These studies never seem to look at time spent parenting, between baby-boom years and now.
My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers.
My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation.
Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
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.
We're also seeing baby boomers, who were raised partially by their grandparents, neglecting the role of grandparent. They live vicariously, through Facebook and video calls, and when the parents ask for them to get more involved, they're met with "I raised you, so I've done my part"
Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
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.
I think the level of obsessive care people feel obliged to deliver to their single child prior to age of 8 is a part of the same story. You can see how radically it changes even with the second child (not to mention the third) but half of the parents never get there nowadays and think it's the norm.
> it doesn't come into play until all of your children are at least like 8.
Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.
My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing.
Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
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.
It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age.
Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.
It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
> 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.
The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
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.
The issue is not so much the access to the methods, but the negative feedback loop that they cause. For every woman freed from unwanted childbearing, how many are socially pressured into not having a child?
Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.
The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.
Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.
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.
Why? Can you defend this for me? I'm genuinely asking. Why is it irresponsible to have a child when you're young and financially not established? Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?
Children are resilient, and so are parents.
In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
Maybe we as a society should decide that having children is fine when you don't have a stable career yet and finance it as such. The contradiction that our most fertile years are also the most unstable is something society could and should balance.
Or alternatively, it’s a great idea because your parents can then help raise them and you can then start a career without worrying about having babies. Imagine being 25, already having your kids, and you never need to go on leave.
Don't the difficulties in pregnancy related to age tend to come up around 40 or older?
I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?
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.
It's actually interesting what underlying prejudices readers project upon the anecdotes of others.
In actual fact, I was merely offering a data point. I have no agenda, I am not in the slightest anti-abortion, I am not against 100% female bodily autonomy, I do not consider past generations to be "the good old days" - the events I described were traumatic for everybody involved - and I do not profess to be qualified to draw any conclusions, or to claim that what happened to me is why the world has changed.
I can only see certain cause and effect chains relating to my own generational situation, and suggested that such changing norms may be one factor in the mix. May.
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).
The local peak around 1990 was a very small bump from the flat run through the 1980s, and was probably a brief rebound effect of the extreme negative social pressure related to unprotected casual sex stemming from the AIDS crisis fading a bit as that became perceived as less acute of a threat, and there numbers dropped rapidly after that peak, quickly going through the floor they had settled in during the long flat period preceding the brief rise and peak.
So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.
It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.
Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
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.
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.
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
What loss? It was not her but her "girlfriend" which I don't even know how to correctly interpret these days. Is she saying it was her love interest or just a friend who is female? Heaven knows!
Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
Partly her parents, for refusing to allow her to go on birth control as a preventative in advance. She did ask. Back then, in my country, parental approval was required by law for people under a certain age. That has since changed.
Unfortunately it took a lot more than asking (i.e. it took "a pregnancy") before they took her seriously.
I am not sure how you think a 17 year old kid with ZERO legal or social rights or family support or money was somehow meant to overpower the iron will of the girl's furious parents (who in turn intractably convinced the girl herself), whose roof she still lived under - being in the final years of high school - and the medical fraternity, and the laws of my country, and the will of society. What was I supposed to do? Lock her in a tower?
But congratulations on shallowly judging people as murderers on a whim. Perhaps you might consider how that is a less than ideal characteristic, if caring about the lives of human beings is your actual goal here.
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.
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.
That's probably not why the number of births is way down.
Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.
Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.
It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.
We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.
Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
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.
The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish.
There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
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.
It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.
> 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?
This is dead wrong. For all of human history through say 1800 gains in productivity flowed back to the general population in the form of more kids (but no per capita growth), this was the Malthusian equilibrium. Since 1800 not only has the typical person’s standard of living exploded but the typical person works in both paid and nonpaid labor far fewer hours. Roughly the typical person worked 4000 hours a year in paid and domestic labor in 1800 compared to less than 2000 hours a year today.
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.
