Don't forget the parenting of extended family and neighbors - it takes a village.. But we're moving further and further from local, village-like lives.

I think this is a major factor to the number of children people have.

It’s not hard to have 3 or 4 kids when the expectation is public schools then “they figure it out”.

Today the expectation is much higher on a per kid basis.

I don't think that's a significant factor because it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8. Nobody is thinking "I'll have to drive them to music lessons in 10 years instead of letting them play outside".

I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.

Abortions are not the primary reason why teen pregnancy is way down. There's actual data, you know.

Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.

I think the uncomfortable truth that many are reluctant to admit is that religion and societal norms (as you highlighted above) played a major role in this.

I'm not discounting other facts such as the housing crisis or cost of living but I fear that while those are important, they are secondary.

Women were often forced to carry a child due to outside pressure and had no recourse. However since the introduction of safe abortions and readily accessible birth control methods, they have regained their bodily autonomy which allows them to skip unwanted pregnancies.

I think that ultimately, liberating women is a _good_ thing because child bearing is difficult and no one women should be forced to go through it.

With all that said, having children can be wonderful. Perhaps a better solution is to both celebrate and encourage families while keeping abortion and birth control accessible. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.

Having kids when you are young and financially not established is just irresponsible, but particularly female bodies don’t do well having kids older when you are established enough to do so responsibly. I’m having this problem right now with my spouse (we have a kid, but are thinking about another), it’s just super hard to get pregnant without medical help.

Oh, I’m sure some “anecdotal” stories will come up, painting a perfect picture of the “good old days” — without calling them that, of course. Here's one then:

Take my great-grandfather, for example. 56, falls head over heels for a 14-year-old girl from church, and boom — 30 days later, they’re married. 8 months later, my grandfather’s born. They stayed married for 50 years. My grandmother was 16 when she married my 47-year-old grandfather after a chance meeting in the woods, and, guess what, smooth pregnancy again. My parents? Same song, different verse. Now, fast forward to today: I broke up with my girlfriend (late 30s, early 40s) because we wanted kids, but couldn’t conceive — and back then when were were younger and when we could, I couldn’t afford it. See, back then, the older man was not only virile but also financially set, while the young woman could pop out babies at the drop of pants.

Yeah, those “good old days” sound amazing. Make World Pregnant Again.

I'm not sure this scans really because teenage births as well as teenage pregnancies enjoyed a local peak around 1990. There certainly was not a general pan-American societal instinct against teenage births at that time. The rate has fallen by more than 75% since. Even the mother-under-15 birth rate in 1990 was ridiculous (about 10x more than today, in most states).

> scandalously

Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high.

There were even worse alternatives, like the mass grave at Tuam or the Victorian practice of "baby farming". https://www.bbc.com/news/extra/4ko2zsk2tb/Tuam

The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent.

I like this. It has nothing to do with the "big picture" in birth rates, but it's a personal story. Mine is simpler. My dad had a societal expectation to be married - a position he was eyeing was only open to married men. My mom was the best bet at the time. Here I am. This, too is a scenario that is no longer applicable.

My mother was also the product of a failed abortion. Crazy to think how different the world would be. Now I have 8 kids!

It's a perspective that often gets lost in the macro-level fertility discussions: how many births never happen not because people don’t want kids, but because the only off-ramp they might've taken got paved over by modern expectations, norms and etc

I'm sorry for your loss.

No you are not heading towards 50 if you were born in 1980. You are nowhere near 50, and I refuse to believe otherwise!

Oh it’s sure birth control that’s doing it and not the backward societal norms that are still sticking.

Thanks for pointing out that the baby boom happened by accidental births and confirming it with your own anecdotal evidence.

I'm really sorry to hear this, and truly wish things have turned out differently.

Kids are a phenomenal experience.

I concur with you, social pressure is a defining element on having/not having them.

Better to have abortion than unwanted child. Usually it's quite miserable childhood for a kid.

> In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant.

And whose fault was that, eh?

