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.
Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.
On the one hand, I like blunt descriptions like yours - the reasons why loving a romantic partner, sex, and caring for children feels good is because that makes the species (or your genes more specifically) continue to exist.
The optimism that some people seem to have about their children weirds me out, too: They will probably end up being pretty normal people. Probably more or less like their parents.
But all of that being bad depends on whether you think that life is mostly suffering and should rather be avoided. It's not what I think. If you think that life is mostly good, then giving life is a good thing.
The issue is - fundamentally - whether you think life is "mostly good" isn't based on measurement.
Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.
Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.
Is life mostly good?
Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing.
After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.
Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.
If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.
Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc.
This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.
70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.
I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).
> The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?
The future belongs to those who show up. I do wonder what percentage of antinatalism is simply mate/fertility suppression. The rest being "mad at God for the crime of being", of course.
> Absolutely nothing about single life is even close to the value you feel having a child.
Funny how people always mention "value" or "meaning" rather than happiness. As a single parent (my kid's mom died when the kid was 1.5) my life is overflowing with meaning. But if anything, I'm (slightly) less happy than I used to be when I was single.
Sorry man, that's rough. Best wishes to you. Definitely agree there are some things you lose, but for me at least, when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time.
It may not be that way for everyone, some people are probably very content just working, watching netflix, a few hobbies, and occasionally hanging out with ever shrinking groups or random strangers.
> when I have multiple days of time away (e.g. some trip or something) its refreshing momentarily, but then I remember how lonely and empty things felt much of the time
Same. Despite the daily struggle, I start missing the kid after a single day. Three days of separation is torture - fortunately that doesn't happen often at all :)
Interestingly, I never felt lonely when I was single. It feels like a new addiction :)
> Now, when all these things don't apply anymore, or you have better replacements, you simply don't need children.
Oh you still need them for all of those. It just so happens that developed capitalist countries figured out you can use immigrant's children for this, rather than paying to grow them in-house, since with outsourcing children you bypass a large chunk of the cost.
Developed countries already sold their own children's futures in exchange for short term equity gains, now it's being done to countries where outsourcing happens.
Capitalism is eating fertility.
> Maybe when children become scarce, and the whole social security civilization collapses, children will again start to be worth something. And then, there would be more of them. But not until then.
Aye, agreed. It will swing back one way or another.
There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.
That isn't realistic though, there will never be enough nannies for every family with children to have one.
If you wanted to pull a purely financial lever, you'd have to give couples enough money to offset one partner's income plus a lifetime of lost income due to the years spent outside of the job market.
IMO this would be perfectly fair and reasonable, considering they are raising a future lifelong taxpayer, but that kind of long term thinking is challenging.
That basically sounds like retirement. If you choose to stop working because of kids, you could be entitled to receive social security just like in old age.
And afford a house large enough for the parents, children, and a nanny.
This is a bigger issue than it may seem.
Some people argue that in the past, grandparents would take care of babies and young children, or that families raised kids in much smaller homes.
That’s true. But there’s a recursive effect at play: most people expect to raise their children in conditions similar to, or better than, their own upbringing, not worse.
They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).
More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)
Probably not. A vast majority of families in the US raise children without a nanny. If the "only" preclusion is 'I don't have enough money to hire a nanny' but becomes satisfied, the requirements will likely evolve to something greater and continue indefinitely.
"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."
Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.
The 3 things:
1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction
3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity
No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.
This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.
We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
> Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia.
I think about this all the time, and how tragic (comedic?) it is that humanity finally created a Utopian age but most of its inhabitants are ignorant of that fact, and thus don't appreciate it, and instead genuinely believe they live in one of the worst times ever.
We are unhappy BECAUSE it's a utopia, and our brains evolved in a landscape that was ALWAYS trying to kill us. Like an immune system in an overly clean environment starts attacking inert things and creates allergies, our minds have created threats and focused on "relative" scarcity over actual scarcity. Instead of "How am I going to get enough calories to survive this week?" it's "Why does that guy get to be in a private jet and I have to fly coach?"