I had a similar financial situation. Difference is we already had two kids. My wife gladly gave up her career to be a stay at home mom. She’s still independent, though. The “contract” is that I make the money, she takes care of home stuff and kids, and she gets to do whatever else she wants.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
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.
Hard work had little to do with it. A unique set of factors generated a historic economic boom that was briefly able to sustain a uniquely prosperous lifestyle for some Westerners. It came unwound because it was never sustainable.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
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, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
> 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.
Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of education and work experience to get to that high bracket.
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
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.
Greetings from the trenches. My wife and I both work (because we both want to but, realistically, we also don’t have much choice). We split it all 50-50, and I pay more because I earn more, but There isn’t enough time for the house work, childcare, and work. Let alone time for ourselves or for eachother. It leads to tension and stress for both.
So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”
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...
I consider this medical malpractice. Freezing eggs in your late 30s is way too late. You're taking an almost infertile woman and subjecting her to unnecessary complications while taking her money even though the staff should be fully aware that this is going to end in failure.
In vitro fertilization simply does not worth reliably beyond 35. You need eggs from your early 20s.
After 35 your last option is natural conception, because multiple passes of IVF are incredibly expensive. It's like a lottery at that point. Natural conception is worse, but you have 12 free tickets every year for five years. That will get you two children if you are lucky.
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.
I'm sorry you're going through that. I don't mean to discount the man's issues with modern dating. We are trying to do our best, but its still really hard.
Good news is if your income is still low by the time they head to college, depending on the state, in-state tuition to a state college will be reasonable or free.
If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.
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.
Same boat. I know a number of women who couldn't find partners who both wanted kids and could pay half the bills so those women are now freezing their eggs or pursuing single motherhood by choice. Of the woman I know who are married, all of them had to talk their husbands into the first child and second child.
Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.
You say ‘modern relationships’ but I feel like you’re describing a stereotypical 1950s relationship in that paragraph. The lack of contrast surprises me.
The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.
In many HCOL cities, for many couples, SAHM isn't a financially feasible option.
Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.
> 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.
No, but if the load is uneven and you’re giving up career possibilities it becomes harder not to think about what you were giving up because instead of some hard to quantify 1950s-style bargain you’ll be thinking of lost promotions relative to your peers when you're doing laundry at 11pm.
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.
Yeah, drives me crazy when governments are trying to lower the cost of childcare with tax incentives or creating dating apps to encourage connectivity.
Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.
My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.
> 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.
One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).
Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.
> 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
And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.
"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."
Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.
Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
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 dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.
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.
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.
(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold
Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
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.
> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
> 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.
Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.
> 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.
That's because they've been raised to believe it's hard.
And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.
For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.
Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.
Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.
I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.
There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book
They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.
They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.
The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.
Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
I’ve got one fantastic child, the relief of starting to get my time and freedom back is still enough to remind me I don’t what to loose that again, even temporarily.
The parents might be fine but the kids aren’t. I got my great programmer job entirely because of anger that my family was and continues to be in relatively bottom feeder jobs. The trauma associated with living in even relative poverty compared to your peers is hard to overstate.
Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
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)
"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"
It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago
The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.
> According to that the issue is culture.
This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.
Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first place), or delay having children until you are financially secure. Couple this with the constant inundation of social media and the myriad experiences available with the click of a button and people are simply taking the short term gratification route.
Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
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.
"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.
No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
What if we just made people financially comfortable and secure again? The axis is "feed and breed" vs "fight or flight."
And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.
Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.
I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.
Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
What we need are 25/30+ year-olds who are completely at ease with sex, who have no hang-ups, and who know how to form strong relationships because they’ve been doing it and having sex freely since they were teenagers.
Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.
On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.
What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.
Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.
Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
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
People have always been and will always have casual sex. People didn't used to be perfect Christian monogamous couples until the 60s. We just punish people less for it than we used to which is a good thing.