Congratulations on not having been killed

Shame you didn't ensure the same for your own kid

My grandmother was scandalously had. If abortion had been legal her entire family tree wouldn't exist. Me, my dozen or so cousins, my father, aunts, all gone.

That's why my father is against abortion.

Underrated comment right here.

When the baseline belief in society goes from “make it work” to “better to end the pregnancy” it shouldn’t be surprising that overall the number of birth goes way down.

I thought your anecdote was interesting and thought provoking and I appreciate that you posted it. Thank you.

I am disappointed at the hostile reaction it provoked in some others ... as if you, or your anecdote, reminded them of something that angered them and they lost track of the difference.

Only until recently women were basically property who got no say in what they wanted.

You either got married to a man who protected you or you got raped. That's it.

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It's only a fluke because we've allowed the resources that once enabled this period to accumulate at the top so that it's not feasible on a broad scale any more.

> There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels.

This has been the dream since the dawn of time (agriculture is automating food production to some extent). The gains in increased productivity is rarely if ever distributed back to the workers though. We have concrete data on wage stagnation when productivity has been increasing in the past few decades. What makes you think it's different this time?

I make 5 times more than my SO and I can realistically have 3/4 families if I wanted.

I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.

Saying it was a fluke discounts the hard work and sacrifice it took. It didn’t happen accidentally. It took raw will and courage to wrestle the social fabric into something more equitable. And without continued effort from those who came later it’s being unwound.

> was an anomaly

Unfortunately suspect this is the right answer.

Nah I don't believe it was a fluke, I believe it is still possible today if not even more so if our economic system wasn't focused purely focused on maximizing capital generation and maximizing profit margins. People are working more today than ever and have never been more productive.

Also in 1950 the population of the US was 151 million, today it's 341 million. it has more than doubled, and the amount of space has stayed the same. More people competing for the same amount of property will always lead to inflated housing costs beyond what inflation would predict.

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house

As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other.

Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.

And conversely being a dad sucks. For the same reasons you list.

There is no longer a way to come up with a sane division of labor for the average couple. Both parents are not intended to be working full time. It does not work for either party.

Heck, humans are not designed to operate as two parents even. There should be multiple generations of help at hand for it to truly be a decent experience. Humans need breaks and our hyper scheduled existence is entirely unnatural.

I watch friends who have kids where both have professional careers and to be honest none of it looks like a fun time. I don’t think it’s good for the kids either.

15-20 years of “sucking it up” and dealing with a horribly overbooked and stressful life is not good for any party. Women have it worse on average, but no one appears to be having a good time.

A generation looking for fulfillment in cubicles... let me show you how that works out:

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor. Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed. Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/01/27/f...

Being a Dad really sucks, too--I'm unemployed at 52 at what should be the height of my career when my kids really need someone who is making money so help pay for college tuition and my wife has cancer, so save it how rough breast feeding is when breast feeding only last about a year or so anyways.

Ive been married for 12 years and know a dozen married couples pretty well. I know of one where the husband expects to come home to a meal and a clean house. Chores are almost always split. Me, my dad and my brother in law all do more chores than our wives.

The only couple actually like the gender stereotype you invoke is a conservative one in their 60s.

Not convinced that this is down to women. In my personal experience women want to have kids wayyyy more than men it is the men who are refusing them or want to delay. In fact I would say this is basically everyone I know, the men are the ones being anti-natal while women want kids way earlier.

You say ‘modern relationships’ but I feel like you’re describing a stereotypical 1950s relationship in that paragraph. The lack of contrast surprises me.

No - being a mom and having to work full time sucks. Being a full time mom probably isn't that bad.

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are.

This absolutely isn't the reality I observe in my circle, but I acknowledge it was the reality for my parents and grandparents.

Not gonna lie: it just seems like you made a poor choice in picking a partner.

Don't blame it on the entire male population.

> unpaid labor

I have never expected to be paid for raising my children.

