It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.
For years, some conservatives have framed the declining fertility rate of the United States as an example of eroding family values, a moral catastrophe in slow motion.
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, recently came under fire for saying in 2021 that the nation was run by “childless cat ladies” who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.”
Last year, Ashley St. Clair, a Fox News commentator, described childless Americans this way: “They just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”
Researchers who study trends in reproductive health see a more nuanced picture. The decision to forgo having children is most likely not a sign that Americans are becoming more hedonistic, they say. For one thing, fertility rates are declining throughout the developed world.
Rather, it indicates that larger societal factors — such as rising child care costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future — have made it feel more untenable to raise children in the United States.
It’s probably not selfishness, experts say. Even young adults who want children see an increasing number of obstacles.
Well, of course it’s not selfishness. Having children is a purely selfish act, because who else are you reproducing for? You can’t do something for someone that doesn’t exist, and bringing existence to someone who hasn’t asked for it, knowing what the world looks like, doesn’t strike me as a kindness. So who else is benefiting? The capitalist machine?
But the world really needs another little copy of me running around because I’m so unique and wonderful! /s
I bet if the billionaires shared just a bit more we could afford to have more kids and they wouldn’t be looking at their labor force drying up…
No… that couldn’t be it.
/s
There’s the option of importing cheap workforce. It has been tried before… /s
You forgot to add… While that imported labour is scared they will get deported so they don’t complain they are underpaid or taken advantage of. Just how the corporation’s want it
What about “I just don’t want one.” is that not a legitimate line of thought? That was what I based my decision on. I have never understood why the default state was marriage and then have a family. I can tell you that me and my childless wife are family.
I agree. The opening line is an insult to me. Why would choosing not to have children be selfish? Forcing someone to live a whole ass life because you want a family is the selfish thing to do, not the other way around.
Agreed, I don’t know why people don’t understand that “I don’t want one” is a completely legitimate reason to not have one by itself. Add to that any level of depth you’d like to choose from financial, climate or political reasons to there just being too many people in the world already and it further legitimizes it, but “I just don’t want one” is and should be completely valid on its own.
The main question seems to be why is the birth rate declining. Presumably people not wanting kids have existed during all times. But even if we assume that there are more people per capita who don’t want kids, the question persists, why is that the case, and how much of the decline is attributable to it.
Considering we evolved to pass our genes, this is weird
I see two issues here. One is how expensive shit is. Having their own kids is the least of my kids’ concerns for their future. They are concentrating on being able to afford to leave the house after college, and start their own lives. When it is so hard for young people to start out, they’re not going to be motivated to have kids unless it’s forced upon them…
… which brings me to my second point:
“I want a baby boom!” [Trump] told a crowd of supporters. “You men are so lucky out there.”
Men these days are super cringey. Half the country views Trump as the Alpha Male, a serial sexual predator. Politicians (who are predominately white and male) are all up in women’s business about their fertility. Is it any wonder why so many young women identify as non-straight these days? And why the traditional gender roles hold no appeal for them? Women have been getting the short end of the stick for millenia, and it’s only recently where they have had enough agency to not participate if they are not being treated well.
You want women to have more babies? Stop treating them like shit, and manage the costs of everything so that having kids isn’t an economic death sentence.
Is it any wonder why so many young women identify as non-straight these days?
Doesn’t this imply they would be straight if men acted differently? I’m not sure a mass version of the “oh she’s not really a lesbian, she just hasn’t met the right man” thing is really the answer here
I don’t think that you meant to imply this and the rest of your comment seems reasonable to me. That bit just stuck out
You’re right, I’m looking for the right phrasing here.
It’s not that these kids who identify as queer are temporarily embarrassed straight people who haven’t found their soul mates. But if you are a young woman these days, and all the men you encounter are incel brats, it’s quite easy to decide you want nothing to do with them. Women can do just fine on their own now, they don’t need a man for validation. Some of them might discover that, for them, sexuality is a spectrum, and they’ll be fine either way, but if all the men they encounter don’t respect them then that leads them in the other direction. Does that mean they would be 100% straight if they found a man who was compatible? They may not feel that way, but very few external observers would describe a woman who is with a man as anything other than “straight”.