Yeah, you have a hard life as you type on a device powered by magic with a full belly and a roof over your head in a building that magically heats and cools itself. Compared to our ancestors, who alternated between fighting to not die of hypothermia or starvation or have their infants eaten by predators, you really have it hard dude. That bald guy on the TV has a really big yacht and you don't, and that means your life is a tragedy. I'm really sorry for the suffering you're enduring because you don't get to party all day, every day. Participating in your own survival is truly an imposition that nobody should ever have to bear.
Have you considered that rather than people being ignorant, not everyone lives this average experience, or that some portion of this increase in wellbeing creates collateral damage and those that experience it don't have the same rosy view?
This is also true. But once that happened, it was a sort of expectation and often necessity. People couldn't outsource as much hard work to machines, built by someone else far away from their farms
Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.
To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.
So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.
I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple.
Has any society successfully done this yet?
Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.
Anything can become cool and desirable if enough people think it is.
The acceptance of LGBT was largely won this way. Same with women’s rights and environmentalism (although that one is still in the midst of fighting for success).
You just have to settle for a long road ahead before reaching any tipping point.
“A man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money sink.
The past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit".
I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.
Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit
It's worth pointing out that pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies also had low birth rates. They spaced their children out more, nursed longer, and didn't have as many kids overall.
Their population densities in pre-agricultural Europe were far lower than the agricultural societies that displaced them,
If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?
> Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.
I was kinda nodding at points at your comment, or at least stroking my chin thinking, until the end. I had a feeling. You just came here to scold people.
> Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?
> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.
Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.
You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.
Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.
TFR doesn't account for mortality which has also continuously fallen since then. If you're not adjusting for that, then you're looking at meaningless decontextualized numbers. Obviously if people want a certain number of children and the children keep dying then they're going to need to give birth more to get the right number of children. Birthing is not a useful measure on its own because pre-adulthood dead children lead to the same impact on population growth as no children in the first place.
I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms staying at home).
I'm not foolish enough to think it's remotely possible in all places, but I do think an element of this is humans in the 21st century demanding a standard of living that far exceeds what they wanted in the 1970s, especially when it comes to vacations, automobiles, houses, etc.
My wife and I raised my first son (born when i was 23) in a 1 bedroom apartment, and my second child was born right after we moved into a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my colleagues were shocked that I "didn't have a REAL HOUSE TO RAISE THE KIDS IN!!!! GASP!!!". And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.
I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.
Awww man, I agree with you sooooo much on the food portion.
My son is now 19 years old, and doing very well financially (he chose to join the Army). I taught him from a young age how to shop and cook on a budget, in a healthy fashion. Started with hard boiled eggs, beans and rice, chicken and broccoli. Those kinds of things.
I also taught him (by observing his teenage friends) to always always always refer to DoorDash as a "Burrito Taxi" to help mentally reinforce the utterly absurd level of luxury you are indulging in when you have a human being drive a 3500 pound vehicle to your home to bring you a single meal prepared by somebody else.
The number of people I encounter who struggle financially (including one of my sisters) who indulge in these practices is insane. Our culture has forgotten that eating at restaurants (at least in the West, unlike say Singapore) is historically an expensive luxury, due to our relatively high cost of labor.
Agree, as a kid in the 1970s we ate almost every meal at home, cooked by my mother. Mostly staples rice, potatoes, vegetables, some kind of meat. Restaurants were a rare treat for something like a birthday or if we were traveling. Fast food, the same. Very infrequent, like maybe a few times a year would we be able to talk my mom into getting a Happy Meal. Pretty much the same experience for all the kids I grew up with as far as I remember.
Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.
It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.
Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.
And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
When we were dating my wife always said she didn't want to have an only child. I was fine with only having one but always assumed we'd have at least two.
After going through pregnancy, she decided she was fine with never doing that again. Her's wasn't an especially difficult pregnancy, she simply didn't realize the toll it would take on her.
So we have one kid who is about to leave the nest.
> People already want more kids than they're having
Maybe some people. But nobody I know wants more children. They want a better future for the children they already have. They want to have hope for their future.
I have to politely disagree. The places that have highest fertility rates are places where contraception is hard to obtain and may be outright banned, and where womens' rights are severely restricted. That is, closer to nature, not far from other mammals. Such societies also usually have high levels of infant mortality, making bonds between parents and infants weaker.
This is not a society most of us want to return to.