It sucks even more when you're broke, which too many people are right now. We've optimized for extracting money from people, it's no wonder they have no more money to spend on their children. Since they now have more choice to not have children, well, they're going to make the obvious choice on a population level.

I think that you're right and that this is one of the predominant reasons for declining child births.

I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy.

Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be the leading factor. People had babies when they didn't have fresh food, running water, or even homes. Certainly far worse lives than we have today.

Peter Zeihan, whose YouTube prognostications seem iffy, likes to call children "expensive furniture". They were useful labor on the farm a hundred years ago, but in small apartments they can be a real nuisance.

Modern parenting is wild - there are too many rules and regulations and things just have to be just perfect to have a kid. Our great grandparents just had them all over the place and would let them roam around in the wilderness. Today we have to coddle and bubble wrap, sign them up for classes, take them places. Just thinking about it seems stressful.

At the same time, we've got these little dopamine cubes in our pockets that are taking our time away from socializing and dating and meeting people. It takes time and deliberation to find someone to settle down and commit to raising "expensive furniture" with for the next twenty years. You can just keep scrolling your feed and filling life with experiences.

Perhaps instead it's that the modern life creates the perception that something different or exciting could be just around the corner - like a kind of hedonistic treadmill, or wishful longing. Our ancestors just accepted their fate and lived their short lives. We have too many things taking our time and attention, and everything has to be "perfect" before we commit.

Not making any value judgments here, just stating observations.

"In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house"

This is a sexist take. It is not universally true, and a like-for-like retort would be considered sexist.

Being a mother is always going to be tougher than being a father.

But, I don't share at all the bit where men just want to work, etc, that's really not the experience of most couples I know (Europe, non rural).

Almost everything you said can apply to father's too. Plus the way father's are treated in family court. Being a father can suck.

your experience sucks. I'm a 50 yr old man with two teenagers and a wife, I'm the major bread winner, but we both work 5 days a week. I do most the shopping and cooking.

being a mum doesn't have to suck. choices are being weighed and made.

> Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.

Breast pump is a thing, the husband can definitely do the feeding with frozen breast milk warmed up in minutes. Or just do formula.

I like being a parent much more than being a breadwinner. Working in an office, commuting, sitting in front of a computer, climbing the ladder, meetings, deadlines, office politics, fighting for promotions and raises and bonuses, OKRs and KPIs, insane pivots to chase fads, the constant fear of layoffs hanging over your head... It sucks. The only rewarding part is coming home to my partner and child.

I much prefer cooking, cleaning, and parenting. I would choose being a full-time parent in a heartbeat over my career if I had the option. But due to my particular skills, my earning potential is much higher than my partner's. It wouldn't make much sense for us. So I slog it out so we can afford what we need. She works too, but not full-time.

But so much of what you talk about is foreign to me. My partner and I have no concept of "my own money" vs "my partner's money"; it all goes into a joint account that we both control and we trust each other to spend wisely. And yeah of course we both share the housework and childraising (because that's table stakes for an egalitarian relationship). I don't just come home from work and play video games or something. Seeing my kid grow, play, and copy me is the biggest external validation I could ask for.

If you value your income more than your kids, then you either shouldn't have kids, or you should marry someone who prioritizes domestic work and parenting over their career. But then don't think they're not pulling their weight just because they earn less than you.

That said, I think if the government wants to encourage more babies, it should pay a basic income to stay-at-home parents, something perhaps comparable to the cost of daycare. Then maybe people like you won't consider it unpaid labor anymore and it will become a more respected option.

The fact that this was written by a man is hilarious

Those sound like premodern relationships? Every with-it youngish person I know has long rejected that model.

And then all your favorite activities are either impossible of much more expensive with a kid. As simple as it is: to travel somewhere pay more for kids, get more expensive hotel room capable of 3 guests.

Sports? Who will stay with kids during your trainings?

Between daycare, transportation to events, eating out and paying for cleaners because you don’t have time to do them yourselves all add up. Unless you’re making more than $60k it doesn’t make financial sense for the mom to work.