This is completely a-historical. Humans have been having sex outside of marriage since that concept was invented and you’re projecting an idealized Western European view on an entire world with a complex history of different cultures. What you’re describing isn’t even true of European history (e.g. read up on hand fasting or the high rates of marriage after pregnancy) and it’s even less so globally. Marriage is in part a financial relationship, and that drive a lot of premarital sex: if men were expected to make a significant monetary contribution (dowry, house/land, etc.) even in the most religious societies many would not be celibate for a decade, they just weren’t having sex in formal legally-binding relationships.
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.
Readit News
My parents parented a few hours a week and were entirely typical. I parented ceaselessly, just like my parenting-peers.
My parents world was possible because kids roamed with peers (and without adults) for many hours a week. This was my childhood, my parents childhood, my grandparents childhood.
My kids grew up under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next. They are also typical of their generation.
Parenting and childhood are radically altered from the baby boom era. Our birth rates (and youth mental health stats) seem like a natural outcome of that.
Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
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.
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I think the obvious factors are far more likely - people are poorer, childcare is more expensive, stay-at-home parents are less common.
It's bizarre to me that the piece doesn't mention the contraceptive pill, which debuted in 1960, the exact same year as peak fertility.
Not all, but probably at least one. When it was usual to have larger families, it was common older children being tasked with some care/monitoring of their younger siblings. My mother was fistborn, and she took care of walking her younger brothers/sisters to school.
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Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother.
Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the child was had, because it was the done thing. It wasn't a time of simple, easy access to birth control and other procedures.
In the late 90's, my late-teens girlfriend scandalously fell pregnant. Her parents + the medical system swung straight into full control, a termination was a foregone conclusion, and we were simply dragged along by the expectations of society at that time.
I'm heading towards 50 now, and have no children. I guess that "scandalous mistake" is the only real chance some people ever get in life, though they don't know it at the time. And for us, modern society's ways effectively eliminated it.
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.
Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all.
It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses or putting forth their own theories without having even skimmed the article.
The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all through their famines, plagues, and predator massacres such that when those pressures relent their population recovers. There's no known precedent for raising fertility rates that fall let alone so low.
Ease of access to birth control and ease and safety of abortion will be having a very detectable impact on the birthrate.
Not saying they need to be restricted, just that they're very relevant data points.
I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?
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Did you bother to check it out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_U...
More than half a million in the US alone, per year. That's material.
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.
Anecdotally, this is something that my wife and I experienced as relatively young parents (~24 at first child): people expect abortion to be the default. I can't tell you how many people asked us when we were going to “just get rid of the thing” because they expected that to be the default option. We have no idea how damaging this effect is to overall fertility.
The saddest part is that many women will get to an age where they do want to have one or more children, but because they are closer to the end of their fertile window, they cannot. I’ve seen this happen to my extended friends and family far more than the “unwanted pregnancy” scenario, which I’ve only seen happen once.
Fundamentally, there's perhaps a broader philosophical divide. Do you believe that children are burdensome, or the most valuable thing you can produce in life? If you think the former, it's nearly impossible to feel any motivation to tolerate the difficulty of pregnancy and childbearing.
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Children are resilient, and so are parents.
In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.
EDIT: typo
this seems very elitist, possibly racist, and certainly could indicate that your view might be wrong, given the literal billions chosing to do this.
I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?
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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.
In actual fact, I was merely offering a data point. I have no agenda, I am not in the slightest anti-abortion, I am not against 100% female bodily autonomy, I do not consider past generations to be "the good old days" - the events I described were traumatic for everybody involved - and I do not profess to be qualified to draw any conclusions, or to claim that what happened to me is why the world has changed.
I can only see certain cause and effect chains relating to my own generational situation, and suggested that such changing norms may be one factor in the mix. May.
So it is not at all inconsistent with a strong social force against teenage births existing and being acted on in the late 1990s, in fact, had that not existed the rise up to the 1990 peak would probably not have been so brief and followed by a rapid drop that went straight through the preceding floor.
It's difficult to find teenage pregnancy rates before 1972, let alone multiple sources, but if you look at Guttmacher's numbers both teenage pregnancy and abortion rates ramped up significantly between the late 1970s and early 1990s. See https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/UST... Teenage abortions rates are even more difficult to find before 1972, but abortion certainly existed in the 1950s, and given the birth rate it's possible teenage pregnancy rates were also higher in the 1950s and 60s.