I'm afraid that the only realistic way is "elvification" of sorts: make adults live, stay healthy, and remain productive for much longer to eventually compensate for very low birth rates, and the very high cost (not just monetary) of raising a child.
Every major life choice (career, marriage, buying a house, moving to a new city/state, etc.), comes with a set of pros and cons. Having children is no different. No matter which choices you make in life, you will always wonder if the other choice might have been better.
Raising a family is hard, but also has many rewards. I have 4 children (now grown) and never regretted it, but I try not to judge others who have made other choices.
You should not have children for your own benefit. Those who expect children to take care of them in their old age, might be disappointed. If you are expecting to get out of them more than you are willing to put into them, you are doing it wrong.
Most of those can be reversed if you find the cons outweighs the pros.
You will never know what parenthood is actually like until you experience it. By the time you can make an informed decision, it is impossible to reverse it. That makes it much more different than most other major life choices, which are usually reversible even if you can't get back the lost time.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...
From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.
1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner
2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want
3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)
4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids
Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.
It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.
TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.
IMO this is a huge piece of it. People want to have it all, and things are structured where in order to have a decent income, you have to go to college. Then to pay off your loans and make it worthwhile you have to work a number of years. Then you have Madison Avenue telling you you need a fancy car, vacations, etc. You’re told you need to own a house to have a kid. You’re not even to zero by the time you’re 30, the same place prior generations were at 18.
That leaves a lot less years to have kids. Personally I started late just as in my example, and I’m very fortunate to have three kids, but I probably would have four if we had started a little earlier. If you subtract one kid from every family you basically get what we’re seeing.
It was a victory that the teenage pregnancy rates plummeted during the 90's in my small town high school, but when I was there there was still a real drive to discourage kids from having kids, and I internalized the idea that "having children will ruin your life" and carried that with me through my twenties.
> It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible
Let's call it out specifically - few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now and for every 1 woman who has "wants kids" in their profile, there's probably 2-3 women who say they don't want kids or "aren't sure".
And these aren't young women either, the age range is roughly 29-35, so even on the older side of optimal age for having kids.
Regardless of what men want, if so few women want to have kids - fertility will drop like a rock.
I am on the apps too and have my range set to 29-38. About 80% of the women I'm seeing have selected as "wants kids". I don't want kids and I can barely find any women to match with who also don't want kids...
I think we both have anecdotes though and unless we have data from the entire company, we can't make any real accurate claim here.
At 29-35, aren't >70% of women already in relationships?
Presumably, the majority of ones that want kids, already have them or are in the process.
Additionally, the apps tend to attract more people in hookup culture. So even from the remaining pool, 33% could be misleading.
Also, whether or not you're in a city / high-cost-of-living area makes a difference. That's less than 50% of the total population (in the US at least).
33% for that age group honestly seems high to me. I'd assume it would be lower.
That’s also my experience. Specially for women in and my wives close environment.
90% or more wanted to have kids. But the ones that started after 35+ or didn’t have a partner until that age did struggle a lot, and many never managed even after investing 10a of thousands of euros on fertility care.
They prioritized lifestyle and career before family. Then it was too late to have both.
There might be many metrics to measure fulfillment in life, but if I had to choose one, I would probably stick with love. And nothing fills my love cup more than having a large family. YMMV.
I have only a distant visibility to that topic but I find the folks talking about fertility have a weirdly high effort discussion (they want to talk about it), but it's just not a real political force to DO anything.
I don't fully understand what those folks motivations are who talk about it, but I feel like their motivations are all over the map (from racist guy to village priest), and it is strange that they they're even talking.
Thete are lots of takes here. Most of them don't explain how TSMC employees, who compared to their countrymen well paid, highly educated and in a high pressure job, have a fertility above replacement rate while the rest of their countrymen have a fertility rate of 0.87%
TSMC provides extensive support for mother's, including childcare in the workplace. It goes well beyond most companies provide (it would dent the bottom line after all with no obvious return given they can just hire a man), and far more convenient and practical than third party services, even if they subsided by the government.
My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.
Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.
A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.
I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.
I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.
We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.
In Québec we have pretty extensive parental leave and we have heavily subsidized daycare (used to be 7$ a day per kid, now it's means-tested but you still get a hefty refund on your healthcare expenses come tax season).