Tbf, the pressure to have a career also sucks.

Yes of course being a mom AND WORKING A FULLTIME JOB sucks because doing anything that effortful and working a job sucks.

Drinking beer and playing video games for 10 hours a day AND WORKING A FULLTIME JOB would also suck.

From everything I hear, being a mom is pretty awesome and rewarding.

But there are only 24 hours in a day and you can't have everything and you have to choose what is most important. Welcome to life.

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Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am. On top of a $3000/mo mortgage. NE USA. When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded." Either that or they have one parent who cannot be employed outside the home.

> Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this,

Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)

BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.

one of my theories for why we specifically see highly-educated people waiting longer or opting out is that it's a consequence of tiger-mom/helicopter-parent upbringings

its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.

if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.

> this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.

My anecdote: As a parent, when I talk to people my same age or younger without children they often greatly overestimate the sacrifices necessary to have children. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people (who don’t have children) make wild claims like having children means you won’t have good sleep for the next decade, or that they need a 4,000 square foot house before they have kids, or that it’s impossible to raise kids in a MCOL city without earning $200-$300K.

A lot of people have locked their idea of what it’s like to have children to the newborn phase and they imagine changing diapers, paying $2-3K infant care costs, and doing night time feedings forever. I’ve had numerous conversations where people simply refuse to believe me when I tell them my kids were sleeping through the night after a couple years or potty trained by age 2.

I think a lot of this is due to class isolation combined with getting a lot of bad info from social media. When you mingle with more of the population you realize most families with kids are not earning programmer level compensation and not living in 4,000 square foot houses, yet it’s working out.

Reddit is an interesting peek into this mindset. Recently there was a thread asking for serious answers from parents about if they regretted having children. The top voted comments were all from people who said “I don’t have kids but…” followed by a claim that all their friends secretly regretted having kids or something. If you sorted by controversial there were a lot of comments from people saying they didn’t regret it and loved their kids, but they were all downvoted into the negatives. It’s wild.

Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456

According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture back. The culture has fundamentally changed.

Just to cause arguments, some things which I'm guessing were an influence in getting her. Cars? (easy to get away from family/village, the culture that valued family). TV/Cable/Video-Games/Youtube? (infinite entertainment 24/7). Fast easy prepared food? (no needing to meet with others for meals). Computers/SmartPhones/Internet? (infinite entertainment and/or ways to interact with others but not actually meet). Suburbia? (the need to drive to be close others)

It's even less about buying a home now and more about just affording a second or third bedroom in a rental. If you look at job centers, even when they do build multi-family they aren't building family sized units.

Older generations need to be more comfortable with their kids getting married and having children before moving out.

In terms of incentives, Hungary has attempted this with tax policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary

Seems to be working!

"Don't have kids you can't afford." Now we're shocked when people makes less babies.

Don't wealthy people have fewer children?

This is an unusual take.

People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren

This, about so many other topics for young people.

There is an unbroken evolutionary thread of more than 4.5 billion years of evolution from the very first organism to you. Every one of our ancestors made it, and chances are they did so in more difficult and perilous circumstances than we can imagine. You can as well.

This kind of doomerism is only accessible because you have social media and global news networks that expose you to the negativity bias of humanity.

Throughout the history of civilization, we have made such incredible progress in medicine, technology, science, the standard of human living, energy production, space exploration, you name it. The world is a very bright place. Any prophecy of economic or climactic doom or cultural doom is just pessimism. In the long-term optimism is the most rational strategy.

In line with this, you can raise a family on a smaller budget than you'd imagine. Children are way less expensive than adults. Child care is accessible and affordable if you look in the right places and are willing to be creative. And children do not meaningfully detract from any other positive sides of life. (At least this has been my experience; I had my first child at 24 on a small budget and in a small apartment with not all that much help.)