Also, notwithstanding that the data does coincide with the given narrative, one must also consider socio-economic and cultural factors--pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates aren't homogenous across groups. For example, the OP (or their girlfriend) could have been from a segment of society at the trailing edge of a trend.
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.
There are still lots and lots of shitty parents out there.
Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about how he is treated like crap by the girls all the time).
Thanks for pointing out that the baby boom happened by accidental births and confirming it with your own anecdotal evidence.
Kids are a phenomenal experience.
I concur with you, social pressure is a defining element on having/not having them.
And whose fault was that, eh?
Unfortunately it took a lot more than asking (i.e. it took "a pregnancy") before they took her seriously.
But primarily, yes, my fault and her fault.
Shame you didn't ensure the same for your own kid
But congratulations on shallowly judging people as murderers on a whim. Perhaps you might consider how that is a less than ideal characteristic, if caring about the lives of human beings is your actual goal here.
That's why my father is against abortion.
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.
That's probably not why the number of births is way down.
Number of births in the US are ~3.6M right now. We also have 1M abortions per year. That's - if abortions were the sole problem - 4.6M births / 330M people.
Except... It was 4.3M births / 177M people in 1960. Double the current rate. It dropped off sharply right after the 1960s. Not coincidentally right when the pill was introduced.
It never was about "better end the pregnancy". It was always about women having a say, instead of being default-delegated to brood mare.
We landed in a ~stable equilibrium with that, with a TFR of 2.1 in 1990. And then live births dropped again, like a stone. And, oddly, so did abortions. Which implies that the likely problem is a drop in pregnancies in the 1990s.
Teen abortions are a tiny irrelevant side show compared to this. So maybe let's not speculate on "baseline beliefs of society" based on what's noise in the statistics.
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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.
You either got married to a man who protected you or you got raped. That's it.
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There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absolutely, positively not bring back prosperous single-earner households is forcing manufacturing back into the center of an information economy while at the same time fighting relentlessly to squash labor unions or any other attempts at worker power.
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 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.
If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.
Unfortunately suspect this is the right answer.
John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]"
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. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
Being a mom just sucks.
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.
It's lower income brackets where marriage rates are really collapsing. A lot of this is economic-- the earnings potential for lower-class men has eroded-- but it's also the men in these income brackets tend not to have adopted upper-class views on egalitarian partnerships, and their potential partners aren't having it.
So among high earners you have stable marriages but where they can't start having children until their careers are secure, while among low-earners the men are both economically and temperamentally unacceptable to their partners. So fertility collapses in both groups.
If this view of marriage sounds unfamiliar, you might want to see e.g. [0], in particular the point about how "top-half marriage and bottom-half marriage are so unalike they might as well be completely different institutions."
[0]: https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/marriage-is-down-beca...
Many women don't want to have kids because they can't find a qualified partner they feel will be a good dad and good husband.
But the stats are clear. Women still perform substantially more labor at home than men do across the US population.
This myth needs to die, it's not true and it discriminates against men.
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.
So I’ve had enough of “mothers have it so tough and dads have it so easy”
Any way thank you for making me feel seen.
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...
In vitro fertilization simply does not worth reliably beyond 35. You need eggs from your early 20s.
After 35 your last option is natural conception, because multiple passes of IVF are incredibly expensive. It's like a lottery at that point. Natural conception is worse, but you have 12 free tickets every year for five years. That will get you two children if you are lucky.
If your income is higher by then, it'll probably be ok.
The only couple actually like the gender stereotype you invoke is a conservative one in their 60s.
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Men in their 20ies don't want kids because they still want to enjoy life without responsibility, but by the time they are in their 30ies they are ready to settle down and the idea of having a family becomes more and more appealing.
Anecdotally, I see many women who want to settle down but never take the initiative to ask a guy out.