When the program was put into place it paid for itself with the amount of mothers that entered the workforce.
I was raised by a single father, but thanks for derailing the conversation with your assumption that I'm a sexist because I didn't account for the edge case in parenting.
In most countries it's 80% if your household salary is such to support it + household expenses, and approaching 0% if it's not.
And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.
But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.
Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.
In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.
The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West
That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.
RE: My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
---
"Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...
I think it probably just comes down to social pressure. There really isn't any social pressure to have kids, and in many places there is pressure against having them.
After all, people have been having kids since the dawn of time in much more uncomfortable situations with uncertain futures.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I think this is not the right explanation.
If you look say 500 years in the past, people definitely could not guarantee their children's lives would be good ones. In many (most?) cases, it was almost certain the children's lives would not be very good. Yet people had lots of kids.
Perhaps people just have better things to do these days than incessantly change the nappies, suffer from lack of sleep and time for basic self-care, constantly argue about how the cheese was cut the wrong way and whether we're watching another episode of paw patrol?
The poor have nothing to lose. It's the same around the world today, poor countries have high fertility. The OECD middle class has low fertility because they're worrying about other stuff (lost wages, career stagnation, etc). The rich (high fertility) have plenty of money for private schools, nannies, housekeepers, extracurriculars, etc for 14+ kids (Musk).
It's weird to say the poor are more secure than the middle class, but that's what the data shows. Opportunity cost is a real thing. If other middle class people forgo kids and you don't, house rents will go up and you might not be able to afford a place.
Some demography experts mention that financial incentives do work starting from the second child (if provided as a lump sum, and with usage not restricted too much). It's not something that can stop the population decline, but it can slow it down to some extent.
The rest, statistically speaking, doesn't make much of a dent in the established social and religious conventions of any given nation, which the governments generally have little control of.
Not sure if I completely agree with this. Since time immemorial the world has been going to hell in a hand basket. My own grandparents were born and braised in poverty in one of the most poverty-stricken countries on Earth. They had lots of kids. Those kids grew up and started their own families. It was rocky, but we are all doing fine, and doing extremely well compared to our grandparents.
I don't have a complete answer for this and I think this is an extremely complicated and multi-faceted problem. From my vantage point, I know a lot of people who can afford to have kids but their mantra has been "Now is just not the right time" as they spent their 20s imbibing in casual flings and evanescent relationships. I was one such person. Now that I am in my mid 30s, the desire for casual sex has been replaced by attaining financial freedom. My desire for wanting more and more is something I am not proud of, but I am not doing anything to change, so what does that say about me ?
Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice,
from what I have tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire
> No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters.
This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.
Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference.
Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...
All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.
'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.
I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.
But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.
I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.
>My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
There's only one developed country with a birthrate above replacement and that's Israel, which is hardly a paradise. Largely due to Ultra-Orthdox Jews, who believe they have a religious duty to have children. Empirically religion is the only thing capable of making people in rich countries want many children, and religiousness is partially heritable so eventually the problem will solve itself as the secular-inclined genes are bred out of existence.
What do you make of the birth rates being much higher and stable among married couples, and of the birth rates among women in their 30s increasing? These don't really correspond to your take.
Are people who want to have kids really struggling to have them though? Keep in mind that fertility rate is not actually about fertility (not directly at least). It's a measure of the kids being had rather than a measure of the capability that the name would lead people to think.
Exactly. So since we observe that actual birth rates among women in their 30s displays a different trend than that of women in their 20s, despite decreased natural fertility, there has to be more going on.
No, the real answer is that "It's war, famine and disease!'
If you eliminated the birth control pill tomorrow, we'd have plenty of fertility: that's what war, famine and disease do.
All the complaints we hear here about how hard it is to raise kids. etc. would evaporate b/c no one would have a choice! And if you thought women have control in these situations then you would quickly learn that women unwilling to try to produce children will not have long lifespans.
I'd have guessed that teenagers dont have enough places where theyre unsupervised or otherwise surveiled such that they can have sex without thinking about the possible results of said sex.