It's popular opinion, but it's demonstrably wrong. In terms of procreation richer countries doesn't do better, richer communities doesn't do better, and while economic incentives may shift needle a little temporarily, so far no consistent effects have been shown with them. Since condoms/pills/abortion detached sexual intercourse from its original biological function, it's only ideals, and culture which make people to choose becoming parents. It's too big a part of life to be paid with money for if you simply don't want it.

Your comment reminds me of the "housing economic theory of everything."

I watched this video a while back about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc

It used to take one income to run a household. Now it takes two.

No, it’s not the economy. All the people my age who have children are the less financially and intellectually equipped to be parents. Yet they are doing fine.

A stable population requires a fertility rate of about 2.1. It’s not about growth, it’s about stability of population at this point.

We certainly can't have a stable society with a rapidly shrinking population.

At the very least, it would take enough automation such that the elderly don't need to either work or get wealth transfers from the working population to survive. Wealth transfers to the old only work when you have many more working-age people than retired people; if you don't, the whole thing implodes.

It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.

It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.

Now you're asking the uncomfortable but important question.

I don't think that is possible so long as inflation occurs. When money is worth less, items costs more which means more economic growth is necessary (increased salaries, expenses, etc). Maybe I am missing something though?

An entirely different economic paradigm.

Why is "stable society" the end goal?

I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.

Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.

Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.

Etc.

I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.

it will take you to "eat the rich"

It would take a TFR of 2.1, so depending where you live, a 40-250% increase in fertility.

There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that

Not capitalism apparently

Capitalist society with strong socialist underpinnings.

That was my first thought too - USD world reserve - but other countries had similar prosperity and child booms so can’t be that. At least not primarily

Recent wars haven't been expensive enough: World War II was significantly more expensive for the U.S. than the Gulf War. The Gulf War cost roughly $60-$70 billion (in 1990s dollars). In contrast, World War II cost the U.S. over $4 trillion when adjusted for inflation to today's dollars.

TFA addresses this theory directly: The leap in fertility that became the baby boom started years before the war.

You mean it was the giant war the people went through that had all these kids and not that things just happened to line up at that time with my stupid political beliefs?

Even though I have put zero thought into most of my political beliefs, I just repeat what my social media programs me to believe, that can't be true. I can't be full of shit.

Look how much I get paid to write javascript!

We have a subsidized childcare in Quebec and the fertility rate is still shit

How fast are you popping out those kids to have more than 2 children in daycare rather than free public school?

As someone with 5 kids, I can attest to #1. Kids are hard and expensive, but they are also the single most rewarding aspect of my life. I rushed into having kids in my early twenties, and those early years were very difficult. Now that my kids are a bit older, I am so grateful for them. My life is infinitely richer because of them, even though I may have less time and money for myself.

>People are stressed about the state of the world. Are we going to enter an era of greater political unrest? Is AI going to ruin the economic prospects of almost everyone? Is climate change going to ruin civilization? Most people I talk to are not hopeful about what the next 40 years are going to look like.

At least on this one I beg to differ on reality if not people's perceptions. You think that worry about the future was somehow lesser during, I don't know, the entire course of the 20th century with two colossal world wars, almost immediately followed by a cold war in which the superpowers were laden with planetary destruction machines and noisily, constantly on the brink of annihilating each other and everyone else? (in aggressive ways that aren't quite matched today I'd argue)

Maybe social media and the always-connected modern culture of publicly fetishizing nearly any social/personal anxiety you care to think of has made people more neurotic about the future, but we've never in modern history had a shortage of things to cause that, while still having plenty of babies for decades.

There is also #4, there is plenty of women who don't want kids. Women having kids was not option until advent of modern birth control unless they were totally celibate.

My wife has zero interest in having kids but enjoys being married, if this were 100 years ago, she likely would have kids by now.

#5 Modern culture is all about egoism masked as pseudo-individualism and self-fulfillment through constant consumption

This is probably one part of it, but I'm not sure it's a very big part. Sacrificing yourself for the group is still a part of some east asian cultures but they aren't doing any better in this regard.