This does not make sense. It's not men taking birth-control pills, plan-b and having abortions.
Today, Tinder and Instagram gives you access to literally the entire planet of single people and the illusion that you have the chance to be with one.
The problem is not who does the most household work, the problem is that the one who does (usually the mom) can't compensate by not working. A single income is rarely sufficient for a family.
Also, as a full-time mom, you’ve given up autonomy to your husband (since he controls the finances). While women can leave the relationship whenever they want, their careers often suffer, and they can’t just pick up where they left off.
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.
I have never expected to be paid for raising my children.
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.
Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids.
My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it often takes 1–2 years to feel secure and fully ramped up in a new position. As someone at a level 4/5, she'd likely be aiming for a promotion once that stability sets in. Realistically, that puts her promotion around age 33 to 35, which is right around the time when starting a family becomes more biologically challenging.
And cheap, reliable, birth control.
One thing to consider is choice. Historically women didn’t have the ability to avoid having children short of abstinence, and even that wasn’t a given in a culture where marriage isn’t voluntary, marital rape is legal, education limited, and you’ve had religious indoctrination saying it’s a sin your entire life. Men didn’t have the risk of dying in childbirth, but had the rest to varying degrees (e.g. stories about wives pleading for children with men who in the modern world would be recognized as queer).
Now that people have choice, the technology to implement their decision, and a huge financial swing (children are expenses rather than cheap labor and your retirement plan) that historical baseline is increasingly irrelevant.
And then you're 35/40 and pregnancy, let alone more than one is way more complicated.
Historically, women didn't have bodily autonomy, had lower education and when those two points have not applied (recent history) there has been hope of an improvement around the corner.
Women now have bodily autonomy, have higher education, and many people today only see a downward trajectory economically speaking.
This is a sexist take. It is not universally true, and a like-for-like retort would be considered sexist.
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).
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being a mum doesn't have to suck. choices are being weighed and made.
Breast pump is a thing, the husband can definitely do the feeding with frozen breast milk warmed up in minutes. Or just do formula.
Even if dad can give the baby mom‘s pumped breastmilk, Mom still needs to pump more to keep the supply up and avoid pain. So mom has to wake up anyway.
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.
However, birth rates are through the floor even in countries with 2 years paid parental leave.
i have a long term spouse and let her make the call because i know it sucks too, i doubt i would sign up for it
theres always adoption. yes, i know the adoption process is rigorous and expensive
Sports? Who will stay with kids during your trainings?
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.
Then you don’t even read magazines, let alone mom forums, or attend playgroup, or basically hear anything.
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Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.
I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.
I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.
Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.
I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
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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.
Yep. When typical wages equal 100% of rent, how is a new couple supposed to sustain themselves?
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.
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.
And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.
For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.
Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.
Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.
I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.
There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book
They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.
They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.
The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.
Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.
Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
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 wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.
The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.
> According to that the issue is culture.
This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.
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Society needs to change and we need to incentivize it.
It's weird how much happens for random, completely unrelated reasons.
Seems to be working!
No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.
And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.
Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.
I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.
Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.
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Millennials are historically notable for having both fewer children and less wealth than prior generations at the same age.
Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe of the population is sexually dysfunctional? Yes, I am.
On public forums like Reddit, I can ask questions about all sorts of topics and get a range of responses. But if I’m a young person asking about sex, the answers are often shaped by politics and public health messaging. Behind the scenes, there’s a strong influence from health authorities, and the responses tend to follow a standard script focused on fear, safety, and official ideas about what sex and relationships must be, rather than letting young people figure things out for themselves.
What young people really need is encouragement to form whatever kinds of relationships they want, whether casual or serious, and to have sex and enjoy it. If you support them in that, they’ll do it naturally. Cautions against early pregnancy can be made gently and are no different to other important non-sexual cautions.
Young people need space to figure out their sex lives for themselves, without someone watching over them, especially not a public health voice pushing out patronizing or useless messaging.
Then, and only then, will we grow a generation of mindful and intentional baby-makers.
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
One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.