"its the advertising" could be another one. people today are put on a heavy track with very high expectation about everything that needs to be done before even considering parenthood - same thing as with the trades. everyone is trained to think being a parent before getting other accomplishments makes you a failure
You are missing that we have to also have a cultural norm of valuing having children. That has sort of disappeared recently (for whatever reasons.). So you need affordability in general (home + childcare, etc), compared to your income, and you need to have values that prioritize children over just traveling the world or playing video games.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
This sounds sensible but the opposite is actually the case. Highest fertility tends to be in impoverished countries where there is little hope for anyone to have a good life.
One other aspect to consider is whether people actually want to have more than two kids per couple, even in an ideal world. Raising children is a huge effort and biologically and mentally very taxing on the parents, especially the mother. But we need much more than two children per couple to be above replacement rate.
Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.
"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"
It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.
Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:
Thanks to inequality, the rich[1] can already afford surrogacy, aka other people's natural wombs.
Only for those who can easily afford daycare and other child-related costs would benefit from artificial wombs, the biological aspect and maternity leave are a small aspect.
Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.
I mean, rockets kill about 3 people per year in Israel. I wouldn't overestimate its effect.
Comparatively about 400-500 die in traffic, similar for suicide, about 150-200 from homicide by their fellow countrymen, 1500 from falling, 10 thousand from heartattacks, same for cancer.
I think Israel is uniquely in a very strong nation building phase, culturally. It has a settler and colonist mentality, to bring people and expand. It has had a very high migration percentage throughout its history. Its population has about tenfolded in the past 50 years, not just due to birth. Most of its secular population is also largely in favour of building and expanding Israel as a jewish state, not in a theocratic sense but in a civic/nationality sense. Many Israelis see having children as a form of national continuity in a way that crosses secular-religious lines.
I'm gonna assume that "fertility twitter" has about the same gender distribution as HN, and posit that you're all probably wrong. It's the mothers, not the dudes, who make the calls here. And to be blunt the dudes don't want to make it worth their while.
We've built a society that offers wealth and lifelong happiness through work, and offered that to everyone. And as a result doing things other than working is less attractive. As long as the aggregate value to an individual uterus (in salary, self-actualization, prestige, whatever) of having a child is less than, say, a six figure tech career, we're going to see less kids.
Want more kids running around to fill seats in your wealthy tech startup? Share the wealth. I'm serious here: if the answer isn't isomorphic to "you can make six figures having a kid" then it won't work.
> believe that their children will have good lives
Again, no. That's a patronizing abstraction implying you need to convince them of the general value of the activity, and assumes she's doing it all "for the kids" and not for herself. You aren't chasing your dreams for abstract ideas of future children, why should she?
I'm saying that a mother needs to know she'll be just as wealthy, in a practical (if not 100% literal) sense, by having a child than by chasing a career. If you aren't willing to hand that cash over, then, to be blunt, GTFO. She's not going to bear kids for your utopia.
It's also age. According to CDC, mean age at first birth: 27.5.
I wanted more kids but was hit with an auto-immune in my mid-30s, so the choice becomes no more kids or high risk of a disabled kid/fatal outcome for both of us.
There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards.
Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing.
Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering.
If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need.
Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have children, rather the opposite. The choice in having children dictates whether you choose rural or urban life.
Not saying it's like this, just offering an alternative theory.
From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
No one used to have money, there used to be few-to-no public services, and people didn't even used to have indoor plumbing, and populations were huge? What changed?
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
[..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
Within a given country you have a huge variance of fertility that as far as I can tell is completely predicted by religious affiliation and intensity thereof.
In my professional NYC suburb 3 kids is the norm (2x national average) and while nobody would describe themselves as religious everyone has some sort of affiliation (eg belong to a temple or church and go occasionally even if kn auto pilot). Meanwhile my tech and finance peers who are explicit atheists have roughly zero kids on average. And a few zipcodes down are more religious communities where the average is closer to 6.
So the three groups of people live in exactly the same country and area and experience themselves totally differently. I also frankly find that a lot of what is perceived as the reason people don't have kids (work, economy, cost, etc) is more a retroactive excuse because for everyone who has this excuse there's someone else living next door making the same salary who has kids.
I don't understand why people care so much. Humanity is not going to go extinct for 1000 years at this rate (which won't continue) and any decline is good for the planet and environment. We can't keep growing as humanity, especially when so many countries are coming up to modern standards. We just don't have the resources for it and a lot of today's problems are a result of that growth. It's really healthy for the human population to shrink a bit.