I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.

Most countries today are losing population (below replacement value).

The US is at 1.62, Taiwan is at 0.85.

There are a lot of economic factors required for having children that are simply not there anymore for quite a lot of people. Third-party malign interference has never been higher. Those dating apps all the women are using, they aren't matching people up to have babies.

They are matching people up who won't ever have babies.

What makes this worse unfortunately over time is intelligent people don't have children if they can't support them; so if you have growing inequality with no social mobility upwards, you have an evolutionary skew towards the dumb similar to the movie idiocracy.

It's not that scary. You don't have to go to church. And don't have to listen to church broadcasts or channels. And no one forces you to do anything.

There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia.

It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia.

There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing.

Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.

We really don’t need this kind of sexist attitude on HN in 2025.

People are choosing not to have kids so they can live their own lives, or because they don't want to bring more children into this crazy world, or any number of various other perfectly legitimate reasons, such as economic worries.

While I agree this might indicate a culture of "selfishness," I have to disagree that it's a bad thing. It seems to me a good thing that people can choose whether or not to have kids, as opposed to being forced into it because lack of education or access to healthcare. It seems to me that society has to adjust to this, not individuals.

People are sharing their own views and outlooks. There is nothing "distasteful" about that, nor are these people selfish and entitled. Bizarre comment.

The incentives are not there, for example, you’re financially invested in raising 5 kids that will pay my pension in the future. By not having said kids, I get all the economic benefit of not having to spend money raising kids, while getting my pension paid (maybe)

Parenting can be deeply meaningful and fulfilling, and your experience is a powerful reminder of that. But I'd be cautious about chalking up declining birth rates to selfishness. People today are navigating a very different world

Here in the US. I think for the young population there is a genuine affordability crisis, coupled with health insurance being so expensive it is a genuine blocker for a lot of people.

Rome was a slave state, its collapse had nothing to do with selfishness and entitlement. That’s what got them their empire in the th3 first place!

> I find the repeated comments of how much parenting 'sucks' and how much childbearing 'sucks' to be distasteful.

Shouldn't people who think that parenting is not a glamorous job be allowed to express their thoughts on this subject?

> It has been the single most incredible experience I've had (5 times over).

So other people's feelings and experiences are according to you distasteful but yours should be accepted as some sort of universal truth?

You had a great experience bringing kids into this world, that's nice but that doesn't mean that everyone should be willing to go through the same things you did.

Having kids you don't want is more of a moral failing than choosing not to have kids because you don't want them

I don't think parenting sucks.

But my parents sucked. And they thought parenting sucks, but they had kids anyway. I don't want to continue the cycle. My wife feels the same way. We're pretty happy, healthy, married for 11 years; we just don't want kids.

Of the 110 billion people to have ever been born, maybe 2 billion have been born into more comfortable circumstances than the median child born in the United States today.

What a ridiculous attitude. The world will always have problems you cannot control. People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.

yeah but compared to the entirity of human history, its still pretty good. Like, I prefer the era I grew up in but so does my dad probably, so its hard to work out if its just a "when I were young and could run a mile without wheezing thing". i.e. We could paint similar tales of woe during the cold war about the uncertainty of the future.

But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.

I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.

Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.

I used to be really angry at parents, thinking it was incredible cruelty to throw children into a world without teaching them just how hard capitalism is going to try and wreck them. But i guess it didn't "used" to be this bad, you used to be able to afford rent i guess.

But still, we need to be teaching above all the other dumb shit thats happening in school: how capitalism hates them. How you need to eliminate middle men, having a regular wage means you are going to be an oppressed slave for life. You need to come up with your own thing, that you own and control and get to do some kind of negotiating for its value. You need to invest in things that can be used to make money in the future, little side hustles always. And maybe even deep dives on how crime really does pay, and if not figure one out yourself at least know the huge majority of people that are going to try and scam you. It is pure evil not to teach reality in high school

The world is amazing and AC exists.