What I’m trying to do is point out that all of these self-described “Alpha Males” who complain about the fertility rate are themselves the problem, because they are so insufferable that women would rather be with anyone else than with them.
You want women to have more babies? Stop treating them like shit
Nope. They want to treat women like shit and still force them to have babies. Once their female children are 12/13, they also want to marry them.
I am quite sure that a Trump presidency would empower the Supreme Court to allow child marriage.
I just downloaded the raw data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN and ploted it in this graph for the countries I was interested in:
The USA is - according to the data - nothing special in this regard. It’s even positioned best of all the countries with the flattest downwards curve. Just look at South Korea :D
I wonder how much of this is caused by microplastics in testicles?
Wow, what happened to South Korea? I heard it was bad but I never realized they were worse than Japan.
It’s a combination of many factors. It’s so extremely expensive to have children here because of how the society is structured and how competitive everything is. If you can’t afford to pay for after school for them to go to every day to and learn additional things they need but don’t get tought at public school, they have no chance to get into a reasonable University and end up with a shitty life.
Another thing is the huge divide between men and women which is getting worse by the day. Men are bitching that women don’t want to date and marry them while not helping with the children or house work at all. So women don’t want to deal with all this shit alone and either get married to very rich guys who can provide a easy life for them or don’t at all and concentrate on their career instead.
The government has poured in unbelievable amounts of money to try to fix it, but nothing is working so far.
They’re not. Higher birth rates are not better when population levels are as high as they are.
Who are these articles for?
Because it’s been the same reasons for a decade and the idiots who keep asking still aren’t reading them.
Boomers who just don’t get it
Looking at some families around me, I would say it’s Boomers that are estranged from their own children and hope grandchildren will somehow fix that. And they are not completely wrong, as having children is such a bad economic proposition that it basically forces people to come back and beg their parents for support, but it’s all very one sided… typical Boomer mindset.
Half of all Americans have less than $500
4 out of 5 Americans have less than $5000.
Cheap diapers are 50c each and you need a minimum of 5 a day, more often 10, so half of all Americans cannot afford one month of basic child care(diapers, food, checkups)
1 out of 5 Americans have enough money to pay for the bare essentials so a baby can survive for more than a couple months.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/24/how-much-money-americans-have-in-savings.html
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$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Everything is expensive now, housing, food, etc. How can you raise children in this era?
The American attitude that children are a lifelong punishment for having sex, and no one should ever expend any effort or a cent of money on a child they didn’t personally fuck into existence?
Money.
People in central Africa must be swimming in it…
I’d suspect there’s a high correlation with better birth control options.
In the 90s, women had to be diligent to take a pill every day. Hell, I can’t even be trusted to take a pain pill when I have a headache.
I can’t tell you how many times an SO and I had a scare because she forgot to take a pill for a few days. I think this is doubly so when you’re in your late teens/early 20s and still don’t have a good understanding of risk.
Now, women can get an injection that lasts 3-6 months, or an implant that works for years.
So we’ve lowered our risk significantly and now it’s more skewed towards family planning. I think that’s a great thing - let the people who want to have kids have them, let the rest live out their lives how they envision it.
But family planning is tough and there are important factors that others have mentioned in their comments here. Money, opportunity, timing, support. I didn’t start having kids until my 40s, but if things had lined up better, I certainly would have preferred to be a Dad a little sooner.
Another aspect of the birth control part is that women can control their fertility through their teens, and then through their 20s, and then through their 30s, and so on. Many of them do so until children make sense financially (as in your case), but there’s a subgroup there who will delay and delay and delay long enough to ask themselves, “Wait, do I really want children?” Very few women have had that opportunity during the history of our species, and there’s a significant number of them who honestly assess it and make the decision not to. My wife is one of them. She was 100% on the “I want to be a mom” train as a teenager and college student, but as she explored the world and learned to live on her own she got the chance to deeply reflect about why she wanted to be a mom, and the reasons just didn’t line up. Birth control really is a game changer because it puts the power of fertility squarely in the woman’s hands for the first time really ever. Before now procreation depended entirely on the influence and whims of men.
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After just putting two through college it’s pretty simple: They’re fucking expensive !!!
Every time I talk to a friend with children it sounds like they’re trying to stop Woodstock ‘99, and I’m too tired for that.