It'll cause some temporary financial issues like less working people to pay for pensioners but that's only while the largest boom passes. Not a big deal.
I myself am in my 50s and never had kids, never wanted to either. I'm polyamorous and bi, I'm just having too much fun having no ties. I've lived in 5 countries. So I'm not really bound to one in particular anymore.
A lot of the birth rate people seem really right-wing with their replacement theory and that's the real underlying reason. They also say they care about the future of society, but at the same time are climate change deniers which will have a far greater negative impact on all of us (including their kids!) than population decline.
Having children at greater than replacement rate isn’t smart if you aren’t poor. Replacement for a couple is 3 (you can’t have a fraction of a child), more is 4.
The demands 4 children place on housing, income and time are literally double that of 2 children - which is less than replacement. That’s before you consider transport and other factors.
I don’t see why on a finite planet people think we need ever more humans. A smaller population would be better in every regard. The only thing that would need to change is capitalism. That’s not hard.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
I’m not sure I agree with this.
Families were huge at times when child mortality was high and the death rate to mothers from giving birth was shocking. Sub-Saharan Africa has a high birth rate, and I don’t think that quality of life is what’s driving that.
> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
How do you explain the fact that poor countries have higher fertility? And within countries, poorer groups and regions have higher fertility.
Yup and thats part of the issue. Too many people want to simplify it down to, "if we just did x, then we will see y." Nah, this is a complicated problem. Its probably gonna take the whole alphabet of solutions, but there is no political will or too much squabbling to since people want their idea why we have population decline to be right. But the bottom line is, having kids is expensive. You can make it less expensive, but that alone probably isn't gonna solve it.
> They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
I’ve had glimpses of this part of Twitter spill into my feed. It was always obvious that everyone was just using fertility as an excuse to push their chosen hobby horse. The logic barely mattered, they just used it as a reason to push their ideas.
From hanging out with younger generations (tech biased) I have a different perspective: A lot of the younger people I talk to just have no idea what it’s like to have kids or a family in reality. They grew up when Reddit was hardcore anti-kid and /r/childfree (remember that cesspool?) was hitting the front page and their feeds every single day with unhinged takes about parenting and child raising from angry people who weren’t parents.
When I had kids a lot of the younger people I was around acted like they needed to give me condolences because my life was over. Then when I was actually happy and fulfilled they thought I was lying to them or secretly harboring resentment that I couldn’t share for social reasons. Like they genuinely couldn’t believe that I liked my kids and spending time with them. Years of Reddit has convinced them that all parents were unhappy and full of regret.
The simple fact is that values are partially heritable, and if you believe your values to be superior (you should!) then having children and encouraging people who share those values to have children is a good way to propagate those values. This works for ~any set of values.
I think its more mother's and father's in aggregate must think babies will make their lives easier or more fulfilled. Because at the end of the day its about incentives
I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.
The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?
All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.
> having men who'd make women comfortable having kids
This is maybe the most underrated comment in this whole lively thread. Completely agree on all fronts. Men are a huge, huge problem in this equation: in the US, anyway, many of them simply refuse to catch up to simple human values about respect, mutuality, and emotional intelligence.
At root it's about entitlement. Scores of women, seeing this very, very clearly since age 5 in the boys and men around them, get to adulthood and, sanely in my view, just say "no thanks". Why shouldn't they?
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable:
> Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.
> In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.
> In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the
problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public
picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the
land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his
amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they
continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area. The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer.
> He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in
driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his
physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area,
he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot
them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.
> One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had
suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family
on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the
documentary record. When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew.
> He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.”
> Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never
be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went
through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly
misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.
I understand the majority of the story, and through some personal experience really feel for women who have a controlling and abusive man. I find the story a bit strange though. It begins describing how boys inherit the idea of some beautiful woman that they are owed instead of it being something that requires constant work and effort. I agree/understand this part. But then it describes him trying to limit public access, how he has no document showing ownership, etc and this is where I get lost. To me that is what marriage is, giving up freedom for a partnership. To turn my husband self into a park, I feel like it is completely understandable my wife wants some space that is "public" and other that is "private". The key is healthy boundaries, ones set by compromise and understanding through honest communication. That's what separates healthy and abusive relationships, not the boundaries in the first place.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story and if I am let me know, I just feel like it describes the ideal situation as one's partner entirety is open to the "public", and where setting boundaries itself is abusive, which I feel like is not really how most people feel nor what they want in a relationship.