But the idiopathic depression of the modern era is certainly interesting. Doubtful it can be studied before natural selection exacts its ruthless revenge

Doomerism is an illness where you can't look out your window and see reality

I've read so many comments, many of which I agree with and some which I don't. Either way, this comment is the only one that touches on the subject of womens careers. We are new parents and my wife is scared that she will lose her job despite protections. We are sick a lot (almost permanently so far) as childcare is a petri dish. We are also sleeping poorly almost every other day. She sometimes has meetings in the afternoon because people can't respect other peoples time off, and has to sometimes have a screaming child in the background. If she were to lose her job, we would have serious economic issues, despite both of us having good jobs. It's not great. It's becoming very clear to me that something is wrong both economically and politically when it comes to child rearing.

It's religion. The church pastor would visit the family if a young couple didn't have children within a year to ask what's up.

That being said: I don't get the discussions in this thread. The world can't sustain billions of people anyway. I think decline in the population is a very good thing to happen.

It's silly to think of it as some sort of insurmountable challenge that should be avoided at all cost.

Doom and gloom that is somewhat substantiated by material reality. The world is getting warmer and nothing is done about it. Far right populism is getting more and more popular, with no end in sight. No way am I bringing kids in this environment.

What about the doom and gloom that people are living? Low wages, expensive housing, unstable employment, and crappy medical care do not fill people with optimism.

> We shouldn't promote teenage and very young women pregnancies

Why not? The statement seems very much derived from 'current culture' morals. For most of human history I would guess that behavior was normal human behavior.

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No; we just have birth control that works. The rest of these are all parts of the puzzle that help people not desire having offspring, but previously there simply wasn't a 99% fool-proof method to do so aside from abstinence or hysterectomy. So; regardless of economic factors, people had kids and dealt with those outcomes.

Yet, richer people have fewer children. It isn't clear that reducing costs (making people richer) would actually increase birth rates

How about: recreate the actual policy that created the baby boom in the first place? Make child allowance such that 3 kids means 20 years of 20% over supermarket wages. Either for women alone, or for a family. In other words: 3 kids? Have a "free" stay-at-home parent.

How does this square with the fact that fertility declines as income rises, both within and across societies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

Homer Simpson is also a fictional cartoon character

That was modelled on the peak post-War nuclear family, a type of family entity that had not existed before and will likely never exist again. One person working to support 4 or 5 is not something we can strive for without a serious look at UBI along with a revolution in automation.

Now we have a dual income trap that doesn't cover things. My poor CEO had to join a 3rd board of directors just to make ends meet

Do we still have sex? I keep seeing headlines that younger generations aren't having sex. My last relationship ended because my mid-30s male partner wasn't interested in sex.

So you basically want to add another tax on young single/unmarried people?

What if you are infertile? Is the government/state going to pay for all the procedures related to adoption/ fertility treatments?

What about gay people? Would they be forced to adopt kids or use surrogates to have children so that they stop paying this tax?

At what age should men stop paying this tax? After all, a man in his 60s and even later can still in theory father a child with a younger woman, so there is really no cut off date for men in this case?

Finally why not pay men as well if they are the ones doing most of the child raising? This would apply in cases where the mother died or left. Would that be acceptable?

I am sorry to say but your proposal is not very well thought out and on top of that your forget that people in relationships without children are already paying more than there fair share of taxes.

For example, a Russian millionaire, Pavel Durov has 5 children, although it seems that they are raised by his ex-girlfriends. Once there is enough money, problem is solved.

This and parenting a few hours a week while kids roamed & learned how to grow up - instead of kids living in boxes under 24/7 adulting.

I mean we know how to solve it. Increase/Apply taxation on wealth.

The GI bill is American; the baby boom is not. Other countries saw the same phenomoenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom

If people think at all rather than just doing what everyone else does. People invest in their future. Peasants don't own land, can't own land, have zero access to financial wealth or education, so they try to breed because adult children are the only type of family wealth they can produce.

Baby boom is those people with that mindset with some sudden prosperity.

Doesn't last as soon as they see the successful people invest in land, financial assets, material goods, and children's education. Base culture matters, you saw Confucius based cultures turn on a dime once they had two to rub together.

I think it was having a government having an active hand in guiding society: housing, education, childcare, stable government jobs, high enough taxes at the top end to finance all of that.

Every major economy was either running at max capacity due to the war effort or was in desperate need of repair and reconstruction. The US starts handing out loans like candy to a) help rapidly rebuild the economies of our allies and trade partners and b) fend off communism. So here we have...

1 - Millions of men with newly gained skill eagerly reentering the workforce 2 - A surge of highly skilled immigrants/refugees 3 - Trade partners rebuilding rapidly using US loans to by US goods (as the US had emerged as the world largest manufacturer). 4 - All of this happening with the benefit of countless technological breakthroughs brought about by the war effort.

It's these anomalies that led to the very temporarily rise of some men in some parts of the West being able to support a family of 6 with a single job and minimal skill or education.

> War, sadly.

The post Vietnam war economy implies this wasn't really true. Also our current post Afghanistan/Iraq war economy.

I know this is what spurred the first, but I can't believe it would spur another.

Both sperm counts and testosterone are way, way down for who knows what reason. People are waiting longer and longer to get married, and the number of unmarried people is higher than ever.

I think war just leads to mostly broken, single men, as there's nobody to come home to.

Do you see rising birth rates in Ukraine and/or Russia?

Not of mass deaths, but the hope of a good future.

Uh, do you mean that figuratively or literally?

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> I assume birth rates also rose after the black death

It seems not. Wikipedia says it took 80-150 years (4-7 generations) to recover from a ~21% population drop [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...

What's mortality salience?

Abortions will happen regardless, they will just cause more deaths, look at the era where Romania banned abortion.

Doesn’t seem like the winning solution is to apply policies that directly reduce the amount of people that _can_ give birth

I don't disagree that misalignment between the sexes might have some influence, but crass men who seem to think women are basically fertility slaves is wildly toxic, wildly dangerous, and only reinforces feminism.

In all fairness, there's probably something to the gender divide situation - I've met and overheard many blue-collar-ish and lower class men with deep resentments about child support and who think marriage is scam or trap used by women who are essentially divorce black widows. Or who just see women as bodies to manipulated or forced into sex. But those same men are also unstable, demanding, and problematic. Which is no doubt why marriage stability remains the province of the more educated and white collar classes.

But fixing it by giving in to the gross fantasies of those men doesn't seem serious.

Another part of the premise is "but the current baby boom isn't French/Japanese/white Americans".

If that were the case, wouldn't the trendlines for Protestant vs Catholic as percentage of population move considerably closer to each other?

https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2014/02/04/50-...

Re: Figure 1. Trends in American Religious Affiliation, 1957-1971

Catholics certainly were having more kids than Protestants at the time, who had by then been normalizing contraception (following the Lambeth Conference of 1930). But eventually Catholics drank the Koolaid like everyone else, so it's less about "cultural confidence" and more about "cultural detox".

Haha, jokes on you: only the cultures of the world that think that or that have the values that cause that will eliminate themselves, to be survived by everybody else that didn't have which ever deadly thought viruses that cause their decline.

> Relative stability, focus on family, growth, men as head of household, minimal single parent families, women spending time with their kids.

This reads as deeply obnoxious sexism. Man as head of the household, sounds like religious fundamentalism.

It only happened after WW2 because the US came out of that war as the only untouched developed economy. A WW3 isn't going to leave anyone unscathed and would probably mean all-out nuclear war.

The world now is in better place than it ever was. We are less violent, live longer, live healthier, minimum wage workers can have luxuries unimaginable by kings back in time. It's time to end the nihilism epidemic.

Times like these you realise HN is surprisingly conservative and narrow minded

Late stage capitalist shitholes are actually really fun.

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