I'm not the author, of course, so I can't say for certain that I have the most correct reading of it. But, if I'm reading your interpretation right, here's what I'd say:
The story analogizing women to land -- which has no voice, no agency, no mind -- is the critical part. If one is consensually "limiting public access" with another sentient human being, that's wonderful -- because you'd be doing that in dialogue, in true partnership, on the same footing, etc. "Hey, we're in a marriage now, that means we agree to not sleep with other people. Deal? Deal." I think the author (and certainly I) would heartily endorse that sort of "wanting some space that is public and some that is private".
The key word in your comment, to me, was "healthy" -- as in "healthy boundaries," and honest communication etc. You're right, it's not boundaries as such that describes abuse or even the entitlement on which abuse rests. It's the kind of boundaries.
What Bancroft is saying in the parable is that, if men see women as pieces of land -- private land, at that -- that they have a god-given right to, then anything healthy between men and women is by definition impossible. That's why, in the parable, the boy's compromises and concessions are in fact no such thing: because they're still founded on inhuman premises.
There are aspects of the parable here that the book goes into a lot more detail on -- male jealousy, in particular -- that overlap a lot with what you and me are talking about. I urge you to read it! The boy limiting public access on these entitled premises is what a lot of men will do, on either side of the "abuse" line: losing their shit when their attractive girlfriend, who they chose in part because of her attractiveness, goes out in public looking attractive, and he sees other people (other men) looking at her. Maybe next time he tells her "you're not wearing that outfit", thus "limiting public access" but not in the healthy sense that you mean it, because she's not treated as sentient, she's not part of a conversation. She's just coerced. (This is excused or minimized as "culture" or "values" by many!)
But again, if I'm reading you right, I think the part where you got lost is just that. Ironically, it's probably because you have a pretty healthy view of relationships that just how fucked up the boy in the story is confused you!
Yeah that helps it make more sense. I was reading it as Bancroft comparing woman to land, instead of it being Bancroft showing there are men who treat women as land. I'll definitely give the book a read.
1. American men feel entitled to women, as from birth they’re told that they are.
2. Women know this, and (rightly!) hate it, and thus some of them pull away from relationships with men — or with entitled men. Unlike before, women can now survive (and even thrive) outside of a relationship with a man, especially an entitled one.
3. As a result, there are fewer babies.
OP’s point was that men ought to look at themselves in the mirror when they’re clutching their pearls about lower birth rates. I agreed, and proposed that the specific mechanism for men being shitty partners to have a kid with in so many cases is male entitlement: guys don’t believe they need to put in the work to be good partners and instead simply deserve a woman to bear their children. (Men are, by far, the more emotional / hysterical sex.)
> you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
Empirically, that group exists, but they're often the minority to the "I just don't want kids" and "focus on other things" groups[0].
As others have pointed out, the world's population grew dramatically in most other times in history when the world around us was more harsh and less certain.
> Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.
Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.
People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.
That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.
The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.
The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.
Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.
i think those stats show the opposite. They had higher fertility rate when things were worse, but women mostly didnt have a choice. Now they're better but still bad, and women do have a choice - so they are choosing not to, judging by the collapsed birth rate.
As you say, a lot of the reasons people give are flippant and superficial. The most common claim I've seen is that everything is too expensive, but this is untrue. For some time, we have been richer than we've ever been in history, on the whole, and yet we witness decline. And all of the money-oriented incentives gov'ts have deployed have also petty much failed.
The problem is composed of multiple factors. However, I would say that there is a unifying element, a master key, that explains all of these elements, and that is consumerism. I mean "consumerism" as an ethos and as a matter of culture.
1. People are creatures of convention. Very few people operate or live life outside of the conventions of their times and of their culture. Culture creates the grain of life most people will follow, for better or for worse. In general, people are terrified of swimming upstream or going against the grain.
2. Subjectively speaking, culture determines conventions, sensibilities, patterns of life, purposes and goals pursued, and what is valued. Culture, whether explicitly or implicitly, imbues people with a sense of how life ought to be lived and where energies ought to be spent. It shapes attitudes toward the facts of life.
3. Inevitably, culture is institutionalized in law. As law is a teacher, culture is partly perpetuated through law.
4. Culture is also replicated and reinforced through media and education. It is usually insinuated.
5. Consumerism construes human nature and human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The obvious case is economic consumption. We believe buying things will make us whole. We believe money is the root of happiness. The life is the market and the market is life. Everything is for sale, for the right price.
6. This already creates an opposition. If consumption makes us whole, then children are antithetical to wholeness. After all, children are consumers! They are competitors. Given the choice between a new luxury car and another child, many couples would choose the car. People routinely make this calculation. They will limit their brood, because children eat into budgets and into time that could otherwise be spent on luxury items and vacations on tropical islands (mutatis mutandis).
7. If consumption makes us whole, then everything else that might be desired is recast as a matter of consumption as well. Even human relationships are reconsidered in consumerist terms. Sexual relationships become consumerist and transactional. Sex itself becomes commoditized, and becomes an instrument of the market. Beauty is desecrated and exploited to push products and services. A functional prostitution and an exploitative stance invade and pollute relations between the sexes, rendering them totally dysfunctional.
8. Contraception enters the picture. Contraception is the paradigmatic expression and cornerstone of all sexual consumerism. It is the incarnation of sterility and physical manifestation of a "NO" to life. It is a manifest contradiction of the essential and core function of sexual intercourse, which is procreative (the other end, the unitive, presupposes the procreative purpose, and so the denial of the procreative is a denial of the unitive). Its acceptance and normalization dethrones the procreative and elevates the pleasurable in its place. Thus, sex is no longer pleasurable. Sex is now for pleasure. The paradox, of course, is that doing this destroys the pleasure of sex, producing a pathological hunt for pleasure that is increasingly bizarre.
9, By denying the procreative, we undermine the significance of the deep complementarity of the sexes. This destroys sexual normativity and opens the door to a consuming and obsessive pursuit of an increasingly unhinged and dizzying array of erotic perversion. Children again become opposition. A child is a wet blanket thrown on the hot fire of deviant eroticism. This way enters abortion as a solution, and the pursuit of intrinsically sterile sexual gratification.
9. Consumerism propels careerism. The career is underpinned by the presupposition that you will need money to consume. A career is your path to making more money so that you can be more happy. Universities are reconfigured away from fuddy-duddy old school liberal arts education to job training centers. Woman are now taught that to be a fulfilled woman is to seek a career. Marriage and childbearing are postponed, not only to attend university, but to spend one's most fertile years shoring up one's careers after graduation. One must justify that expensive education (expensive in time and money). Careerism sacrifices the family for the mirage of consumerism.
10. Now, human life is also commoditized. When women do come around to wanting children, whether for good or bad reasons, they often discover that they are too old, having made a sacrificial offering of their fertility to their corporate god. But we believe we are entitled to children. We believe we are entitled to other human beings as instruments of our fulfillment. So we pursue fertility treatments like IVF. IVF is consumerism on steroids.
12. Consumerism reshapes social practices and life patterns. It created friction and impediments that make having children more difficult, because the assumptions that underpin it maintain that you won't have children, at least not until later. The implicit support, the social and economic architecture of the world and its operations and customs, become hostile to family life. Bad habits, like living beyond one's means, are fed. We demand a standard of living we cannot afford, and view children as hostile elements that rob us of our birthright.
13. A culture must justify itself. Thus, each failed generation rationalizes its bad decisions to soothe its own collective ego by re-presenting its failures as normative to the next.
The solution really is simple: women ought to marry in their mid-20s on average and start having children immediately. The obstacles are cultural and habitual. Our culture creates friction and our cultural programming causes us to deviate from the successful pattern. Instead of ordering the patterns of human life around human nature and human development, we strap human beings into a Procrustean culture, torturing and deforming them to suit weird and arbitrary standards. Instead of conforming our desires to reality, we deform reality in an attempt to conform it to our desires.
Everyone in this thread saying otherwise is wrong, the problem is low testosterone, simple as; there's obviously other factors causing actual health-related low fertility, but as for the lack of having children it's simply low testosterone.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.